This is a crosspost from another thread regarding locking in with friends to play on the same team. Some call this team stacking, I say it's the doorway to actual competition, depth of gameplay, and an extended lifespan for this game. This is all that needs to happen. I have nothing against the inclusion of random servers. People join random games on first person shooter all the time. People put up dedicated servers, and random people join and play. That's great. The problem is that there is NO way that I can consistently play with my friends. There just isn't a way to do that, and that fact is what stops MNC from being a game that anyone interested in gaming for competition could care about. My ideal for this game would be to have a ranking and matchmaking system just like the other MOBA games. If this game had a solid matchmaking system (and you don't have to have centrally-hosted servers for this, other games just assign it to a player), and would match up players based on their rank, this game would not only see more consistent matches in terms of player skill, but it would also allow the more competitive players to get better by playing better people. DotA does it, League of Legends does it, Starcraft 2 does it. Street Fighter 4 and Blazblue do it. Surely MNC is a deep enough game to rank players and let them fight similarly ranked players. The frustrating thing about it is that there is a lot of depth possible in this game that simply isn't allowed because of the random assignment. I would LOVE to see video of high-end matches between coordinated, familiar teams. A spectator mode would be great. Replays would be great. The sky is the limit in terms of cool stuff this game could have to support a competitive scene. Maybe even establishing team colors for your club tag. Until it is possible to choose to play with your friends though, nothing else matters to a competitive team or competitive scene, and MNC is just a distraction. For a game called Monday Night Combat, with a parody league logo and gameplay that is purely in the spirit of competition, I would expect some level of support for competition and coordinated teams. If Uber has no plans to ever support a real, persistent competitive scene, I would like to know that now. TL;DR: My wishlist, in chronological order- Servers that allow constructed teams. This can be by allowing hosts to lock and move players, and having a marker in the server browser that says whether a given server joining scrambles teams after each match. Just make it an option. A persistent player/team ranking system. A matchmaking system that uses said ranking system. All it has to do is assign server duty to whoever has the best connection to everyone else, just like every other game that does this. Replays. Spectator mode. Club tag colors that show if the entire team has the same club tag.
eh? Why suggest that only admins can make players change team... They should be able to pick their own team and if it's unbalanced you should be able to enable a option that can auto balance teams.
I dislike almost everything in your post about "ranking" because it adds a huge development load that is counter-productive to the current server browser. How would servers with mods factor into this? How would servers with bad admins factor into this? Also, if you think a competitive environment can't be fostered in a game like this you are wrong. Games with nothing more than internal server browsers are easy to use, much more customizable, yet are still incredibly competitive. The foremost that comes to my mind is CS 1.6 and CSS. Both are games whose competitive community is booming to this day (a 10+ year old game, and a 6 year old game), their server browser is very similar to Monday Night Combat's. In games like Street Fighter it is very easy to match people based on skill, you just take a look at their win-loss ratio, even then, the matchmaking isn't very good. LoL is a DoTA clone, and no real competitive gameplay actually takes place on it. I've played every single one of the games you listed, and every time you play you get matched with people who have the same "rank" as you, but they don't play at your skill level 90% of the time. Case in point, I'm a Platinum in Starcraft, I either steamroll my opponent or get cheesed like crazy, little to no competition is actually there. It is simply better to just organize gaming teams and play with those people. In games the automatically match you with other randoms, it isn't fun nor is it competitive to play with people you do not know, and sometimes are severely below you in skill; causing your skill to drop just because you got matched with a bad teammate. Playing with people whose play styles you are familiar with, and designing "plays" against other teams who do the same is infinitely more competitive. Nothing is more frustrating than a teammate who doesn't understand simple mechanics. Also, constant ranking creates unnecessary pressure for those who just want to play the game and relax at certain times, fearful they will lower in rank, they don't play at all. This does not work very well 90% of the time, as hosts are RADICALLY overpowered against their opponents in an fps/third person shooter. In games like LoL it's less important to have sub 100 ping. Other than what you said about p2p hosting and the ranking system I agree with everything.
Like I said of course it is a chronologically-organized list. First and foremost, the game needs a way to set up games between teams that don't automatically scramble the players. If none of the rest of the list happens, that's fine. Obviously, the game doesn't need a ranking and matchmaking system. I would definitely like replays and spectator modes. All of this depends on the ability to play with people of your own choosing. If that doesn't happen, none of the rest matters, and I would definitely argue that until that happens, no persistent competitive scene will be here. And again, that's not to say the game needs a ranking system to have it of course. I personally would like it, but players do organize their own matches all the time in other games through various channels, and I recognize that many other competitive games go without it and are recognized by MLG etc.. Suggesting one possible option is not the same as suggesting that it is the only possible option. I agree that players should be able to move around in a lobby as they please, and the admin should have an auto-balance feature available to them. I also think that locking slots and moving players manually should be an admin option, among other things. Players should not have the same rights over the admin though. That's just chaos.
I like everything in the OP, but I think if it had to be boiled down to two features that would make it inot the game this most important is being able to select your team, and being able to record replays is the second most important. Without these two basic features (which we know UE3 can easily do) we can't have a competitive scene, and that would be sad because this game seems to have so much potential.
Being able to choose your team is a must for most fps games. However rankings in an fps is not the direction you would like this game to go, games like HoN have a ranking system but suffer in the way that a player may not be good when they start, but as they progress they are already in a low bracket making it very challenging move up ranking. Real Competitive scenes do not start with matchmaking they start with teams being created and playing each other with organized ladders. This is also a way new teams can instantly dive into the action by playing scrims, without the need to build a ranking.
