I often find that people who disagree with me are just plain wrong...
Extreme arrogance is not generally a positive trait.
If you could still forge a record then the entire purpose of matchmaking would be redundant, as you say.
Those who choose to forge their records would of course have their matchmaking broken, but for the other 98% of players, there wouldn't be a problem.
I disagree strongly about random maps. Players should scout the opposition not the map. How it can be rationalised that space-faring societies do not have access to telescopes is beyond me, and I can justify a great deal if I want to.
I play Sins for the tactics and the strategy, not for realism. Those who play a space RTS and find that some things aren't realistic shouldn't be surprised in the least. If realism is sacrificed in exchange for a more skill-oriented and interesting early-game, that's fine with me.
Also, the concept that random maps are somehow more interesting than maps designed specifically for a game has to be wrong. There are no other RTS games where random maps are better than custom maps. The neutrals and wormholes and the organisation of the planets add a great deal to maps. Simply ensuring the players aren't roided isn't on the same level of gameplay- and players with a volcanic planet near them almost always dodge it anyway, only the ice would be valuable enough to justify the civics labs.
How about a map where the economy spot and defence spot were assigned to particular slots in a team, so that you could put specialists in those roles, rather than just have them filled randomly? Would that improve gameplay? With other RTS games having specialists able to play their game is normally considered an advantage, rather than the 'unpredictability' of not knowing how you will have to play before you start.
In large team games where players like to play different roles (and to actually know their roles beforehand), I fully agree that that situation can be much better when players want to know how exactly they'll be playing for their team on the map. But sometimes players prefer the random element - if they're playing in a smaller game with less expectation for specialization, for instance, or if they don't want commonly-known rote optimized expansion strategies to completely dominate the early game. One possibility to fix this sort of thing would be for map creators to create, say, 15 or 20 balanced maps for each common scenario (1v1, 2v2, etc) (or, if that's too much work, to generate random maps and to save the ones which are "balanced" enough). Then, when "random map" is selected, one of the preset and balanced 15 or 20 maps is used. This way people couldn't just memorize exact strategies for early expansion, but are still guaranteed that the map they play will be pretty balanced.
Of course, this would have to be built into Sins, which is probably way too much to hope for, given how much the devs seem to care about multiplayer.
Random maps have their advantages, as do preset maps. I guess since I prefer 1v1 I like random maps better.
I definitely agree that rankings would be much better if they were separated into the number of wins/losses for each particular type of game (3v3, etc).
