Intelligent Multiplayer Match-Up Systems

I had a nice entry cooked up yesterday dealing with the rapid decline of email use in Korea. The only game related piece is that students find using IM and SMS more like playing a game, while they compare email to completing a chore or work. Not big surprise that email is on the downswing (in a big way in Korea) as I have some friends here in the states that don't use email at all anymore and rely 100% of IM. Anyway, blogger ate my post and it vanished into the ether.

Anyway, what I wanted to blog about today is intelligent match-up systems for multi-player games. Halo 2's system is supposedly working better now, but I haven't played in a while so I can't confirm. Microsoft is reporting that over 28 million hours have been spent on Xbox Live since Halo 2 was released about a month ago. WoW. A lot of my friends are still hooked on Halo 2's multi-player feature, and many lament on the fact that most matches are very competitive. I think this fact alone needs some exploring. Do these match-making systems, that pit you against players of similar skill, encourage more players to participate in multi-player matches? Do these systems help retain players after the initial foray into multi-player games? I'd probably say yes to both, but obviously there's no proof yet.

Games like Counter Strike, Unreal Tournament, and others don't have any intelligent match-up systems. I think if such a system was implemented, a lot of people who get turned off after getting pwned over and over again would actually stick around and play the game longer over time. The recently released Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth uses such a system. I probably would never try any RTS online, b/c I'm horrible at those games. But with a system like this, I'd definitely try it out.

So who's going to take the Halo's Xbox system and port it to FPS PC games? I'd really like to be able to play CS:S with people of my skill level more often, as opposed to getting stuck on a shitty team for 15+ matches and just getting pwned all over the place.