August 19, 2026
ALPHA
Good morning beautiful people. Today I will be sharing our plans for matchmaking, how we will achieve it and some of the speed bumps we expect to encounter. Hopefully this is the first of many developer posts, be sure to let us known on discord and social media that you like these. Matchmaking was the item I joined the team to implement before I went and Yak-shaved an entire server so it seems appropriate to make my first post about it.
Lets start by ensuring we're all on the same page.
Matchmaking is the process of taking a group of players and deciding who should play against who to achieve the best and most fun games. In this case that typically means comparable skill levels.
You push a button to search for a game and we find a game for you to play, ideally it'll be with players of the same skill level as yourself and with the setup you have searched for. We are treating matchmaking as a competitive system and those using it will be assumed to be looking for a competitive gameplay experience.
Note, lobby balance (deciding who is on which team) is not matchmaking but there is some overlap in what they do. We are purely talking about matchmaking today, we may talk about lobby balance and rating another day.
Before we go into how this will work; I want to answer some questions you might already be asking:
Our first release of matchmaking will be purely for 1v1. It's the easiest to implement, works best with a smaller player count (which we expect to happen when it first comes out) and is already seen as a more competitive mode. More importantly; when stuff goes wrong it affects fewer people.
Our ideal experience for you will be:
There will be a selection of maps active at any one time, with each match taking place will be on one of these maps selected at random each game. Each season will have its own pool and allows us to keep things fresh while also not being too constrained.
While we've not decided exactly how we will use them, we will be having seasons. At minimum there will be leaderboard winners each season. Additionally we have more options around major balance changes, map pool alterations, matching algorithm changes and rating adjustments to all happen on seasonal boundaries.
Slightly more of a stretch goal than the other items but something we will be planning for. You get a selection of maps and can veto a limited number of them. Is there a map you lose every game on? Veto it! The game you play after matching is then picked from the remaining pool of maps.
Of course BAR is frequently played as a team game and we'll not be resting on our solo laurels. We want to add in matchmaking for small teams. Unfortunately a lot of what we do with small teams will be built around lessons learned from solo; thus we can't promise any details at this stage.
Some of the things we will need to make a decision on are:
These come under the title of Player vs Environment or "PvE". PvE has consistently represented at least half of all BAR matches and is important to us; thus making it work for matchmaking is also important.
The big problem with PvE is we are not matchmaking for a team to fight another team of players (in which case, just make sure the skill levels are comparable) but against an AI threat. Furthermore one of the things that makes our PvE modes so much fun is how you can tweak the balance. Barbarian AI might not be as good as a player but you can give them a better start position, resource bonuses and of course just add more. You can also do the opposite.
So at this stage I can say we want to put in PvE matchmaking but I cannot predict the form it will take. Those of you enjoying this mode, keep an eye out for discussions on the matter because your input will be vital in shaping this.
FFA is not nearly as popular as our other modes and we think this is partly because it can be so hard to find a fair game. In theory it should be one of the easier modes to matchmake for, but, as with PvE the devil will be in the details and we're not committing to a specific implementation at this time.
We all want it; we all want 8v8 matchmaking. Unfortunately it is much harder than the rest of the options.
The more players searching for a game at one time the easier and faster it is to match up the players.
8v8 games are long, that means more time between searches. 8v8 games use 16 players, so you need more people to make it work, at the same time this also makes it harder to match players up. It's even worse for those on the edge of skill ranges (high and low).
Additionally the majority of our 8v8 games take place on two maps with many players have a strong preference to one over the other. This further fractures the situation, essentially giving us two or three groups of different players in an already tight situation.
8v8 is special to many of the devs; it reminds us of what the game used to be like. When I joined the team we would typically have one 8v8 going at a time, it was a social situation as much as it was a game. It influenced many decisions for the game; for example it led to the creation of the join queue. As the game has grown, the ability for players to stay in the same lobby and build connections is something we appreciate even more and do not want to lose.
Matchmaking has the potential to bring about some fantastic improvements in lobby discoverability but it could also take away from one of the things making Beyond All Reason such a fantastic game. Maybe matchmaking for 8v8 is not the right choice? We'll see, for now only time will tell.
As mentioned at the top; if there's positive feedback and a desire to see more things then we want to keep posting developer updates. Let us know what you liked about this post and what you want to hear more about.
