A Sabot is a casing on the projectile of a firearm, facilitating a better utilization of the propellant [1]. Assuming the game of NS2 is the Firearm and the player the bullet, the organized play system facilitates the better utilization of the game by the player, thus being a Sabot .
So the above diagram should be extended to incorporate another entity "party" between player and team. The system should support parties to join up to teams for games/matches.
The use case could be something like:
- 3 friends create a party to play 6v6 gather.
- the system finds either another 3 player party, or a 2 player party and a single player or 3 single players and matches them to a team.
- This team can then find another 6 player team to play against.
Yes, I think adding 'party' between 'player' and 'team' is a good idea!
As long as there's no player profiles, ELO, etc. I'm fine with it, and as long as it doesn't get in the way of players who don't want this sort of stuff, great.
If not, I'm sorry but I won't play NS2 if stats and whatnot come out, I'll be done.
need to prevent trolls from leaving or ruining the game and also the loss of that 1 player.
make people autojoin passworded servers, so there's no 20 min+ wait on where everyone is.
also this sounds good.
need to prevent trolls from leaving or ruining the game and also the loss of that 1 player.
make people autojoin passworded servers, so there's no 20 min+ wait on where everyone is.
also this sounds good.
Yes, there would have to be servers set aside that get a randomly generated password for each game and players get automatically connected from the matchmaking system. That or some other way to make servers unjoinable by other players. Hopefully there would also be some sort of HLTV-type system to let people spectate as well.
Give people an incentive to win (ranking points) and punish them for leaving preemptively (loss of points) Also maybe a system to replace leavers with player looking for a match, and allow them to not risk their ranking points and only be their as a cope out. Also leavers should be able to rejoin their game without being replaced within an acceptable time and reconver their pres, since disconnects are frequent.
Promote the way the game is meant to be played (6v6 has the adventage of requiring lower population of player)
juggle between allowing people to find a match quickly and playing against a team of their caliber.
Give a lot of exposure in game tot he system, make it the main component of the game and public games secondary, so you will create as much traffic as possible in the match making system.
The only thing i dont understand in the diagram is the "schedule" part, does it mean you start searching a game and then it gives you a time and date your team needs to show up?
also also i dont think "games" and "match" should be different, it should be the same thing and should involve playing 1 round one each side before being offered to rematch for another 2 rounds until 1 person on either side disagree to replay. a final score of 1-1 would result in no ranking point beign lsot or gained and 2-0 would result in a transfer of points from one tema to the other.
The only thing i dont understand in the diagram is the "schedule" part, does it mean you start searching a game and then it gives you a time and date your team needs to show up?
Schedule refers to competitions I think, e.g. a league would have a schedule for every team to play the other teams. So you would only have a schedule if your team was signed up for a competition, not for a single match.
also also i dont think "games" and "match" should be different, it should be the same thing and should involve playing 1 round one each side before being offered to rematch for another 2 rounds until 1 person on either side disagree to replay. a final score of 1-1 would result in no ranking point beign lsot or gained and 2-0 would result in a transfer of points from one tema to the other.
I think in this diagram "game" is the same thing as what you call "round", i.e. playing both teams on one map would be called 2 games according to the diagram, and a "match" could be 2 games (1 map), 4 games (2 maps), bo3, bo5, etc.
did you ever have a look at Killzone 2's clan and organised play systems? Had a whole suit of options for challenging other clans, setting dates/times, wagers with ingame clan currency called Valour, setting up of tournaments etc. It was pretty automated and only needed the clan leader or clan officers to pick said time and send the challenge. Our clan got a whole lot of utility out of it and even the devs set up their own official tournaments through it.
Sounds nice, dunno if the wagers are really necessary/desirable but other than that hopefully Sabot would be similar, I just hope we don't have to wait months and months for this to start taking shape!
A Sabot is a casing on the projectile of a firearm, facilitating a better utilization of the propellant [1]. Assuming the game of NS2 is the Firearm and the player the bullet, the organized play system facilitates the better utilization of the game by the player, thus being a Sabot .
WE HAVE A WINRAR!
Cool ideas throughout the thread guys. Parties are definitely a very cool feature to have. Let's say you've got two friends with you, and you want to play together in a 6v6 - Your party would join with other players through the system to populate a team. From a database design perspective, I don't think we need a 'party' entity in the chain, but such a feature is a must have in my book and I will strive to make sure it is included.
