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Online gaming is old. Online gaming has been around even longer than Jonathon Ross. What started as a few Unix geeks playing Xpilot and bzflag led to the explosion that was Doom, and eventually the First Person Shooter genre becoming synonymous with online gaming. Other prominent PC-oriented genre's have also becoming popular, notably Real Time Strategy and recently the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMPORG). Clearly someone at acronyms-for-president.com won big.
Yet online multiplayer gaming has yet to make it to the mainstream. The difficulties in successfully going online are not trivial - the last game I tried to play online was Operation Flashpoint. To play this game, you have to download and install Gamespy and 80MB worth of patches. This was nothing compared to the unimaginable red-tape of actually trying to join a game - 90% of servers are either full, empty or keyed, and the remaining 10% either have a ping of 2 hours or 26 minutes remaining before the next game starts. Joe Public, who doesn't know the difference between the terms download, save and install, would not know where to start.
And it's only once you've got into a game does the fun truly begin, usually starting with 3 to 5 seconds of "cor, I'm online, look there's another pla-" and a rocket in the face. The kind of people who are good at overcoming technical problems to play a game online are also the sort most likely to stay up until 4am every night playing said game, and the least likely to be tolerant of those who are not. This shows in both their playing ability and their attitudes to newer players. Reading a thread on the Nintendo forum I came across a quote by Starlight: "Playing games online is soul destroying, some people are just too good." It probably isn't an exaggeration to say that the people who play online games are 50% of the barrier to people who want to play online games. Why should they be accommodating? They don't want stupid newbies cluttering up their games, as there is usually no mechanism to separate the new players from the experienced. Any novice starting out in the likes of Unreal Tournament is going to be so much ash within seconds of entering the game-zone. That's only for a new game - anyone without a minimum of two years experience at the likes of Starcraft cannot contemplate venturing online if they want to even learn from the drubbing they will get.
Should a person make it through the technical, skill and social barricades modern online gaming present, chances are they were supposed to be there in the first place. Not many people have the time, energy and technical expertise to commit to playing online games in a meaningful way. Major technical and organisational hurdles have to be cleared for online gaming to even contemplate becoming a mainstream activity, probably the reason Nintendo have delayed their online plans for so long.
Consoles are games machines. Consoles don't go wrong. If consoles are to connect to the internet, they have to do so in a way that is totally idiot-proof. The stupidest person alive should be able to get a console online and play games - if Forrest Gump can't do it, the endeavour is doomed. I teach people basic computing for a living; you'd be amazed how many people don't know they have to have a connection to the internet established before they can receive email. In reality, the perfect world of a foolproof connection is pretty much impossible with current technology - a basic knowledge about the way computing devices talk to each other is required to connect any broadband device to the internet. Chances are most people won't want to cough up £25 a month for a broadband ISP just to plug their Xbox into, and will want to share their broadband connection with a PC or three, introducing a boatload of new technical problems. 50% of those who might be interested in playing games online are already put off.
On top of the money you pay to BT or NTL is the price of any gaming service at the other end. Counterstrike servers are a bloody pain to connect to, and even worse to set up, but they're free. It's indisputable that online PC gaming would be stone dead if gamers had to connect to a service which they had to pay to use. With free counterstrike servers all over the place, and the monstrous Battle.net in all four corners of the Earth free to anyone who buys a Blizzard game, it makes you wonder why the console manufacturers, with billions of dollars resting on whether online console gaming sinks or swims, can't offer their customers the same service. £40 a year for Xbox live isn't much, but it's more than many people will want to shell out if they're only casually interested. Even the necessity of a credit card to play online is going to thwart a lot of people (depending on how pliable their parents are).
