Ladders in 1.0

I'm super late to this thread.

I bought the Age of Empires 2 reboot on steam. That game had a quickmath and a yahoo games style rating. But no matchmaking.

The vast majority of my games were low quality. Korean tower rush. Franks knight rush. Turkish Janissaried and bombards. I won the vast majority of my games doing whatever I felt like.

I watched the replays and here was one common element. My opponent was not as much of a student of the game as I was. They never bagged their boars and they farmed way too early. Of course I won!

I played that game extensively for a month. I was "#2000" but I wasn't competitive - just playing in what little free time I had between work and children. I lost interest, the quickmatch dried up, and I moved on.

PA doesn't need starcraft leagues. But it does need matchmaking or I'm nervous it will run out of momentum without it.

The key to this discussion though is matchmaking and ladders are both confirmed. It is simply a question of when they're being added. The current thinking is shortly after 1.0 release as they're going to need quite a bit of work to do well.

That said I'm hoping for a simple indication of experience so you can tell new guys from vets. When you know that you can manually balance things to get fun games.

Forgive me, but "shortly after" is little better than Soon! Tm.

Are we talking two weeks? Two months? Steam holiday sale? Next year?

A new civ game is coming out this fall. Hockey and football is starting up. The next installment of annual AAA franchise. I don't doubt the devs have the marketing and sales info to know if waiting or launching is worth it.

There is risk in everything. If reviewers slam the game over polish or matchmaking that review will stick.

I don't need state of the art. But a skeleton framework to back up "this feature coming soon" is a plus. Something as simple as self-grading yourself 1-10 and matchmaking grabbing folks +/- 1 from youm

Well uber avoid giving dates so can't help on when, however based on neutrino's comments it should be the next major update to the game after release. It's evidently quite a big job so I'd guess a month or 2 before its ready although you can bet it will be fed out on pte during that time.

That said they do sound open to the idea of including something very basic at release so will be interesting to see what they come up with.

here are some stats dating from 2013

Number of unique players by week :

Replays added in the database each week (so, basically games played till the end) :

total amount of replays in the database per week:

Unique player that at least played a game:

Number of games played:

Ladder frequentation stats:



And in my experience Friday afternoon is always a party up in FAF, we hit a record 960 people online not too long ago. 900 is a number we tend to reach on friday afternoons.

it's kinda crazy it represents that many people connected in a single chat channel plus the IRC connections (which aren't counted). And would you believe it: that chat is healthy and calm.

on a dip FAF has 200-350 people online and on average 500.

the active player base last I heard is some 16 000 (but it must have gotten bigger since then).

the people who bought the game is, of course, much much bigger. RK4000 has some 15 copies that he hands out to randoms who come onto faf and I have bought the game as a gift (in a number of varied ways, physical gold edition, normal, steam) almost as many times.

EDIT because of Zep's post :
2557 Unique players last 24 hours.
5246 Unique players last 7 days.
9931 Unique players last 30 days.

585 Ladder games last 24 hours.
2787 Ladder games last 7 days.
11409 Ladder games last 30 days.

3329 Custom games last 24 hours.
15038 Custom games last 7 days.
59732 Custom games last 30 days.

These stats are old. New stats are available realtime on the right side of the website :
http://www.faforever.com/

We've doubled the unique player/week for example.

1/5th of the games (coop - solo - AI Stomp included) are 1v1 ladder games.

couple of stats you may have that I'm still curious about.

• how many total signed up on faf?
  
• how many active out of that? define "active" loosely, say "online in the year" for example
• average online simultaneously
• peak online simultaneously

it could.... Zep?

wait I already kinda have an answer to that:

so we know that solo and AI stomp are in there, so we DO have those stats. and out of all that 1v1 still comes out one fith!

Also, accordingly to the kickstater (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/659943965/planetary-annihilation-a-next-generation-rts), you will have 23.721 brand new players the first day of the release.

These backers backed the game when the promise of a solo game was not in planned at all.

Do you really think they won't be disappointed by the lack of simple multiplayer tool like a matchmaker?

Where are you even getting these numbers from? All of the kickstarter backers should have had access to the games for months now?

Pledge $15 or more
5000 backers All gone!

Early bird discount of $20 tier!

Estimated delivery: Jul 2013

Pledge $20 or more
18721 backers

The finished game on PC or Mac and an exclusive wallpaper for the Kickstarter introductory price of just $20!

If you are able to add 18721 and 5000, you have my number.

They will get the release game, because beta was for higher tiers.

And if you had paid any attention, you would have known that all of those people got access to PA last November. https://www.kickstarter.com/project...nihilation-a-next-generation-rts/posts/667763

no awhile ago they revoked that and gave every one who bought a copy one way or another access.

So they had access to the beta while pledged less than what they should have !?

yes.

I don't care. people were getting it on steam sales and humble bundle also cheaper even before that.

it's been a paying open beta.

They gave everyone who had backed on kickstarter and had pre-ordered access to the beta around 2 months after the original beta release.

So, we aren't getting global chat or latter by 1.0?
Could we at least get some sort of point ranking, just a ratio of W/L and sample size would be a good start.
Something like this: mredge73 (0.7,10)
This would show that I have only played 10 games and I have won 70% of them. But, I should probably avoid someone who has won 70% of their 400 games played. This doesn't go far into telling you the skill of a player, but at least it will give you an idea on how experienced he/she is.

I had no ill intentions, and if you read what I usually post you know I'm not the one for fear-mongering and ranting either. And I understand your position completely.

I am sorry to have de-railed the thread in any way, shape or form. It was just a question that occured to me, but I realise I should have posted it somewhere else.

You don't have those stats, because you are only counting those who use FAF. For example, Steam has 631 in-game right now; those aren't included, nor are those who just play via local installs on a LAN, or entirely singleplayer.

Based on Steamcharts, I'd be inclined to think more people are playing over steam than FAF - 300 to 600 people in-game at any time, over 24 hours, suggests more than the 2694 Unique players per day that FAF has.

Wow, we really can't keep a thread on topic around here can we.

And you guys wonder why we don't want to talk about features before we launch them. Every single time it just ends up in a second guessing argument about how we run the project. If you guys think you are actually helping us by second guessing every decision we make, you aren't. You are making it more difficult.

BTW I'm still waiting for someone to cook up more math on matchmaking queue sizes vs player populations.

Again, you described why not to have quickmatch. If it matches poorly, people won't touch it, it is like a button only masochist and sadist press, depending if you are on the torturing or the tortured side.

Unless they are completely sure they can make a working quickmatch, which does take a playerbase mind you, they should keep it simple and just have a ranked listing and have ranked games autogenerate so players don't interfere with the ranked game rules. It is better if people see a name and a number before they agree to let that person whail on them ingame, and it works with less people.

I say user doesn't set up game and it autosets, because if user sets up ranked, a lot of people are going to lava planet combox and 12 planet system and stuff.