My not so humble view about the game lobby

Thanks for the numbers, it's some interesting data !

It's true my numbers are waayyy off (all people that own the game will never play at the same time), but i'm used to always take the worst case scenario.
Professional deformation

But it's true that RTS are a niche genre nowadays, so maybe the community aspect could be pushed a little more into it.
(but i wonder how many copies Uber hope to sell at launch)

You are right that they should consider the worst scenario, but there is solution to each of these problems (too much bandwidth from the game lister? Don't send it to players in game, increase the polling time). Chat not manageable? Split it in several channels; etc..

I totally agree with the chat centering thing. It really makes you feel that the game actually has a community.

The only thing I really see as a problem, like mentioned earlier, is the amount of people in it.
I think a community really starts to feel like a community when you start recognizing peoples names, not because they are pro-player, not because it's a friend, but because you've seen them so many times. To a lot of players this can only happen if you are "forced" to see the names many times, like in a player list in the chat on the start screen.

When you get thousands of players in a list at the same time, it kind of doesn't work any more. Creating new channels isn't a good solution in my opinion, because then you never get a feel for who's online, and the community feel kind of breaks down.

I can see some parallels with MMORPG's and the community feel there. The one MMO I've played the most is WoW. It is much easier to get a community going there (in an MMORPG), since seeing other peoples names is a core part of the game. If you're in a city and see other people there, you will eventually start recognizing names.

When there are too many players playing the game, more realms are created, which is kind of like creating new chat channels, but the difference is that you had no need in seeing all other realms. You had your realm/community and it was big enough to feel there were many players around all the time, and small enough that you could recognize people and guilds.

This would be like locking players to chat channels, but just like in WoW realms, as soon as there are too few players it turns in to a ghost realm where you never see anyone. In an RTS this is probably much more prone to happening to a chat channel, since the actual game is separate from it, than in a game where the core idea is to play in that "chat channel".

I know WoW didn't have, or didn't really use a global chat system, but you knew there was a city you could go to where people heard you, and you knew that if you saw a character you could possibly see him again (unless he stopped playing it), instead of him always playing on a different realm with that character.

When they started mixing in other realms (Cross realm battlegrounds) you suddenly had too many names to keep track of, and so the battlegrounds part of the game suddenly felt disconnected from the community. You rarely fought against, or with, people from your own realm (unless you had a group). Before this you always knew you could meet whoever you met in the battleground, out in the worlds as well.
In an RTS this would be like fighting against people from other chat channels, but never seeing them in your chat channel.

This might have turned in to a incomprehensible rant now that I look back on it. Didn't mean for it to be this long, but I hope you get at least some of the idea here =)

Wow Zep, this really shows how much thought is put into FAF, and it's impressive. Thanks.
I can rest knowing that if this game is a huge flop I know I can comeback to something.

Zep has done some great work. But don't go in to FAF expecting it to be SC:FA.
He has his own vision for the game and you might not like all of the changes.

I've been on FAF and It's fine, I like it.

One thing i did not see get mentioned is in the chat lobby would you want it to be able to talk to people outside the game via irc?

Personaly i think yes since it will bring the community more closer and more integrated.

Seeing the list of planned features for the gamma version, I guess Uber disagrees with my view (shared by the FA/Starcraft community )

+1 : We need a stand alone lobby. It is quite better than an nuit-in one.

I already express my support to this idea, but i would like to highlight a point i really care.

For the moment, the PA lobby is a sad nomans land, most of the time there is only few games waiting to start, and the number of players in the top is a meaningless figure. Actually if i would not have steam and mumble, i would feel alone and anonymous on PA.

On the contrary when i played Balanced Annihilation on the spring engine, even if the amount of players was small (around 100 players), i felt like something happend there, i was able to see in the "IRC like" lobby every players connected, chat with them, meet people, set up games... i didn't need side software to play with friends, every thing was concentrated in the lobby and it was good.

So i share the opinion of Zep, Uber should not try to reinvente the wheel, a lot of good stuff already exists an can be integrated.

If I may suggest - it would be best to actually wait and see what they're offering tomorrow and see how it works before criticising.

Some great thoughts here thepilot, appreciate you taking the time to lay them out so clearly and succinctly. Hopefully Uber listened, we shall see.

Have you ever looked into Glicko (now Glicko-2)? It was developed to resolve this issue with Elo and create a better rating system.

Actually, doing a quick Google it seems Microsoft have a comparison on the two systems in their FAQ

https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/trueskill/faq.aspx

To summarise what the FAQ says, they believe they're similar but TrueSkill is better because it is designed to handle multi-player games where as Glicko is purely for 1v1.

I definitely agree that Elo should go die in a fire though. It's a system known to be flawed and in the computer age there's no reason to use it. I think I'd be very happy with Trueskill.