The next issue is the game itself, or rather the lack of it if you're not 1337 enough. Simply put, it’s not possible to do too much to separate players of differing skill levels. People only tend to learn from and enjoy playing against other people as good as or slightly better than themselves. Pit a newbie against someone too experienced for them and they're likely to get mashed, lose interest and stop playing. First game I ever played online was Quake (I had somehow managed to wander onto a BarrysWorld server :O), and for weeks afterwards I didn't have the heart to even load the game, still in shock over the mauling I got. Ideally, player skill should be somehow measured offline by the game. Once they connect, they get directed to play with groups of people of the same ability, with the game constantly re-evaluating the player’s skill level. The only service I know of that attempts this is Warcraft III on Battle.net - the default "join-a-game" button looks for players of your win/loss record to play against. This is a good first step, but a process designed to help newbies should be opt-out, not opt-in. A chess style ranking system (similar to Blizzards own ladder scores) would be an ideal replacement for win/loss ratio's.
The last problem I faced was one of empty servers. That and people dropping from a game in progress, to leave just three of you running round a 100 square mile island looking for each other. Blizzard, a company with a great many years experience online, have come up with a solution of sorts to the problem of disconnecting players - in Warcraft III, those that remain can take control of an army left behind, assuming they were allied to the player who disconnected. This isn't a perfect solution, and doesn't map well to the FPS genre, but it helps. Ideally, disconnecting players would be seamlessly replaced by server controlled bots. Advances in AI would be necessary to make this happen, which would be a lot of hard work, but may well benefit the industry by finally ripping its attention away from constantly honing graphics. This new advanced AI could also be useful in getting a game service off the ground, by providing a wealth of opponents, and keeping it from dying exponentially. Once a game starts to become unpopular and opponents harder to find, people desert it faster, making opponents even harder to find and so on, propagating the downwards spiral. Populating servers with bots who play very similarly to human opponents would add a lot of longevity to a particular games online life. 3rd party AI development studio's, your time starts now.
Should Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony address all these issues then online gaming will be set to rocket. I would wager all three companies are aware of the problems, and no company in the world, with the possible exception of Blizzard, has any great amount of experience in what the three gaming hardware giants are currently facing. Xbox live has made a good stab at addressing some of the technical issues surrounding online play, but it's still strictly for geeks who own consoles. For any of the online strategies to go truly mainstream, they have to make an attempt at solving all the problems listed above. My guess is Nintendo's effort will be more encompassing - they've been staring at this problem for absolutely years, and have a reputation for making games easy to play. I have no idea about Sony - they may well hold off a broadband assault until the Playstation 3.
Yet online multiplayer gaming has yet to make it to the mainstream. The difficulties in successfully going online are not trivial - the last game I tried to play online was Operation Flashpoint. To play this game, you have to download and install Gamespy and 80MB worth of patches. This was nothing compared to the unimaginable red-tape of actually trying to join a game - 90% of servers are either full, empty or keyed, and the remaining 10% either have a ping of 2 hours or 26 minutes remaining before the next game starts. Joe Public, who doesn't know the difference between the terms download, save and install, would not know where to start.
And it's only once you've got into a game does the fun truly begin, usually starting with 3 to 5 seconds of "cor, I'm online, look there's another pla-" and a rocket in the face. The kind of people who are good at overcoming technical problems to play a game online are also the sort most likely to stay up until 4am every night playing said game, and the least likely to be tolerant of those who are not. This shows in both their playing ability and their attitudes to newer players. Reading a thread on the Nintendo forum I came across a quote by Starlight: "Playing games online is soul destroying, some people are just too good." It probably isn't an exaggeration to say that the people who play online games are 50% of the barrier to people who want to play online games. Why should they be accommodating? They don't want stupid newbies cluttering up their games, as there is usually no mechanism to separate the new players from the experienced. Any novice starting out in the likes of Unreal Tournament is going to be so much ash within seconds of entering the game-zone. That's only for a new game - anyone without a minimum of two years experience at the likes of Starcraft cannot contemplate venturing online if they want to even learn from the drubbing they will get.
