U.S. Patent no. 10,286,326: Soft reservation system and method for multiplayer video games

Issued May 14, 2019, to Activision Publishing, Inc.
Priority Date July 3, 2014

Summary:
U.S. Patent No. 10,286,326 (the ‘326 Patent) relates to multiplayer video game sessions. This invention addresses the drawbacks related to matchmaking to help optimize the matching of players in multiplayer games. The system analyzes historical player data and determines an optimal mix of players based on players’ styles. The system can then continually adjust the matchmaking to preserve a balanced match based on observations relating to player behavior, gameplay quality, and other information. The system may identify these attributes and computer them in a scoring engine to create potential matches of players based on optimal criteria. This would lead to an improvement over old systems of matchmaking that are either entirely manual in nature where players add friends to a group, or where the design is too static and is unable to compute changing variables to maintain match quality.

Abstract:
A soft reservation system and method is provided facilitates an unrequested reservation of a gameplay session in multiplayer video games. A soft reservation may include a match between two or more players for one or more subsequent gameplay sessions that are reserved for the players. The system may, for instance, anticipate an interest by players in a gameplay session and make a soft reservation for the players, who may not have explicitly requested the reservation, to play in the gameplay session. A soft reservation may be made for a player based on a match score, a game profile, a player profile, and/or other information.

Illustrative Claim:
1. A computer-implemented method of reserving gameplay sessions for players in a multiplayer video game, the method being implemented by a host computer having one or more physical processors programmed with computer program instructions that, when executed by the one or more physical processors, cause the host computer to perform the method, wherein said host computer is in data communication with a plurality of computing devices and wherein each of said plurality of computing devices is configured to interact with an instance of the multiplayer video game, the method comprising: using a scoring engine in the host computer to identify a first player for which an unrequested reservation to play in a gameplay session of the multiplayer game is to be made, wherein said unrequested reservation is a reservation to play in the gameplay session of the multiplayer game made before the first player expresses an interest in playing in said gameplay session; using at least one of the scoring engine or an analytics and feedback engine coupled with the scoring engine in the host computer to determine first availability information associated with the first player, wherein the first availability information indicates an estimated time at which the first player will be available to play in the gameplay session; using at least one of the scoring engine or the analytics and feedback engine in the host computer to identify a second player for inclusion in the gameplay session based on a potential match of the first player and the second player; and using a pipelining engine configured to access data indicative of at least one of the match score of the first player and the second player, a game profile of the first player, a profile of the first player, a game progression of the first player, a game mode of interest to the first player, a log in time of the first player, or a log in time of preferred players of the first player; wherein the pipelining engine is a modular programmatic component, executed by the host computer, and wherein the pipelining engine is further configured to generate the unrequested reservation, within the multiplayer video game, for the first player to play in the gameplay session with the second player based on the first availability and said data.