On Xbox One, with Smart Match and the new social reputation model, Xbox Live gamers will play more enjoyable and meaningful matches than ever before.
The majority of players on Xbox Live are respectful of others and are able to socially adjust to the people they’re playing with. But there are those few bad apples who just can’t seem to grasp those social norms, whether it’s humming Top 40 songs as they’re playing through a match or swearing at everything that happens to them. If it’s a family member doing something that bothers you, it’s usually easy to tell them to stop; with strangers online, they may see no reason to improve their behavior no matter how diplomatic you are.
With Xbox One’s new social reputation model, all of the feedback a player gets is used to evaluate a player’s online social rep. The more you play without getting a bunch of complaints, the better your rep will be – and you can use the info about rep on another player’s gamer card to decide if you want to play with them or not. And yeah, everyone has bad days – a complaint here and there isn’t going to tank your score. This system is only looking to identify players who are repeatedly disruptive on Xbox Live, ruining the experience for a lot of players.
Then there’s the fact that gamers enjoy playing games with their family and friends, but in doing so they may not always get the challenge they revel in, as they do while playing other gamers of similar skill. That’s one of the reasons online gaming is so popular.
Many people have met other gamers from all over the world while playing on Xbox Live, but they all have better things to do than sit in the title game while waiting for their match requests to get paired. Smart Match on Xbox One solves that issue by “untethering” the player from the title game while the match search is processing. You can do other things, such as watch a video or read a blog post in the meantime, and when your requested match is ready, Xbox One will let you know and pull you back into the title to play. The new Smart Match service allows titles to change their match model from traditional peer-based host searching to completely untethered and cloud-based.
What does that mean? For one thing, you’ll be able to fire up your favorite shooter and see the typical wait time for different online game modes (say, “quick match” with a one-minute wait time, or “match by downloadable content (DLC)” with a seven-minute wait time), and instead of automatically going with “quick match” so you don’t have to wait around doing nothing, you can select “match by DLC” and switch to another task while you’re waiting. Then once you get into your selected game, it will be a more enjoyable match, as you get to play with people with your same DLC, making the most of the latest map or car you just bought, rather than having to use the same options every night.
For more details on Xbox One’s social reputation model or Smart Match, check out this blog post.
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Jennifer Chen
Microsoft News Center Staff