Seriously. The way I see it, there are two major problems in this system.

The first problem is that you can't choose who the gamefinder suggests you. I have 3 teams I want to play with currently. The gamefinder suggests me two opponents (two teams on the other). One of them said "no thanks", the other isn't on IRC and doesn't answer my PM at all. So despite having three teams there, the suggestions are useless to me. The whole gamefinder isn't because I can still choose from the list but this is still somewhat annoying.

The second one is cherrypickers. Now, I'm not talking about anyone who chooses the team with any basis. For example, if you are recovering with some team and only got 10 players, you might not want to play against some undead team full of Dirty Players and the like. And that is fine.

But then there are the players who require links and say "No thanks" when the opponent's win ratio is too high, the race is some that their own race is actually weak against ("Gosh! Does he suggest that the weaknesses of my team should actually come to play some time?!"), has teams built in a certain way... If you are that specific with the games you are willing to accept, that's fine with me. Doing that in the gamefinder so I need to spend more time looking for games because cherrypickers that won't play because of some such reason is not.

The way I see it, there needs to be a challenge system in gamefinder. So if you have team there and get challenged and deny, you lose something (gold, coaches, cheerleaders, apotechary... Dependant on the team value so it always hurts a little. Not much for individual time but so that if you constantly do it, it matters.).

Well, there is the problem "But sometimes I need to leave... Like something important happening just before the game starts.". Yeah but that can be taken care of. We don't want to punish every single time you say no to a challenge but if that happens constantly. Let's say that they start after three denyings or so. And to not punish those who have played longer, three denyings within a month or so. Whatever is the method, the point is that this problem can be taken care of.

Now, that simply this would only lead to the same cherrypickers just looking at who is on gamefinder and challenging specific opponents who would have to accept. But this can be fixed by not seeing who are online there. You submit a team to the gamefinder and it randomly picks you a challenger based on teamvalues and such. If there is nobody with proper teamvalues online (for example, if you have a very expensive veteran team), it waits untill there is someone or you submit a team that has possible opponents currently. Or it could give challenges to those differiating much in team values but make the exception here and not penalize them even for denying.

There could be some sort of mechanism to actually prevent you getting mad undead teams against your recovering teams. For example, adding a possibility to put "I won't accept these teams now" option which needs a description "Because..." and how often you have done that becoming something everyone can see and if you abuse that, you lose the right.

"But who tries to make sure nobody abuses it? The admins are already overworked!" Yeah, but adding a few people as janitors to whom abusers can be reported would help, these janitors then informing admins only when they think it is approprriate. Thus, not much time would be needed to punishing these people as the only ones admins would see are the ones already reported and evaluated to be such...



I don't know... My point is that however details are handled such a system could exist, wouldn't be hard to make and all the problems could be solved one way or another.


As a relatively new FUMBBL member, am I the only one longing for such?