Should a person make it through the technical, skill and social barricades modern online gaming present, chances are they were supposed to be there in the first place. Not many people have the time, energy and technical expertise to commit to playing online games in a meaningful way. Major technical and organisational hurdles have to be cleared for online gaming to even contemplate becoming a mainstream activity, probably the reason Nintendo have delayed their online plans for so long.
Consoles are games machines. Consoles don't go wrong. If consoles are to connect to the internet, they have to do so in a way that is totally idiot-proof. The stupidest person alive should be able to get a console online and play games - if Forrest Gump can't do it, the endeavour is doomed. I teach people basic computing for a living; you'd be amazed how many people don't know they have to have a connection to the internet established before they can receive email. In reality, the perfect world of a foolproof connection is pretty much impossible with current technology - a basic knowledge about the way computing devices talk to each other is required to connect any broadband device to the internet. Chances are most people won't want to cough up £25 a month for a broadband ISP just to plug their Xbox into, and will want to share their broadband connection with a PC or three, introducing a boatload of new technical problems. 50% of those who might be interested in playing games online are already put off.
On top of the money you pay to BT or NTL is the price of any gaming service at the other end. Counterstrike servers are a bloody pain to connect to, and even worse to set up, but they're free. It's indisputable that online PC gaming would be stone dead if gamers had to connect to a service which they had to pay to use. With free counterstrike servers all over the place, and the monstrous Battle.net in all four corners of the Earth free to anyone who buys a Blizzard game, it makes you wonder why the console manufacturers, with billions of dollars resting on whether online console gaming sinks or swims, can't offer their customers the same service. £40 a year for Xbox live isn't much, but it's more than many people will want to shell out if they're only casually interested. Even the necessity of a credit card to play online is going to thwart a lot of people (depending on how pliable their parents are).
The next issue is the game itself, or rather the lack of it if you're not 1337 enough. Simply put, it’s not possible to do too much to separate players of differing skill levels. People only tend to learn from and enjoy playing against other people as good as or slightly better than themselves. Pit a newbie against someone too experienced for them and they're likely to get mashed, lose interest and stop playing. First game I ever played online was Quake (I had somehow managed to wander onto a BarrysWorld server :O), and for weeks afterwards I didn't have the heart to even load the game, still in shock over the mauling I got. Ideally, player skill should be somehow measured offline by the game. Once they connect, they get directed to play with groups of people of the same ability, with the game constantly re-evaluating the player’s skill level. The only service I know of that attempts this is Warcraft III on Battle.net - the default "join-a-game" button looks for players of your win/loss record to play against. This is a good first step, but a process designed to help newbies should be opt-out, not opt-in. A chess style ranking system (similar to Blizzards own ladder scores) would be an ideal replacement for win/loss ratio's.
The last problem I faced was one of empty servers. That and people dropping from a game in progress, to leave just three of you running round a 100 square mile island looking for each other. Blizzard, a company with a great many years experience online, have come up with a solution of sorts to the problem of disconnecting players - in Warcraft III, those that remain can take control of an army left behind, assuming they were allied to the player who disconnected. This isn't a perfect solution, and doesn't map well to the FPS genre, but it helps. Ideally, disconnecting players would be seamlessly replaced by server controlled bots. Advances in AI would be necessary to make this happen, which would be a lot of hard work, but may well benefit the industry by finally ripping its attention away from constantly honing graphics. This new advanced AI could also be useful in getting a game service off the ground, by providing a wealth of opponents, and keeping it from dying exponentially. Once a game starts to become unpopular and opponents harder to find, people desert it faster, making opponents even harder to find and so on, propagating the downwards spiral. Populating servers with bots who play very similarly to human opponents would add a lot of longevity to a particular games online life. 3rd party AI development studio's, your time starts now.
