Video Game Player Matchmaking Task
A Video Game Player Matchmaking Task is a player matchmaking task for multiplayer video games.
- Context:
- It can (often) aim to maximize Video Game Player Enjoyment.
- It can be solved by a Video Game Player Matchmaking (that implements a video game player matchmaking algorithm).
- It can make use of a Video Game Player Matchmaking Logic.
- Example(s):
- for Doom (1993 Video Game).
- for Quake (Video Game).
- for Clan (Video Gaming).
- for Diablo (Video Game).
- for Halo 2.
- …
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: Multiplayer Game Player-Party, Battle.Net, GameSpy Arcade, Game Server.
References
2019
- (Wikipedia, 2019) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/matchmaking_(video_games) Retrieved:2019-11-8.
- In multiplayer video games, matchmaking is the process of connecting players together for online play sessions.
2018
- https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/open-source/open-match-flexible-and-extensible-matchmaking-for-games
- QUOTE: But matchmaking — the art of matching a set of players together to maximize their enjoyment of the game — isn’t easy from a technical standpoint, and can require many inputs to get right. Each game is unique, making it difficult for an off-the-shelf matchmaking solution to be flexible enough to support them. Consequently, game developers often spend substantial time and resources developing a customized, scalable matchmaking solution for each new release, when they could be spending that time doing what they do best—creating great games.
What if game developers could focus on just the matchmaking logic — the inputs and logic for selecting players — instead of building a whole matchmaker from scratch for each game? Google Cloud and Unity are jointly announcing the availability of an open source matchmaking project called Open Match to do exactly that. Open Match is designed to allow game creators to reuse a common matchmaker framework. It includes three core components: a frontend API for game clients, a backend API for game servers, and an orchestrator that runs game-specific custom matchmaking logic. It’s instrumented with OpenCensus (opencensus.io) for metrics gathering and Prometheus (prometheus.io) is configured by default.
- QUOTE: But matchmaking — the art of matching a set of players together to maximize their enjoyment of the game — isn’t easy from a technical standpoint, and can require many inputs to get right. Each game is unique, making it difficult for an off-the-shelf matchmaking solution to be flexible enough to support them. Consequently, game developers often spend substantial time and resources developing a customized, scalable matchmaking solution for each new release, when they could be spending that time doing what they do best—creating great games.
2017a
- (Wikipedia, 2017) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/matchmaking_(video_games)#History Retrieved:2017-3-2.
- The earliest online games, such as Doom, required players to exchange their personal IP addresses. With Quake these evolved into more permanent dedicated server addresses and an address book was added to the game's menu to store them, but finding the IPs in the first place remained a very involved process.
Players stepped in by listing servers on their clan websites. [1] In 1996 this process became automated with the first server browsers: one integrated into Diablo via Battle.net, the other a desktop application for Quake players called QSpy (which became GameSpy Arcade). In both cases a "master server" stored and transmitted a list of IPs; Diablo also featured a contacts list. Server browsers made online gaming easy for the first time and its popularity grew rapidly as a result.
Matchmaking saw its next major evolution with the release of Halo 2 in 2004. The clan culture needed to support dedicated servers had not made the leap to consoles, and expecting players to self-host had proved limiting. Halo 2 resolved the issue by automating the self-hosting process with the twin concepts of playlists and parties, a system which proved so successful that it quickly became the second industry standard for matchmaking.
Today playlists are more common in console games, while server browsers are more common in PC games.
- The earliest online games, such as Doom, required players to exchange their personal IP addresses. With Quake these evolved into more permanent dedicated server addresses and an address book was added to the game's menu to store them, but finding the IPs in the first place remained a very involved process.
2017b
- (Chen et al., 2017) ⇒ Zhengxing Chen, Su Xue, John Kolen, Navid Aghdaie, Kazi A. Zaman, Yizhou Sun, and Magy Seif El-Nasr. (2017). “EOMM: An Engagement Optimized Matchmaking Framework.” In: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web. ISBN:978-1-4503-4913-0 doi:10.1145/3038912.3052559
- QUOTE: ... Matchmaking connects multiple players to participate in online player-versus-player games. Current matchmaking systems depend on a single core strategy: create fair games at all times. These systems pair similarly skilled players on the assumption that a fair game is best player experience. We will demonstrate, however, that this intuitive assumption sometimes fails and that matchmaking based on fairness is not optimal for engagement. ...