Going alongside the recent newsletter, I figured I might as well as write a more in depth progress report here.
So as you can see here, people will have their party shown on a tab in the client and essentially all the functionality of x'ing up as well as faction selection will transition to the client itself. People that are in charge of a party will be able to invite individuals into the group via the client and, assuming those people accept the invite, they will also see a similar screen. A problem that I pointed out to Geo after I saw this screen was that it doesnt really seem like there is any actual chat feature within the party system itself. Now obviously the client has aeolus, pms, and just the ability to create various IRC channels, but we will probably need to think of how we want to approach communication on this party screen.
You can also see that new players will likely immediately click on the play tab and will then be taken right to the matchmaker. Ideally we will want to combine the ladder as a 1v1 matchmaker itself so that there will be no confusion between the two, but it will likely stay separated in the first release to minimize any accidental destruction of the functionality of ladder. Anyway, those new players would then ideally be capable of quickly and consistently getting into a game where there will be no problems with lobby politics.
Feature-wise, Dog essentially covered what you guys need to know. Askaholic is currently working on the complexities of the queue code itself and trying to make it so that the server is capable of putting 2 random dudes into a game on the same team while also juggling parties themselves. Likewise, there's the investigative aspect of trying to understand how to precisely convince the server to spawn people in as players on the same side. Initially I figured that this was already solved in ladder, but apparently in the code for ladder all that happens is that the server is given players to put into a game and then the server just sets everyone in the game as an enemy. There is no actual "teams" as the server does not care who is who and where they are. Ideally, GW code can simply be pasted over as a lot of this problem has been work Brutus has been working on solving.
Clientside work is the biggest roadblock currently due to a variety of factors related to dev manpower for java and the complexity of the java client. Geo is trying his best to create a functional ui that is easy to comprehend, but if anyone has any ui experience and wishes to help him in some fashion, please do get in contact with him. Personally, I don't see anything really unclear about the way the party system seems to work now and so I don't have much of a problem with the look. But then again, I'm aesthetically incapable and can't tell the difference between shit and art.
Another thing we're working on is the creation of multiple pools for a variety of rating ranges. I don't really have anything ironed out for it, but suffice to say it would likely be a system of 3 pools with varying map quantities and map selection processes. For example, the pool for the lowest rated players would tend to gravitate to the classic 10x10 maps such as palms, twins, regor as well as 5x5s. These maps are pretty basic to get into and should stop people from being dumped into a game on Ditch or Seton's and having such a negative experience they want to stop playing the matchmaker/ladder. Likewise, their pool would consist of fewer maps.
As you increased in rating, you would slowly raise your probability of getting maps from the next pool. So for example, let's say a 500 or below rated player has a 100% chance of the bronze pool. A 600 rated player could have 80% and 20% chance for the silver pool. It could go on until say 1000 where you have 100% chance of getting the silver pool. Then, at 1400 you start the same process but with the gold pool and so on and so forth. I would imagine for matchups, you would just utilize the average probability between the two players and determine what map pool to use from that. After the map pool is chosen, you then just pick some random map from it similar to how ladder operates now.
I'm probably leaving stuff out because I'm tired, so if you have anything you want to know about feel free to ask.
