Web Based Profiles, Matchmaking and Community Tools

Hi All,

I have a couple of ideas/requests about what would be nice to have available to us in the platform when the game comes out.

1. Player Avatars!

I have seen too many games and forums provide you with only a subset of images to use as avatars or crests. This is extremely irritating!

What are Uber's plans for Player customization within the standard game (unmodded) at the moment? Will we at least be able to pick our own in game avatars/flags?

With Uber's aim to have huge matches with up to 32 (or more?) players I think it's important that we get to customize at least our own avatars.

I know it's not really all that high on the list of priorities right now but I really hate when a game that I've been really looking forward to comes out with such a silly limitation.

2. Player Stats!

Stats stats stats! I would ideally like to be able to navigate to an opponents profile and see his/her in game stats.

These would include Win/Loss ratio, In game Killeath ratio , favorite unit, medals/achievements etc etc. This would help make games more interesting/strategic.

For instance, if a player I'm about to skirmish has a certain favorite unit, that would give me some important intel on which units I need to have available to counter with.

Also, it's worth mentioning that the distinction between unranked and ranked is important.

3. Online Linkable Player Profile

Complete with stats, player crest/avatar/flag. It would also be nice if game summary stats where available on their last few games.

4. Guild/Alliance Features

Simple group management features would be nice to have. A guild page listing it's members including ranks etc. Scheduled Guild Matches list etc.

The ability to challenge another guild using this interface would be nice.

5. League/Competition Management Features

These would include a League Ladder, League Page, League Planet(s) distribution (for leagues that wish to use the same 'map' across the board)

6. Player Communication

This is fairly self explanatory. But additional features would be the ability to challenge another player, schedule a game (including email reminders)

End List (for now).


I realize this is all a tall order, but that's one of the reasons I'm mentioning it now. I think having a unified platform with these features, all on the web (including a mobile version) and available in-game is extremely beneficial to the longevity of this game.

Just imagine it, You're at work. You have a few minutes so you go looking at the League Ladder and see that PlayerXYZ has overtaken you. You're somewhat miffed that you've been usurped so you check out his Profile and see his stats and you think, I could take this guy! You click the Challenge button and go back to work. You get on the bus to get home and grab your phone to see that the player accepted your challenge! Huzzah! You schedule a game in your local time for 7 than evening and you spend the rest of the bus trips checking his game summaries and achievements to try and come to terms with the kind of player he/she is.

AND THEN YOU WHOOP HIS/HER BEHIND! At least you would have if you'd had this intel available! Teehee.

TL;DR Web Based Profiles, Matchmaking and Community Management Tools are awesome!

I dunno though. If Uber were to provide a list of Image Macros, Nyan Cat and General "Meme" Avatars I think 99% of everyone you could find online would be satisfied
:|
I weep for humanity on a daily basis by the way.

Those are all nice suggestions OP. On avatars and profiles I'd be happy with something purely functional. There's no sense creating a social-multiplayer network and being mediocre in both the social and multiplayer respect (see: starcraft 2).

nanolathe: your recent posting has been A+, you're doing god's work

I can dream can't I? Hehe.

To be perfectly honest I would be extremely happy with 1, 2 and 3.

A problem with allowing users to upload avatars and what not is that you always get jerks using photos of their **** or something, which is a big problem considering minors could be playing, which means Uber will need to have people verifying that the images are family safe and that can waste a lot of time and money, or at least put in a reporting feature for the community to alert Uber to anyone using inappropriate images.

minors don't have dicks?

but rly i dont wanna see some guys anthony weiner either.

Um why not just use your Uber account avatar.

Same in game, in forum, in store, etc... we have custom avatars here, and stupid ones aren't really an issue.

Sadly I think silly or rude Av's are going to be an issue regardless of how its set up, if you can put your own thing in there then SOMEONE will be stupid. But that said ANY game that has player uploaded Av's has the same issue and it just something gamers just get used to.

I'd be interested in the stats for sure, love to look through all the bits and bobs that you can find one someone.

As for the guild/management system, definitely a great idea allows players and groups to get together easily and with some form of structure.

Snez.

The problem is, will the benefits be worth the effort Uber would need to put in?

