Marvel Rivals’ Matchmaking: The Deepest Investigation You’ll Ever See

Marvel Rivals' matchmaking system has sparked controversy, frustration, and deep speculation from players who believe their matches are being manipulated. But is the system truly rigged, or is there a more complex reality at play?

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💬 Comment below: Do you think Marvel Rivals' matchmaking is fair or manipulated?

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In this nearly 1-hour deep dive, we explore:

0:00 Intro
1:40 From Fair Play to Engagement: A History of Matchmaking
5:11 The Rise of EOMM - Engagement Optimized Matchmaking
8:59 The Science Behind the Scenes: EOMM, OptMatch, and EnMatch
17:15 Why Players Believe “Matchmaking Is Rigged”
27:24 Behind the Accusations: How Does Marvel Rivals’ Matchmaking Actually Work?
41:39 The Pros and Cons of Marvel Rivals’ Matchmaking
48:38 Conclusion: Rigged or Just Reality?

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🔍 SOURCES & REFERENCES 🔍

📜 Primary Research Papers & Academic Sources

EOMM: Engagement Optimized Matchmaking Framework (Chen et al., 2017)
📖 Proceedings of the 2017 International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2017)
🔗 https://doi.org/10.1145/3038912.3052559

OptMatch: Optimized Matchmaking via Modeling High-Order Interactions on the Arena (Gong et al., 2020)
📖 Proceedings of the 26th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD 2020)
📖 Proceedings of the 38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2024)

🛠️ Industry Documents & Patents

Activision’s Patent on Matchmaking to Encourage Microtransactions (2015, Published 2017)
📜 US Patent 20160005270A1
🔗 https://patents.google.com/patent/US2...

🎮 GDC Talks & Developer Presentations

NetEase GDC 2021 Talk: "Find the Right Match – AI Enhanced Matchmaking Practice"
🎤 Game Developers Conference (GDC 2021)

📖 GDC 2006 & Microsoft Research
🔗 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/resea...

💬 Forum Discussions & Community Insights

Marvel Rivals Players Discussing "Forced 50% Win Rate"
🗣️ Reddit /r/MarvelRivals, Overwatch & Dota 2 matchmaking threads
🔗 Overwatch 50/50 Thread:   / why_is_forced_5050_real  

Marvel Rivals Players Analyzing EOMM

🗣️ Reddit /r/marvelrivals discussion on engagement-based matchmaking
🔗  / analysis_of_eomm_in_marvel_rivals_2017_2025  
📖 Arpad Elo’s "The Rating of Chessplayers, Past & Present" (1978)
📖 B.F. Skinner’s Variable Reward Systems in Gaming Psychology