November 30, 2006 - Epic's Steve Polge jumped on the Unreal Tournament 2004 server admin mailing list earlier today to guage reaction to a possible automatching feature that could be added to Unreal Tournament 2007:
We want stats and player ranking to be a more important part of the next UT. Particularly, we want to be able to use player ranking to help players find servers which match their skill level, to avoid the issues with wide skill disparities you often see in UT2K4 pub servers. However, it's easy to game the rankings if you control the server.
What alternatives to EA's approach can you suggest? We know our admin community is important to the success of UT, and we don't want to do anything to shut any of you out. In any case, it's quite possible to game the rankings even without controlling the server, if the players band together.
Personally, as a long-time UT player, I'd like to see a separate ranked mode of play for automatching, and then a standard unranked system for playing with friends, though I wouldn't mind an additional search filter for the unranked stuff that would show me where to find players of similar skill based on their ranked match rank. How about you?