As Garat's blog entry so nicely puts "small ideas can mean a ton of work and unintended consequences."

I'm going to interpret that as "A seemingly simple idea can mean a lot of unanticipated work"

Granted these are not really small ideas but the same still applies.

These suggestions I'm talking about involve a lot of work. As nice as they are it would mean building a brand new web platform and interfacing it with their servers and clients and that is a LOT of work.

I think down the track it would be awesome if those Community features became available. But for now just 1, 2 and 3 would be nice.

Not that I care too much about having avatars. But leave the worrying over dicks for avatars to the psychotic mom groups who seem content to stick to controlling our press, radio and television. There's no reason we should stoop to their level.

As for stat tracking though...

You know, I think that the biggest part of this is the idea of having profile pages. I think that if there can be a profile page for each player, where you can go and see their statistics and alliances, it would help the game out quite a bit. I don't think that it would even necessarily have to be a huge webpage, it could just be a part of the game. I am reminded of Command and Conquer 4 (yes, yes, it wasn't a great game, but still), and how they had the experience system. You could see what level other people were and what achievements and unlocks they had. I think that something like that would help.

achievements and experience systems are kinda silly. they're a cheap way to give the illusion of progress or draw out how long somebody plays your game. they do very little to improve the fun of the game. actual progress is reflected in ELO or TrueSkill, if you don't care about that then what's the point of experience systems? leagues can be interesting though as there's a competitive element involved.

achievements as a fun after thought for achievement junkies are fine. nonsense leveling/experience systems like what we see in halo and starcraft 2 HotS are a waste of time though. what's worse these systems can do damage by confusing players who misattribute importance to them. if it's a matter of conveying how prolific a player has been then just give us a games played or hours played stat.

Instead of uploaded avatars, I'd like to have an 'army painter' à la Dawn of War, with a flag/emblem creator (using an official set of parts).

I would tend to disagree with that. I find that achievements and experience can actually help me enjoy the game more. I really enjoy metagaming and achievement collecting, and it can provide a sense of focus and something to do after you've mastered the basics. Directed in the right way, it can help you to learn advanced techniques that you might not have otherwise.

You do realise the impossibility of achievements teaching players anything useful beyond the basics, don't you? The developers who have to put the achievements in would not only need to anticipate the best strategies that only the best players can come up with, but also that these strategies don't become obsolete after every patch or newly discovered strategy.

I feel like you plucked these ideas straight from COD ( not meaning to provoke flaming here ) and tried to put them with an RTS. Kill Death ratios would be slightly useless, because of the massive scale of the battles. Why count individual deaths?

Because having a high in game KD ratio could potentially indicate that you use your units properly rather than spamming someone with them. Having said that, spamming someone with bots is potentially 'using them properly'...

It's just another interesting, potentially useful, stat. If a player has a very low KD ratio but lots of game wins for instance, that could indicate that they are fond of unit spamming. It's another piece of intel.

I wouldn't mind that, though I'm extremely picky and more likely to want to design my own crest.

Maybe, a middle ground could be a system where you make a monochrome (2 color black and white, like the picture I have included) crest, in photoshop or MS paint or whatever. The actual color in game could then depend on the team colors that you use for the current match.
Maybe, in team versus team matches you could have 2 colors, 1 for your whole team and one for yourself. Then the one color could be the team color and the other could be yours.
I think that such a system could be both flexible and (almost, with the expetion being someone using a blank image) always very readable in game, with little to no issues with inappropriate profile pics. I also think that it would mix very well with the minimalistic style of the game

Sorry for ranting and not staying completely on topic, but I think that it would be a cool system (as I am also eager to design an avatar of my own), and I would love to hear anyones thoughs on this, or avatars in general

I heavily disagree with this. While stuff like this has no direct influence on how the game plays it can be quite helpful to keep people in the game. It can help to stop people from quitting altogether after frustrating losses, when they at least got some weird level up/achievement/whatever for it. Which in turn results in more players, which is very very very good. Blizzard did many stupid things with Bnet 2.0, but they did get a quite good grasp on how to make sure that people keep playing ladder.

idk i guess i have a deep-seated dislike for random experience systems.