Hello guys.
I’m always looking for opinions from DE players on what convinced them to switch from Voobly to there, even though Voobly is way more stable and now offers the new civs too, through WK DE. Well, one of the reasons is obviously the lag. There’s usually less lag on DE, thanks to the dedicated servers (but there are a lot of disconnects and freezes too). Another reason is that DE has those QoL features, but I’m sure they’ll be added here too at some point, it’s just a matter of time. The last reason is the most interesting one: match making. This actually surprises me, but a lot of people do like to be able to play with a totally random person just by clicking a button. I personally prefer the lobby system by far, but it looks like it’s an unpopular opinion overall. Maybe casual players don’t even bother learning how to host a room or to set it properly. Anyhow, what’s the opinion of the Voobly community (especially the admins) on match making?

I think that an idea could be to add a custom lobby (“Auto match lobby” or something) with fixed rooms; every room would be a different ladder (e.g. RM 1 vs 1) and wouldn’t have a fixed size. The players who’d join a room would get randomly matched with other players in the same room (possibly of similar rating to theirs). Is such a thing possible? Obviously, some things would need to be implemented (for example, an algorithm to create the matches) and it would probably be a little heavy on the Voobly servers, but maybe it’s worth it, if some people would find their gaming experience on Voobly more comfortable like this. I mean, I’d rather keep the lobby system myself, but what if we had both?

Hi, random casual player here,

That would be cool but I think we need (community) the raw code first, since it will require a rework of the networking architecture, (this including different elements from the client to website, to the database) and an additional server with a decent hardware to be able to manage it (due the high simultaneous traffic and on the payload), this obiouvsly require more money to be invested and a huge amount of time of programming work, this mean also to completely rework the voobly client and all the related elements mentioned above, also aoe2 and voobly codes are not released and probably never will, so rationally speaking we can exclude completely the matchmaking option due tons of reasons.

Matchmaking will go against the voobly concept, and with the actual lobby system I don't see how the random matching could be implemented honestly.

See post below.

Yeah, what you said is totally correct. But what I'm talking about is kind of a workaround. I'll try to explain in a better way.

Suppose you wanna find a match. You join the custom lobby "Auto match lobby" and you see lots of rooms (as usual). Those rooms have no host and simply function as follow: the users who join them get matched with each other through an algorithm. Suppose we're talking about a 1 vs 1 match. One of those two people becomes the "host" and, in Medieval Siege (or in the Auto match lobby itself, or whatever) a new room with those two people is created automatically. Then, everything works just as usual. The only coding needed is Voobly-side, you don't need to touch AOE2 at all. If we see things with a sharp eye, it's still the lobby system; the only difference is that the rooms would be created automatically. This would leave the players the freedom of leaving the rooms, for example. It wouldn't be a forced match making. Is now more clear what my idea entails?

EDIT: Giuseppi_C is still me. I wanted to train a bit and didn't realize I was still logged with that, sorry lol

The work on the source code on aoe2 or voobly will be required in case of matchmaking, since have a totally different concept technically, voobly leans on the aoe2 architecture and work as a big communication center and manage all the small other things like ratings, result etc... And p2p it's also way easier to manage, implement and cheaper (this show by many predecessors) compared to a matchmaking system wich require an additional server due the amount of work required.

Even if you randomize the users by putting 8 players randomly in a room, it's still not match making if you can leave the room room everytime, the result is an unnecessary work by the server for something you already do.

That's said even if you follow this concept you will have to work on aoe2 code, aoe2 with the current architecture cant comunicate directly with no servers, so need an "intermediate" to let this happen (voobly) , counting that currently random matchmaking can't be implemented and both system together will kill the server performance, so you choose for one or another if you have the possibility to choose.

You see like randomly choosing players and put them in one room, performance speaking not worth, at that point better go for a complete matchmaking system like it is in DE for example, dedicated server, matchmaking etc...

Excuse me, but a play in DE and is not lag, nothing, cero lag, voobly has more lag, an older game, and not only graphically, without going any further with shift you can give orders to the villagers after building something and not to stay the whole game standing in a house, which makes the More casual players opt for an easier game.
Besides that the room system is old, I personally like it, but most people prefer a system like DE, and for something most games have it