FreeGameDev

in multiplayer online games you have random partners, so how about: an
'algorithm'? for matching up people based on skill level?

Gauge by : matches; wins; age; familiarity with interface {speed or whatever)

There is not a project page I know of.
I have not done any work on it so far
I am not a programer, and believe it is worth a try
Development is not underway to my knowledge, good luck

Assuming the game is based on 1v1 matches where you can win or lose:



The +25 is to avoid "/0" and to make a beginner's loss not count too much.

Also instead of giving wins = win + 1 each time a player wins, you can make it depend on the difference in player ratings:



Age plays no role (and can be lied about) and it might be hard to interpret player actions and time automatically.

Then you get rating whores who only play easy games to increase their rating.

What you want is a rating system that rewards high skilled players meeting high skilled players, and does not make it a big risk for a highly rated player to play a lesser rated player, yet at the same time discourages (or does not reward) picking on lowly rated players.

The ELO system, designed for chess, is pretty common for games. It works reasonably well, but does have some issues.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/ELO_rating

charlie {l Wrote}:Then you get rating whores who only play easy games to increase their rating.

What you want is a rating system that rewards high skilled players meeting high skilled players, and does not make it a big risk for a highly rated player to play a lesser rated player, yet at the same time discourages (or does not reward) picking on lowly rated players.

I have seen some shocking examples of rating systems that either allow stat whoring, or just plain don't work.

Dawn of War for example gets stat whored because the win/loss ratio for every player is displayed and players can pick their matches

Tekken 6 just plain doesnt work, my tenth match online was against a person with > 10k wins and > 80% ratio (my ratio was < 50%)- but players cant see this info until they are committed to the match.

I think a good system should be automated matchmaking based on games played threshholds and win/loss ratios - but I am not a good enough mathamatician to come up with the formulas.

Bodsda

Most games simply don't need a matching system - many games have worked well without it way before consoles came into the picture as a serious online service that demanded automatic match making and hosting instead of servers.

oln {l Wrote}:The ELO system, designed for chess, is pretty common for games. It works reasonably well, but does have some issues.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/ELO_rating

Seconded!

This (or variants of it) is what is used in chess and a couple of RTS games (AoE III). It's easy to implement and I enjoyed playing within it.