The Isolation of Random Matchmaking

[UtopiaV1]

Wow, forced random matchmaking AND no dedicated lan? What did we ever do to you Rob Pardo? Why do you hate Starcraft players/RTS players/human beings?

Just because you are unmarried and unloved, doesn't mean everyone else wants to share your isolation and frustration by forcing a randomly-generated online rollercoaster of l33t dickheads and timid n00bs. Just like MW2 and Assasins Creed 2, I am sooooooo not buying this.

You hearing me publishers/developers? You are losing a customer with inane design choices and stupid DRM! And I can't be the only one.

 

[Duffy13]

To clarify some misconceptions I'm seeing in the comments:

*MM is not forced, it's only in ladder play.
*Custom games still exist and let you do whatever you want.
*True LAN does not exist, but partial LAN is said to be in development. (After you log in game runs locally but occasionally validates your account against the Blizz servers, perfect no, but still better then no LAN)

On to the article:

For once I have to disagree with you Shamus, at least with your MM point.

Matchmaking is for the competitive ladders, competitive being the keyword. This is league play, as with any league 'sport' if you play in the league enough you eventually stabilize your position and get to know your opponents. I bet the top 10 in each bracket are familiar with their opponents.

However, I perfectly understand that some people don't want this competitive level, which is why the custom games exist. A whole play-style of doing whatever or playing your friends just for the fun of it. This will include all the custom maps that will flow forth once the game releases.

The UT example sounds nice, but it's no different practically speaking. You picked a server and fought your way to the top. The only difference is you knew the people you were playing since they were regulars. But you never improve past what was available to you. You could have left that server to play elsewhere and done horribly due to better players being out there. At which point you would be abandoning your community for higher competition, or if you didn't care you could stay on your home server and limit yourself to your micro community which is but one small corner of the game's players.

To be honest I think what we're really discussing here is a social problem, not necessarily a mechanics problem. Assuming they have the most basic friend and group tools (which it looks like they will have) it comes down to us to actually socialize. Why does it require a home server?(Which is kinda impractical for RTS games) Does the nature of the game in question prevent us from socializing?

 

[ReverseEngineered]

I totally agree with you, Shamus. Back in my day (and I'm hardly old), we picked our own server or game to play in. There were games for the hardcore, games for newbies, even games for people who liked hamsters. You tended to find a server that you enjoyed and you hung out there. Maybe you improved to the point where you became bored, in which case you found a new server, but you generally found a good group of guys and a good place that you could count on for a good time.

With matchmaking, all of this goes out the window. Now you are always up against whoever the computer decides you should be against. You have no choice in the matter, no communities, no familiar hangouts. We lose something that we used to take for granted and that emerged on its own. It was beautiful emergent behavior, but without the ability to choose your own game, that becomes impossible.

What I don't understand is, why do we *have* to have matchmaking? Why not make it optional? Sure, it means making two separate systems -- a matchmaking system and a game browser -- but neither of these is difficult to develop and pales in comparison to any other development efforts.

Give users a choice and they will decide what they like best. Make the choice for them and you either hit or miss. Do you want to risk missing the mark? Leaving users the option is just another way of hedging your bets, which is always a good idea on a multi-million dollar investment. It makes sense for them to do this. Taking a stance one way or another always means you are excluding some fraction of your available market.

PS: The poster above me clarified that this is only for ladder play. If that's true, then perhaps this is a reasonable limitation, but this isn't just about SC2, but all new games. New games are dropping dedicated servers and game browsers and are falling onto the simpler-but-restrictive matchmaking systems. Though some users may prefer these, it removes a lot of control from the user and risks forcing them into something that they don't want. Making a "beginner mode" is a common trick that developers use to help new users approach their program, but it's always a mistake to do this to the exclusion of the intermediates and power users. Crutches are good, and it's okay if some people continue to rely on them, but you have to expect that many people will outgrow those crutches and long for something more. If a developer misses this, they will find that people like their application at first, but soon grow tired and frustrated with its limitations. You always need to give your users room to grow.

 

[Xocrates]

Oh, for the love of...

Starcraft - Game is god. We decide who your opponents are for you. Other humans aren't people to be interacted with or form communities with - they're merely more advanced AI opponents.

