TF2 followup, and Xbox Live observations

[prog]

I was amused to find that 50 percent of all the people I have played with in Xbox Live have awarded me an "Avoid" flag, meaning that they've asked Live's matchmaker to make it less likely to encounter me in the future. I assume that they are all past teammates from my TF2 sessions, which I played without a headset on - thus ignoring anything that they had to say to me - and invariably appeared at the bottom of every end-game scoreboard. Heh heh.

As one who has designed a system like this in the past, I found it interesting that the Avoid flag comes in two flavors, established by answering a three-part quiz as you assign the flag to a player. If you give it to them because they're too good, or too crappy, or just plain clueless about the game (which is a separate answer from 'too crappy'), then the matcher will take it into account from then on, but the target player isn't otherwise affected. If, on the other hand, you Avoid them because they're a disruptive player in some way - a jerk, a quitter, a spoilsport or just irritating - then you will also negatively affect their public reputation. Furthermore, that player will be informed of their perceived transgression. (In my case, it was none of these, so people just thought I sucked / was clueless. Which I can't disagree with, I suppose.)

There seems to be a mistake here, in that the system assumes that game skills are communative. IOW, if I consistently crush you at chess (yes, there's a chess game somewhere in Live Arcade), I don't think either of us would assume that I'd therefore wipe the floor with you at Halo 3 as well. But the system seems to treat it as just so. Now, I may be assuming too much here; the system knows what game the two of you played together last, so perhaps it affects only its weighting regarding that one game. But if it does, it doesn't say so.

I know about the different types of Avoid-flag because I played a rollicking game of Aegis Wing on Live the other day, whose sole downer was a little boy who got a bit hyper as the four of us approached the last level, and started chattering non-stop, eventually breaking into a sort of sing-song screeching. (He stopped when the game's host threatened to kick him off.) After the game, when I saw that there was an Avoid-reason category labeled "Inappropriate use of voice, such as shouting, singing or inane chatter", I laughed.

The opposite of Avoid is Prefer, and there's no refinement for that; if you Prefer a player, the matchmaker will try to pair you up with them more often, and their public rep improves.

Comments

[cnoocy]

So if I play chess with a random stranger, and discover that both of us like to sing selections from the musical Chess while we play, our public reputation improves in general when we indicate Prefer for each other?

You're making me wish I had a 360.

[prog.livejournal.com]

That's my understanding, yes.

(My model of 360, with the 20GB hard drive, just had a $50 price cut, doo dee doo...)

[prog.livejournal.com]

That said, I'd assume (without even looking at it) that Live Chess (whatever it's actually called) suffers from the same nobody-is-playing-RIGHT-NOW-and-therefore-you'll-never-find-a-random-stranger-to-play-with problems that all the 360's long-tail games have.

Though, you know, some of us are fixing to patch that. mu hu ha ha, etc.

[mogaribue.livejournal.com]

In the PC world, we just have Steam friends. You friend people you like to play with (and who often frequent the same servers you do, so probably from similar geographic regions). You are then alerted when they are playing, and can jump into their game (assuming it's multi-player) whenever.

Sadly, no 'enemies' setting. hah

[prog.livejournal.com]

It's quite clear to me (especially from ahkond's comments in my last TF2 post) that PC is not just the native platform for games like TF2, but the superior one. They did what they could with the console port, and it's very good (and one-player shooters, like HL2 and Portal, play perfectly fine)... but the real love is clearly on PC.

Just the notion of self-selecting your game-friends by server makes it a better experience.

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

This post had too much Xbox content and not enough TF2 content!!1!

AVOID AVOID

Would not recommend

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