Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.

Tian Ding

Techniques are described herein for automatically pre-constructing bundles of play-items based on the degree of synergy between the play-items. The degree of synergy between play-items is determined empirically, based on contents of player-constructed game-sets and outcomes of actual games using those game-sets. Automatically pre-constructing bundles involves generating pairwise synergy scores between every possible pair of play-items, and then (for bundles containing more than two items) using those pairwise synergy scores to determine bundle-wise synergy scores. Techniques are provided for identifying candidate bundle(s) of play-items to offer or award to a player. The candidate bundles are determined based on synergies between the play-items in each of the pre-constructed bundles and the play-items in the player's specific game-set.

Techniques for offering synergistic bundles in games involving game-sets of play-items

Techniques are described herein for a gaming system that maintains an internal score and an external score for each user. The system maintains the internal scores to reflect demonstrated user skill. The system uses the accurate internal scores to facilitate communication between client computing devices associated with users that have been selected to participate in gameplay instances based on the internal scores. The external scores maintained by the system displayed to the users. Because the external scores are not used for matchmaking, the external scores may be adjusted in any way without requiring internal consistency. For example, to combat gameplay stagnation, the gameplay system periodically resets maintained external scores. For a time, comparisons between the reset external scores do not accurately reflect the users' rankings within the game. However, as the users participate in gameplay, the external scores return to levels that are similar to the users' internal scores.

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Lake Forest, CA, United States of America

Tian Ding