Teamfight Tactics: Riot announce matchmaker change to create fairer games

Riot Games have announced a change to the Teamfight Tactics matchmaker that will make it “extremely unlikely” for players to be matched against the same opponent in consecutive rounds.

Teamfight Tactics matches feature eight players, but battles only ever take place head-to-head, with the game pairing off players in each combat round.

Who you get matched with can have a significant impact on your chances of success, with different opponents having different levels of absolute power, and also different compositions being more or less effective against your own.

In an attempt to ensure that the matchmaker doesn’t result in certain players being unfairly rewarded or punished based on who they play, Riot technical game designer Geoff Marsi announced that the next major update, Patch 9.16, will include a change to the matchmaking system to make it very unlikely for players to face the same opponent multiple times in a row.

While a certain degree of randomness is inherent to a game like Teamfight Tactics, the change should hopefully prevent players from feeling unduly punished by the random selection of the same opponent multiple times.

There’s little more frustrating than taking a massive health hit, or even being eliminated from the game, because you got matched against the strongest line-up – or simply the player whose line-up directly counters your own – in back-to-back rounds.

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On the flip side, players can also unfairly benefit from such matchmaking, especially if they play a ghost squad on consecutive turns. When there are an uneven number of players remaining in the game, one player will face a ‘ghost’ version of another player – that player cannot take damage if their ghost army loses, but the ghosts are also much easier to beat as they don’t benefit from trait bonuses.

If one player gets the chance to play against the ghost squad in consecutive rounds, then, it can mean effectively free wins while the other players in the game risk actual defeats, and especially in the final stages of the game this could be enough to change the final outcome.