It's not as robust as you'd like, but it's good enough. There is the custom games matchmaking that allows you to filter this and that, but as I said - the game is meant to be an environment for competitive play. Thus the main focus is on ladder automatches, be it 1v1 or up to 4v4, preset teams or autoteams. You click 1v1, pick a race (or set random) and the system rolls an opponent (around your skill level, judging by a zillion factors), a map (from an official pool), makes a game for you and your opponent and there you go.

This is, IMO, SC2's greatest failing.  The system is essentially worse than no filter at all.

In essence, bnet is the host of every game, and it maintains a list of "popular" maps.  If the map you want to play isn't on the list of popular maps, you can't play it (unless you're the one who uploaded it to bnet in the first place, but good luck getting people to join when you're at the bottom of the popularity list)!  You have no way of knowing which games actually contain people in the lobby, and which are empty, which pretty much means only the most popular 10 maps are playable because no one can find each other to play the others.  Absolute disaster.

Can you organize the list of games by map name?  (I'm guessing not.)  Also, does it have the annoying "your latency is too high to join" crap that the original SC had or did they fix that?

No, the only way to find games is to browse a list of the most popular maps, sorted by popularity.  If you're looking for a map that isn't in the top 300, you cannot play it.

 

Haven't encountered anything like that.  Mind you, there's a significant problem with people playing with the minimum specs (or possibly below) and then joining an 8-player game and slowing it to hell.  Really ruins the game for everyone else.  Isn't helped by the fact that most custom maps are just "mash wars" where you send hordes of units at the enemy and watch them frag each other en-masse.

Wow, that online "matching" seems quite bad.... glad I'm not buying into the fad....

 

I guess I should get online more to help out the SoaSe club

The latency is usually related to ping. How far you are from the server or a bad internet connection is the cause. I used to set my servers for auto-kick anyone over 500 ping where a person with 300 ping can lag a game but 500 was unplayable. I apologize to all the Australians I had to kick.

Contrary to popular opinion, ping is not the best indicator of lag.  Someone with 100 ping can lag up the game, and someone with 400 might be perfectly fine.  You basically never know for sure until the game actually starts and you see the performance you get from each player.

Yes someone with the crap comp and great ping will lag a game as they will not process fast enough to keep up but I dont care if you have the best computer on earth, 400 ping will lag as it take 400 milisecs to send 1 byte back and forth. This will be multiplied by more people with there ping

Yes, it takes 400 ms to send one byte back and forth.  It may also take 400 ms to send 1000 bytes back and forth.  If the program is well-written, you won't even feel 400 ms.  Now, for a twitch reflex shooter that might be another story, but for a RTS that's no big deal at all.

My understanding is that much of it was related to ports and port-forwarding.  If your ports or a host's ports weren't forwarded properly then you'd see all red bars and high latency.  Has SC2 fixed those types of hosting problems similar to how Alloy (mostly) fixed the problem with Sins?

Oh, I see.

Basically it's like alloy, in that BNET is the host so no one needs port forwarding.

Well, that's a bit of a grief overdose. How the hell are supposed to get people to play your map if they've never seen it or heard about it and there are a few hundred custom maps already? How often do you pick a random custom map from somewhere in the internet and expect someone else to be willing to play it right now, waiting for you? In Sins you go on to ICO and see a dozen games with one being on a custom map and you think "hey, I might just play that". 
Why can't that be done on BNet2? Maybe because there are usually way above 15000 games in Europe region in peak hours. Do you realize how much bandwidth and resources it would take on the server side to collect data on every game being closed and opened in real time and send these to dozens of thousands of people, refreshed every few seconds? Games in SC2 usually take 15-30 minutes. Assuming 30 minutes, that is 8 games being closed and created every friggin second.

What Blizzard did about the game finder is a necessary evil these days. I know everyone would like to be able to have access to exact data about every one of the 15000 games, to be able to filter out by whatever they want and then pick out from a list and get info about who's waiting in the game. But it is technically not possible. Or maybe you would prefer the old SC1-Diablo2 join game screen, where the server randomly chose 20 games to show you and refreshed the list after a few seconds. Good luck finding a game on the custom map you want among 15000 other games.

I agree, you should be able to list maps by name or have a little more accurate numbers regarding how many available games there on a map (the popularity rating is in fact the amount of games played on that map in the past hour). Maybe they will add that later - SC2 is finished (at least wings of liberty are), but BNet2 is work in progress and a lot of stuff is already announced to find its way in there.