Sabot will include stat tracking, but in the spirit of the type of game NS2 is, there will probably be an option to turn it off. So players that want to track accuracy and wins-as-commander and other such stuff could leave it on, but people that like flying old-school can do so. Of course, this system stands apart from the server browser, so you will always have the option of playing as you do now. This system will never, ever take away or impede functionality or ways of playing that already exist in the game.
The idea of giving feedback on your team-mates is also a very cool one. For example '@Flayra was a bit of a n00b commander. But he took the time to listen to our advice, was responsive to our requests, and didn't give in to the unreasonable demands of some more immature players. Would definitely play with him as commander again, and look forward to him getting better.'
For timeframe, we're not thinking six months. Obviously committing to a time-frame would be suicide, but I will be disappointed in myself if there is not a well-functioning prototype in the public domain within two months. Of course, to make that happen we will need to keep the feature set very tight for initial release. Cooler stuff can then be added on top of the functioning base over the following months.
Are you guys heading towards an in-game pug system or matchmaking type system? Cause that is one of the things the game needs badly; would make it enjoyable for both the casual and competitive, since we can match against the best made matches
That w/ performance increasing (performance does everything from frames to hitreg, although I'm not sure if this game will ever get a tic increase) would really make it a perfect game for me, sort of like how quake live is.. a flawless game minus the fact that it's played through a browser
And hey wait, does this mean your official servers will go towards this party/pug/matching system, and the regular server browser will remain for community servers? This could be very positive in increasing the amount of community servers being active
So say I feel like doing a competitive pug, hop in, play a match, then just want to play normally not claw gripping my mouse doing 360xxmlgnoscopes in a community server, or say combat mod. I feel like that would be awesome!
Edit: And in my mind parties should work like this
(6v6 total)
2 party que searches for 2 party que of equal skill > then finds 4 solo for both sides, or two parties of 4 of equal skill, or just 6 parties of 2, so there will never be an insane stack. However if a match is never found like that; then I guess after a wait period it can open up to more uneven slots
As for scheduling players. It would be awesome if a player could input a play schedule into their options which the system would then compare vs all other players and output a list of game times that everyone tentatively agrees to.
Mine might look like (in PST time)
Mon-fri 8pm-11pm
sat 11am-1pm, 4pm-12pm
sun 8am-8pm
Maybe allow specific exceptions to be made so if I know that some wednesday in 2 weeks I'm going to a show I can list it and the system can account for that.
Game times that would be available would be 1 hour from the end of my window (so it won't find matches for 10:30 start on monday-friday) so that the game is likely to be finished by the time my scheduled time is out. This would be a great tool for reducing the back and forth necessary to find a game time for planned skirmishes between teams and for league type games.
It could even be used between individuals as a way to plan to setup a party or team sometime during a chosen week.
]I think you really underestimate the size of the competitive scene in NS2. ...... The ENSL has around 75 teams currently signed up, each team with around 8 players = 600 people. .....
No I'm not underestimating it at all..... 75 teams IS SMALL.
Hell, Team Fortress Classic had during it hayday around ~100-110 teams at most and that was 9v9 and TFC competitive scene was considered small at the time........and NS2's is even smaller than that.....
I think he's saying that if 600 people play ns2 competitively, and most of them play every day, thereby contributing to the 2000 concurrent players daily, then the percentage of the playerbase that plays competitively is very high.
I have a small list of things that I think are very important for the first version of the matchmaking system.
1. ELO-ranking! A simple win/loss gain/loss would suffice, as you are working as a team (individual stats would be cool, but you win or lose as a team!). Without any sort of ranking system matches could become extremely one sided, and playing with people of similar skill is what match making is all about. It doesn't really matter if the ranking is hidden or shown as it's just a means to get a fairly even game going on. Imagine the success of the matchmaking if top players were to be teamed with fresh greenies. It wouldn't be a very enjoyable experience and I doubt a lot of people would give matchmaking a second try.
2. Party queueing! I think this would help bring a lot of players in to playing 6v6. Rookies can queue with their more experienced friends and have them help them out with stuff would ease the experience and "ladder anxiety" for lack of a better word. Not really knowing what to do and when to do it could potentially make players not use the matchmaking for fear or bringing their team down.
