Valve, the developer of popular shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, has updated the game’s matchmaking system to include non-CS:GO activities.
The company initially revised matchmaking factors last year in what it called Prime Matchmaking, which matched players who had linked a unique phone number to their Steam account. Later on, Valve also added that players must reach a certain in-game level to get into Prime Matchmaking. Unfortunately, the results of this feature created, in Valve’s words, a “hard boundary… and players who might otherwise be perfectly happy playing together were separated.”
“So, what if the Prime system was re-imagined using a wider range of factors?” Valve explains. “We started with that question, and have been experimenting with matching players using observed behaviors and attributes of their Steam account, including the overall amount of time they had spent playing CS:GO, how frequently they were reported for cheating, time spent playing other games on their Steam account, etc.”
According to Valve, the new system is working: “In matches created using Trust Factor, most players ended up generating fewer reports regardless of their Prime status.”
(via ESports Observer)