As for ping and stuff, it was sometimes bad during beta but I never had any issue after the launch.

Sorry man, but Blizzard's "solution" is much worse than the local-hosting that's been standard for ages.  They tried to reinvent the wheel on a very dubious premise and now we have a square wheel.  They could have done nothing and kept things stock standard and no one would be complaining.  Blizzard chose to pursue this obviously flawed system, so no they don't get this defense at all when there's a perfectly practical and well-established procedure that they completely eschewed.

The thing you fail to notice is that whenever a game is local-hosted , it opens up doors for hacks and closes doors for detecting them. Niche games like Sins may not see too much hacking online, but Blizzard is getting spammed 24/7 about hackers. Having everything stored, resolved and recorded server-side makes it far easier for them to track down hackers.

You must've never met a guy who enters the game and instantly has 999999 of any resource he wants with no way for you to prove it. I don't believe there is so much traffic in Sins for anyone to develop hacks, but SC2 is the prime target. If competitive play, Blizzard's no.1 goal with SC2, is to stay in this game, hacking must be dealt with swiftly. SC drowned in hackers, Diablo2 drowned with hackers. Red alert 2+, COH... all the games I've seen saw hackers aplenty.

If the service is convenient, it is good. If the game is unplayable because people hack and can't be dealt with - the game is going to die. Blizzard added 1 to 1 and made a decision.

Who cares in custom games?  I'd gladly deal with the occasional griefer or hacker on my own if it means I can play what I want, when I want.  I don't need or want big brother watching over me.  Griefing is only a problem in competitive situations where people a need to win at any cost, and Blizzard handles the competitive stuff very well.  They had a great system in WC3 and they've kept it more or less the same in SC2.  My only real complaint there is that Blizzard doesn't rotate their maps.

Modern games detect and desync that kind of hack.  Besides, in a custom game people just quit when it's completely obvious that someone's cheating.  It's unranked, and a day from now you won't even remember. 

This kind of griefing is incredibly uncommon in Warcraft III, so frankly I don't see any merit in your claim here.

I can't play what I want; I can't find anyone to play with unless I'm playing the top 10 most popular maps; It's virtually impossible to host my own home-made maps.  Far from convenient, the system just doesn't work period.

 

 

Nerull does raise an interesting point--how the hell are you supposed to deal with 15,000 available games at one time?  That problem has never occurred to me since the only other non-Sins games I've really played are arena-style FPS where there might have only been 300 populated serves max at a time (for a given game type.)  By the time anyone finishes scrolling through 15,000 games they'd be filled.  Maybe it could have a map search function where you could type in the (partial) name of a map and then it could look for games hosting it.

Not 15000 games in lobby.  That'd be kinda crazy.  No, that's 15000 games total, including the ones that have already launched and are not recruiting.  I know that when Warcraft III settled down after release, there were approximately 15-20 games visible at any given time.  There's a bit of an equalizing effect.  The more people are online, the faster games fill up.  This means that the number of visible games at any given time isn't that great.

 

I simply don't buy "the local-hosting system doesn't work" garbage.  The reason is simple: it DOES work just fine in Warcraft III.  I can tell you that with SC2's system, if I go to page 2 of the popularity list, it's absolutely dead.  I'm lucky to find a lobby with one person, forget about getting enough to actually start the game.

Not sure I understand the rigmarole about custom maps, custom games, etc.  Everybody I know just plays ranked games.  The system will find opponents for you, it will select a map, and then you play.  At the end, you move up the ladder, or down it.

You are allowed to contest a couple maps (select a few maps you don't like).  I don't do this because I'd rather get exposure to all the maps, even if there's a few I don't like.  But the option is there.

The system seems to work for me just fine.  You are also allowed to use this system to play with your buddies, btw.

Still haven't seen 1% of the vitriol I was accustomed to seeing here.  The other day I cannon rushed someone and got called a "faggot" right before the dude quit.  I guess that's the worst I've seen, including months in beta.

I'm also pleased to say that I really don't see single unit spam.  Oh, there might be a particular player here or there who spams one thing or another - sure.  But the entire community doesn't single-unit spam, much less single-unit spam the same exact units.  It was a given throughout most of Sins life that everyone spammed lrm.  That was simply the way of things.  There's been a few times where lrm spam took a back seat to something else - carrier cruiser spam for instance.  But there was always major spam with this game, and I guess there still is.  Sins was probably the biggest spamfest I've ever encountered.  But I see tons of different units used on a daily basis with SC2.  Play against one Terran player, he goes mass marines, marauders, a few medivacs.  Play another and he pumps siege tanks, hellions, and thors.  Play another and he goes mass banshee or mass viking.  Same story with protoss and zerg - I see a wide range of units being used.

