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Match Finder/Builder


Tarvin

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I'm a long term fan of both Command and Conquer and Renegade and am about to leap into my first game of RenegadeX. Of course this might make you wonder, 'why is someone that hasn't played yet posting a suggestion?'

The reason is because I've been trying to learn more about how the game is different from Renegade and was playing through the single player Renegade to get used to the feel of the game again before jumping in. Yes, I happen to enjoy most everything about the game. No, I'm not insane, I'm a game designer. We like to punish ourselves.

Anyway, enough of the rambling introduction and to the point. I've been watching the server screen to get an idea of how many people play so i can judge what will happen if I join an underpopulated server. The top populated server(s) stays populated while the others languish. When the population on any top server dips down it instantly refills in seconds leading me to believe there's a fair number of people watching to join the more intense battles on full servers.

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The actual suggestion!

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Why not introduce a match finder system? Players can either go the usual route of going directly for a server they want or they can set preferred settings for servers and they will be added to a game que. When the que is filled to a minimum level everyone waiting for similar games will be dumped into a server and people can stop waiting in the shadows for a match that looks good.

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True. Thinking about it some, implementation would require a bit of a match finding server to hold peoples' positions while they wait for enough other players to populate a game server. On the bright side it wouldn't require near as much power as a game server.

Still, having this would help energize the player base because they wouldn't be waiting for a map on the server list to populate before they join. It would just happen.

Game servers would have to be tweaked to talk with the Match Finder system though. They would need to output the match settings to determine if they are a match for each player as well as what the current population of the server vs. the max, and if the match is already in progress or waiting to start.

Most of that is already communicated by each server and shown on the server screen. The only thing missing is something to inform a Match Finder of which games are already in progress and if certain milestones have been reached like if buildings are destroyed or there is only 5 minutes left.

If a match is already won before a server receives a population boost through the Match Finder or there is only a short amount of time left before it ends people will just leave and defeat the purpose of the finder. This could be solved by the finder only dumping groups of people into matches that have just started or haven't begun yet. Otherwise, it could just dump small groups like 4 people at a time into any available server so even a low population server would get enough boost to make the match more fun and worth staying in.

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I don't understand the point of this. You either join a server you're interested in or you don't.

We're really just looking at ways to see who is "waiting", so all we need is a chat room, so if people start noticing that a bunch of people are waiting to get in the populated servers, then they can get to populating a server.

Thats called using the community. The matchmaking doesn't make much sense, and it which server does it dump you? A random one? There's only 2 servers really being used right now, and for good reasons.

Just let the community see each other and you're good to go. For a dedicated player-hosted community like Renegade, match makers are just useless.

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The idea of match making is to move people through to playing on servers more quickly. Chat room or not people prefer to jump into games that are already populated which causes others to be neglected like the current situation. Give people the ability to hop on waiting lists while they participate in chats to pass the time and the game becomes more attractive.

Chat rooms were already present in Renegade multiplayer and the issue was still happening that's going on with RenegadeX.

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