The last few days I have been busy playing most of the games from the list I posted before. I didn’t have the time to play them all yet, so let me start with the genre I had the most difficulties with. Namely RTS(Real Time Strategy)Although I’m not unfamiliar with RTS,(It’s actually one of my favourite genres in pc gaming) I have to admit that playing online isn’t one of my strong points. I normally enjoy myself by building op a defensive base or a huge army before engaging the enemy. This is considered “turteling” by experienced online gamers, because it takes quite some time to establish this. The trick in most online RTS games is that offence is the best defence, and you need to be quick about it. So spam as much units as possible as soon as possible and attack your antagonists before they attack you.
Starcraft 2
Last Friday I received an emailed notification by Blizzard that I have been invited to participate the Beta test of Starcraft 2. I originally wanted to use Warcraft 3 as a case study but since Starcraft 2 is a more recent title and it’s as conventional as RTS games get, I choose to use Starcraft 2 instead.
The first thing I noticed after creating a profile was the ability to indicate a skill level:
- New player - little rts experience
- Experienced – played rts in the past
- Veteran – you played rts for competitively years
Although I don’t really know what the consequence of this choice is, I presume it predetermines a rank. During my test u choose the experience option what plces me in the copper league, which should be one of the lower leagues in the games ladder system. Since the game doesn’t provide in depth information about its ranking system, I looked up it on Blizzard Battle.net page and its supporting forums.
The system should work like this:
Starcraft 2 places its players in a ladder system with ranks and leagues. Each league represents a certain skill level and each rank represent the player’s position within that league. Winning matches raises ranks and should eventually raise leagues. Unfortunately it’s unknown what specific statistics are needed to climb up a league. Losing matches Obviously does the opposite of winning the players ranks.
Rob Pardo (Executive Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard Entertainment) even claims that Starcraft’s matchmaking is to good, which result into exhausting matches. A form of randomness is added to create more diversity.
Encouraged by this system I started up the game full with hope and promise, to soon find out that I’m not by far up to the task to defeat its current players. I quit the game after five humiliating defeats, and I would have deleted the game of my hard drive if it weren’t for the optional A.I. opponent.
Luckily there is still hope, Starcraft 2 is still in beta and is not working in optimal conditions. I can only hope that the final product will be more friendly to less experienced online gamers .
Lets move on to another game
Dawn of War 2 (+expansion)
As some of you might know, Dawn of War 2 took a step away from the conventional RTS style of gameplay by taking away base management. There is no base building at all. Instead the game focuses more abilities of the units itself and on character progression trough a RPG system. Note: the RPG system is available in the single player component. This system is replaces in the multiplayer component by optional gear and a tech tree.
The first thing I found out after starting up a multiplayer game is that Dawn of War uses TrueSkill, a ranking system that is also used for xbox live matchmaking. TrueSkill is developed by Microsoft Research. From what I understand, TrueSkill distinguishes itself from other ranking system by keeping track of not one but two values. Average skill and the degree of uncertainty. The system then compares these values with that of the other players to make a match. TrueSkill players that are most likely to draw each other. Off course there is complex underlying mathematic system that is used to make these comparisons, but that’s not the point of interest to my research. 
What is important to know is that is system like this works best when there is a low level of uncertainty. The only way to gain is to have a lot of data on the player. In other words, the players needs to player as many ranked matches as possible to get a good match. And that’s where the system flaws, at least to the appeal of new players.
To test the system I played an online ranked matches of Dawn of War 2. I’m still a level 1 player en got teamed with a level 3 players. The level of my opponents on the other hand where dangerously high, 37 and 48. Obviously the game ended up in a big humiliating defeat. The other matches that I played where very similar to this one and also ended up lost. Note: being defeated like this does not encourage to play another game is not a warm welcome.
The flaw is that new players or not likely to continue after being defeated in a game in which they have no chance of winning. By this the matchmaking system never gets a change to get enough data.
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