Intel Drop: Ghost War Connectivity and Matchmaking

When creating our online infrastructure, the development team’s focus has been on ensuring stable and resilient connectivity. Since its launch, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands has been up 99.26% of the time, with rare downtime that was mostly due to patch maintenance. The team is aiming for the same stability for Ghost War, the upcoming free update for Ghost Recon Wildlands. The Ghost War Open Beta, which takes place September 21–25, is an opportunity for us to test our online infrastructure as well as our matchmaking system. Players have asked us about connectivity and matchmaking, so we want to shed some light on how those two work for Ghost War.

 

Network Model and Connectivity

 

Just like campaign mode, Ghost War’s networking model is based on peer-to-peer networking. In order to improve connectivity, we have decided to back up our networking model with relay servers. These relay servers route packets between players who cannot connect directly to each other, essentially eliminating many of the situations where players can’t connect because of incompatible NAT types. In order to minimize any lag induced by this routing, we spread our relay servers over many geographical locations and picked servers that offer the quickest routes to relay packets between players.

 

During the Open Beta, we want to know more about the quality of your connectivity experience. If you experience lag or latency when playing, please leave feedback on the official Open Beta forums to let the team know about it.

 

Ghost War's Quickplay Matchmaking

 

Please note that during the Open Beta, you will be able to choose Quickplay or a custom game. (Learn more about custom games

here

.)

 

When it comes to PvP, matchmaking is one of the most important criteria for our team. Our priorities for matchmaking in Quickplay are: connection quality; providing a good balance between players’ skill levels in a session; and ensuring reasonable waiting times.

 

Matchmaking works with two kinds of criteria – hard and soft. While hard criteria remain in place (hence the “hard”), soft criteria become more permissive or even relax completely with waiting time. Some of the most important soft criteria employed by our matchmaking system are geographical location (world region), skill level, and the player’s spoken language.

 

The world region (America, Europe and Africa, Asia-Pacific) is a hard filter. In order to keep the lag and connection quality reasonable, we will never automatically match players across world region boundaries. However, in order to help players located in a low demographic continent find a game, matchmaking will automatically expand its search to the nearest high concurrent user area after a waiting period, while still remaining in the same world region (for example, North and South America).

During the Open Beta, we are also experimenting with allowing players to create a private party and enter Quickplay alongside friends from different world regions (for example, America and Europe).

Depending on the impact on session quality (high ping and/or bad experience), we may or may not remove this feature

. So please don’t hesitate to let us know about your matchmaking experience on the official Open Beta forums.

Lol I'm kinda pissed at Ubi right now . I should head over and tell them that if the ping on any player is over 150 the experience sucks. No need to play I can guarantee that it sucks.

Lol I'm kinda pissed at Ubi right now . I should head over and tell them that if the ping on any player is over 150 the experience sucks. No need to play I can guarantee that it sucks.

Somewhat true, at times due to my Internet type, which can be finicky during bad weather, I can have a ping of 400+.

It's not the norm but it does happen to me, I notice it too in game play, but it's not debilitating.

I have noticed the "Host" change in mid-round, this happens a lot if the "Host" is laggy, this is the instance in which

a laggy host can effect all players in that match as they are the "host" or source, and I give UBI credit they do swap hosts anytime

higher pings are detected, what I don't know is what value that is set to, that triggers that.

I know what triggers mine, so I won't play if I am experiencing bad weather, or I will warn the team that

I am having high ping. I think in AAPG the Ping restrictions on servers is 2 or 300 anything past that and your kicked.

UBI mixes regions, and most of us have seen this, they can claim that they don't but I know better. As long as they allow

cross region matchmaking they will have a hard time implementing a ping restriction cap.

Well i think they have fairly broad regions defined I think Canada /US/Mexico/ and maybe South America aka the Americas are one region, Europe as a whole I think is one and the Asiatic countries are in another. I know in BF 1 we did some testing and 150-175 was the upper limit before it started really impacting play. If I ever see a 400 ping to anything I usually shut down and watch TV. I dont handle bad hit reg and stuttering / warping well when playing a shooter. The last round of PUBG I played I unloaded a full extended mag on a fully kitted M416 into a guy. Had enough pink mist to paint a building i mean virtually every shot showed a hit as he stood there. Then he warped behind a wall and shot me with a good ole triple tap in the head and I died. I rage quit and have not been back on yet. His name wa long duc dong or some other asian name of course.

You would be correct.

Sorry I wasn't on last night. Dentist appt messed me up. I took a Vicodin and hit the bed.