Ladders in 1.0

Exactly- what we're looking at here is what is practical to implement *now*. A proper rank / matchmaking system will take quite a bit of work.

This would be sufficient to avoid the 'noob stomp' problem people are worried about as it will be obvious at a glance who the new guys are, at the moment you can't tell until your in a team game and they open their build with 6 teleporters....

They did say that this was based on both PA numbers and previous experience.

I don't know exactly which RTS's neutrino worked on, but I assume that he's not just making stuff up and would be in a better position to see those numbers, about say Supreme commander... which he was lead programmer for. If SupCom's playerbase was really "mostly multiplayer" I doubt he would have just implied that it mostly wasn't.

I kinda like the example of the shoe. It fits well. Today i played a game against i think a pretty young player and he lost again. He was complaining about how hard the game is. The same thing back in the day when i played against my sister. She wouldn't play games against me cause she knew she would lose.

Normally I think it would be no biggie to have no ladder at release because all players start at the same time. It reminds me of the example in a Uber stream where Scathis mentions that he enjoys winning when the game is just released cause he has more experience then the people who just bought the game.

Well this time there are thousands of players who already have lots of experience so if people then try to play the chance that they'll be raped is pretty big. Some people will eventually avoid PA for that. PA is pretty different compared to other RTS games so the learning curve is steeper.

BTW props for bringing it up John. We'll see what you guys come up with.

Something I've got to say, one of the great things about this game is the Ai doesn't feel like as much of an ai as previous games (Ex: Supcom), in Supcom the ai built the exact same build every time you played, you could learn exactly how it plays. With this ai it has randomly generated maps.. so yeah.. it also has a MUCH more dynamic ai.

not faf's number's if he hasn't gone to look himself.

Neutrino was the graphical engine dev for Total Annihilation and lead Programmer on Supreme Commander.

I get the feeling he didn't follow up much on the whole FAF phenomenon.

As for me I played on GPGnet when I finally mustered the guts to play multiplayer (which took me like five tries, and then I came back to it perfectly aware that it was only to get PWNED but I LOVED THAT!)
and that lasted for a long while, maybe not a whole year and I was basically following faf since it's birth and hopped on as soon as GPGnet crashed so I DO have a measuring stick of my own. plus I have the stats published by Zep.

I know what's going on with faf and trust me, it is impressive.

@neutrino At the end of the day, whether you have the ladder in or not by 1.0 I'm just glad that you were willing to discuss it and have an open mind about it. I can only really speak for myself but this is exactly the kind of interaction that I was missing as of late. I know it takes you time, but I really value it. Thank you.

nah, you don't speak for just yourself there,

I second this motion!

Why don't you force everyone into an Elo system? Give the AI an Elo-Rating too (maybe make this a constant value). And then show the Elo-ranking next to everyone. Is that hard to do? I don't know. For 2v2 or 3v3 add up the Elo-number of each team and divide them by number of players per team. Then calculate the ratings for the teams and give each player after the game the amount his team has won/lost.

Trueskill please. Not ELO.

That was just a placeholder, Elo is just the one I know .

In answer to your questions ....

1) I've got about 100hrs /played so far. My first strategy game was Battle Isle; I was 25 when TA first came out and I played it a ton; also played a lot of Age of Mythology and I've played a lot of SC2. Other than the latter I've only ever played with a few friends or vs AI. Pretty sure I'm not going to improve much no matter how much I practice ;-)

2) I've a couple of friends who have / are talking about getting PA. If this is anything like SC2 then I can play 1vs3 and win (and I'm only Silver league, so that tells you what they're like)

3) I tend to play a handful of different games at any time, so I'm not likely to play many people I don't already know at all regularly (not unless the community's a lot smaller than I expect). Hence wanting a matchmaking system. I don't actually mind about ladder - I'm not bothered about ranks. Just want to be able to find similar-skilled people to play.

I'm expecting a reasonable percentage of players to be like me; maybe I'm wrong, but I hope not

Play time is definitely an indicator of experience, but I can certainly say it can be almost completely unrelated to skill.

To exemplify this, here's my anecdote about my skill level:

I would also like to mention that much like SleepWarz I do not like having to actively search for games at my level. As much as I am now a very experienced RTS player and really like them, I completely suck at them. This means that much of the time I will be unable to provide a challenge to those I meet in a lobby. As I find that people tend to be annoyed at facing some who is unable to even challenge them I tend to avoid even trying.

While I am not remotely competitive I definitely feel that having a highly visible in-game ladder provides motivation to a far larger portion of the player base than just those to take part in it. To use numbers already posited in this thread, I would say that with a ~10% 'buy-in' to a ladder you would find that ~20-30% of the remaining players would have it in the back of their mind as a goal. While they may or may not join the ladder at some future point it's mere existence motivates them to try to get better.

The better the matchmaking (which as you said, is crazy hard to get right) to more of the population can find matches at their skill and the more they can actually use it to get fun matches, which is what is (in my horrible uninformed opinion) most likely to keep them around long enough for them to be interested in what comes in subsequent patches.

And this shows why you cannot rely on completely external solutions. If it is integrated into the base game it can work, but if at any time you are relying on people to go looking for something it'll stop working as we hope it will.

Even given FAF's popularity, it provides no stats on how many players are playing singleplayer/only against friends.
It's fairly established that the majority of RTS players don't play online multiplayer, and especially not ranked.

This is just wrong though. Most people that buy the game never show up online. PA is like this as well. You guys represent the fringe, not the mainstream. That's just reality.

How many people actually play FAF? It's a fraction of the player base that bought the game.

We have numbers from PA and previous games to look at. It's unlikely that PA will have enough players to make matchmaking work well anytime soon.

Note all we are talking about here is *when* these features come online. You can already play the game multiplayer just fine. A ladder is really just an extension of the existing game for those players who are want to play competitively instead of casually.

Every bit of data we have from previous games is that most people are playing against the AI. And of the people that do play multiplayer only a fraction of those play ranked.

Note that those players tend to be overrepresented in places like forums about the game because they are typically more passionate than the casual players.

I just wanna thank Uber for providing their reasoning for perhaps including and perhaps not including ladder in 1.0, and have become convinced that ladder later provides more benefits than ladder now.

Only a fraction of those play ranked right now because the ladder is kinda wonky and it's not available through the game itself. Or were you talking about games like StarCraft in their post-release, post ladder release phase??

From the folks I've talked to, the majority of people play the AI because they are:

A) Learning how to play without a tutorial
B) Just checking out the awesome
C) Don't want to play multiplayer because it's too "hardcore" or something similar.
D) Have crappy PCs

One note with the AI, it would be interesting to have the AI getting it's rating changed just like any player. Knowing exactly where the AI stands in the ladder would be quite different from most games and would provide a lot of visibility as to what the difficulty levels actually mean.

If you put it this way, we should try to find middleground. Nobody wants your attention anywhere else then where you think its most needed so i gues we must find a way to overcome this. I'd suggest making PA-stats promoted massively on the main page of the game so that players that just start the game see that button and be guided to a page with a short explanation of mods and how to install PA-stats for the time being. If you also make a big promotional button or banner where you say what is going to be in ubers PA competitive patch with maybe even a nice countdown timer or a calender or something of when thats going to be in the game. This way i assume its not going to take toomuch attention away from where its most needed, but all the new players will know how to play some ladder matches using PA-stats and everyone thats new is almost instandly informed that competitive play will be in the game very soon and is more likely to stay around. Maybe play some PA-stats matches to practise. Also the old players that are likely to come back will know whats up by just starting the game and they are atleast immidiatly informed that its going to be in the game when you got it done.