Leveling the playing field

From the little experience I had with team based online action games (aka Demigod) I have learned one thing rather quickly: Only a balanced team is a happy team.

We all know the 'Leroy Jenkins' players: they have lost countless 1v3 situations but they will storm into every fight and die in a heartbeat. Or sometimes you want to play with a friend who has not quite the same skill level (aka he plays like Your Mom)... From the looks of it this will be less of a problem in MNC than it was in Demigod but I think it would probably be possible to even the odds a little anyway:

If the matched teams are not on the same skill level you could give the less experienced players the option to get more HP or a shield or something in custom/coop games. You can probably come up with a better game mechanic though.

But the basic idea is (and this is probably even more important for the Xbox): If your little sister wants to pick up the gamepad and play with you on the same team - although she has only played browser games with pink unicorns so far - there should be a way to help her enough to have fun as well.

Competitive gaming is all fine and well, let's be honest though: Maybe <= 5% of the players really train and try to get better, the others just want to have fun. Of course you can try to match teams with equal skill levels (and that's probably the best option in the long run) but sometimes you want to play with your RL friends or people you like.

It should be optional of course and not count towards the ladder ranking when it is used.

Just a thought I had after reading countless post on that very topic.

Many games (especially RTS's) have the option to put handicap on certain players, or increase their stats to match the others. Of course, this is something you do in good faith - if the guy you want to play with says he never touched this game, you're going to give him some extra points, but then you get pissed off if it turns out he knows the game inside out. Of course it has to be optional, but the major problem is that HP doesn't necessarily cover the lack of skills - the little sister example you mentioned, maybe she'll have double the HP than you, but that only means she'll take twice as many shots as you, and if she barely knows how to move or shoot (I know many people who still can't use mouse and keyboard together for "modern" PC games) she'll still die instantly.

What's the solution then? Putting handicap options? Giving such options into people's hands could be a pain if some idiot is hosting your match, ruining it completely. It wouldn't even work if it was automatic, because who's to say a new account is of someone who never played the game? They might be pros from some other account. Leveling up while playing seems to be the solution chosen by most games lately, but that hardly works, as (for example) on Halo 3 I often find extremely skilled level 1 people, and totally noob level 30 people aswell.

I don't know what Uber Entertainment has in mind in order to try to level the field of the matches, but whatever it'll be, there's no such thing as perfect system, and fans should keep that in mind before spamming the forum like "OMG my guy got killed in 3 secs WTF imba game it sux".

MW2's death-streak feature is a step in the right direction, IMO. it's open to everyone, but isn't abusable by good players. that said, i found all, bar one, of the streaks utterly useless in team-games (map size has an effect on the use of these too, hence the futility in MW2).

I really liked the Handicap System in Quake 3 and Warcraft 3 custom games where you could give yourself a n% handicap so you/your units only have n% health and do n% damage. I played a lot of War3 matches vs my oldest brother using a 70% setting and then it was very fun. On one sad day however I forgot to give myself an handicap and yet my brother still won and was so proud of it that he never played me against thereafter so that he can forever claim he won the last game in War3 we ever played .

a handicap system has the handy advantage over a buff system that it isn't abusable (well maybe by masochists )

I'm sure players will find a way to grieve in multiplayer if you have buffing system in versus multiplayer. However MNC has this game mode:

Blitz allow players to defend their Money Ball against armies of robots by themselves or with up to three of their closest friends over XBOX Live

That's like the perfect friends/learning mode. Buff or handicap should not matter much except for your own fun/performance. If you use a buff the points you get should not count to the career metagame or maybe only partially.

BM, how does the death-streak feature work? I haven't played MW2 and can only guess what it does. It sounds like a good idea though.

TBO, I experienced something similar in Demigod: I played with a friend on the same team against AIs. While he was constantly forced to go back to the crystal (even though I was playing Sedna and healing him all the time) I went only back once to buy like 3 mana helmets. I think it was a very frustrating experience for him (although he didn't die once) and we haven't played Demigod since. I tried to help him with his build and all but he gave up after only 2 or 3 games.

I think a multiplayer game which has a mechanic that lets experienced and new players play together without frustrating them can go a far way.

I really really don't think death-streaks should be implemented. It's a horrible mechanic and it's nearly universally unpopular - because at the end of the day.. it gives a bad player a chance of beating a good player. Martyrdom is just generally loathed. Final Stand is glitched. Painkiller is horrendously unfair (basically means that if you find them 10 seconds after they spawned - you're dead). Copy Cat is the only one which makes any sense.. but I'm not sure whether that would work in MNC.

