Quick-what? It’s quickmatch!

Quickmatch is a new way of being matched into multi-player WarLight games with your fellow players. The goal is to quickly and easily get you into a fun game of WarLight that you will enjoy.

Quickmatch will officially launch along with the new Unity client, but a preview is available today. Read below for more details.

How does it work?

When you click the “Give me a real-time game” button, quickmatch will find equally skilled opponents for you and start the game. Unlike the real-time ladder, which can take up to five minutes to find an opponent, quickmatch is designed to be instantaneous.

Although you can think of quickmatch as a better real-time ladder, it’s much more than that. For one thing, it supports multi-day games, too! Further, it won’t be required to be unlocked and will be usable by players of all skill and experience levels. In fact, one of its goals is to make it easy for new WarLight players to start playing multi-player, without having to hunt through a list of confusing open games.

Quickmatch will also replace the need for auto games, both the normal and coin ones. When joining a quickmatch game, you can specify how many coins you’re willing to wager, and the quickmatch system will find a coin opponent for you. Coins will never be required to play quickmatch, but it’s an option for those who do use coins.

Ratings

When you complete a game, like a ladder, you’re rated based on your performance. However, the ratings are much more in-depth. Instead of just having a single rating like the ladders, you’ll get a rating per template, a rating for all real-time games, a rating for all multi-day games, a rating for all 1v1 games, a rating for all team games, a rating for all FFA games, and even a rating for the country you play from!

That’s a lot of ratings! But you don’t need to worry about any of that. You just play games you enjoy, and the quickmatch system will produce all sorts of interesting data for nerds showing what types of games you excel in. Quickmatch uses this data to match you up against equally skilled players.

What settings does it use?

That’s the best part!

At any time, you can open up your quickmatch settings and see a list of all the templates, with a check-box next to each. You can check the templates you like and uncheck the templates you don’t like, as you’ll only ever get games on the templates you check.

If you only like one template, then check just that one and you’re guaranteed to get a game on it. You’re always in full control of what templates you play.

But really, what settings does it use?

No, wait, THIS is the best part!

The templates will be decided on by the community by voting. As you play quickmatch games, you’ll eventually unlock votes you can use to vote on templates. Anyone can also propose new templates to be voted on, and you can move your votes around at will if you change your mind.

The top 30 templates with the most votes will be the templates used by quickmatch. So this list should always reflect the will of the community, and can change dynamically as new templates get invented.

30 templates? Isn’t that a lot?

You may have heard me say before that the reason the real-time ladder is limited to 10 templates is to not overwhelm new players. As quickmatch is designed both for new players and veterans, there needs to be a way to ensure that new players don’t get overwhelmed.

The solution to that problem is simple: When you first join the quickmatch system, you have only one template unlocked. As you win games, you’ll unlock more and more templates, which you can choose to use or not use.

This provides the best of both worlds: we can have lots of templates available for experienced players to choose from, while newbies avoid being overwhelmed and can learn new templates at their own pace.

30 is just the starting number, I suspect that eventually we can raise this even higher.

Want to try it now?

The member-only alpha of the Unity client has a sneak peek of the quickmatch system. Not all features are complete yet, but you can start playing multi-day games through it and start unlocking templates today. Try it out and let me know what your thoughts are!