When you clicked a couple of time on Artanis in SC1, he said "This is not just Warcraft in space!".

Face it, how many people play WC3 and how many play SC2. Just dig out the sales numbers and you will see. Where in WC3 you have 20 games, in SC2 you'd have 200 or more waiting for players, each filling up in split second.

What you're saying is pretty much like
"I don't know why cargo trucks have 18 wheels. They should have two. You think two wheels are too few? Bullsh!t, my motorbike has two and it works just fine!"

Another extremely biased and unserious statement of yours is:

Now put your bottom in the seat of a game developer. You receive a complaint about hackers from players who want to play your game without people hacking.
Do you seriously think, do you really believe, that it is by any means acceptable for you as the developer to reply to those emails with "Just quit the game, you'll get over it" ??

The automated matching system works just fine.  As I already said, I have no problems with it, other than in Warcraft III Blizzard didn't rotate their maps often enough (which is to say, they did it twice in WC3's ten year run).  If they rotate maps more often in SC2, then I'll have no qualms at all with the system.

I'm speaking specifically about the custom system.



Completely irrelevant; whether you consider these two the same series or not (I do) the technical aspect of setting up a 2-10 player multiplayer game is completely unchanged.

WC3 was very popular, and at its peak had similar traffic to SC2.  It is completely analogous.  Far more analogous than any of the comparisons to SC1 you're making.



SC2 is brand new, WC3 is ten years old.  Of course they're going to have different traffic.  Fact is, the WC3 custom system worked best when its traffic was high near the start of its lifetime.  I could create a game and it would fill up in seconds, and we'd start.  Yes, you sometimes ran into issues where the lobby would fill before you could join, but then you just joined another lobby, it wasn't a big deal.

In SC2, if the map you're playing isn't on the top 10 popularity list, it just will not fill.



Maybe if it were more prevelant that'd be a point, but it isn't.  I have never seen the kind of blatant hack you describe in WC3, ever.  Modern games will desync and cause the hacker to drop, so honestly I don't think this is a problem anymore.

That was a joke.

Yes, very interesting. So, which one is it?

And no, WC3 was NOT that popular and no, it did NOT have the same traffic.
WC3 sold 1 million copies within a month while SC2 sold 1.5 million within 48 hours.

With SC2, games would be filling up before you managed to click on them all the time. That system would work good ONLY for the MOST UNPOPULAR maps.

Well, during beta I've seen a number of hackers, mostly maphackers. Without server-side logging it is nigh impossible to track them. If you've never seen a hacker, you're a happy person - that does not mean hacking doesn't exist. You don't think it's a problem, but it is a problem.

Oh, by the way - haven't you heard of the WC3 mess where bad people would make popular map files corrupt with viruses that infected the system when you downloaded the map (it was called just like a new version of your favorite custom map). Having to fix that crap delayed Diablo 2 patch 13 by two months or so. Yet another reason to have things server-sided.

A piece of news regarding this concern:

Here is what I found in the in-game news when I launched SC2:

In my opinion, Blizzard scored.
Yet again.

 

------------------------

PS. And an update on our "did WC3 have similiar traffic to SC2" discussion.
Current stats are:
52.300 games worldwide.
20.122 games in my (Europe) region.

It's nice to see a developer want to support custom content and even showcase it.

 

ah good old sins glad its still alive,but I switched to sc 2 permamently as its more stabile,has shorter matches and x1000 bigger online

to all of you who say micro in sc2 doesnt matter apparently didnt get to high leagues.....

example: 1 pheonix is able to kill 6 mutalisks solo .......

and another note: sc2 pro players(koreans,god damn them) train in sc 14 hours a day,live in baracks in small groups are playing on keyboard like on piano just to not lose apm rythm (actions per minute)

I personally hate all that stuff and will never get to high league,simple kiting is a maximum I can show in fights but I still love sc2 for its features(and sit in platinum league)

 

heres something shocking - korean pro playing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbpCLqryN-Q&feature=player_embedded

thinking not really important,after playing 14 hours /7 days a week your gameplay so polished that you win games with instincts

 

......................................

for that reason I loved soase - no need to be a mad korean to be at the top(jj is an exception)

 

i really don't like overdone "physical" aspects of rts, namely micromanagement and twitch. imo those belong in the fps genre. to me, cnc3 is a nice balance between actual strategy and "reflexes"