Shadowrun

Bill Fulton, game designer, at FASA stated why there is no ranked games in Shadowrun. He gives some good background information that makes Shadowrun multiplayer seem promising:

Hey folks,

This whole story about us doing ranked match with friends (and some very unflattering accusations at Gears) is really just an unfornate series of misunderstandings. I’m going to attempt to clarify this as cleanly as possible, so please bear with me if I repeat what some of you already know. (BTW–I’m the UI & matchmaking designer on Shadowrun, so I’m pretty sure what Shadowrun is doing).

• Shadowrun WILL be doing a party system. One of our focuses is to make it easy for you & your friends to easily get into games together and stay together.
• Shadowrun WILL be using TrueSkill in order to do skill-based matchmaking. Because it is no fun to play against others whose skill is too different than yours, we’re going to put people into games with others of similar skill.
• Shadowrun will NOT be doing ranked match or displaying any skill numbers. We want playing Shadowrun to be about having fun, and not about making some number go up. Plus, displaying rankings/skill seems to just reward cheating, which we don’t want to do.

I believe the misunderstandings around this issue stem from the following causes:

• Some people (incorrectly) believe TrueSkill & ranked match are inherently linked. This is not the case. So when we say we’re not doing ranked match, many people seem to *hear* that we aren’t using TrueSkill; and when we say we are using TrueSkill, some people *hear* that we are doing ranked match. The two systems do not have to linked and we are not linking them.
• Some people (incorrectly) believe that the party system inherently means ranked match. There’s no reason they have to be combined. So when we say that we’re building a party system similar to Halo 2, we mean the ability to gather your friends together before getting into a game. We don’t mean that ranks will be displayed or that when the game ends we’re going to ‘explode’ the match and send everyone back into matchmaking separately.

A brief overview of how Shadowrun matchmaking will work:

• You and some friends can get into a party.
• Your party (or just you by yourself) can go into matchmaking and get into games with similarly skilled players.
• At the end of a match, the next match will start immediately with the same group of players (minus anyone who choose to quit, and plus anyone who has since joined).
• Often, when a party goes into matchmaking, you’ll be joining a game in progress. This means that the match didn’t start once you joined, but will have been going before you got there (and may continue on once you leave).
• At the end of a match, if teams are too uneven, they will be ‘auto-balanced’ to make them more even.
• A friend who shows up late can join your party and get into your match while it is in progress (as long as the game isn’t full).
• A party could leave a public match and switch over to playing a private match (just with party members–no strangers), or go from a private match to a public one.

I hope that this clears up the misunderstandings. I think the bad press directed at Gears because of this misunderstanding is pretty unfortunate (and not to mention unfair to them). If someone could get this info to the 360Arcadians and Knuckles Dawson, I would appreciate it.