New Arena Matchmaking System Announced

I have to admit that I haven’t done any arena pvp in a very long time and now playing a restoration druid probably won’t make me do it anytime soon because of all the talk about death knights eating through our HoT’s. The latest announcement about a new matchmaking system for the arena tournament still looks really interesting even if I’m not really very familiar with exactly how it works.

WoW EU Blue poster Wryxian wrote the following on the subject:

With the release of patch 3.0.8 we have implemented a new matchmaking system for arenas that will improve the overall system and help ensure that players will be matched against others of equal skill. The new matchmaking system uses a rating that you cannot see, and is separate for each of the arena brackets.

The rating changes at the end of each match are affected by this new system, and as it just came out, there may initially be some odd behavior in rating changes, but these will straighten out fairly quickly.

We will monitor this new system and update it as needed to help provide the best experience possible in arena matches. source

From what I understand, it seems like this system will be using more updated ratings in its matchmaking for each arena team bracket. This should make matchmaking more fair for all arena tournament participants.

update: Kalgan gives us more insight into the hidden rating talked about above.

The hidden rating uses a different approach to determining player ratings. It’s more complex, but it tends to figure out a player’s skill level far more quickly/accurately than an Elo system does.

However, changing player’s actual team/personal ratings extremely rapidly isn’t exactly what we want. So, we’re using an approach where we use the hidden rating (internally we refer to it as the GDF rating since it uses gaussian density filtering) for matchmaking since it creates better matchups than Elo and we use it as an anchor to figure out where the team/personal ratings should be moving toward. source