Video Game Matchmaking Should Be Based on Personality and Not Just Skill

By Maddy Myers | August 5, 2025 | 10:15am

Video Games Features matchmaking

Video Game Matchmaking Should Be Based on Personality and Not Just Skill

Multiplayer game matchmaking has been a frustration for players since time immemorial. If you’ve played online games at all, you’ve had the experience—probably often—of getting matched with a group that’s just all wrong. Is this even fixable? I don’t know, but I don’t think skill-based matchmaking is the full solution to the problem.

Most of the time, matchmaking in multiplayer games works like this: players get sorted according to their internet connection strengths and current wait times, then placed with other players who have a similar win/loss ratio. Other times, like in Elden Ring Nightreign, it’s based solely on internet connection, so it’s completely random as to whether or not you’re going to end up with players who are as good (or bad) at the game as you are.

The first method is most common, and it’s already pretty complicated to implement; developers want to be sure players aren’t waiting too long and that their teammates and opponents all have pretty decent internet connections, and those are priorities that make sense to put first ahead of skill. But here’s my big question: why is skill the next most important thing on the list?

It’s been fascinating to me that Nightreign hasn’t put skill into the equation at all. The result is that playing the game online is like participating in a big social experiment. Sometimes, matches go great; sometimes they’re terrible. You never know what you’re going to get in terms of your teammates’ behavior and skill levels. That’s made the game experience extremely unpredictable, at least if you’re playing with strangers. (If you’re playing with friends, it’s a lot more fun, but that’s no shocker.)

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There are definitely some people online who are angry that the game doesn’t have skill-based matchmaking, but not everyone. As one example, in response to this post on the Steam forums from somebody wishing the game had it, several of the responses are from people who are happy the game doesn’t take skill into consideration. The result is a fascinating debate between players who enjoy “carrying” a couple of newbies, versus others who see this as a waste of time. The original poster says further down in the thread that they don’t like to help out other players in other FromSoftware games, either, and they only “invade” other players’ games, because they like to show other players “how much they need to learn.”

Nightreign is a three-player PvE game, and it’s difficult, but if you’re very good at the game, you can definitely be the “main character” and carry your two other teammates over the finish line. My second-ever online match with strangers in Nightreign was not unlike this; I had barely any experience in the game, although I did at least have 360 hours of Elden Ring under my belt. That didn’t help that much, though, because I was still learning where to go in Nightreign in a very literal sense. But I got matched up with two players who were extremely good and, instead of disconnecting and abandoning me, they both carried me and we beat the game’s first boss. This was a pretty hilarious thing to happen in my second-ever Nightreign match, and it absolutely gave me an outsized positive impression of the game that soon changed when I played several other matches with strangers who were not nearly as patient with me while I was still learning.

Playing a ton of FromSoftware games has fundamentally changed the way that I think about almost all video games. FromSoftware games are famous for being difficult, but I’ve always found that the thing that’s hard about them isn’t necessarily that they demand quick reaction times (like a twitch shooter would) or strategic thinking (like, say, StarCraft). FromSoftware games demand one thing above all, and that’s patience—patience with yourself as you learn and observe enemies’ attack patterns, and patience with the games’ often opaque storytelling.

Although I think that most FromSoftware game fans would agree with me that patience is the highest necessary virtue to complete these games, these fans absolutely do not all have the same conclusions about how to behave in Nightreign. There are some who want to extend their patience to other players by serving as guides, or by carrying strangers through Nightreign. And there are some players who want to lord their skill over others, almost as if to say, “I was patient enough to gain these skills, and now you need to be patient with me invading your game and beating the shit out of you.”

I recently learned about the gamer personality archetype system coined by academic Richard Bartle way back in 1996. The personality types were based on player behavior in MUDs and MMORPGs, but I think they can also be applied to FromSoftware game players, and probably many other kinds of game fans. Here are the four types: Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers. The first three types are pretty easily explained by their names; I myself have traits from those first three. But then there are the “Killers,” the player type that I have a lot of trouble understanding and playing alongside.

Here’s how Bartle described these players in his original paper: “Killers get their kicks from imposing themselves on others… The more massive the distress caused, the greater the killer’s joy at having caused it. Normal points-scoring is usually required so as to become powerful enough to begin causing havoc in earnest, and exploration of a kind is necessary to discover new and ingenious ways to kill people. Even socialising is sometimes worthwhile beyond taunting a recent victim, for example in finding out someone’s playing habits, or discussing tactics with fellow killers. They’re all just means to an end, though; only in the knowledge that a real person, somewhere, is very upset by what you’ve just done, yet can themselves do nothing about it, is there any true adrenalin-shooting, juicy fun.”

This is the perfect way to describe a FromSoftware invader. And, I would wager, this gamer personality type is also a person with whom I hope to never be matched in Nightreign, or any team-based game, even if it’s a team shooter in which “killing” is nominally the objective. This is a person who doesn’t want to cooperate, and I’m a person who simply loves to cooperate. When I’m playing a team shooter, I want all of my teammates to work together, and if there’s a lone wolf playing as a sniper ignoring the rest of the team (you know, that one Widowmaker in Overwatch), then I don’t really want to get matched up with them ever again.

I’m not sure if Bartle’s four archetypes are the best way to categorize players in every single type of game, but it’s not my job to figure out the answer to that. I do think, as somebody who’s played a lot of multiplayer games over the years, that personality is something that should be worth game designers’ consideration when designing matchmaking systems. And especially if Nightreign ever gets a system like this, because it’s a game that relies so much on cooperating, it seems even more important to factor in players’ personality. Just because all of us like FromSoftware games doesn’t mean we’re all invaders.

Maddy Myers has worked as a video game critic and journalist since 2007; she has previously worked for Polygon, Kotaku, The Mary Sue, Paste Magazine, and the Boston Phoenix. She co-hosts a video game podcast called Triple Click, as well as an X-Men podcast called The Mutant Ages. When she is not writing or podcasting, she composes electro-pop music under the handle MIDI Myers. Her personal website is midimyers.com.