Matchmaking: How we traded communities for convenience.

Matchmaking: How we traded communities for convenience.
Replayability vs my story
Is The Crew The Start Of A Huge Step In The Right Direction For Arcade Racers?
Do you think the "era of Minecraft" that we live in has been a positive or negative impact on the gaming world?

Matchmaking: How we traded communities for convenience.

Posted: 26 Sep 2016 03:30 PM PDT

Today it's hard to come across an online game where the focus doesn't lie on matchmaking/partymaking. If it's not already there, you can count on it being the number one requested feature. It's easy to see why it has become so popular - just click a button and soon you'll be in a 'balanced' game. No more menus, server browsers, manually balancing teams or organizing games yourself.

I was thinking about this earlier today, and started listing pros and cons for myself. Initially I had a few pros, but the cons kept adding up the longer I kept thinking about it, which was weird, because I always considered myself a proponent of matchmaking. Here's the gist of what I came up with;

Pros

Can make finding balanced games easier.
Some people enjoy climbing the ranking ladder.
Generally a very fast way to find a specific type of game with certain parameters. If you have x amount of friends, you know you'll fight x - 1 opponents of more or less the same skill level.
Convenient. Press that start button and go make yourself a cup of coffee or browse reddit. You'll be notified when it's time to play.
Promise to finish. Theoretically everyone agrees to finish the game, not leave when they start losing or when they feel like it.

Cons

Still manages to create unbalanced games which are 'seen' by whatever ranking algorithm to be balanced.
No community. Unless you're playing premades with people you already know, you're facing off against endless, faceless opponents - with faceless teammates. Acting like an asshole doesn't matter, there's a pretty small chance you'll see your teammates again or remember their names. Feel free to troll and flame, there's a small chance the consequences will carry on to the next game.
Can, and is, commonly exploited. Smurfing happens a lot, and I've personally sandbagged a lot of games to get to mess around in the low ranks when I don't feel like tryharding or waiting those long queue times that happend at higher ranks.
Cheaters and griefers have a greater impact than ever before. Cheaters ruin the game for both teams, but in matchmaking, you're held hostage until the game ends. If you leave, you'll be penalized. Kicking the cheater makes you lose, playing with the cheater makes the whole game boring. Griefers, feeders and afkers form a similar scenario.
Perceived skill is compressed to a few numbers and a rating. It doesn't matter how you got there or how you play, if you have a higher rating, you're 'better'.
Importance of the rating. This honestly breeds so much toxicity. It's too much about winning, not playing the game and exploring new strategies. One bad fight, one noob on your team, one bad hero choice - game's ruined, time to flame until the game is over. You either choose the commonly accepted min-maxed strats/weapons/builds, or you face shittalk by the rest of your team. If I want to fuck around/experiment one game, I'll have to either choose between ruining the game for my team, or playing a smurf and curbstomping lower ranked players.

Conclusion

I guess what I'm trying to say is, I used to enjoy playing online games more when I played on various community servers. You see the same nicknames, you do some banter, and after a while you'll figure out who's better than who.

Bad players are just as big of a part of the server as the good ones. Everyone's just there for the game, not to tryhard for some points and blame everyone when things don't go their way. I'd even argue bad players improve faster when they watch and play with the good players on a regular basis.

There's less incentive to be an asshole if you play with the same people. It actually grows a good community. When you have a good community, it starts self-policing. Griefers and hackers are votekicked, and no one is held hostage by a ranked matchmaking game. Leavers are free to leave, noobs are able to improve. Teams are balanced manually if everyone agrees x should play on y instead of z.

If the game is competitive, you're generally welcome to ask for mentoring or help. Improving is done for yourself, not for increasing your ranking. Those who want can arrange matches/duels. I didn't mind searching in IRC for those cs 1.6 matches, but I can see it's not a very modern way of doing things.

Matchmaking games obviously has deep roots in different ratings, like ELO, and sure, in 1v1 games it kinda works. With team-based games, I'm not so sure. Too many things can go wrong, and one player has too much power or the 9 other people's time/game. I guess it kinda works when you're talking about premades against premades. It's insane how much hate/flame you see noobs get nowadays in matchmaking, I don't remember seeing anything like that on community servers.

I miss community servers. On the other hand, I do see how hard and time consuming it would be to constantly arrange a balanced game and make everyone commit to playing it to the end.

Before anyone asks, I've played matchmaking a lot. For years, and years, and years. I got to a very high/highest ranking in hon, dota and more recently csgo. It's still fun, especially with friends, but making new ones and trying to be competitive is extremely frustrating and I haven't solo queued high ranking in a very long time.

