NS2 needs to track wins + automatic team balancing between rounds + preferred team option
CowMeat
Join Date: 2013-03-02 Member: 183557Members
Join Date: 2013-03-02 Member: 183557Members
Opinions/Observations:
A) Many NS2 games are unfair due to uneven teams.
Uneven games are often frustrating.
C) Some players like to play with their friends.
A proposed solution:
1) NS tracks a players wins and losses. This informaiton is turned into a hidden ELO rating similar to chess.
2) Players can select a preffered team (or a team which their friends are on).
3) These hidden ELO ratings are used to match players into even teams between rounds, trying first to place players on their preferred teams.
A) Many NS2 games are unfair due to uneven teams.
Uneven games are often frustrating.C) Some players like to play with their friends.
A proposed solution:
1) NS tracks a players wins and losses. This informaiton is turned into a hidden ELO rating similar to chess.
2) Players can select a preffered team (or a team which their friends are on).
3) These hidden ELO ratings are used to match players into even teams between rounds, trying first to place players on their preferred teams.
Comments
This, I fear.
Matchmaking systems, whether they are based on tiers or skill, require a big players pool work properly (i.e. : not having a huge queue)
I've been advocating for some type of skill-based matchmaking system for a while as I feel its the best option to minimize stacking/help build the playerbase. To organize it, I suggest:
- Basing it on a simple win/loss ELO-rating system
- Keeping that ELO-rating secret
- Organizing people into grouping (like SC2 leagues) based on that ELO-rating
Then I'd have a dual-matchmaking system, which worked like:
"Soft" matchmaking
- Adding another column to the server browser showing the percentage of players in each server that are in the same skill group as you
- Allow server operators to restrict which types of skill groups can join their server (e.g. making rookie servers only allow the lowest skill group players to join and vice versa for veteran servers)
"Hard" matchmaking
- Allow people to start a gather-style lobby that people can join (e.g. like the L4D1/2 lobby system)
- Give the ability for the lobby creator to specify which skill group players can join it (e.g. only ones from your skill group, or ones from the skill group above and below you, etc)
- Once enough players have joined and 'ready-uped', then the system finds an open server and has all the players join it
Edit: I love it dearly, but there's no point pretending it isn't a tiny game.
Skill rating systems aren't perfect, but the worst case scenario is it doesn't work and the status-quo system continues. However, if it does work, then it solves a whole host of NS2 problems such as making the learning curve more manageable, less ragequitting/concedes, more players, etc.
Ideally, this system would be combined with an in-game gather system so that if it didn't work, the gather system would still be useful for PUG/comp organizing.
- Huge skill differences (i.e. even just one player going 40-1 can imbalance a server)
- Quits/f4s from the losing side
- Having a terrible or very new comm
The first two are best addressed via skill-based matchmaking. The last one needs another solution, but it wouldn't be any worse under a skill-based matchmaking system.
It won't work. SMNC died because they thought they could do a matchmaker with an average of 3000 players. Didn't work, game died within a month or two.
Sort of like how skulks are universally hostile to new players.