It would also be of great benifit to players who just want to play a game with their friend(s), instead of having to fear getting on different teams or even different games when using the matchmaking.
3. Having properly set up servers with NSL-maps, tournament mode and a properly set up consistency check. (to attract the guys playing this game competitively) - I don't really think I need to dive further into why this is important.
-
Some other stuff that would be cool down the line:
1. Clan-vs-Clan. Basically a scrim finder. At the moment a lot of scrim-finding is going on on irc (#ns2.search on quakenet if anyone doesn't know) or in the shoutbox on the ensl-website. If you could create a team ingame and get ELO-ranking implemented a lot of the teams not using either IRC or the shoutbox could still be able to find games within their skill level at the push of a button ingame.
As for your own version of battle.net, I think you could spend your resources a lot better somewhere else. There's allready steam, with steam groups and whatnot. I don't really think there's a need for chat channels and friend lists. Just get proper steam integration like dota 2 has, if it's possible.
2. Being able to see what top games are going on. As in, you click on a tab called "Spectate" in game, see what gathers/scrims are going on ranked by ELO (or maybe as an alternative, based on what games friends are in) and can immediately jump in and spectate without taking up a slot on the server, basically like in Dota 2.
This would help nurture the competitive scene as people could check stuff like build orders, positioning in engagements, and all kinds of good stuff in real time instead of only seeing competitive games when they are getting streamed.
This brings some other problems though, as people might be watching their opponents and knowing what they do exactly when they do it. Perhaps being able to, as the captain of the team, set a password to be able to spectate their team. Fog of war would be all that is required. I think it could be awesome.
I have a small list of things that I think are very important for the first version of the matchmaking system.
1. ELO-ranking!
This brings some other problems though, as people might be watching their opponents and knowing what they do exactly when they do it. Perhaps being able to, as the captain of the team, set a password to be able to spectate their team. Fog of war would be all that is required. I think it could be awesome.
lots of good ideas here, i would hope at least some of them are part of the implementation. I am sure they could try a few different things for how to calculate a rating or ELO, maybe wins/losses or even somehow incorporate score ingame since it reflects more than k/d ratio. Dota 2 solves this second problem by having a delay on spectating.
Being able to queue up for a game that matched you with people in your skill level would be so awesome for this game!
I hope Hugh is making a list of all the good ideas so that even those that could be too complex to make it into the first version could be worked on later!
I'm sure they will include some sort of ELO-type rating to help match games together, [pessimism]it just might not be that useful unless the player-base grows from what it is now [/pessimism].
Hugh said 2 months, so we might actually be seeing something this side of Christmas, awesome!
]I think you really underestimate the size of the competitive scene in NS2. ...... The ENSL has around 75 teams currently signed up, each team with around 8 players = 600 people. .....
No I'm not underestimating it at all..... 75 teams IS SMALL.
Hell, Team Fortress Classic had during it hayday around ~100-110 teams at most and that was 9v9 and TFC competitive scene was considered small at the time........and NS2's is even smaller than that.....
Roo already pointed this out, but I will chip in too - you missed the point, I wasn't arguing that the NS2 comp scene wasn't absolutely small compared to other games, I'm saying it is relatively big compared to other games - i.e. I don't think many games, especially small games like NS2, have such a high proportion of players interested in competitive play. Surely the relative size of the competitive scene is what matters to how much the devs can justify supporting organised play. Your argument appears to be "there are only ~600 players registered on the main NS2 league site, so catering to organised play is a waste of dev time" without mentioning the fact that NS2 actually has a very small active playerbase, so this actually represents a considerable amount of those players.
]I think you really underestimate the size of the competitive scene in NS2. ...... The ENSL has around 75 teams currently signed up, each team with around 8 players = 600 people. .....
No I'm not underestimating it at all..... 75 teams IS SMALL.
Hell, Team Fortress Classic had during it hayday around ~100-110 teams at most and that was 9v9 and TFC competitive scene was considered small at the time........and NS2's is even smaller than that.....