Sidenote; The thing about all kinds of matchmaking/partyfinding in general, it definitely makes other players more anonymous and faceless. You can find a good example in modern MMORPGs, earlier you had to make friends with different people so you could get a party going, nowadays it's click this button and play with these random people you don't even talk to. They're just there because you need them, not because you want them to. Who they specifically are is irrelevant, you probably won't see them again. The party serves it's purpose as long as everyone sort of does what they're supposed to. Might as well be playing single player rpgs with bots instead of mmorpgs.

We traded communities for convenience.

Apologize for grammar/typos and the generally incoherent ramblepost, English isn't my native language.

submitted by /u/teinsittenkinacon
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Replayability vs my story

Posted: 27 Sep 2016 06:23 AM PDT

I never replay games. Well, I never replay games with mutiple story branches/paths/etc. As I see it, the story I played through the first time is my own, unique and the one I want to remember.

Still, developers keep using story-wise replayability as a selling point. Many examples can be given from the past years but I am thinking about Oxenfree and Life is Strange mostly. I feel kind of weird about it. I want the game to have many different paths and branches so I can do my own, but at the same time, I know that I'm not going to care about those that I havent went through during my playthrough.

Any of you feel the same way? Shall multipath-story videogames be pitched with more focus on the uniqueness of your playthrough rather than replayability?

submitted by /u/rojovelasco
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Is The Crew The Start Of A Huge Step In The Right Direction For Arcade Racers?

Posted: 26 Sep 2016 10:49 PM PDT

The Crew has been around for a good 2 years now and has been deemed quite mixed reception throughout those.

I just got it finally on the Ubi 30 Program for free and although I was hesitant to play cause of all the negative feedback, I picked it up and it was like love at first sight.

The current king in arcade racing to most people in the last decade is the Forza Horizon series. Won so many hearts but what about The Crew? IMO, I prefer it.

This isn't a thread about why The Crew is better than Horizon but merely one that states what The Crew did oh so right. There is a lot of flaws in the game which I'll get to but what this game does well is so good that Forza needs to rethink their strategy. Well, Forza is a really polished, great racing series but The Crew just makes me think... Wow.

Car customization

Funnily enough, being the most requested feature in a racing game by far most devs seem to put it aside. It really rears its ugly head in Forza and Need For Speed 2015 where we are promised HUGE customisation features but most cars seem to have very few, if any.

THIS is what The Crew shines in, consistency. A lot of customisation options for all 50 or so cars in the game. Visually and performance-wise. That's impressive. Where Forza excels is the performance customisation but The Crew does it just as good, with visual customisation on top of that.

The Map

The entire USA? Sign me up please! Well, not the entire country but the map is fucking HUGE. Just like the car customisation the quality is almost consistent through out. So many landmarks and cities to go to. Scale is incredible when you think about it.

Freedom

Don't know about you but I hate being shackled to the main story. I love doing what I want and progressing by doing what I want. The Crew scratches this itch for me.

My biggest concern is the lack of single player missions outside the story but who cares when there is so much more to do. It alleviates this.

Social features

Yep, of course. A major selling point of The Crew (hence the "Never Drive Alone" slogan) and it does it great. The PvP is awesome, mainly cause you can set the players as ghosts which is the only way for me to enjoy multiplayer races and I'm sure many people are sick of the ramming.

Then there is Freedrive Challenges, THIS is awesome!

So to anyone on the fence, it reignited my long lost love for the good old days of racing games like Midnight Club, NFS Underground and Burnout.

submitted by /u/negajoey
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Do you think the "era of Minecraft" that we live in has been a positive or negative impact on the gaming world?

Posted: 26 Sep 2016 09:14 PM PDT

It seems every once in a while, a certain game will take over the gaming world and begin to influence what sorts of games have are popular/profitable such as:

-LoL and DOTA influencing MOBAs and competitive e-sports,

-Skyrim pushing for the popularity of Open-World gaming,

and currently Minecraft having a stranglehold on the gaming community and causing a rise of Survival-Crafting games (7 Days To Die, No Man's Sky, etc.)

While it's good for any genre of games to get more traction, the success of Minecraft as a constantly-updating, early access, "living-art" style of game has brought about a plague of un-finished early-access games.

What do you think of the impact of Minecraft of the gaming world? Any expectations on what sort of game would have to come about to lead us into the next era of gaming?

submitted by /u/JacksonRyde
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