RTP is based around the idea of 'similar people', by comparing interests, competitiveness, etc. However, the only way to change is to change your 'profile', a non-trivial task, and we all have 'moods'.
For instance, I'm a 'lots of fun, reasonably competitive' profile at the moment, and it'll find me partners based on this. However, it doesn't say what features have suggested a buddy and which do not - for instance, it won't inform you that it suggested Annatar because he's fun-oriented, or that Tim on your friends list was depreciated because his computer sucks.
Further, sometimes you want a casual game. Sometimes you want a hard-fought no-holds-barred thing. This fits within the mechanisms of RTP, but not the way profiles are modified.
I thus suggest that the RTP window needs some buttons to allow you to shift your focus, similar to 'mood' or 'availability' buttons in other IM clients. If I come home and can't find anyone, I want to be able to 'relax network standard'. If I'm not sure who is best from a long list, I want to be able to 'make profile less casual and more competitive'. A few buttons would allow you to further filter the suggestion list without having to edit your profile every single time.
Similarly, I'd like icons to appear on buddies where their profile is exactly the same, or very different. For instance, if Annatar (sorry buddy ) is casual, has good computer, but hates competition, I'd like a blue 'fun' symbol and a red 'competition' symbol to be next to his name, informing me that we have 'fun' in common but are very different in 'competition'. Making lists sortable by these features would allow users to tune results without needing to trawl through each individual profile. It'd also make simply searching for users a bit easier.
While I haven't used RTP yet (no beta invite), the suggestions you make above make a lot of sense.
Having a visual system of colour coded icons to represent the different aspects of a player's profile gets a +1 from me. Would allow me to pick friends to play a game from those suggested, based on my mood and time available to me.
In general I think the whole idea of RTP is great and I'm looking forward to joining in on the fun and seeing how the proggie turns out.
Hmm, these suggestions do make sense. But there are lots of categories and if you hover over the recommended friends (I think, almost nobody is online right now so I can't really check), it tells you the % match. It's not as visually impressive as what you're suggesting, but I think it'd get confusing if people always wanted to compare by the individual categories. A Demigod player might care more about being matched with people with good computers rather than having fun. Maybe someone will think 4 or 5 categories are important, how do you mark that all up with icons?
I do like the mood settings so you can relax the thresholds a bit. You can set "Only match with like players" that will try to find something like 70%+ matches, then you can relax it to 40%+, and then everyone?
Moods! Interesting.
So instead of Profiles we have moods? I would like to hear others chime in on the idea.
Also, the emoticon or color for the "player type" sounds interesting. There are so many combinations however, we might have a few player profiles that are a good fit though. The data will dictate if that is possible or if there are not enough stereo types.
Zargon
I like the suggestion of having moods... and ideally providing a default mood setting the player has configured when logging into RtP.
What about using the emoticons for the match probability? You can break them into several thresholds, again something like 0-40%, 41-70%, 71-100%. You'd have a green smiley face, yellow normal face, and red unhappy face. You could tweak your 'mood' settings to show either green only, green+yellow, or green+yellow+red. Hovering over the emoticon would list which fields matched exactly.
The main issue is as you say, there are lots of combinations and people will think different ones are more important. Someone might care about having fun and will look for the person who matches that. Someone else might just want a lag/stutter-free game and will look for the good PC. If you show the exact matches, it would be sort of the "perfect alignment" and in theory should work pretty well for finding the right matches.
I'm not sure it's just match probably that's relevant, though - for instance, Demigod is a game that is very competitive, so people might prefer competitive matches there, whereas another game they might not be as fussed with regard to that criteria. Demigod is also very latency-sensitive, so people might want to know if someone is a '75% match', but that their connection is much worse - whereas with Sins, this element is nowhere near as critical.
The system already allows you to pick which of your 'profile' attributes are most important - for obvious reasons I've chosen fun, competition and region (lol AU internets etc). However, there are only 10 profile elements total (excluding age), so that's 20 icons required to express 'very close' or 'very distant' on them, and you'd only show the selected relevant ones (ie I'd never see more than three) and arguably 'likes RTS/Action/etc' are more about game choice than playstyle matching.
For instance, my 'fun' rating is at maximum, so someone who is otherwise a solid match but is 'fun 50%' would get the 'much less interested in fun' icon. My computer is 'decent gaming', so someone with a great rig wouuld show 'blue hardware' or someone with a much older computer would show 'red hardware', depending on the game as mentioned above.
Even if they're unwiling to reveal profile settings for other players in this way - which would be fine - being able to click a button that says 'I don't care about competition right now' or 'I less tolerant of connection speeds right now' would allow you to hone-in on the 'closer' matches by the criteria you care about at the time without revealing any such information.
Sure, but what if someone puts all 10?
Excuse me? How is putting everything at 10 relevant to comparing absolute values? Someone with everything at 10 would probably find it very difficult to be matched with anyone. If you're talking about the 'likes genre' sliders, they're basically meaningless unless RTP knows what genre a game is (it doesn't). How much someone likes action games is totally meaningless when matching up a game of Sins, so it can be at 10 all people want. I simply wouldn't bother displaying indications of 'likes genre' unless they're relevant to the game in question (which RTP doesn't know about yet).
+1. Didn't yet get invite to RTP but i like this "moods" idea very much. That would be very useful if it was introduced into RTP.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. There are 11 profile elements total. What if someone wants to be matched by using all of them? You may only care about 3 so you'd see 3 icons, but there's no guarantee that someone won't be trying to figure out all 11.
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