Persistent, as well as new complaints about the Marvel Rivals multiplayer matchmaking system, have prompted a new response from the game’s development team. Their response denies specific allegations about their systems in a more direct manner than the developers have previously discussed the topic. In a social media post on Tuesday, the Marvel Rivals X account pushed back against claims of EOMM matchmaking, promising to soon release a video to demonstrate how its matchmaking and ranking systems actually work.
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Almost since the game launched, some players have suspected that Marvel Rivals uses a form of matchmaking called “Engagement Optimized Matchmaking” or EOMM. As one can guess, this type of matchmaking is not necessarily focused on skill-testing players. Instead, it prioritizes engagement and making them feel better about their win-loss ratio to keep them playing the game for longer.
Often, multiplayer matchmaking team games like Marvel Rivals can be a time-consuming and frustrating experience, especially when playing in ranked mode. Players may rage quit after a particularly difficult game, a bad losing streak, or an encounter with a cheater or other perceived unfair interaction. EOMM matchmaking practices attempt to smooth these harsher experiences out by analyzing behavioral patterns and gifting struggling players easier games, weaker opponents, or stronger team members in the matchmaking queue.
While this may sound like a positive thing for some, opponents of EOMM believe that it compromises the fairness of matchmaking by overly downplaying skill. Stronger players dislike being matched with weaker ones and feel that an EOMM system is manipulative of players overall. Although players have long suspected that the game uses a form of EOMM, no definitive proof of this has been uncovered in Marvel Rivals.
This disagreement had been simmering in the background for a while, until the conversation got kicked up again after a recent interview with Marvel Rivals Director Guangaung was published on the Rivals Assembled YouTube channel. Some observant fans watching this interview thought the developer had accidentally admitted to EOMM.
When asked a question about whether EOMM was “in use,” Guangguang responded by describing the production of a video the developers were working on to thoroughly explain matchmaking, which some fans felt implied that EOMM was already in the game. This misunderstanding of the answer was clipped and amplified on social media, eventually prompting the official Marvel Rivals X account to issue a statement clarifying the developers’ position on EOMM in the game.
“As our game continues to thrive, we want to reiterate that Marvel Rivals does not use EOMM,” wrote the Marvel Rivals X account. “We are currently working on a video to demonstrate our developer insights on the matchmaking and ranking system, which is expected to be released next week.”
However, some players remained skeptical even after receiving this official response, with commenters posting screenshots of a 2024 paper from the 38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence authored by NetEase engineers titled “EnMatch: Matchmaking for Better Player Engagement via Neural Combinatorial Optimization.”
“We propose EnMatch, which utilizes the latest work in the intersection of neural combinatorial optimization and reinforcement learning,” the paper said. “Through this method, the development of matchmaking systems can evolve from fair game to player engagement.”
Developers should want to understand how player engagement factors into game design; however, the question remains of how much engagement is prioritized over other factors, such as player skill.
The current implementation of an EnMatch-like system in Marvel Rivals may still differ significantly from EOMM, with the balance still leaning towards skill consideration over engagement. This would make the new denial of EOMM technically still true. However, critical fans feel that the spirit of their complaint is about Marvel Rivals prioritizing engagement over fairness, an unhealthy balance of which may be present in the current iteration of the game.
Fans will have to wait until the promised video describing the matchmaking system is released in a couple of weeks to confirm the specific mechanics present in the game. It will be interesting to see if players buy the matchmaking explanation, or if Marvel Rivals’ developers will change their messaging on the issue in the meantime.
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