While Blazblue doesn’t have a good automatching system, it has several features that I applaud.
1) Quarter matches for up to 6 players
Quarter matches are already kind of a given, in this day and age for online fighting games but it’s definitely nice that it’s here. The only tricky thing is joining a room before a game starts since once a game is already in play, you can’t join and it basically means you have a 5 second window to join a room.
2) Disconnects listed on player profile
For a while, Street Fighter IV didn’t list disconnects in a player’s record. Thus, when they’re close to losing a match, they simply reset their console to avoid either getting a loss, or simply just to prevent you from getting a win. A later patch put the disconnect % in, but I’m glad that BlazBlue has it in from the start. Listing a player’s disconnects helps to dissuade players from disconnecting, since you don’t have to play people with high disconnect %’s.
3) No “ranking down” upon losing
In Street Fighter IV, if you lost a match against someone at your level or lower, you would lose a relatively signficant amount of points to your ranking. This would in turn contribute to high level players disconnecting if they’re about to lose to lower level ones, or higher level players just not wanting to play lower level ones at all since they practically gain nothing if they win, but lose a lot if they lose. In BlazBlue, you can never go down in ranking, so if you’re a high level player and lose to a level 1, you lose nothing. At the same time, the level 1 player that defeats the high level player gets a lot more points and moves closer to his true level. So in a sense, the ranking in BlazBlue is accurate because it takes into combination skill and experience and should be the way to go for all fighting games.
4) Hidden character selections
I wish this was done more often in online fighting games. In games such as Street Fighter IV, in a ranked match one player will often try to wait until the other player has chose which character to be and then he chooses a character to counter that player. In a sense, the player that picks second always has the advantage, and I always felt it was unfair. Well, in BlazBlue, when you choose a character to play for online, it won’t show you who the opponent has picked until after you’ve both selected – then it displays the matchup. Genius and fair.
Of course, BlazBlue’s online isn’t perfect – I’m not a fan of awarding ranked points during player matches or the lack of real matchmaking (you have to try to join rooms), but it makes several strides forward in how online fighting games should be. And maybe this is specific to me, but when you want to start playing as a new character, you’re stuck with your “high ranking’, so it’s hard to find decent matches. Lower level players think my level is too high, so they just kick me from rooms even though I’m trying a new character, and higher level players try fighting my new character once before kicking me thinking I suck. I wish I could just reset my rank back to 1 given I can’t rank down, but I guess I still prefer the ranking system here than in Street Fighter IV.
I think quarter matches are nice, but having a ranked score is meaningless when you can pick and choose your opponents. Warcraft 3 had automatic matchmaking, and that was back in 2002!
Btw, Sf4 introduced blind select with the championship edition update. It’s really stupid how Japanese developers are terrible with online matchmaking.
agreed on the picking and choosing opponents bit. it’s so stupid that someone can just boot you from the room if they don’t want to fight you, but online is still something very new for the Japanese. hopefully tekken 6 will work out well.
i didn’t know that SF4 has blind select now too though. that really makes sf4′s online look a lot more comparable to BlazBlue now with both having blind select and disconnect records. those are probably perhaps the most important features when i think about it to prevent abuse (outside of picking your opponent).
in fact, now i can’t even decide which fighting game’s online is better:
- blazblue has quarter matches while sf4 doesn’t so blazblue gets a point there.
- sf4 has automatic matchmaking while you’re even in arcade mode (blazblue you still have to look for a room to join even in ranked) so sf4 gets a point.
and then it just comes down to how both sf4 and blazblue handle their ranking system. sf4 allows for ranking up and down, while blazblue you can only rank up without ever resetting your rank. now with the disconnect % in for sf4, i think that gives a slight edge to sf4 online overall since a player’s rank is now more meaningful.
I disagree with your #3 point re: ranking system. I think losing “points” is critical to the ranking system in fighting games and it’s because of this:
Points based on time spent at something isn’t indicative of skill level.
Without ranking down, you may see someone with 14k points, and you don’t if the guy is just god-tier or he just put in 1000 hours into beating scrubs all day. I feel this really makes the different between fighting games and MMOs that reward grinding all day. I play both and I see the difference between the two genres and I, personally, enjoy the fighting game mindset a lot better.
It boils down to (I believe you had an article on this in the past [or link to an article]) whether someone values hardwork/time invested vs. talent/skill building in games.
I just re-read point #3 – so I see your point with the disconnecting; so i guess disregard my previous post LOL.
actually Jason, i think your post had some merit, but i wanted to clarify that with BlazBlue, you’re not gaining points and rank from beating scrubs all day. it’s the same system as in sf4 online: you get a very insignificant amount of points for beating scrubs. spending 1000 hours beating level 1s in both sf4 and blazblue will get you nowhere. you can only hope to progress if you beat someone closer to your level, or higher.
i guess what i’m trying to determine now (and your input is certainly helping) is whether allowing for a ranking down versus not being able to rank down is the better system assuming everything else is fair. the progress forward is the same: you can only get a lot of ranking points for beating someone at your level or higher, but in sf4, you can rank all the way down to 1 if you begin to suck or everyone around you gets better, and in blazblue, if you hit any level, you can never go below that.
thinking in the long run, perhaps the ranking down keeps things a bit more standardized – assuming a rank level of 100 in sf4 is the best, that’s not going to change much from when the game is released to a year later since the ceiling doesn’t keep raising. yet in blazblue’s “no ranking down” approach, a level 100 may be awesome when the game first launches, but due to “inflation” after a year, rank level of 500 is really where the top level players are at. add on another year and now they’re in the rank level of 1000. but if you’re starting at level 1 then, you’ll probably be gaining tons of rank points for beating current low level players who are at level 100 so you’ll make your way up quickly. which method provides more useful information and is a more accurate representation of skill level? is “inflation” good for ranking?
well, like most modern matchmaking systems, you could simply record a loss for a disconnect. i think to determine a valid skill base, it seems intuitive that you would need the ability to lose points to have a valid system, otherwise, as jason said, you would end up with the ability to grind your way up the ladder.
the skill base is all relative though. in the absolute sense, it means very little to have a rank of “100″ if you don’t know what the average skill level is. so if you make grinding on scrubs impractical, and you reward points with inflation taken into account, the system would seem to work in the same way.
also, most casual people are very adverse to “ranking down”. i think wow’s leniency on deaths reflects this preference. if the game is more accommodating to the casual gamer, more people will play, it’ll be more popular, and probably make more money, which in the end, is what the bottom line is all about.
btw in the sf4 championship edition update you can’t “rank down” either. you earn points like xp, and you can still lose points, but you never lose your highest attained ranking.