Street Fighter 4 online match making?

Sup guys,

Haven't posted over here in a while, just dropping by to post about what's on my mind these days, and that's the awfully unbalanced online matchmaking system of SSF4.

Here's a quick rundown of how a match gets set up on SSF4. You can either host your own game, or you can chose to automatically join a game someone else is hosting. Once you join a game, you find yourself in the game lobby where you can check the other guy's disconnect rate and he can check yours. You can also check out their online profiles, achievements and stuff like that. If you're good with the other guys' disconnect rate, then you jump to the character selection screen, where you get to choose your character - and once both players choose they reveal their character to the opponent. After that the host chooses the stage and then the match begins. Once you're done playing, the winner gets rewarded with Player Points and Battle Points. Player Points represent general player skill, while Battle Points represent the skill with a specific character, and thus each player has a different Battle Point rating for each character. The number of Points you're rewarded is based on how good the winner did along with how big the gap between the 2 opponents skill ratings was. Confused? Don't worry, it all makes sense after you spend a bit of time playing online.

Here's an interesting thing about SSF4's matchmaking:


IT F*CK!NG SUCKS.

You have no choice over who you're going to play against, the game just chooses arbitrarily to match you up against absolutely any player of any skill level, seemingly disregarding completely your own "Player Points" rating. I can't even begin to imagine why Capcom would build a game that obviously as a fighting game has an awful lot of complicated netcode and they decided to skimp on such a simple thing such as matching up player levels. I mean seriously, as you're starting out you might get to face Daigo, AKA. the Beast, reigning champion of the EVO tournament (think of it as the World Cup for fighting games) and then the best thing you can hope for is getting a hit in, maybe chip a bit of damage so you can save some face and not give him a free Perfect KO! Or, as an intermediate player like myself, you can get stuck in a series of matches against low skilled opponents who are just starting out, making you feel like you're just griefing them. Even though simultaneously revealing the characters is fair all the other problems ruin the game.

Capcom is rumoured to be patching the console version of the game when the arcade version releases, and I think it would be a great time to implement a change to this horrible matchmaking system that is driving both new and older players away. Fighting games have great communities, and SSF4 deserves a great one, don't let it be ruined by such easy-to-fix yet so annoying things.

That's all I had to say. Let me know in the comments section bellow what you think ;)