Matchmaking ideas

[mindloss]

I don't buy the notion that AI Wars is not really compatible with matchmaking systems. Yeah, it's great if you have a group of friends you know who all play, but for those of us who have to find teammates online, it's non-trivial. There's the subforum for it, the IRC channel, Hamachi, Steam... which only compounds the problem by fracturing the player pool into separate compartments. As for the objection about getting casual players that won't stick it out through a game, I don't think AI Wars attracts many people that would slog through the tutorial/solo games, find the forums, go to the trouble of joining a match and then bail: very much the exception instead of the rule is my guess.

A proper solution would probably be to build a lightweight matchmmaking system where you tell it what hours you're typically available to play, contact information, and game preferences, and it would email everybody when a good enough match was found and serve as an automated game organizer (preferably in-game, but on web would be just as good.) BUT, since I know that's not a high priority and would involve a fair amount of work, here's what I think is the best of my quick-fix alternatives.

Make a new subforum, or repurpose the existing one -- just a change in process. Right now it seems to be people posting with e.g. "Hi! I want to play! This is my Skype/email/whatever, I'm GMT-2" which I don't think translates frequently into actual games getting started. Instead, have the posts be info for a specific game startups, e.g.:

"I'll be running a game with all expansions, dual 8s, 60-star, Hard Spirecraft/[etc.], flexible on map type / AI types. We'll start [tonight/tomorrow/next Saturday/whatever] at 10pm GMT. Anyone who wants in please reply here, send email, or you can try just joining [IP] at 10. Expect the game to run 10-15 hours, we'll finish up next Fri/Sat night or two if we have to. Please don't join if you're not going to finish."

or even

"WANT TO PLAY ASAP. STARTING GAME IN 3 HOURS. DONT CARE ABOUT SETTINGS PLZ JOIN WRITE BACK HERE"

Ideally, you could put a sticky with a simple template that people could fill out with the pertinent info.

Anyway, I'm just throwing that idea out there... it would work for me, but does that appeal to anyone else?

(For the record, the other quicky solutions that came to mind were tossing up a public google spreadsheet where you could list your info and see everyone else's, and... I'll be damned, I forgot the other one.  )

[x4000]

Yes, the idea of a calendar-based thing is the idea we had, too.  We didn't implement it because there was very low interest.

If you're looking for people to play right now, then the IRC channel is something that people tend to use for that.  The subforum is more for finding someone to play with on a regular basis.

The current reigning idea for a form of matchmaking is to build an IRC client into the game; it's been discussed in great depth in mantis, along with every other potential possibility under the sun.   Here and in mantis.

All in all it still seems like something that very few people are interested in compared to how many people actually play the game, so it hasn't been at the top of our priority list.  And it's a sizable enough thing that we're not planning on even looking at it until the next big development push at the earliest, alongside the next expansion (not that this would be an expansion-only feature if we did matchmaking).  We built a custom matchmaking system into Tidalis, but it's been supremely unpopular and people just complain about how they can never find anyone on there; I strongly suspect that any true realtime matchmaking system we'd do for AI War would be the same, for the same reason: most of the time, people aren't just sitting around waiting for someone to show up to play with (unlike other RTS games, which have very short sessions).  So even if there are a ton of people playing, you'd have no way of knowing that from looking at a matchmaking service, because nobody is there waiting to play.  Which makes the whole game seem ghost-town-like and doesn't solve any problem.

Anyway, I appreciate the frustration, but honestly I think that something like 1% -- if that -- of the AI War fanbase is looking to find random people to play with, just based on talking to folks.  And those that do tend to find a small group of people via the forums, and then just play with them.  There are a few exceptions to that general rule, but that's an even tinier percentage.  With about 80k people who own the base game and/or some combination of the expansions, that's a pretty incredibly tiny number of people at any specific hour of the day.

At any rate, if someone wants to set up some alternate meeting grounds type things as an experiment I don't mind, but it's not something I'm going to sink time into at this point; we're short on time and there's other things that people are clearly more interested in.  Force field changes, etc, etc, etc. Sorry! 

[mindloss]

Okay, I sort of figured you must have already hashed this out long ago, but I had to check.

I'm often looking for people to play with right now, and the IRC channel doesn't seem to be much help... I've had a bit of luck with Hamachi.

But yeah, obviously the best experience would be to have it built into the game. I'm sure you're dead right about the reaction if you made a 'typical' matchmaking system, wherein people join a lobby of some kind and wait around for other people; this is why I think setting a flag or some info that says "hey, I want to play [whenever people are ready | some time block]" and make it clear to the user that the expectation should be that they'll have to wait for a couple hours/days/whatever it works out to before they get pinged back. That may fail for other reasons, but at least you wouldn't get the visceral ghost town effect.

And really, 1%?? That's kind of shocking. I mean, I guess even here on the community-oriented forums people are talking almost exclusively about solo games... but the whole game seems so designed around multiplayer... thus why it's a crying shame that it's can be hard to get that going for some of us in the first place.

I might give it a shot. I was thinking about whipping up some ultra-barebones page to start, where you can type in your email address and click a checkbox saying you want to play, and when n people are checked in, it blasts out an email telling them how to set it up.

Maybe I won't make it, maybe I'll make it and nobody will use it, maybe I'll make it and one other person will use it and I'll get one good game out of it. We'll see. 

[x4000]

Well, a lot of folks here are playing multiplayer... with friends. A few with friends they met on the forums. It's just one of those things where I don't know hat I'd wan to be locked into an 8 hour game with total strangers, and that seems to be something that a lot of people -- but not all -- feel. My estimate of 1% is regarding players looking for random pickup games with people they don't know.

Anyhow, all good. It's one of those things where there's always a ton of possibilities for the game in all directions, but this one just isn't ever exciting enough to be at the top of the list. Yet...

[mindloss]

Well, I've got to meet some friends through playing some games. I'm willing to chance it. My first and only multiplayer so far was a fun one.

My world's-simplest-matchmaker is half done. (http://mindloss.com/cgi-bin/aiwars.py)

I'm going for minimalist Google chic. Well, that and I haven't learned anything about web design since 1995.

[Coppermantis]

I only play with a single person, as no one else I know plays it. What is the IRC Channel for AI War? I'd like to maybe play with some different people. Matchmaking could be okay, but I think would require quite a lot of coding, such as recording your statistics and listing other players in your skill range. At least that's my idea of how matchmaking could work. It would help if there were easier server tools, like in Civ V or Alien Swarm where you can just invite a person from in-game, but Hamachi is working fine for now.

[x4000]

Cool stuff!

And you can find the IRC channel on the main site under the AI War community section, FYI.  And I think linked in a sticky on this forum...

[Coppermantis]

Cool stuff!

And you can find the IRC channel on the main site under the AI War community section, FYI.  And I think linked in a sticky on this forum...

Ah, so you did. Apparently I missed that. Thanks!

[x4000]

Np!