Wow, forced random matchmaking AND no dedicated lan? What did we ever do to you Rob Pardo? Why do you hate Starcraft players/RTS players/human beings?

What I don't understand is, why do we *have* to have matchmaking? Why not make it optional? Sure, it means making two separate systems -- a matchmaking system and a game browser -- but neither of these is difficult to develop and pales in comparison to any other development efforts.

The game DOES NOT FORCE MATCHMAKING. Custom games still exist, arranged games with friends still exist, as do friends lists, and personally I would be extremely surprised if the game won't support clans in some way or another.

The reason why people are focusing so much in matchmaking is because a) it's what people are going to use the most, b) it appears to be the first time matchmaking is actually good.

Please people, get your facts straight before you complain.

 

[Sonic Doctor]

Loved the mention of Doctor Who fans.

I'm not very well versed in the realm of playing RTS games online. When I was growing up until a couple of years ago, I was big into RTS games: Command and Conquer, The Age of Empires series, The Empire Earth series, and Star Trek Armada 2. The problem was I never had a good enough internet connection. When I got to college I had a fast enough connection to play Star Trek Armada 2 online, because that was the RTS game I was playing all the time(everyday), at the time. I don't know how they set up my opponents when I played, but I never won. Most of the time I lost so badly that I started thinking the silly thought that people were cheating somehow.
Examples: One time an opponent, within the first five to ten minutes of battle, sent a large wave the most advanced ships and wiped me out, when I had just barely had the time to construct ten small ships and had nowhere near the resources to build the whole line of stations needed to get to build the advanced shipyard. The second example happened within the same amount of time from the start of game. The new opponent didn't build ships, but built a wall of star-bases that led down to my base. I couldn't see how he could have done that, because star-bases are of course one of the most expensive things in the game. Even if he was mining everything in his region and in other regions, he couldn't have mined that much ore and built those star-bases in that amount of time.

Sorry about that, I'm in a ranting kind of mood.
Loved the article Shamus, it would be interesting to find out what type of opponent selection style many of the RTS games have used over the years. For now, I'll stick to playing against the cold lifeless computer.

 

[Bodyless]

Xocrates got it right...if someone ever played warcraft3 on Battle.net, you know what features SC2 will at the very least get.

They could however maybe add another ranking for customs games, like on CoH, so you can get even matches in custom games, too.

 

[300lb. Samoan]

Great article, I think the community aspect of online gaming is going to be (or should be) a big objective for developers to focus on. When the "no dedicated servers for MW2" hoopla was in full-swing, I wrote some comments about how dedicated servers allow for communities to form and how this is one of my favorite aspects of online gaming. When I play Team Fortress 2, I have a small list of favorite servers that I've attended for a while and I know what to expect when I go there. Besides the ping/responsiveness and the map-list, a big part of that experience is the people I'm going to see there. Their competitiveness, friendliness, and general attitude all affect the game experience. Some servers I go to are filled with chatty goofballs who like to take one night off a week to open the server for "fun times". Others are populated with hyper-analytical wonks who imagine they know more than Valve about the game and like to challenge your knowledge about the game as well as your patience. Yet more are filled with generally friendly but team-oriented people who like to work together to take an objective. While seeking out these different servers and figuring out what kind of experiences to expect takes a lot of time, with matchmaking the player has zero control over what they're getting in to. It's my hope that developers will start thinking about the social experience of playing their games as well as the logistical and graphical components.

 

[Fearzone]

Back in Dawn of War I--the last game where I really got into online matches (other than WoW Battlegrounds)--rankings started at 1000. If you were at 1400 you were pretty good, and leader board players were 1600 to 1800 or thereabouts. You could be automatched with anybody 200 points above you or below.

Me, personally, I liked being ranked at around 1200-1250. Once I was at 1250 I wasn't motivated to go much higher, because that put me in the range of 1050 to 1450 players, where the majority of competitive players were, and offered the best, and to my mind funnest, diversity of experience.

You can't really localize the community and have a competitive ranking at the same time--maybe you can in an FPS but not in an RTS. Now Battle.net can support "guilds" for non-competitive multiplayer matches, and the like. But for rankings to mean anything you have to be out there among all the competitive players.

