Servers for different levels of play - "soft matchmaking"
YoungTrotsky
Join Date: 2007-03-09 Member: 60307Members
Join Date: 2007-03-09 Member: 60307Members
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?
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?
Comments
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.
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).
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.