Rename "Matchmaking" to make it clearer?

[vgaming]

Describe the desired feature

Is it possible to rename the current "Matchmaking" tab to a more elaborate/clear name? And/or add a hover help that explains what it is?

Context: in the current UI, the main Lobby contains two tabs: General Lobby and Matchmaking. The General Lobby contains human-created games, while the Matchmaking tab contains "bot-started" games, such as AfterBot games on 1.16.

The problem with the current approach is that it might not be clear. Maybe it's just my lack of understanding, but I completely failed to figure out what Matchmaking is, until chatting with people on Discord.

Notably:

• Wesnoth's "Matchmaking" is NOT actually a server browser functionality. This is because you don't connect to any other additional servers once you connect to the Wesnoth server. All the traffic is centralized, so the concept doesn't apply.
• Wesnoth's Matchmaking works differently from e.g. Chess or Go. Instead of asking to have a game and being automatically connected to opponents of a similar rank, wesnoth's Matchmaking process is more manual. You have the ability to choose your opponent, for example: connect exclusively to half-started games where the opponent is already known.
• Without an online Bot, it's impossible to interact with this functionality at all.

Some alternative names:

• "Server-created games"
• "Bot-created games"

P.S. See also this discussion to understand what this feature is about and how it was created.

[Pentarctagon]

@stevecotton @Discontinuum FYI

[Discontinuum]

It was named "Matchmaking" because bots host games basically to create matchmaking, as Wesnoth lacks any automatic matchmaking of its own. The original variant (bot hosted games) sounded too technical to my taste, not telling enough for a common player

[stevecotton]

At the moment, I think "Matchmaking" is the best of the suggested names.

[soliton-]

Is this related to what matchmaking means in any other game?

If this is an area for automatically hosted games then it should say that.

[vgaming]

From my personal point of view, I was just very confused when I saw the tab. An on-hover explanation or any any other means to let the user understand what it means would be good from my perspective, too

E.g. I only want to avoid a situation when a person doesn't know what this tab means and gets confused without any way to get help. In other words, we know that wesnoth doesn't have automatic matchmaking and therefore we have to make alternative choices, but the player does not know that.

Thoughts?

[Discontinuum]

I think it looked confusing primarily because the lobby of 1.17 is empty right now

[vgaming]

@Discontinuum to be specific, the lobby didn't have AfterBot. The rest was there: I've used 3 accounts to create up to 2-3 games to try to figure it out

[Hejnewar]

we know that wesnoth doesn't have automatic matchmaking

But we should have one

[knyghtmare]

But we should have one

adds plus one vote

[Discontinuum]

@vgaming

the lobby didn't have AfterBo

Yeah, it's running on 1.16 currently. I think I'll add some test bot to the 1.17 lobby to see how it looks

[soliton-]

I think it looked confusing primarily because the lobby of 1.17 is empty right now

If the tab title is confusing unless there are games running that display in the tab it sounds like the actual info you gather by extrapolating from the displayed games and not from the meaning of the tab title. It would be better to have an actually meaningful tab title.

[vgaming]

we should have Matchmaking

It's slightly even more complex I'm afraid. If I understand the intentions behind creating the current tabs (#7056) correctly, then we want to specifically split out bot-initiated games. So even if we'd get some form of Matchmaking, we may still want to keep a separate tab or... supersede the bot with this new Matchmaking? Basically, the question of what would happen to AfterBot is not clear to me.

I think we should also create a separate issue for true Matchmaking BTW. The current issue, while worded abstractly, is about AfterBot and similar bots that de-facto exist today..