Ladders in 1.0

All that means is that the best data we can get on this is what steam gives publicly. As I said, we don't have access to Uber's ubernet data, so we can't know the exact details of the palyerbase. The issue was you comparing completely different player metrics and saying one was higher than the other when there was no way to tell, rather than comparing relatively similar player metrics as Shwyx was doing.

damn I misread him actually xD

anyways I think it's ridiculous to fight it. an online count would be nice in PA so that we could know once and for all. although I believe it must be something we may be able get with a mod or something.

it's really quite obvious.

the same could be said, the stats still remain handy since both parties are in a similar situation.

Except here PA, we know, has it's majority on steam, and FA more than it's steam count on FAF.

So yeah the stats are blurry but the scale is very obviously tipping to one side.

Again, hard to say that FA has more than its steam count on FAF in unique players (since those aren't measured). And regular FA non FAF likely has more players overall since there's all the non-steam FA players as well.

you'll just have to trust me on that one.

You know you can go see yourself? get your own impression, conduct an experiment, where you host an "all welcome" Setons Cluth game 50 times on each service at same daytimes, see which one on average fills up fastest.

P.S. we do have total player online in a day, biggest peak and last peak for both

Oh I don't doubt at all that multiplayer for FA is much much busier in FAF, since FAF is basically FA's multiplayer community.

fine then, DON'T test it.

I was still talking about stats inclusive of singleplayer, but since you wanna be like that.

it's crazy that you'd think it's invalid when steam/faf is the only way for those single players to get together with their buds and bash an AI together. FAF is the only way for them to do campaign together.

faf is the best way for them to use mods, the only way for them to have a mods vault, their own replay vault, a tutorial vault.

I'd like to think it's likely 99% of people playing the game are either on FA or FAF.

from there we have the stats, whether they're playing alone or not of whether they are on FA or FAF and how many they are.

FAF is the only real way to play multiplayer outside of LANs. Singleplayer requires neither steam nor FAF, so there are no total stats on that.

The amount of players not using either Steam or FAF likely outnumber them both.

Sigh. We don't for FA. To summarise:

Steam - Singleplayer/LAN - Player count known, unique player count not known.
FAF - Single player and multiplayer - Player count known, unique player count known.
Offline/LAN - Singleplayer/LAN - Player count not known.

Steam & FAF have similar player counts, though we can't compare unique player counts. Offline/LAN is probably the largest group. At the very least, it would be equivalent to Steam.

Which means what we do know is:

• FAF would account for less than 1/3 of total playerbase.
• Some fraction of that is playing multiplayer. We know 1/5 are ladder games.
• Therefore, ladder games are less than 1/15 of all games, and multiplayer accounts for less than 1/3
• Best case, assuming no-one is playing outside of Steam, is 1/10 games are ladder & less than 1/2 multiplayer. This is clearly not going to be the case though.

Isn't there another way to help us through a lobby enhancement to find people / indicate skill level even if it is player chosen? In other words the match itself could have an indicator of the skill level you were looking for. And thus over time yourself you could figure out which matches were the kind you enjoyed? I'm just trying to think outside the box of solutions that could solve the problem without taking the time it would take to create a match making and ladder system.

So, this is about dev time and money.

You are complaining about me only concentrating about one small part of the argument, but if you remember, it's you that asked for viability numbers. I gave you some, but the result doesn't please you as it doesn't go your way, so now you are arguing about something else.

Ok, let's argue about money then :

Why have you decided at some point to make a micro-transaction store inside a RTS (something that was NEVER done before) instead of a matchmaker (something any RTS and most of multi-player games has)?

You are arguing a lot about PA "being a new game platform". A new game platform like PA need a matchmaker before micro-transaction. That's a fact : Micro-transaction is NOT needed to play, and doesn't affect playing at all.

But you though micro-transactions were a most important feature than a matchmaker. Probably because you though it was important to get revenue out of PA.
How much money did you get out of it?

