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IllegalPaladin on 05 November 2009
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vlad321 said:
JaggedSac said:
vlad321 said:
JaggedSac said:
IllegalPaladin said:
JaggedSac said:

Just so people know, Valve implements their L4D "matchmaking"(I use the term loosely) using dedicated servers.

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3169669

"After spending a day at Valve's offices playing Left 4 Dead for the premier episode of the next season of the 1UP Show, the 1UP crew came away with a truckload of new info on the Xbox 360 version of the game. Without a doubt the biggest news is that Valve will be running dedicated servers on Microsoft's Live online service. And while they didn't indicate how many exactly they'd have going, they did imply that they'd have everyone covered, as in when you played online, you'd be on a dedicated server, period. That alone should go a long way toward making the game a great online experience, but they haven't stopped there. Splitscreen play will also allow you and a friend to play together on Live from one 360, and you'll be able to slice the screen whichever way you like -- horizontally or vertically."

 

This is in response to the person above griping about L4D not having dedicated servers.

Your point? I was playing the PC version.

Regardless, my general issue in my post was that I'm not a fan of having little control over what matches I'm placed into when they've generally ended up being very high ping games (200-300+). I've been placed into what looks like dedicated servers (assuming that's why there's a MOTD) and everybody there has had a high ping or in games where one guy has a ping of 50 and the rest have 400-700 ping. Hell, I've even had a high ping as a lobby host...

Going to a different game such as Team Fortress 2 for example, I'll do a server refresh and sort by the lowest ping servers (and other filters such as map and such) and I'll usually end up in servers where my ping is under 75-80 and I'm usually joining full 24 or 32 player servers.

That would be a problem with their matchmaking algorithms, not matchmaking in general.  In fact that would be quite easy to rectify.  Latency would be the highest priority in a good matchmaking system.  Perhaps Valve did not do this.

And what if I feel like sacrificing some latency for some other features, such as mods? How would matchmaking handle that then?

Mods would need to be registered with the master server that handles the matchmaking.  Then you can select whichever ones you want to be used when filtering for matchmaking.  The developer could have this automated where people can submit their mods and it shows up, or they could have some quality control over it and only add mods that meet quality standards.  Quite simple if you ask me.  They already do this with playlists.  They could just open up playlist submission to consumers.

So I have a selection for the mods, ping, people who play, maps, game type.... sounds an awful lot like a good ol' server browser to me except they spent a hell of a lot more time setting this up.

Seems like a lot of effort just to replace what already worked well.