Should Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony address all these issues then online gaming will be set to rocket. I would wager all three companies are aware of the problems, and no company in the world, with the possible exception of Blizzard, has any great amount of experience in what the three gaming hardware giants are currently facing. Xbox live has made a good stab at addressing some of the technical issues surrounding online play, but it's still strictly for geeks who own consoles. For any of the online strategies to go truly mainstream, they have to make an attempt at solving all the problems listed above. My guess is Nintendo's effort will be more encompassing - they've been staring at this problem for absolutely years, and have a reputation for making games easy to play. I have no idea about Sony - they may well hold off a broadband assault until the Playstation 3.
unknown kernel wrote:
> Ranking systems are the way to go I think. The way Yahoo have ratings
> for their games is good - I used to occasionally play chess and
> draughts online at university (their PCs weren't up to much else) as a
> distraction from study. It's a decent way of finding someone at your
> level.
Yahoo is a good model for the way online gaming in general should work, but the designers of consoles have a lot more problems to face than those writing java applets..
> Ranking systems are the way to go I think. The way Yahoo have ratings
> for their games is good - I used to occasionally play chess and
> draughts online at university (their PCs weren't up to much else) as a
> distraction from study. It's a decent way of finding someone at your
> level.
Yahoo is a good model for the way online gaming in general should work, but the designers of consoles have a lot more problems to face than those writing java applets..
I didn't really try online gaming until I got broadband, and the only game I enjoyed for long periods of time was UT. I was never very good, but I at least performed respectably. The reason I think UT is relatively easy to get into is that it is so widespread: there are just more newbies. I tried CS, Tactical Ops and Medal of Honour too - but there are fewer players and of those a higher percentage play for hours a day and know every inch of the maps. It just isn't that much fun.
The other thing I dislike about online gaming is the huge amount of unpleasant teenage boys, who channel all their sexual frustration into being complete eejits on chat channels.
Ranking systems are the way to go I think. The way Yahoo have ratings for their games is good - I used to occasionally play chess and draughts online at university (their PCs weren't up to much else) as a distraction from study. It's a decent way of finding someone at your level.
The other thing I dislike about online gaming is the huge amount of unpleasant teenage boys, who channel all their sexual frustration into being complete eejits on chat channels.
Ranking systems are the way to go I think. The way Yahoo have ratings for their games is good - I used to occasionally play chess and draughts online at university (their PCs weren't up to much else) as a distraction from study. It's a decent way of finding someone at your level.
I swear 50% of CS players cheat, or have some gun that kills everyone standing within a 90 degree arc in front of them.
UT is far easier to get into than CS I'll agree, mainly because CS is full of evil kids who are whipped by their parents to be the best and only the best... or at least thats how it seems :P
I actually chose Unreal Tournament as it was the best example I could think of where newbies actually have a fighting chance of survival. If you're a newbie, you are more likely to enjoy UT than any incarnation of Quake or Counterstrike imho. Even so, it is extremely hard for newbies to get into, like you say.
The part about the newbies being hammered is so so true, I play a mod for UT called Tactical ops basically every single day and killing newbies is very fun for a minute or two but essentially skill destroying. When I play I want to be challenged, not spend 20 minutes or so killing "the_slayer_2k" or some other yahoo chat style named player. The only problem with hating newbies is when you realise that without the newbies there would be no players at all, or money for the developers to work with. Newbies are what makes the world turn around in online gaming :P
Sorry for posting an essay in chat.
Actually, I'm not sorry at all, here's why:
**************
Sorry! Only Regulars, Notables and Staff can start topics in the 'The Future Of Gaming (Prime Topics)'. This is because a large number of Newbies and 'Just Arrived Today's were spamming the site.
You can start topics in any other forum you like, and when you become a regular, you may start topics here as well. Click here to see the ranking information.
**************
I hope all your eyeballs fall out through the effort of reading this.
Actually, I'm not sorry at all, here's why:
**************
Sorry! Only Regulars, Notables and Staff can start topics in the 'The Future Of Gaming (Prime Topics)'. This is because a large number of Newbies and 'Just Arrived Today's were spamming the site.
You can start topics in any other forum you like, and when you become a regular, you may start topics here as well. Click here to see the ranking information.
**************
I hope all your eyeballs fall out through the effort of reading this.
