Topic discussed to death? NO! This is the current year, so it's time to bring it back up damnit!
I'm bringing this up partially because the A bright future of NS2 or Death? thread hinted about it a little bit.
But I'm also bringing it up because Reflex just launched their matchmaking system. Reflex is an arena shooter in early access similar to Quake. If you think that NS2 has a small community, then take a look at Reflex steam charts.
The way that Reflex matchmaking works is by you adding all the game modes that you are interested in being matched for in the menu. Then you press play. You immediately get put in a warmup mode game lobby, with other players also waiting to be matched - not necessarily in the same gamemodes. When the system has found a match for you, you get pulled from the game lobby and play your match.
Now this is not the first time this kind of idea has been suggested for NS2. But what has changed, and the reason I think it is time to bring it up again, is that I think we now have a good example of how it would work - in Reflex.
The warmup mode idea is crucial for a small community like NS2 or Reflex, you don't want to sit idle in some game lobby like in Starcraft or CS;GO. That said, my experience with the Reflex match system, is that it actually doesn't take very long at all to find a match, in spite of the tiny community.
Of course, take this with a grain of salt. Reflex benefits from the fact that it primarily matches 1v1's, not 6v6's - and that you can search for more than one gamemode at a time.
Matchmaking would be such a powerful tool for NS2, because it would help with one of the most damaging problems that I think NS2 has had throughout its lifetime : Lack of skill segregation.
Matchmaking would not just offer a method to organise games with groups of players with low skill disparity, which would inarguably produce better balanced games. - but equally importantly it would unlock the ability, to match friends so that they can play on the same team. A guy called SnarfyBobo last night talked about what a shame it was that NS2 didn't have a way to queue with your friends last night to an audience of 300 people.
There are a lot of challenges to implementing matchmaking to NS2, I get it. Like what do we do about commanders? What do we do about the 3k+ elo players, who likely don't have a lot of players to be matched against. I could add a 3 page monologue on these subjects, but I think I'll release here before the thread gets too long to read![:)]( ":)")
I'm bringing this up partially because the A bright future of NS2 or Death? thread hinted about it a little bit.
But I'm also bringing it up because Reflex just launched their matchmaking system. Reflex is an arena shooter in early access similar to Quake. If you think that NS2 has a small community, then take a look at Reflex steam charts.
The way that Reflex matchmaking works is by you adding all the game modes that you are interested in being matched for in the menu. Then you press play. You immediately get put in a warmup mode game lobby, with other players also waiting to be matched - not necessarily in the same gamemodes. When the system has found a match for you, you get pulled from the game lobby and play your match.
Now this is not the first time this kind of idea has been suggested for NS2. But what has changed, and the reason I think it is time to bring it up again, is that I think we now have a good example of how it would work - in Reflex.
The warmup mode idea is crucial for a small community like NS2 or Reflex, you don't want to sit idle in some game lobby like in Starcraft or CS;GO. That said, my experience with the Reflex match system, is that it actually doesn't take very long at all to find a match, in spite of the tiny community.
Of course, take this with a grain of salt. Reflex benefits from the fact that it primarily matches 1v1's, not 6v6's - and that you can search for more than one gamemode at a time.
Matchmaking would be such a powerful tool for NS2, because it would help with one of the most damaging problems that I think NS2 has had throughout its lifetime : Lack of skill segregation.
Matchmaking would not just offer a method to organise games with groups of players with low skill disparity, which would inarguably produce better balanced games. - but equally importantly it would unlock the ability, to match friends so that they can play on the same team. A guy called SnarfyBobo last night talked about what a shame it was that NS2 didn't have a way to queue with your friends last night to an audience of 300 people.
There are a lot of challenges to implementing matchmaking to NS2, I get it. Like what do we do about commanders? What do we do about the 3k+ elo players, who likely don't have a lot of players to be matched against. I could add a 3 page monologue on these subjects, but I think I'll release here before the thread gets too long to read