And I highly doubt a store take less time to develop than a matchmaker (I know what a working matchmaker takes to make, and I wouldn't imagine all the security and automation issues I would have making a store).

Also, who do you think will be the most likely to spend money on your store:
- The 1v1/competitive online player that wants to show off.
- The solo/GW player that doesn't play online.
(I'm pretty sure you can have statistics on that).

What do you think PA will attract and retain as a platform with no matchmaker, no chat and no tournament system?

Yeah another big point you are missing is that i.e. if most players are from the EU most will play in the evening and only at 5:00 am in the morning. So to find games in the evening you'll need less players as well.

It depends if you are splitting the matchmaker per region. As Uber does it for their servers (I still don't think it's a good idea but well), it does applied for US (or EU during the day, or Australian,.....)

Uber does not split the players by region. Anyone can join any server. Just like anyone can join the ranked queue. But if you're part of the biggest timezone the window where you look for players will much more likely be the same window other players look for games as well. So it helps to bring down the required count of players. Sure it sucks for people who live at the end of the world.

A few people have suggested showing approximate player skill in the lobby and I really like the idea. It really does what matchmaking would do, but without the need for a large playerbase. And it's not limited to 1v1, 2v2 or anything.

This may just be me, but doesn't FAF prove that Neutrino is right and that a few months can in fact be waited? FAF builds up over the course of more than a year.

In fact, wikipedia tells me Supcom FA launched in 2007, so a ladder made 4-ish years after the game launch still grew.

Supreme Commander had GPGnet before it even released. GPGnet was the official version of FAF so to speak. It had a chat and a ladder implementation, even before release of the game. In GPGnet the community build up, resulting in the creation FAF. FAF was created as a community effort when the development of GPGnet stopped and people wanted bugfixes and stuff.
So the success of FAF at first was solely based on the users of GPGnet switching over after GPGnet was put offline and GPG said "hey guys, GPGnet now is dead, but we recommend to check out FAF".

If you remove the early release of GPGnet from this you'll end up with nothingness. FAF would never have existed.

Well, that's also pure speculation, but yes since they already had GPGnet from Supreme commander, it wouldn't really take any effort to implement it for FA.

The matchmaker is not related to the game. It's a different part, inside the lobby.
I didn't "port" the matchmaker of GPGNET to FAF, it was redone from scratch (it doesn't even use the same maths).

But what is true is that it doesn't take much effort to make a matchmaker.

Yeah the code I hacked in for PA is only very few lines of code and even with some basic matchmaking it would not be more. I am confident I could add that in a few hours. Most work about implementing it was understanding how to create games from a mod. That part is trivial as well if you happen to be a dev @ Uber.
So we have a full version of a matchmaker for FA based on the work of a single person who did it quickly in his free time and we have an automatch mod for PA that also was done by a single person quickly in their free time.
Arguing that a simple matchmaker is something that costs a lot of time is pretty weird looking to me. Especially since Uber has code like this already in some form, looking at playfab and some code fragments inside of PA.
What's supposed to be so much work?

Guys, I hate to put too fine of a point on it but SupCom didn't generate enough revenue to justify it's existence! You guys do realize that, right? Hence the whole kickstarter thing we did so that we could actually create a game like this. Publishers know this as well which is why investments in RTS games are few and far between. FAF doesn't have enough players to justify anything other than a hobby effort. That effort was built on top of many millions of dollars of the base game and engine that was built. We must come up with a model that is different than FAF and appeals to a much larger crowd if we want to find a long term model that works.

As the guy that came up with the idea of making GPGNet a separate application and making it so that it could feed data into the game so that it could be replaced (hint hint I saw what happened with TA) you guys owe me a massive solid. Yet you are arguing with me like I'm any other member of the community who just fell off the turnip truck.

Anyway it's now obvious in hindsight that engaging on this issue was a mistake. There is no way I'm going to convince you guys that we know what we are doing or that we have some idea how to develop and market a videogame.

Nothing, it's all easy and only takes five minutes. Obviously we are idiots because it isn't already done.