Why an in game ladder is more important now than later.

Pretty much half, or even more so than that of the player base will be established in early access than full release. Unless Uber has some AAA marketing up their sleeve, that means that they will need to retain that early player base. A ladder should keep newbies from rage quitting their first game. A tutorial is equally as important, so players don't build like 40 metal extractors or fall in some other noob trap. (That was my first game ).

i've mentioned before, that ladder is one of the very few things I think the game needs pre-release, or released as soon as it leaves beta, the game doesn't need much more to justify being released "in-full" but thats defiately one of them

Don't make the same mistake Supcom 2 did!

I completely agree. I find that when I'm using PA STATS and actually seeing my ranking go up and down, it motivates me to play better. The argument can be made that it's too early but I think if they add it now and reset upon release that should be okay.

which one? /s

Finishing the galactic war mode is just as important if not more then a multi-player ladder.

Erm.. no. No, it isn't, unfortunately.

this isn't a unanimous opinion.

There are lots of people around here who couldn't care less about singleplayer.

I do want GW to be finished. (and most importantly iterated)

but I value the ladder and any element of multi above that of any element of single.

And there are people who couldn't care less about multiplayer too.

I thought part of finishing Galactic war was making it multiplayer .

that's what i meant by iterating.

And my point was that the ladder and Galactic war could both be considered multiplayer components that need finishing.

A ladder's a definite requirement, I'd say. I'm willing to bet a load of people will only do multiplayer with friends until there's a ladder which matches them to opponents of similar skill. Till then they just expect to get trounced in public games.

The sooner the better, i'd say.

At the same time, there is only so soon they can release on and so many resources such as developer programming time that they can spend on doing so. Meanwhile, we have PAStats 1v1, and like ranked Street Fighter 4 matches, if you don't like the name in the lobby you can back out before clicking ready, cant you?

Guys Galactic War was going to be a multiplayer experience eventually right? It should be fun for singleplayer players and also for multiplayer.

Meh. Ladders will be in for sure, but I only play unranked. Because I don't play the game at a regular schedule. Sometimes I don't play for two weeks, sometimes I play everyday. That's what I hate about playing on ladders... the game forces you to keep playing often otherwise you'll drop down the ladder. Which demotivates me anyway.

So I play unranked. That said, unranked would still put you against opponents of similar skill.

Another problem is that newbies don't learn from playing against other newbies that make equally bad mistakes. That's also a reason why a decent tutorial series is necessary.

To answer mot's question, GW was originally planned for multiplayer, but I haven't heard a clear 'yes' from Uber since SP-GW first came out. So it's not clear if they are still doing it, but I hope they will. They really should, they promised 40-player GW games anyway.

We already have a ladder though.....

Yes.

Let's also say that (in general) a game better be enjoyable even if you're a total noob.
(like myself )

It would be nice to have some kind of player score system to make the games actually mean something.

I really like the way yahoo games handles this for games like chess. You get given a score and if you beat someone around your score then your score goes up a bit, if you beat someone with a much higher score then it goes up a lot and theirs goes down a lot.

The only negative is that for a highly ranked player there is more risk in each game and little reward on offer, but that should encourage highly ranked players to play against each other to reduce the risk on giving away their high score.

Each player would be shown their score, and where that score places them in the world/ their continent/ their country/ their county etc.

It would be nice if this was all automated and you had to go out of your way to play an unranked game, so that everyone got ranked quickly rather than it just being for a select bunch of players.

Maybe uber can work together with the PAstats people and just integrate the thing into their design.... It's not optimum, but its ready, free, and pretty much established.

fully integrated skill based matchmaking would be awesome.