"The problem with Online Matchmaking" or "Why I never play Catan"
By onyxfrog 1 Comments
I have some issues with the paradigm of putting together a game amongst friends.
You see, right now if you want to play a game you need to enter a lobby and see if someone else wants to play and either wait there for someone to show or move to another game lobby. While this may sound totally normal, think about how this same scenario would translate to real life. Imagine you threw a party and invited a bunch of your friends. Now take every game you own and put them all in different rooms and then let everyone wander from room to room until they find a game they want to play. Just think how it might play out...
As you can see, this may take a while and its not how a social situation with your friends would work. Someone would say "hey, lets play Monopoly" and someone else chimes up and suggests Apples to Apples, and everyone agrees and you all get to have fun and play together. A much more amicable situation.You walk into the first room and there is Worms. Fun, sure but you aren't really in the mood for it so you leave. You go to the next room and there is a copy of Catan, and there is someone else in the room! Then you remember that two player Catan isn't really that much fun and decide to move on.
So why can't this kind of model be brought to the consoles? This is my proposal and while I understand it may not be an optimal model, surely its better than what we have to work with now. When you sign on you can go to a list of your games that have a multiplayer component. All you have to do is go down the list and tick off the boxes of what games you would want to play right now, and maybe some light hierarchical ranking like a top choice or top 3 choices. Thats it. Your preferences are pushed to all of your friends and when three of your buddies check off that they would play some Turtles in Time, everyone gets a prompt and the game is launched.
Yeah, there are other factors that would need to be worked out to make this happen even to the point that to do this seamlessly it may only work on newly released titles or require some patching to get it into older titles, but I really don't see any other way that I'm ever going to get these twenty points for being the Chancellor of Catan.
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