Roo already pointed this out, but I will chip in too - you missed the point, I wasn't arguing that the NS2 comp scene wasn't absolutely small compared to other games, I'm saying it is relatively big compared to other games - i.e. I don't think many games, especially small games like NS2, have such a high proportion of players interested in competitive play. Surely the relative size of the competitive scene is what matters to how much the devs can justify supporting organised play. Your argument appears to be "there are only ~600 players registered on the main NS2 league site, so catering to organised play is a waste of dev time" without mentioning the fact that NS2 actually has a very small active playerbase, so this actually represents a considerable amount of those players.
100% this.
But lets be fair too, this sabot project will potentially require a lot of ressources and is a big gamble for tiny town unknown world. If it ends up failing and people dont use it - they integrated a 'gather' system somewhere in the beta into the game, no one ever used it - it coudl really hurt uwe, so it really depends on the financial status of the game either its.
A. Doing amazing, looking for stuff to spend money on,
B. Doing meh, dont wanna disapoint the investors by taking unecessary risks,
C. Doing awful, in need of a catalyst that would revive the game and generate revenues.
I hope ns2 stats and ensl get involved, theres a ELO on ns2stats, theres a popular gather system on ensl and they have great experience with the competitive community of ns2, we know they are involved for the nsl, but it would only make sens for these two to tam up with UWE to come up with a well crafted matchmaking in game
I have a small list of things that I think are very important for the first version of the matchmaking system.
1. ELO-ranking!
This brings some other problems though, as people might be watching their opponents and knowing what they do exactly when they do it. Perhaps being able to, as the captain of the team, set a password to be able to spectate their team. Fog of war would be all that is required. I think it could be awesome.
lots of good ideas here, i would hope at least some of them are part of the implementation. I am sure they could try a few different things for how to calculate a rating or ELO, maybe wins/losses or even somehow incorporate score ingame since it reflects more than k/d ratio. Dota 2 solves this second problem by having a delay on spectating.
Being able to queue up for a game that matched you with people in your skill level would be so awesome for this game!
Actually I don't think the score in game reflects if a player is good or not. There are a lot of stuff that is very important that doesn't give you any point. Like standing in some hallway trying to block a retreating fade from getting back to the hive, etc. There are to many things to take in to account in a game like NS2, and getting a +2 (x5?) for welding a resource tower is most of the time not worth it when you could (should) be out killing life forms, RT's and upgrades instead. Also, this isn't CoD, score doesn't make you a "good" player.
ELO would most preferably only be based on wether you win or lose the round, and decide how many points you gain depending on the ELO of the other team.
I think the system is a great idea and has the chance to provide tools to remove two core problems in public play:
1. Disorganized Play
2. Unfair Teams
Problem 1 should go away pretty simple by having an organized match, just make sure the system has something like gathers, were people can join an organized match easily.
Problem 2 requires something like k/d ratio or point tracking, so players can see how strong the teams are before the game starts. For commanders this could be won/lost games.
So if you were to include a gather style system the creator of a gather match could then set requirements, like a minimum ratio of win/lost for commanders or that teams should not have a balance difference greater than x.
This would allow players that spontaneously want to play a game with other people on their skill levels to have a few rounds of instant fun. It will still allow others to play public, it will even improve the game for them because the stronger players will probably not be there anymore and thus not stack teams
Clearly you've never played a ranked game on Xbox Live.
Unless you're going in with a full team of 6, or 8(in the case of the suggestions in this post), you're going to get random people who don't know how to team.
That's just the nature of online gaming.
You're also going to get people who purposely quit out of games to "lose", so that they can stomp all over people of lesser skill.
If they add in any sort of system, people will 'game' the system. That's just the nature of gaming. People are crappy, and do crappy things.
In my honest opinion:
I really don't care either way if a system like this is added in or not, as long as I can still find games the way we do now, I'm cool with it.
I'd like to see it as a supplemental/complimentary system, instead of a complete replacement.
Comments
A Sabot is a casing on the projectile of a firearm, facilitating a better utilization of the propellant [1]. Assuming the game of NS2 is the Firearm and the player the bullet, the organized play system facilitates the better utilization of the game by the player, thus being a Sabot
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabot
If not, I'm sorry but I won't play NS2 if stats and whatnot come out, I'll be done.
a) UWE is going to give this thing one shot, then discard it
b) UWE is going to break the game by throwing this thing into it
(kidding! kidding! I love you guys and can't wait to see what you do)
make people autojoin passworded servers, so there's no 20 min+ wait on where everyone is.
also this sounds good.
