If there's one single thing that I believe would help grow the qw community cross server automatic matchmaking is it. For me, and I'm sure a lot of other people, it's just too much trouble to hang around irc/servers to get a game going. If I could just start up my qw-client and automatically get match for a game I would play a lot more.

I know it would take a lot of effort to get it working, and I'm sure some players think it's lame, but I really think it would make the community much bigger.

What do you think?

Why exactly? Typically I launch ezQuake and check whether there are any 1/2 servers (1 player on the server, with max players set to 2). If not then I pick some good server, select a map and set /1on1 mode. Then I minimize ezQuake and do something else. If somebody wants to play me, ezQuake window will flash in the task bar, so I will alt-tab back and go ready.
Another thing is that it takes quite some time to find an opponent this way.

From time to time I am also thinking about hypothetical match making system, but how would it improve the scenario I described above?
The issues any "new" system would have to deal with is, how to make all players use it? The scenario I described above simply works and everybody knows it.

Not all players know about that, or check the same servers. Nor do all players have the patience to wait like that. I don't, and I can't because I have so little time to play that when I do I just want to get going right away.

What I'm thinking is that it should be either a feature of the client or of the server, then everybody using the client or a server with matchmaking would be added automatically. There's a reason 99% of modern games use matchmaking.

Imo the problem atm is that one doesnt want to hang alone in a server waiting for a random opponent, who's most likely different div than what you're. I can see lots of ppl haning spectating some game and if you ask them they might wanna play. If I could mark my self as "I want to play" and some popup would come up when there's another individual with same goals it would be much much better scenario.

Actually I agree a bit with ZkilfinG... People like us who are used to the scene and know by heart how to find a game - it's easy for us. We have no problem idling on a server until someone shows up, or talk to people on irc/teamspeak and ask for a game.

But imagine a person who sees the teamquad documentary, finds nquake.com and downloads quake. Installs the game and then what? He has no idea what to do, how to get a game, basically nothing. Let's not forget that not everybody uses IRC either. Most of my friends IRL don't even know what IRC is.

Unfortunately I think the best system there is is a laddersystem like StarCraft 2 uses, but how on earth would we get that to quakeworld? ^.^ But it would be the best system, for sure.
To be able to just open the game, press "multiplayer", press "1on1", "2on2", "4on4" or "FFA" and the system would find you a game as soon as it could, against people with similiar skillevel.

But I guess that's a dreamworld.

Yours,
Andeh

"I just want to get going right away" ... you should also realize that the QW scene is not millions of players eager to play you right here and right now. Finding an opponent quickly cannot be magically solved by some ultracool program. You will always have to wait and "hang" somewhere for a while, no matter if it's on the QW server itself, or in some app where you "mark" yourself as willing to play.

Also, many other games have plain server browser where you only get the list of available servers and you simply join a non-empty one or an empty one and wait. You do not have to be super genius to figure this out. Getting into IRC is another thing, but joining a QW server isn't really a problem if you already have a client that gives you the list of all the servers.

Of course. What I'm hoping is that an automatic matchmaking would make it easier for new players, thus growing the community, thus making for faster matchmaking :-)

There would have to be some kind of central server (it could of course still be distributed between several servers for redundancy). I guess it could then be either a client feature, server feature, or a separate "app" like JohnNy_cz meantioned. I'd prefer if it was integrated into the client or server though, reducing the need to download and launch a separate application.

I was also thinking about ranking, and I don't think that's too hard to implement (aren't there webpages with automatic QW ranking already?). However due to the limited size of the community I think you would get to play people of different skills anyway. Perhaps it could be a setting though, "Max higher/lower ELO rank for opponent". Then players can chose which is most important. A quick game, or an even game.