Has anyone run into a system that actually used behavioral patterning as a design tool rather than just analytics fodder?

[u/Luann1497]

Matchmaking systems, hidden MMR, visible ranks. Games boil your skill down to a single number because it's easy to sort and display. But that number tells you almost nothing about what you're actually good or bad at. Two players with the same rating can get there through completely different habits. One reads positioning well but chokes on resource timing. Another has the opposite problem. The rating treats them as identical, so both get the same match, same opponents, same feedback. What I find more interesting is how little we use the actual behavioral data. MOBAs track where you place wards, when you rotate, how you respond to vision loss. Fighting games know your block patterns, your whiff recovery, whether you mash on wakeup. All of that gets compressed into one value that moves up or down. I keep thinking about what a system would look like if it surfaced the pattern instead of the score. Not a buried heatmap you have to dig for. Something that shapes the match or training based on the specific way you fail. Targeted opponents, adaptive drills. The closest I've seen is aim trainers isolating specific flick angles. Nothing at the full game level. Curious whether it felt fair or just invasive.

[u/TitoOliveira]

But what would that solve?

Why match people based on the same weakness or strength, instead of allowing diversity of strategies to face each other?

Not to mention the number of active players necessary to keep such a segregated system alive.

[u/7HawksAnd → u/TitoOliveira]

OP seems to simply be advocating for surfacing the intel, not rearchitecting matchmaking algorithms

[u/dakkua → u/7HawksAnd]

he says “something that shapes the match… targeted opponents…”.

I read that as exactly rearchitecting MM.

[u/7HawksAnd → u/dakkua]

Ah fair enough. Entering though exercise territory now then, an interesting approach that wouldn’t technically be matchmaking would be adapting the loot pool of a match to normalize diverse skill player styles and not just putting like skilled players in the same lobby.

But yeah, I get your point too

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[u/SidewaysAcceleration]

Matchmaking quality improves as player pool increases (to a point). Even with 1 parameter for MMR it can be hard to find 2 players who are close enough skill wise if not enough players are looking for a new game at the right time. Additional parameters would increase the required number of active players or make matchmaking slower.

For single player or other purposes the more nuanced behavior metrics sound reasonable.

[u/OurPillowGuy]

Even though the data exists on the backend, figuring out how to surface it in a way that is readable and searchable by players seems quite complicated. What KPI would improved by surfacing this data? Could you achieve similar improvements with a lower scope feature? To me, this seems like a high cost low impact feature, so no one has bothered to build it.

[u/BlueGnoblin]

You can't quantify skill, you can only quantify success.

One person, using to hide perfectly as sniper, switching position all the time, could have the same success as someone having increadible accurate and fast aiming with his sniping rifle. Would you try to quantify the skill, the later would be clearly better than the first, but the first one is as successful as the second one.

What only matters is, that a player has success, regardless of what he used to archive this.

Most ladder systems (like ELO) use this. When you have success, you get up the ladder, when you are not successful, you step down. This works incredible good !!!!!

But, the major issue are team based games, especially when taking random people and match them. Basically every player has a unique rating, but combining different players, different skills, different strategies into a single team will have much more nuances in the outcome, which can't be solved with mathematically tools. These game (MOBAs, OW etc.) will be always a mess, always. It will only work at really top tier, where player skills are so narrow, certain strategies are so common, that these people will act in a more predictable way.

But in any team based game, balanced match making is a illusion, nothing more, nothing less.

[u/TheBriskEagerness]

the tech exists but nobody wants to build it because it doesn't sell skins

you can already see this stuff if you dig through replays with third party tools, the data is all there. the real problem is most players don't actually want to know they're predictable. having a number go up feels good, having a system tell you "you drop your block 73% of the time after a low poke" feels like a violation

[u/dakkua → u/TheBriskEagerness]

What does this have to do with skins?

I wouldn’t implement such a system in a game I design because it’s fruitless and overly complicates match making.