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I have always liked the matchmaking ladder system from WarCraft 3; I will probably also like the ladder system for StarCraft 2. The main reason I liked the WC3 system was that it did a pretty good job of matching you up with and against players of your skill level. I have yet to come upon an FPS game that manages to do something similar (on the PC at least).

I'm playing Bad Company 2 right now and the matchmaking is nonexistent. You just pick a server and hope for the best. All of the recent FPS games I've played have worked like that (TF2, L4D 1&2, DK, COD 4&5). Modern Warfare 2 has matchmaking, but it's an unsophisticated piece of crap that sucks; 300+ hours played has taught me to hate that game's matchmaking.

Anyway, here's my question: has anyone played any FPS games with a WC3 style ladder system (and matchmaking)? For PC? Consoles? What about third person shooters? This concerns me mainly because I play by myself about half of the time and don't always have a group of friends/clan mates/whatever to back me up. It takes the fun out of playing a game when you are up against uber pro players or are placed on a hopelessly bad team.

It can be harder to quantify a FPS player's value to the team, so most of the matchmaking systems I've seen are absolute garbage.

Honestly, what I'd prefer is for them to actually do Servermatching, where they move people who are too good to a higher level server until their "most important scores" begin to fall in line with the other, then use that set of values to rate the player's target server-level.

In a lot of games it's about how many kills you get, but how about grabbing the most points? Or disarming the most bombs? Least deaths? Most assists? How can you rate "best communication" or such? Really, I've played matches of CoD where I find a nice spot, a good sniper rifle, and kill absurd amounts of people without providing nearly any net benefit for my team.

So I don't think you'll find many/any FPS games that match that way, but it is a very good idea, and I think they'd be well served to take your idea and run with it. If they can find a way to design the games so that you can quantify 'value' and 'skill' better, then a WC3-style matchmaker would be great.

Servermatching would be a significant improvement over current 'not matched' matchmaking. I had a game with the world number 2 Transformers player the other day (2500 kills in three days, lol) with predicatable results, and we should really never have been put together.