 

[w00tage]

I don't understand why companies have to keep reinventing the same wheel in different shapes. Just take the best of what you've seen in the industry and do it up to suit your game. We players will be happy to be on familiar ground, evolutionary improvements will happen naturally, and life will be good for everyone.

 

[Weaver]

I feel like they've done matchmaking well, but Shamus hit it on the head with the community part. Dawn of War 2, one of the largest problems people had with it, was the disconnected feeling they got. There were no public lobbies to chat with people and organize a game, there were no places to hang out and meet people, or even really clans.

We, as a small forum community, made various steam groups and that seems to alleviate the issue, but what will battle.net have? Why can't we have chatrooms and portals? Unreal Tournanament had a bloody IRC client built into it, now THAT'S how you do it right. Unreal 2k4 had an IRC client AND an MP3 player built into it, these guys really went above and beyond with the amazing features like that.

Battle.net, while having very good matchmaking is still a far cry away from actually creating a community. I find this really, really ironic since blizzard is always throwing around "we want gamers to be connected to the community!" and stuff like that. What community? All there is is a "play game" button that pits me up against strangers. That isn't a community.

I've experienced stuff much like Shamus has and also in the unreal tournament series. I would come home from school and play on the same server every night. I got to know the people, laugh with them, play with them, and have fun with them. Sure, we weren't really connected to this big, amorphous ethereal blob of a "community" or a "meta-community" but we were, ourselves, a community. We knew each other, respected each other and looked out for each other. Why don't games want this anymore? IMO half the fun in an MMO is just talking and getting to know people. I feel that blizzard, of ALL companies, should know this.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

They should kill however invented matchmaking for PC, it is a very unfulfilling experience (IWNet). Thank God that I still have UT2K4.

 

[Rythe]

I also disagree with the main points. A lot of it seems to stem from not having a good idea of what they are and aren't going to be doing with this matchmaking. A lot of it is also based on past experiences with crappy matchmaking system which Blizzard's setup seems to be a far cry from. Lastly, you're lumping 'community' into a ranked tournament setup. Shamus, you aren't looking for a ranked tournament arena, you're looking for a casual arena. On one hand, you have open games, a possible soft-LAN setup, and whatever clan/friend's list systems they decide to implement. These, along with external communities, will all let you foster the game community you want. Make an open game, invite the people you want to invite, and tada!

One the other hand, Blizzard's proposed system will let ranked matches be much more meaningful. The idea behind it also stems from the one behind the random dungeon system they implemented in World of Warcraft. Yeah, it hurt general community quite a bit, but on the other hand, people didn't have to dig around for over an hour just to find a damn tank for the damn daily heroic dungeon quest. It improved the game, but meant that players had to do the community thing themselves. It's kind of our own fault when the community aspect there suffered. I mean, it's an MMORPG, how many more guild opportunities, chat channels, world events, and general options for community do we need?

So with Battle.net and Starcraft 2, they know the kind of tools we want, and I'm sure that most will get in there sooner or later. That, and there's a good chance that whatever ranked bracket you end up in will foster that old sense of server you had with Unreal Tournament. If someone moves out of your bracket, you will have the friend's list to back you up. Also realize that when someone does get good enough to curb stomp whatever community they're in, even if you are all good friends, it's typically hard to play competitively with them and still enjoy the experience. There are points where those people need to move on or quit the game because that competitive spark is lost for them and no one wants to play against them. In the ranked brackets, they'll move up, and new blood will be brought into your bracket/community.

Lastly, I think there are aspects of FPS matchmaking and RTS matchmaking that only make a loose correlation to each other because of the very different way the two types of games typically play out. Your comparison and expectations from the one to the other may be flawed.

 

[Rhino of Steel]

I'm confident that there will be enough of us chimp-level players to make up a bracket or division or whatever the groups are referred to (heck, since a lot of us aren't in the beta perhaps Shamus can be our Chimp Overlord, at least he'll have had practice). I usually play RTS games for the single player only but all this news about the effectiveness of the SC2 matchmaking is getting me really interested in trying it out.

Frankly, when I play multiplayer games I prefer random people to people I know nine times out of ten, although I know I'm probably in the minority there. I really don't care about forming a community with the people I play games with and especially in RTS games it's not like I find I have time to chat. A simple 'gg' from opponents at the end of a match is good enough for me. I came back to WoW for a short while after the random, cross-server dungeons were implemented and I love that system (although I really hate how tempting it now makes Cataclysm for me). This seems like more of the same but with better odds of being paired with players of similar calibre.

