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« on: October 22, 2013, 06:16:50 pm »
I could foresee a few slight problems with any sort of a matchmaking system.
This community, as much as I love it, just isn't big enough yet. If the Gents loaded all their best players into two ships on one team, and joined into this proposed "queueing" system, today, right now, about how long of a wait until a "team of similar skill level" is available? Sure, it could happen, but it would probably take quite a while, and there's the distinct possibility of there not being any team whatsoever online at this very moment that would be "similar skill level". In bigger games that use these MOBA style ranking match-ups, I'm assuming there's a lot more than 1,000-2,000 concurrent players. There needs to be a multitude of potential good fits at any given point in time to even consider a matchmaking system. If there's not several teams of very comparable skill level ALREADY waiting in the queue, that ship of Gents is never going to form up and wait for basically nothing. Unfortunately, I really don't think this game has the numbers to do it right now. Hopefully in the future this point is moot.
Then onto the issue of any kind of a "rank/score system" in this game. If it exists and is publically viewable, you are going to have people trying to 'win' the ranking system. No matter what the metric for rank is, win/loss kill/death total games played, etc., you will have a group of players doing nothing but "grinding" that statistic until it's perfect. I could see the possibility of new groups doing in-house matches to boost their own win count. Or people refusing to play/rage quitting matches they cannot very obviously win. This will pretty much invalidate the ranking system. If a new group could jump in and artifically boost their ranking by gaming the system, what is the point of the ranking system?
Second problem with ranking players would be detracting from actual team-work gameplay. Any point in time where someone is playing a match to boost an individual statistic rather than focusing on a teamwork spirit, it detracts from this game. We already deal with this in achievement farmers, and there is no real benefit from having a high level in game. Imagine the problem if there was another ranking, but one that had actual effect on matchmaking or leaderboards and what not.
Also I don't think trying to apply one ranking metric across all three classes would make sense at all. What if there's an engineer who does NOTHING but tank the hull, but his regular captain is very highly strategic and meticulous with planning every move. If they're both on the same ship most of the time, even though one does basically nothing but click and the other puts out considerable effort and expertise every match, would the two of them deserve the same rating score if they decided to queue separately for matches?
The only way to make a ranking score that would NOT detract from gameplay and be able to accurately gauge skill would be to rate an entire red or blue team at once, with specific crew. That way, the only way to increase ranking would be by playing cohesively as a team, with no individual having any opportunity or motive to "go on their own" to boost their personal stats. Problem is, again, this game does not have the number of player to even begin thinking about a system like this. Not to mention the difficulty in putting together the exact same 8-16 people on a very regular basis. Not very likely.
So I have my own idea for a way to deal with "stacked" lobbies. If you enter a lobby and suspect the other team of being "stacked", decide if you want to fight against a "stacked" team. If you don't want to fight against a "stacked" team, find or create a different lobby. Problem solved.
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