Example:
"Pros: he welded me and saved my life once. Cons: He's a communist with a gun. 4/10 would grudgingly weld him back."
Promote the way the game is meant to be played (6v6 has the adventage of requiring lower population of player)
juggle between allowing people to find a match quickly and playing against a team of their caliber.
Give a lot of exposure in game tot he system, make it the main component of the game and public games secondary, so you will create as much traffic as possible in the match making system.
The only thing i dont understand in the diagram is the "schedule" part, does it mean you start searching a game and then it gives you a time and date your team needs to show up?
also also i dont think "games" and "match" should be different, it should be the same thing and should involve playing 1 round one each side before being offered to rematch for another 2 rounds until 1 person on either side disagree to replay. a final score of 1-1 would result in no ranking point beign lsot or gained and 2-0 would result in a transfer of points from one tema to the other.
I think in this diagram "game" is the same thing as what you call "round", i.e. playing both teams on one map would be called 2 games according to the diagram, and a "match" could be 2 games (1 map), 4 games (2 maps), bo3, bo5, etc.
WE HAVE A WINRAR!
Cool ideas throughout the thread guys. Parties are definitely a very cool feature to have. Let's say you've got two friends with you, and you want to play together in a 6v6 - Your party would join with other players through the system to populate a team. From a database design perspective, I don't think we need a 'party' entity in the chain, but such a feature is a must have in my book and I will strive to make sure it is included.
Sabot will include stat tracking, but in the spirit of the type of game NS2 is, there will probably be an option to turn it off. So players that want to track accuracy and wins-as-commander and other such stuff could leave it on, but people that like flying old-school can do so. Of course, this system stands apart from the server browser, so you will always have the option of playing as you do now. This system will never, ever take away or impede functionality or ways of playing that already exist in the game.
The idea of giving feedback on your team-mates is also a very cool one. For example '@Flayra was a bit of a n00b commander. But he took the time to listen to our advice, was responsive to our requests, and didn't give in to the unreasonable demands of some more immature players. Would definitely play with him as commander again, and look forward to him getting better.'
For timeframe, we're not thinking six months. Obviously committing to a time-frame would be suicide, but I will be disappointed in myself if there is not a well-functioning prototype in the public domain within two months. Of course, to make that happen we will need to keep the feature set very tight for initial release. Cooler stuff can then be added on top of the functioning base over the following months.
That w/ performance increasing (performance does everything from frames to hitreg, although I'm not sure if this game will ever get a tic increase) would really make it a perfect game for me, sort of like how quake live is.. a flawless game minus the fact that it's played through a browser
So say I feel like doing a competitive pug, hop in, play a match, then just want to play normally not claw gripping my mouse doing 360xxmlgnoscopes in a community server, or say combat mod. I feel like that would be awesome!
Edit: And in my mind parties should work like this
(6v6 total)
2 party que searches for 2 party que of equal skill > then finds 4 solo for both sides, or two parties of 4 of equal skill, or just 6 parties of 2, so there will never be an insane stack. However if a match is never found like that; then I guess after a wait period it can open up to more uneven slots
Mine might look like (in PST time)
Mon-fri 8pm-11pm
sat 11am-1pm, 4pm-12pm
sun 8am-8pm
Maybe allow specific exceptions to be made so if I know that some wednesday in 2 weeks I'm going to a show I can list it and the system can account for that.
Game times that would be available would be 1 hour from the end of my window (so it won't find matches for 10:30 start on monday-friday) so that the game is likely to be finished by the time my scheduled time is out. This would be a great tool for reducing the back and forth necessary to find a game time for planned skirmishes between teams and for league type games.
It could even be used between individuals as a way to plan to setup a party or team sometime during a chosen week.
No I'm not underestimating it at all..... 75 teams IS SMALL.
Hell, Team Fortress Classic had during it hayday around ~100-110 teams at most and that was 9v9 and TFC competitive scene was considered small at the time........and NS2's is even smaller than that.....
1. ELO-ranking! A simple win/loss gain/loss would suffice, as you are working as a team (individual stats would be cool, but you win or lose as a team!). Without any sort of ranking system matches could become extremely one sided, and playing with people of similar skill is what match making is all about. It doesn't really matter if the ranking is hidden or shown as it's just a means to get a fairly even game going on. Imagine the success of the matchmaking if top players were to be teamed with fresh greenies. It wouldn't be a very enjoyable experience and I doubt a lot of people would give matchmaking a second try.
