CHAMP: Cross-domain Hybrid Architecture for Matchmaking and Prediction in Online Multi-Player Games
Kai Wang, Ge Fan, Chaoyun Zhang, Yuyang Jiang, Yuze Liu
Abstract
Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) games rely on matchmaking to maintain competitive balance. Our prior work, CUPID, framed matchmaking as an assignment re-optimization problem and showed that a single-mode win-rate predictor can meaningfully rebalance teams. However, deploying such a system across diverse player populations exposes three practical bottlenecks: most queueing players lack sufficient in-mode match history (cold start), skill distributions shift drastically across rank tiers (distribution inconsistency), and extreme skill segments are severely data-starved. We present CHAMP, a cross-domain matchmaking framework that resolves these deployment bottlenecks. To address data sparsity and cold starts, CHAMP replaces the target-mode-only player profile with a hybrid domain feature collection: a timestamp-ordered cross-mode short-term sequence whose slices are annotated with target-domain features, plus per-mode breakdowns of long-term, real-time and team statistics. We further propose the Domain-Aware Win-rate Network (DAWN): a Domain-aware Knowledge Extractor (DAKE) compiles target-mode attributes into learnable representations that feed Domain-Aware Temporal/Spatial/Permutation OmniNet Encoders (DATOE/DASOE/DAPOE), so that mode-conditioned representations and per-mode debiasing are learned jointly inside a single shared network. Online, one trained DAWN serves every supported mode, with per-mode position-satisfaction thresholds as the only mode-specific knob. Offline, DAWN achieves 67.73% win-rate prediction accuracy, outperforming all evaluated attention and sequence baselines. Online A/B tests across the entire League ladder of a large-scale MOBA game, from novice players up to the top-expert players served by Elite Mode, demonstrate consistent drops in imbalanced matches. For lower-tier players, CHAMP reduces the 5-minute kill crushing rate by up to 20.73%.