Online gaming is old. Online gaming has been around even longer than Jonathon Ross. What started as a few Unix geeks playing Xpilot and bzflag led to the explosion that was Doom, and eventually the First Person Shooter genre becoming synonymous with online gaming. Other prominent PC-oriented genre's have also becoming popular, notably Real Time Strategy and recently the Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMPORG). Clearly someone at acronyms-for-president.com won big.
Yet online multiplayer gaming has yet to make it to the mainstream. The difficulties in successfully going online are not trivial - the last game I tried to play online was Operation Flashpoint. To play this game, you have to download and install Gamespy and 80MB worth of patches. This was nothing compared to the unimaginable red-tape of actually trying to join a game - 90% of servers are either full, empty or keyed, and the remaining 10% either have a ping of 2 hours or 26 minutes remaining before the next game starts. Joe Public, who doesn't know the difference between the terms download, save and install, would not know where to start.
And it's only once you've got into a game does the fun truly begin, usually starting with 3 to 5 seconds of "cor, I'm online, look there's another pla-" and a rocket in the face. The kind of people who are good at overcoming technical problems to play a game online are also the sort most likely to stay up until 4am every night playing said game, and the least likely to be tolerant of those who are not. This shows in both their playing ability and their attitudes to newer players. Reading a thread on the Nintendo forum I came across a quote by Starlight: "Playing games online is soul destroying, some people are just too good." It probably isn't an exaggeration to say that the people who play online games are 50% of the barrier to people who want to play online games. Why should they be accommodating? They don't want stupid newbies cluttering up their games, as there is usually no mechanism to separate the new players from the experienced. Any novice starting out in the likes of Unreal Tournament is going to be so much ash within seconds of entering the game-zone. That's only for a new game - anyone without a minimum of two years experience at the likes of Starcraft cannot contemplate venturing online if they want to even learn from the drubbing they will get.
Should a person make it through the technical, skill and social barricades modern online gaming present, chances are they were supposed to be there in the first place. Not many people have the time, energy and technical expertise to commit to playing online games in a meaningful way. Major technical and organisational hurdles have to be cleared for online gaming to even contemplate becoming a mainstream activity, probably the reason Nintendo have delayed their online plans for so long.
Consoles are games machines. Consoles don't go wrong. If consoles are to connect to the internet, they have to do so in a way that is totally idiot-proof. The stupidest person alive should be able to get a console online and play games - if Forrest Gump can't do it, the endeavour is doomed. I teach people basic computing for a living; you'd be amazed how many people don't know they have to have a connection to the internet established before they can receive email. In reality, the perfect world of a foolproof connection is pretty much impossible with current technology - a basic knowledge about the way computing devices talk to each other is required to connect any broadband device to the internet. Chances are most people won't want to cough up £25 a month for a broadband ISP just to plug their Xbox into, and will want to share their broadband connection with a PC or three, introducing a boatload of new technical problems. 50% of those who might be interested in playing games online are already put off.
On top of the money you pay to BT or NTL is the price of any gaming service at the other end. Counterstrike servers are a bloody pain to connect to, and even worse to set up, but they're free. It's indisputable that online PC gaming would be stone dead if gamers had to connect to a service which they had to pay to use. With free counterstrike servers all over the place, and the monstrous Battle.net in all four corners of the Earth free to anyone who buys a Blizzard game, it makes you wonder why the console manufacturers, with billions of dollars resting on whether online console gaming sinks or swims, can't offer their customers the same service. £40 a year for Xbox live isn't much, but it's more than many people will want to shell out if they're only casually interested. Even the necessity of a credit card to play online is going to thwart a lot of people (depending on how pliable their parents are).