 

[Kelbear]

I prefer totally random play.

In ranking systems, I find myself right in the middle all the time. Worse, in balancing systems, I find myself on a team of losers all the time because they expect you to pull everyone else up.

I like random play more, I don't like the sense of futility in striving against a system that will always drag you down for succeeding.

Maybe I'd like to screw around with a wonky set of equipment, but I can't because I'll get gangraped by a server of players that I could only compete with when using every ounce of my concentration. Gameplay is just plain different at higher levels of skill. The tiniest slip-up will have you ripped up. Sometimes I just want to relax and zone out.

Maybe I'd like to be /surprised/ by a challenging player in random matchmaking, so now I have to rise to the occassion, instead of facing a never-ending struggle. That one player is a much more salient obstacle to identify with. Some friendly banter may occur as the two of you recognize each other out of the crowd for some personal competition. Then the chaos of an 8v8 battle becomes focused into a 1v1 fight with 14 mooks scattered around the two of you. It breaks up the monotony to have some variability in the challengers.

 

[Telperion]

The other thing that gets lost in the random matchmaking games is the sense of community. If you play with the same group on a regular basis, you get to know other players. You develop respect and trust, and the ability to gauge your performance against a familiar opponent. In a game with random strangers, there's little room for community or culture. Social networking is all the rage these days, and I think a bit of that thinking would do wonders for competitive online gaming. Let people associate and form groups based around common interests.

This is something that has been bugging me for a while. On Xbox Live I routinely play Battlefield 1943, because it is a good game with just enough to content to keep me coming back month after month. I'm also getting so good at it that most of the time I'm in the top five after a match regardless of which side won. Occasionally someone asks to be my friend on Xbox Live when I make top score, but that's about it. The random feel of not having kind of community around the game sucks a lot out of the experience. I want to be gaming with people who are on my level, but when I end up in a game where everyone on my side is running around like headless chicken it doesn't feel all that fun. In games like Battlefield 1943 no matter how good you are, you can't win the game on your own. Scoring well is nice, but what I really want to do is enjoy playing together with other people, who are also into the more tactical aspects of the game.

 

[sramota]

Why aren't they just adding a "Difficulty" button?
Easy sets you against lower, Normal against equal and Hard against harder opponents..

 

[Lemon Of Life]

I quite like the skill based matchmaking, since I don't play regularly enough to get hooked up with a specific community of players.

Why aren't they just adding a "Difficulty" button?
Easy sets you against lower, Normal against equal and Hard against harder opponents..

I guess because the easier players would regularly be up against much better players, who are there for some easy wins.

 

[Cartographer]

I kind of agree, any system that has the aim of (ultimately) enforcing a 50% win rate on players (which is the end result for all but the top player in the world) just sits wrong with me and I can see it backfiring.
That said, I'm still pissed off with the lack of LAN play and having to be online to "authenticate" the game, and thus cart (or beg/borrow/steal) around a connection whenever we decide to play. Yet another example of paying customers being "punished" for paying for the game I guess.

 

[SonofSeth]

Matchmaking in SC2 beta is pure concentrated awesomeness. Every match you feel like you can win, every time you loose it's because you did something wrong, not so much because someone was on a power trip.

I think I understand the main point of this article, but I completely disagree with it. I believe the best way to learn is to incrementally raise the difficulty level and adapt along the way.

If what you are interested in is a perfect build strategy that elites use, you can find that on some forum anyway and with how replays work in SC2, it's basically easier to download an awesome replay and watch it step by step to really learn, than looking for a strategy. You'll learn way more that way than being stomped by someone in the first 7 minutes. You'll never see really interesting strategies if the skill difference is too big, it'll just end too fast.

As for the community part, I would really like that people wait and see what community options will be available before condemning the whole thing before hand. It's ok to voice ones wishes, but acting like you actually know what you are talking about is just silly.

 

[BehattedWanderer]

I agree--I too think that they, among many others, should repeal the "No Chimpanzees" rule. Microsoft, however, should remove their "Howler Monkeys allowed" rule for the 360.