1) "On one hand, you're jumping to conclusions that haven't yet been proven." That's exactly what you do. Remember how you typed "The games with fewer levels of custom matchmaking have longer lifespans, far as online communities." I still wonder where you get that from.
In fact, it feels like it's the opposite. Having boring matchmaking surely kills off a community faster than having plenty of options/specific queues.
2) I know there has to be a time limit, but it should be set to 20 minutes or higher if the player queues up for Stock Mode.
3) I'm not being indignant, I'm just replying. When you type **** like "Dial the rhetoric down a notch.", I'll obviously tell you to stop complaining how I type. Regarding your lie of a comment;
"I wasn't commenting on how you type at all."
"How you type" and "what you're trying to say" are two completely different things. The way you worded that, I assumed you were talking about your typing skills, which I never addressed. Your overall rhetoric, though,
does negatively impact what you're trying to say, whether or not you actually realize it. Hence my rather blunt suggestion to dial it down. I admit that the way I said it was mean-spirited, but that doesn't relieve you of the fault itself. "Your lie of a comment". Classy~
If you need examples of matchmaking hindering or bolstering a community, I'll gladly point you toward the Gears of War series versus Mass Effect 3. Gears of War 2 had multiple playlists sectioned off by game type (Warzone/Execution, Wingman, Guardian/Submission and Annex/King of the Hill) and then further by Map Packs (there were four choices, I believe, plus what came standard in the game). It was sectioned off by so many playlists that the only ones that ever seemed populated were Execution and Guardian. If you wanted to play on DLC maps, tough luck. As a result,
the developers later chose to condense all of these playlists into a fraction of their previous choices, limiting it to simply Ranked and Player varieties, with any DLC only available in Ranked. Then, even as the community got smaller, you could still find a match more easily than when it was a top 5 populated game on XBL.
Same thing happened with Gears 3-- they had so many modes available that eventually everybody stopped playing the least popular ones, and
everybody switched to Team Death Match. I'm an Execution fan, myself, but I stopped even trying to play it because no one was ever in there. My friends, also Execution fans, switched to TDM or stopped playing altogether because they were tired of playing bots. GOW:Judgment was even worse because even fewer played that game to begin with, but there were just as many choices.
Then there's Mass Effect 3. Not nearly as many people play this game's multiplayer as Gears, and yet even two and a half years post-release, I can find a match within seconds. That's because matchmaking gives you four overall options which are based on difficulty: Bronze, Silver, Gold or Platinum. You can further narrow down if you
want, but that's all you have to choose. No DLC playlists, no custom ruleset versus standard ruleset, nothing. I can even find matches quickly on the
Wii U version, and barely 100,000 people have ever even purchased it!
Since I'm thinking more about this now, there's also Resident Evil 5 & 6, both of which sectioned off their modes without any option of combining matchmaking so you could get a larger amount of people. Guess what happened? Everybody played one mode because that's all you can find partners for, then got bored and quit. Mercenaries Reunion never took off because nobody was in the freaking matchmaking, which was sectioned off from regular Mercenaries (despite them being virtually the same thing). But you know why it's so easy to get a Mario Kart match regardless of which version you're playing or how old it is? Because there are, like, two options. Either choice gives you half of the current online population. Again, that's
basic math at work. More choices, less chance that choice is the same choice someone else chose.
Any fighting game out there that I can think of has very basic matchmaking options: Ranked, Player and a couple other modes pretty much specifically for parties of multiple friends. "For Fun" is Player, "For Glory" is Ranked, and a private match itself is made for parties of friends. Adding too many customization options past that setup
will shrink the available community for matchmaking. It's derivative. It's math. It's not complicated, and it's supported by evidence from other popular games.
Oh, and as for the 20min suggestion... do
you want to sit through a 20min. stock match?
