Servers for different levels of play - "soft matchmaking"

YoungTrotsky

I don't know if this is actually possible but it seems like a lot of steam stuff can be integrated into games so I was thinking it would be good if there was a server variable that admins could set that only allowed players to join if they had a certain number of hours of NS2 playtime, and maybe even a maximum number of hours too. The default would be no restriction so only servers owned by people who actively choose to limit their servers would have a restriction, I would not expect the proportion of servers with limitations to be more than about 10% of the total server count.

That way you could have, for example, 'beginner' servers that only allow players with <10 hours playtime, 'rookie' servers that only allow players with <50 hours and 'veteran' servers that only players with >200 hours could join, etc.

This would help protect rookies more from getting stomped and experienced players from getting bored/accused of hacking, while the majority of servers would remain as they are now because plenty of admins just leave their servers running vanilla settings.

Like I said I don't know if this is actually possible but every player theoretically has a number of hours played associated with their steam ID. Thoughts?

YoungTrotsky

Really, no one has anything to say about this?

littleevilwolf

hours played says nothing about the players skill just means they play a lot

YoungTrotsky

Not necessarily talking about skill, as you can see I never used that word in my post. Talking about experience, which I think correlates with game sense, listening to commander, working as a team, not making rookie mistakes, and many other things that make playing with inexperienced players quite frustrating.

Do you really not think it would be an improvement to play on a server where all the other players had >200 hours experience compared to playing on a server with 8 experienced players and 8 complete beginners. Some constructive feedback would be more useful than a snide and misinformed one-liner.

littleevilwolf

leave the game on while u sleep / whatever during the day. it adds hours so again hour r not a good base to use for "experience". if u mean connected to a sever go afk on a eu server no one will kick and again u just sit there all day/night when u not really playing the game. easy bypass to ur point

YoungTrotsky

You're right, all the rookies would do that because they are desperate to get stomped by experienced players. You, sir/madam, strike me as delusional. I await your further attempts to argue the futility of my suggestion with bated breath.

littleevilwolf

actually people already sit afk on most servers and rookies dont stay on rookie server and if people say this is not a rookie server, and dont get mad when u get stomped they dont leave. i know non rookies hang out on rookies server they only do to "teach" them if u dont use team work, dont talk, dont take orders , blah blah blah u will be stomped.

Ironsoul

Also using the spark editor adds hours to your time. I've accumulated about 60 hours from having the spark editor in the background while watching youtube.

YoungTrotsky

What I was suggesting was that something like this would allow their to be a small number of servers that would be refuges for people to get away from the general FFA that is public play. I clearly stated in the OP that the default would be the same as it is now and that I would expect the majority of servers to stay like that so anyone could join, experienced players could play on rookie servers to help teach if they wanted to.

This would simply mean there would be some servers where only new players could join and some servers where only experienced players could join. I do not believe there is a significant number of players that have a high playtime just from running the game in the background, but maybe you could have suggested that the system use rounds played rather than hours played, instead of just making the same point for the third time, there is a default 3-minute AFK kick in the game now anyway (this is the bit where I expect you to suggest that loads of people would make and join servers with no AFK-kick that automatically made players join teams and then ended the round after a minute just for idling so they could bypass the system, muahahahaaaaa).

rook2pawn

littleevilwolf wrote: »

hours played says nothing about the players skill just means they play a lot

It does mean someone with 200 hours probably knows that bile bombs can kill arcs, and some notion about the build orders on both sides and the concept of a minimap.

These concepts are completely foreign to most of the players in the past weekend.

YoungTrotsky

Phew, I was starting to think it was just me.

shriike

I'd prefer to see an elo system of wins and k/d. Only players with higher elo can play on "veteran" servers.

YoungTrotsky

Well, that could work too, but ELO is more a metric of player skill, which isn't what i'm talking about so much as just experience. I think dividing people by skill-level is not a great idea as you improve fastest when you play against people who are better than you. But dividing people by experience should reduce the frustration of having some players that are being held back or undermined by their teammates because they have no idea what's going on. By just using total hours or rounds played any player can eventually get to a point where they can join any server, even if they don't have the best aim or prefer to play support roles so don't often rack up big K/D or even necessarily win lots of rounds if, for example, they like to anti-stack or switch to the losing team when auto-balance kicks in (damned auto-balance).