2. Party queueing! I think this would help bring a lot of players in to playing 6v6. Rookies can queue with their more experienced friends and have them help them out with stuff would ease the experience and "ladder anxiety" for lack of a better word. Not really knowing what to do and when to do it could potentially make players not use the matchmaking for fear or bringing their team down.
It would also be of great benifit to players who just want to play a game with their friend(s), instead of having to fear getting on different teams or even different games when using the matchmaking.
3. Having properly set up servers with NSL-maps, tournament mode and a properly set up consistency check. (to attract the guys playing this game competitively) - I don't really think I need to dive further into why this is important.
-
Some other stuff that would be cool down the line:
1. Clan-vs-Clan. Basically a scrim finder. At the moment a lot of scrim-finding is going on on irc (#ns2.search on quakenet if anyone doesn't know) or in the shoutbox on the ensl-website. If you could create a team ingame and get ELO-ranking implemented a lot of the teams not using either IRC or the shoutbox could still be able to find games within their skill level at the push of a button ingame.
As for your own version of battle.net, I think you could spend your resources a lot better somewhere else. There's allready steam, with steam groups and whatnot. I don't really think there's a need for chat channels and friend lists. Just get proper steam integration like dota 2 has, if it's possible.
2. Being able to see what top games are going on. As in, you click on a tab called "Spectate" in game, see what gathers/scrims are going on ranked by ELO (or maybe as an alternative, based on what games friends are in) and can immediately jump in and spectate without taking up a slot on the server, basically like in Dota 2.
This would help nurture the competitive scene as people could check stuff like build orders, positioning in engagements, and all kinds of good stuff in real time instead of only seeing competitive games when they are getting streamed.
This brings some other problems though, as people might be watching their opponents and knowing what they do exactly when they do it. Perhaps being able to, as the captain of the team, set a password to be able to spectate their team. Fog of war would be all that is required. I think it could be awesome.
lots of good ideas here, i would hope at least some of them are part of the implementation. I am sure they could try a few different things for how to calculate a rating or ELO, maybe wins/losses or even somehow incorporate score ingame since it reflects more than k/d ratio. Dota 2 solves this second problem by having a delay on spectating.
Being able to queue up for a game that matched you with people in your skill level would be so awesome for this game!
I'm sure they will include some sort of ELO-type rating to help match games together, [pessimism]it just might not be that useful unless the player-base grows from what it is now [/pessimism].
Hugh said 2 months, so we might actually be seeing something this side of Christmas, awesome!
100% this.
But lets be fair too, this sabot project will potentially require a lot of ressources and is a big gamble for tiny town unknown world. If it ends up failing and people dont use it - they integrated a 'gather' system somewhere in the beta into the game, no one ever used it - it coudl really hurt uwe, so it really depends on the financial status of the game either its.
A. Doing amazing, looking for stuff to spend money on,
B. Doing meh, dont wanna disapoint the investors by taking unecessary risks,
C. Doing awful, in need of a catalyst that would revive the game and generate revenues.
Actually I don't think the score in game reflects if a player is good or not. There are a lot of stuff that is very important that doesn't give you any point. Like standing in some hallway trying to block a retreating fade from getting back to the hive, etc. There are to many things to take in to account in a game like NS2, and getting a +2 (x5?) for welding a resource tower is most of the time not worth it when you could (should) be out killing life forms, RT's and upgrades instead. Also, this isn't CoD, score doesn't make you a "good" player.
ELO would most preferably only be based on wether you win or lose the round, and decide how many points you gain depending on the ELO of the other team.
Unless you're going in with a full team of 6, or 8(in the case of the suggestions in this post), you're going to get random people who don't know how to team.
That's just the nature of online gaming.
You're also going to get people who purposely quit out of games to "lose", so that they can stomp all over people of lesser skill.
If they add in any sort of system, people will 'game' the system. That's just the nature of gaming. People are crappy, and do crappy things.
In my honest opinion:
I really don't care either way if a system like this is added in or not, as long as I can still find games the way we do now, I'm cool with it.
I'd like to see it as a supplemental/complimentary system, instead of a complete replacement.
They said hopefully 2 months for a test version