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Matchmaking

Overview

The PlayFab Matchmaking feature provides a great way to build matchmaking into your game. It offers a simple, yet powerful system to help your users find each other. This feature upgrades PlayFab’s deprecated matchmaker and uses the proven capabilities of SmartMatch on the Xbox network.

This feature marks the first time that established Xbox network SmartMatch matchmaking technology is available outside the Xbox ecosystem through PlayFab.

When an individual or group wants to enter a match, your title submits a request to the matchmaking service. Once the request is made, the service holds on to the request and tries to match it with other requests. The service then creates matches that contain players who are most compatible.

Terminology

The matchmaking system uses common terms that you need to understand. These terms are:

  • Ticket: A ticket is the resource at the core of the matchmaking process. A ticket consists of a player or a list of players that want to play together, along with their attributes (such as in-game levels, favorite maps, or skill).
  • Queue: A queue is a collection of tickets to be matched together and a set of rules that controls how tickets are matched.
  • Rule: A rule is a constraint on which tickets are eligible to match. The matchmaking algorithm searches for a set of tickets that satisfy all the rules defined by a queue to create a match.
  • Attribute: An attribute is a value associated with a player that can have rules applied to it. You can specify attributes in either the ticket or the player's Entity Objects.
  • Match: A match is the output of the matchmaking process. It's a collection of tickets that satisfy all the rules for the queue the tickets were submitted to.

Basics

When a player or group of players want to play together, one player creates a ticket for themselves or the entire group, and submits it to matchmaking through your title. The join flow ensures that all players in the group consent to match together. Once the player or players join, the matchmaking process begins automatically. When matchmaking finds a suitable match, the title groups those matched players together into a game.

You submit a ticket to a matchmaking queue. A title can have multiple queues. For example, a title might create one queue for a ranked game mode and another for a social game mode. Tickets can only match with other tickets in the same queue. A player can only be in one ticket at a time.

To define a queue, you must create a queue configuration. The simplest configuration consists of the queue name and the match size (a minimum and maximum number of players). The matchmaking service tries to fill the match to the maximum size specified. If there aren't enough tickets, it can create a match at the minimum size.

If you have different game modes with different match size requirements, create multiple queue configurations. For more advanced matchmaking scenarios, configure queue rules.

The matchmaking service currently supports these rule types:

  • String equality rule: ensures that a string attribute is the same across all tickets in a match.
  • Difference rule: ensures that the absolute difference for a number attribute between any two tickets in a match is less than a configured maximum difference.
  • Set intersection rule: ensures that for a given attribute that is a list of strings, all tickets in a match share at least as many values as is configured.
  • Match total rule: ensures that the sum of a number attribute across all players in a match is within a configured range.
  • Region selection rule: ensures that the latency to a common data center for all users of the match is less than a configured max value.
  • Team size balance rule: ensures that teams included in a match contain similar member counts.
  • Team difference rule: ensures that teams included in a match are within a configured difference for a specific attribute (such as skill).
  • Team ticket size similarity rule: enforces that the number of large parties is equal to the number of teams, or is zero.

Define rules to enforce basic functionality, such as matching players with the same map, game mode, or game version. More advanced uses allow constraints to relax over time or become disabled after some time. Such rules are useful for skill-based matchmaking. For more in-depth documentation on these options, see Game Manager.

For more information on specific flows from either your game client or service, see the following documentation.

Quickstart guide

Configuration

Tutorials

SDKs and Tools

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