Regional Identity is a Good Thing

Yesterday, Frost Giant dropped a community discussion post on reddit about matchmaking, proposing a mixed matchmaking method where you could match with anyone in the world but still maintain some sort of regional MMR for ladders and leaderboards. It’s an interesting idea, but it misses out on one key component – regional identity.

Korean Terrans, Chinese Protoss, and South American Zergs

One of the most powerful arguments for regional servers (or in the presence of Hathora’s tech, regional player groupings) is that of regional identity. When a microcosm of a game’s community plays each other exclusively, as happens with server regions, regional metas tend to evolve. We’ve seen examples of this throughout Starcraft 2’s history – examples of this include the advent of the Phoenix Colossus style coming from Jim, MacSed, and the other Chinese Protoss players during Starcraft 2’s Heart of the Swarm expansion, the “Erik Opener” that has taken the Zerg world by storm in the last several months, or the entire concept of Korean Terrans.

These playstyles and idiosyncrasies don’t evolve if players get matched up against a global pool. Yes, there is an argument to be made that players will still naturally be grouped by playtime – Americas players would naturally match with Americas players during standard Americas hours due to ping priority and people in Europe and Asia’s sleep schedules. Despite that, a Global pool with global rankings still fail to engender the type of regional identity that I’m talking about here.

Regional identity is about more than just diverging playstyles – in the modern era where games from all over the world gets broadcast and players stream, even hyper-regional matchmaking isn’t guaranteed to build regional metas. It also provides tremendous storylines from the esports perspective. The ability to talk about “the best player from NA going up against the top European” only happens if that matters. Frost Giant has pitched a mixed approach – where there is a global pool of players but regional ladders and leaderboards on top of a global leaderboard. That gets us partially there – but it matters less.  Viewers will always be able to refer to the global leaderboard, and that removes some of the mystery of results.

At the end of the day, hard regional pools give us storylines, both in terms of playstyles as well as regional matchups and rivalries. We won’t see that (at least not to the same level) with a global pool, even if there is some possibility for regional ladders tacked on top. Without that, the landscape of stories is just not as full. Yes, this is primarily an esports argument, but esports drives eyes on the game, which leads to more players. It’s certainly why I got into Starcraft.

Pragmatism

As important as regional identity is, we do need to talk about reality for a second. Stormgate is not guaranteed to be a massive game – RTS is a diminished genre and it will be fighting against the Starcraft 2 juggernaut that commands 100 thousand games per day 13 years after release. Stormgate will also be coming out around the same time as ZeroSpace (the RTS project that commands the services of SC2 professionals Sasha ‘Scarlett’ Hostyn, Paulo ‘Catz’ Vizcarro, and Jared ‘PiG’ Krensel, among others), and Tempest Rising. It will be a crowded market in 2024, and that means building a matchmaking system that works best with hundreds of thousands of games may not necessarily be the best approach if Frost Giant isn’t confident they can keep it populated. From a pragmatic perspective, it makes sense to go with an approach that maximizes your potential player pool, even at the expense of regional community and identity.

The other key thing to point out is that this is not an approach that was previously even possible - ping considerations and the lack of companies like Hathora meant that developers had to host servers locally in the places they wanted people to play. The fact that we can even has this discussion is due in no small part to the fact that Frost Giant is considering implementing rollback netcode (significant ping performance improvements) and looking towards a "serverless" architecture that will allow them to ensure some level of ping neutrality between most players.

Getting Involved

As always, if you want to engage with the Frost Giant developers and get information from them as they post it, you should sign up for their newsletter, head on over to /r/Stormgate on reddit, and sign up for the beta and wishlist the game on steam!