On the official Shadowrun forums, Bill Fulton has answered our questions yet again. This time he explains how parties affect matchmaking and the auto-balancing system.
Parties will only be split as an absolute last resort to keep the match balanced.
If a party gets split, it will be reunited at the first opportunity where it won’t unbalance the match.
He goes into much greater detail on the matter in his original post.
Tags: auto balancing, bill fulton, matchmaking, parties
I just look forward to being able to get in games with players on my friends list and jump from game to game. On a side note, I can’t help but be apprehensive about the TruSkill method of gaming. I would much rather play in a game against someone with 3x the skill as me, therefore I can learn what works and what doesn’t. That’s one of the nice things about hosted games and/or dedicated servers. I think though that TruSkill will hit the other 80% of gamers out there that wish to game against similar players to themselves.
But gg FASA for the party system, can’t wait to try it out.
I hope the auto-balance doesn’t take affect in private games.
It’s interesting that they say they are building a “social game” and that they said that H2’s system wasn’t social gaming friendly.
“[HALO 2’s] system is great for competitive gaming, but it sucks for social gaming…We didn’t do an exact replica of the party system from Halo 2 because we didn’t replicate their matchmaking system. We wanted to emphasize social gaming, not competitive gaming. That said, below are details of how we attempted to balance the conflict.”
At least in the beta build, there is no auto-balancing for private matches (although when you first join the room it appears to default you to one team or the other based on either the auto-balance algorithm or maybe just the number of human players on a team).
I can only assume that this would remain as is in the final game. I know I was really annoyed at how in Gears there was no way to just go in a room alone with a friend and walk around the map.
Also, it would completely destroy any hope of clan matches and tournament games since it would keep switching the teams up. Can you imagine playing a clan match and then having your star player get switched to the other side?
I have to agree with this statement. Halo 2 was designed to randomly match you up against similarly skilled players, then disband the group and start over again. This works great for competition, but it was one of the downfalls that created a horrible online community.
Other games like Splinter Cell and Mechassualt were somewhat self-regulating. When people got together with a good room, they tended to not be jerks because it saved them the trouble of having to find a new room. In Halo 2, players know they will probably never see those same people again, so there is less incentive to be civil. When I played these games a lot, I got friend requests often, and I still have many old Mechassualt friends on my list. I can only remember gaining a few friends while playing Halo 2 in matchmaking, and those I have long since removed.
Shadowrun blurs the lines between those old server list games and Halo 2’s jump in and play matchmaking. It shares the benefits of both while helping to alleviate the problems of each. You keep the self-regulation and atmosphere of a server listing, while enjoying the benefits quickly finding a room of similarly skilled players.