I am implementing match making system similar to a game like Clash of Clans where the opponents that you are matched against are always offline. You don't play against them directly in real-time you just pull some of their user data and play against their saved player data. I have custom game servers that can validate all the results of the match and update both players' data records. But the one part I am missing is how to actually match players. Thanks in advance.
Thanks for your full information. For clarification, we do not provide game developers with arbitrary query into the PlayFab core service database tables, since the enormous number of queries will cause the potential performance issues. For your case, you can get a leaderboard of players around the current player's score, then randomly pick one of them for the challenge. In addition, PlayFab does not automatically record the online and offline status of players. You can write the custom event to trigger the CloudScript to store the statuses to their publish player data.
Currently, PlayFab provides a matchmaking feature that designed for the synchronous matchmaking (the players should be online). And there is no ETA for the asynchronous matchmaking system. We would suggest you use the Photon Turn-based for the asynchronous matchmaking. There is a thread discussed on the topic of asynchronous matchmaking for turn-based games: https://community.playfab.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/207129407-Persistent-turn-based-games-. You can check this thread for the suggestion on asynchronous matchmaking.
I have read that topic and I don't think that the Photon-Turn based system is going to solve my problem. Let me try to give some more details:
The first solution that comes to my mind is a simple DB with a row for each player with a data model like this:
{
player_id string (PlayFabID - unique key)
player_state int (offline = 0, offline = 1, under attack = 2, etc.)
player_level int
}
On login/logout update the player state
For match making it would be a query something like this:
SELECT player_id FROM matchmake_tableORDER BY RAND()
WHERE player_state == 0 AND player_level == reqLevel
LIMIT
Also to help clarify there is no multiplayer in the normal sense where 2+ players are competing at the same time in the same room/lobby/game. You build a virtual base with your resources and you can attack other players' virtual bases. When you are offline other players can attack your virtual base.
I don't think that the Photon Turn-based system would work for what I am trying to build, let me try to give some more details about the problem:
This is the part that I'm struggling with. I need to find a random player who is offline and has a player level equal to the requesting player
The most obvious solution in my mind is to have a DB with an entry for each player like this:
[player_id, player_state (online, offline, under attack), player_level ]
When a player logs in or logs out the Player's state would be updated in the DB.
When a player requests to find a match the server would make a DB call which would look something like this:
SELECT player_id FROM player_table WHERE player_state = "offline" AND "player_level" = request.PlayerLevel ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1
This would get a random player that is offline and has a matching level. I can then update that player's "player_state" to "under_attack" so they can't be matched again while this match is in progress.
I don't want to have to manage, maintain, and scale my own DB for this project. I was hoping that there was some solution that you guys provided which I have not found that can solve this problem.
Please advise, thanks.
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