I think the main thing is that it seems there is some kind of levelling up system/customisation system - this is the one thing which could if handled badly make the game a real nightmare for a newbie. Make sure, therefore, that the upgrades give you more choice, more flexibility, more possibility, more opportunity - but not an overall advantage. Not only should each of the 6 unique characters be balanced against eachother but each of the X number of customised possibilities should be balanced against themselves. Alternatively, perhaps DO have something like copy-cat. It would be disastrous in my mind to have a team of upgraded MNCs against a load of new players.

Getting a better character is great fun - but not if until you do you can't compete.

I think we need to know the sizes of the teams before we get too concerned about this. In Demigod, every player is a third or a quarter of your team, so one bad player can be a huge disadvantage. However, in games with more players, like 12v12 TF2 or something, a couple bad players won't have such a large effect.

I guess this brings up the question is this going to be locked to whoever starts the game has to finish it (demigod) , or are new people allowed to join/leave the server at will (tf2)? If it's the former your concerns are correct, but if it's the latter, people leaving and autobalance, as well as a team shuffle option would pretty much eliminate the issues.

Also, demigod is a lot different than a shooter in that dying hurts a lot- you lose xp, they gain gold, making the difference between you even greater. In a FPS this effect is much less noticeable and definitely isn't as much of a slippery slope. just my take on things.

MW2's death streaks sorta' suffered from poor execution. i only ever use Marty' because i only ever play team games (you never see combat in the first 10 seconds of a life in anything but TDM, but TDM is just regular TDM with a few people you don't shoot at). that said, i've never, ever, had issue with Martyrdom in with MW1 or MW2. it keeps me on my toes, and if i'm nub enough to get caught by one; i made a mistake and deserved it.

it's a case of to-each-his-own, i suppose. i doubt copying MW2's streaks to MNC would make any sense what so ever, but if there's going to be form of non-abusable, non-honour system, anti-slippery slope mechanic, i think it'll be the Death Streak.

Handicap is fine and all by me when it comes to custom or non-ranked matches, but it makes no sense whatsoever in ranked games.

Im pretty sure the game will include a training or tutorial to get to know the gameplay mechanics, classes and modes, that makes more sense than saying: "here, your rank 1, you get 25% more HP and attack".

There is a huge difference between giving a player an advantage and knowing how to play, which is sort of what the OP has confused.

There are a lot of things to do in the game so newbs can definitely have fun just exploring the space of possible actions. For example they can start out playing support and just try to play more of a defensive base maintenance role as one example.

Of course all of the matchmaking tries to match you with similarly skilled players. So if you end up on a team with a wide range of skills you should match against a team that has a wide range or that is around the average skill of your team.

Hopefully there'll be enough players for this to work out properly - if there's not enough players, you'll inevitably end up with people who may not be your skill level.

I do sense lack of enthusiasm for my idea...

well in team based fps games, it might really not be necessary - if you play Capture the Flag for example every one even if he is a total noob can do something useful and won't hurt the own team like they can do in Demigod by feeding. And then you can always balance out the teams by having the weaker team 1-2 more players.

Well, in this game it doesn't look like any teammate can do serious harm (unless there's friendly fire, but you need to be a downright idiot if you make your team lose by friendly fire), but still it can be terrible. For example, no one picks up the Support guy because the players see someone did that already, but maybe that guy is a noob, and has no idea about how to help the team, and end up losing inevitably. It's a difficult situation and even games with long testing and thousands of players for the system to choose from (eg. Halo 3) often have extremely unbalanced matches.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to see how this works out in MNC.

to be honest, on xbl the ranked match option was pointless as no-one who could host a game hosted a ranked match as noone would join the game as everyone else was joining the more popular social matches, so i say you should only use ranked matches

Wait, there's no point in having ONLY ranked matches. For example, what if there's this one person out of many, who has just started playing the game? He's not going to be finding any matches at all due to the fact that (roughly) three quarter's of the game players are a higher rank than that person?

Besides the point, I don't think I've EVER seen a game where you could only play ranked matches.

The main thing we want to do is avoid splitting up the community too much so that everyone can get into a game.

I'd say Halo 2's handicap system is where it's at and MW2's system is not.

This might only work for the PC version but it would be nice to have an option to set a game to 'not ranked' in the lobby. All games would be on the same server list but the host could choose to open a game to just fool around.

Why unranked games at all you will ask:
- Sometimes you just want to test something or play with a friend who plays for the first time. So much nicer if you can host a random 'do crazy stuff' game and know it doesn't affect your ranking.
- In team games (especially >2v2) there usually seems to be one player who takes everything too serious and one totally new player who stumbles over his own feet. This can lead to nasty flame wars in chat.

If it is not too much work I'd ask for a lobby option for unranked games. And maybe you could mark those games in the server list with a [NR] tag or something.

The advantage would be that all players could browse the same list and could look for the game type they like best. However if there are not enough people for their preferred game type they can just jump into the other without any delay. The whole community is in one list.