What is SmartMatch?
The team working on GameSpy Comrade are always trying to figure out ways to help you get more out of gaming. First, they took the best elements of our previous software and rolled it up into a nice, sleek little app that lets you chat (across platforms) with buddies and allows you to instantly join a game server that any of your friends join. If you haven't downloaded Comrade yet, you should give it a try.
Nowadays the Comrade engineers -- and when I say that I want you to imagine that they all wear lab coats and hard hats, because I've been pushing for that for years -- have developed a new tool for quickly getting into a game. Instead of forcing you to scan through a massive list of servers (or instead of picking one for you), the "SmartMatch" tool uses some basic criteria to give you a 'short list' of the four or five servers you'll probably care about the most. It gets you into a good game, quick.
All this was done with some clever UI on top of the Server Browsing SDK. You, Mr. Game Developer, have this technology in your hands right now. All you need to do is spend some time deciding what criteria you can use to pare that list down to a manageable size.
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