Sunday, March 22, 2009

Improving the Multiplayer matchmaking experience

We’ve been having a blast playing gears of War 2 multiplayer. A few of us got cocky and decided we’d try our hands at playing the kids online. I can’t help but imagine a more helpful environment for multiplayer:

A multi-dimensional visualization tool, color coded with some bar graphs of the number of players online playing different styles of gameplay. Maybe putting such a tool on xbox live is kinda a big complicated deal. Fine, just put it on a per game website or some such, let me view it with my PC and/or cell phone while I’m playing and/or before I logon to the servers. How many people are playing? Why am I having such a hard time finding matches? Is it because nobody is playing? If I wait will a game end then I will be able to join? Am I in a ‘waiting to play’ game queue that is just waiting for available server time or something? Ugh…. push the data to this environment so I know when I log on what will give me the most likelihood of getting a match in the quickest amount of time. Better yet, just make the queries possible and allow others to build websites around the interface, may the best man win…but then you don’t get control….

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