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Hello, Stormgamers,
What does it mean to be the first truly social RTS?
For us, that means bringing players together in ways that are more fun than ever before. We love cooperative play, so we’re building cooperative modes like three-player co-op vs. AI and co-op campaign. We also aim to create an ecosystem where players around the world can test their skills against one another on the ladder.
We’d like to focus our latest discussion on how we plan to bring players together for competition.
Let's talk matchmaking!
As we embark on the process of designing Stormgate's ladder system, we're faced with a fundamental question: should our matchmaking be regional or global?
Easy question? Or impossible?
First, some key points and initial thoughts. Global matchmaking has some benefits:
- it reduces the time to get matches against players of your skill level, even in non-prime time hours for NA/EU;
- it increases the size of the player pool, better matching opponents by skill level, resulting in better-quality matches;
- it simplifies live operations;
- it simplifies playing with friends who live far away;
- it makes it easy to see where you match up compared to the rest of the world;
- and it reduces the mystery behind “who are the best players in the world?” for esports purposes.
We believe it’s important for players to be able to find games within a reasonable amount of time at any time of day. Global matchmaking would also increase the likelihood of seeing players in the ladder who you otherwise would rarely or never get matched with. This can help create fun rivalries and even lasting friendships.
On the other hand, there are powerful arguments for a regional matchmaking system:
- Regional matchmaking has a higher likelihood of players in a given pool matching, which leads to more accurate regional MMR;
- Regional matchmaking directly answers the question: who is the best player in this region? It avoids the confusion of playing matches against out-of-region players when trying to climb a regional ladder;
- Without regional matchmaking, players from one region may end up dominating a global ladder;
- Many players would say that they prefer regional matchmaking because latency tends to be lower and that a low ping is more important than skill parity for better-quality games.
But wait, what if we can do both?
The idea here would be to match players together globally, while still presenting a ladder and leaderboard that filters players by region. This is most definitely a case of us wanting to have our cake and eat it too, so we want to carefully weigh the options to make sure this approach makes sense. This is where you can help.
Here are our questions for you:
- What would you think of a global ladder that could also be filtered by region?
- Would you enjoy facing players from other regions while trying to climb your ladder?
- Would you like to see separate MMR and ladder rankings by faction?
- Do you have any fears or concerns about global matchmaking?
- What if there were rules in place to make it so you’d not have to play any matches with 130+ms pings?
- What region/country/city are you in and what would you consider “good” latency for an RTS? What is the highest latency you’d find acceptable?