Hey Everyone!
It’s been just over a month since we launched Dawn of War III, and ever since we’ve been carefully watching how you’re enjoying the game. With the release of the first major balance patch, we’re now in a good place to implement a feature you’ve been asking for: Leaderboards!
For those with a bit of competition in their blood, your rank on the Leaderboards is what you can look to for bragging rights against your group of friends, or the entire Dawn of War III community. Here’s a super quick breakdown of how your rank on the leaderboard is determined.
Placement Matches
Your first 5 matches with every faction, in each game size (1v1, 2v2, and 3v3), with or without an arranged team, are considered placement matches.
You may find yourself matched with opponents much better or worse than yourself during your placement rounds. This is intentional and allows the game to calibrate your matchmaking rating (MMR), thus giving you opponents similar to your skill level from the 6th game on.
MMR
Once you’ve finished your placement matches, you will be given an MMR, which is a range of hidden skill rankings that are used to place you against players of similar skill level when you match. As you play more, and win or lose matches, your MMR will fluctuate to try and not match you against someone drastically better or worse than you.
When you go search for a multiplayer match, the time it takes to find an opponent is our system working its magic. If there aren’t many players of similar skill currently looking for a match, the system will eventually widen the scope of the ‘skill band’, and place you in a match with players a bit higher or lower skill than you, in effort to get you into a game in a timely manner. If this happens, don’t worry. The system is designed so that beating a player with significantly more MMR will net you a large increase in your own points, and a large decrease in theirs. Losing a match to such a player will result in a small drop in your points and a small gain to your opponent.
Leaderboards
So how does this all factor in to the leaderboards? Basically, after you run through your five placement matches, you’re assigned an MMR that will be compared to everyone else’s, which will determine your ranking on the leaderboards. Your rank on the leaderboards can be seen on your player profile. Note that your rank on the leaderboards is not the same as your MMR. Your rank is determined based on your MMR, but those actual values are hidden.
That’s all! We’re super excited to be introducing leaderboards and can’t wait to see who reaches the top. If you’re just in it to have fun and aren’t the super competitive type, that’s totally cool too! It’s all in good fun, and our MMR and matchmaking systems will still be doing their jobs to place you against similar players so you can get in there and have fun.
Are you on your way to the top of the leaderboards? Let us know on our forums!