Sinister Soups Serving Musings On Game Development and Play

Star-Crafting A Fun Online Experience

It should come as no surprise that Starcraft 2 will include a matchmaking system as its default method of starting multiplayer games. Blizzard went that route with Warcraft 3, to ensure that players could find good challenges for their teams and be ranked on fair matchups, as is necessary when you have a ladder system to support.

While the system in Warcraft 3 was good for its time, it could also be said that it had its flaws, chief among them its propensity for matching you with people who would proceed to curb stomp you.

At least, as a rather mediocre RTS player, that was my experience with the thing, and judging by the Penny Arcade strip linked above, I wasn't alone.

Luckily, Blizzard seems to be working to ensure that Starcraft 2 doesn't have the same problems. I had already heard that it would have different ladders for different skill levels, so that the more casual fans of RTS, like myself, might actually have a chance to compete with others on their level. Now, a recent article at the Escapist reveals some other steps they are taking to address problems with skill mismatches.

Their first major improvement is limiting each copy of the game to creating a single account, rather than allowing unlimited accounts like their former games. The reason this is important is because there is a certain breed of griefer who likes nothing more than to stomp on newbie players, a practice apparently called "smurfing," which they can only do by creating new accounts with no win history. If they tried this with an experienced account, the game's matchmaking would never match them with the a newbie player, since it tries to match very closely based on skill.

Handily, by limiting you to a single account, you can't go around creating what are essentially griefer or troll accounts, whose sole purpose is to ruin other peoples' experience. It also integrates nicely with Blizzard's recent update to a single-account Battle.netsystem, which now integrates WoW accounts as well, and will definitely be required for future Blizzard products.

The other thing mentioned in the above article, is that they are considering adding some slack to their matchmaking. Apparently, right now, the matchmaking in Starcraft 2 is too accurate, to the point that players are pretty much always matched on an even level. While this is fair, it leads to poor pacing for someone playing a night of Starcraft 2. Every game they play is a breathless, tooth and nail fight, and it doesn't allow the more relaxed play one might get playing a more novice opponent, nor the extreme challenge of facing a better player, which many people swear by as a means of improvement.

Ultimately, I think Blizzard is on the right track here. Exceptional matchmaking, combined with limited accounts to ensure honest skill levels means that both great players, and the really terrible ones (like, again, myself) can have good, exciting games without undue frustration, and I can definitely see the benefits of a slight random component to ensure a more interesting gaming session.

If I were them, I would actually consider going a step further than pure randomness, and think about how they can craft the sort of pacing they want. Since they seem to already be thinking in terms of a series of consecutive games, a session if you will, it wouldn't be too hard to start coming up with heuristic rules to give players the sort of experience that they desire, or alternately, that Blizzard wants them to have.

For example, if a player loses a couple of games in a row, maybe the system adapts to give them a few easier matchups, to give them some breathing space and a chance to try to apply what they might have learned from their defeats against a less demanding opponent. If they are willing to give players this kind of control, they could even allow you to choose from a preset difficulty, or "experience" that they'd like to have that night. Maybe I choose the Relaxed experience, and am only matched with opponents who are my level or lower, while another player wants a Meat Grinder, to hone his skills or just wrack his brains, and is therefore matched only with people of significantly higher level.

Of course, I'm sure Blizzard is already thinking about these sorts of things, and there are challenges there, such as making sure that someone who wants an easy experience is only matched with players who want a hard one, or you just get the same sort of griefing play this whole thing tries to avoid. Still, it'll be interesting to see what lessons Blizzard pulls from the current closed beta, and how the online RTS landscape will change when Starcraft 2 is released.