Friends? What friends?

 I'm assuming you WILL get these with friend battles.

"Your opponent will not know your name or any information about you, and neither of you can send short messages. There will also be no battle records kept for this mode, so whether you win or lose, it doesn’t matter. Just sit back and play."


NOOO!!!!!!! *$&*$*&$*$&*$&*$&$*$&*$*&$

God damnit I for one want to know whos ass im kicking at all times.

Some players are beginners and may I want to play other beginners online. Some players are mediocre players and may want to play other mediocre players. It's not all about wanting to fight the best players online. I don't think it would be fun playing someone much worst or better than you. It would be convienent (instead of going to some website) to have matchups similiar to many online game websites like Pogo.com where I can choose a room based on skill level and see potential opponents' ranking and have the option to sprawl if he/she inclines.

I remember I used to go to Pogo.com to play checkers and improving my rating pushed me to be a better player. Sometimes I would play Grandmasters to learn from them, sometimes I would play weaker players to experiment. After several months I reached Grandmaster. I am pretty proud of that achievement. I think this is more rewarding to most people than achievement points. I also think people would be playing the game even more using such a match making concept. And isn't that would any developer want?

And geez, how is competing to have a high rating such a bad thing? It's not all about ego, but so what if it is? 

Yeah, I can understand how some people would be disappointed that there's no stat tracking.

On the other hand, having the AI step in when a player disconnects is a pretty cool idea.

I dislike that a little bit, but don't care at the same time. I think it's cool when you get stats to record how you do, but after a certain amount of time it just becomes a thing of how long you've been playing. Not to mention what happens if you stop playing for a while.

Something that I'm a fan of (mainly in some Counter-Strike servers with their own stats) is when stats are reset after a set amount of time (like every month in my CS example). That way I think it's more based on skill rather than a penis waving of how long you've been playing (in total).

Let me try and illustrate my idea. Have two separate stat data lists (for the sake of it, I'll call them hard and soft stats/data). Say the overall data is the hard stats and the data that is reset is the soft stats. My idea is that the soft stats are recorded and added to the hard stats when it's time for the data to be reset. This way, you'll still have your total stats to compare with everybody else like is done with most games, but also how well you did within the term that the soft stats run.

In a way, I think it's kind of like the ladder terms in Diablo 2. When a ladder starts, everybody has to start from scratch and build up from there and they can still go and play their already established characters if they want. Then when the ladder term is over, the characters and items are converted to normal and they can be used with the normal characters and items that they have already found.

If those feauters dont include they can skip online from my part. Can you challenge your friends online?

guys, be happy that this game even has online

I don't care. I played the Strikers online for 3 weeks, then played with friends for 3 months.