The next issue is the game itself, or rather the lack of it if you're not 1337 enough. Simply put, it’s not possible to do too much to separate players of differing skill levels. People only tend to learn from and enjoy playing against other people as good as or slightly better than themselves. Pit a newbie against someone too experienced for them and they're likely to get mashed, lose interest and stop playing. First game I ever played online was Quake (I had somehow managed to wander onto a BarrysWorld server :O), and for weeks afterwards I didn't have the heart to even load the game, still in shock over the mauling I got. Ideally, player skill should be somehow measured offline by the game. Once they connect, they get directed to play with groups of people of the same ability, with the game constantly re-evaluating the player’s skill level. The only service I know of that attempts this is Warcraft III on Battle.net - the default "join-a-game" button looks for players of your win/loss record to play against. This is a good first step, but a process designed to help newbies should be opt-out, not opt-in. A chess style ranking system (similar to Blizzards own ladder scores) would be an ideal replacement for win/loss ratio's.
The last problem I faced was one of empty servers. That and people dropping from a game in progress, to leave just three of you running round a 100 square mile island looking for each other. Blizzard, a company with a great many years experience online, have come up with a solution of sorts to the problem of disconnecting players - in Warcraft III, those that remain can take control of an army left behind, assuming they were allied to the player who disconnected. This isn't a perfect solution, and doesn't map well to the FPS genre, but it helps. Ideally, disconnecting players would be seamlessly replaced by server controlled bots. Advances in AI would be necessary to make this happen, which would be a lot of hard work, but may well benefit the industry by finally ripping its attention away from constantly honing graphics. This new advanced AI could also be useful in getting a game service off the ground, by providing a wealth of opponents, and keeping it from dying exponentially. Once a game starts to become unpopular and opponents harder to find, people desert it faster, making opponents even harder to find and so on, propagating the downwards spiral. Populating servers with bots who play very similarly to human opponents would add a lot of longevity to a particular games online life. 3rd party AI development studio's, your time starts now.
Should Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony address all these issues then online gaming will be set to rocket. I would wager all three companies are aware of the problems, and no company in the world, with the possible exception of Blizzard, has any great amount of experience in what the three gaming hardware giants are currently facing. Xbox live has made a good stab at addressing some of the technical issues surrounding online play, but it's still strictly for geeks who own consoles. For any of the online strategies to go truly mainstream, they have to make an attempt at solving all the problems listed above. My guess is Nintendo's effort will be more encompassing - they've been staring at this problem for absolutely years, and have a reputation for making games easy to play. I have no idea about Sony - they may well hold off a broadband assault until the Playstation 3.
Yet online multiplayer gaming has yet to make it to the mainstream. The difficulties in successfully going online are not trivial - the last game I tried to play online was Operation Flashpoint. To play this game, you have to download and install Gamespy and 80MB worth of patches. This was nothing compared to the unimaginable red-tape of actually trying to join a game - 90% of servers are either full, empty or keyed, and the remaining 10% either have a ping of 2 hours or 26 minutes remaining before the next game starts. Joe Public, who doesn't know the difference between the terms download, save and install, would not know where to start.
And it's only once you've got into a game does the fun truly begin, usually starting with 3 to 5 seconds of "cor, I'm online, look there's another pla-" and a rocket in the face. The kind of people who are good at overcoming technical problems to play a game online are also the sort most likely to stay up until 4am every night playing said game, and the least likely to be tolerant of those who are not. This shows in both their playing ability and their attitudes to newer players. Reading a thread on the Nintendo forum I came across a quote by Starlight: "Playing games online is soul destroying, some people are just too good." It probably isn't an exaggeration to say that the people who play online games are 50% of the barrier to people who want to play online games. Why should they be accommodating? They don't want stupid newbies cluttering up their games, as there is usually no mechanism to separate the new players from the experienced. Any novice starting out in the likes of Unreal Tournament is going to be so much ash within seconds of entering the game-zone. That's only for a new game - anyone without a minimum of two years experience at the likes of Starcraft cannot contemplate venturing online if they want to even learn from the drubbing they will get.
Should a person make it through the technical, skill and social barricades modern online gaming present, chances are they were supposed to be there in the first place. Not many people have the time, energy and technical expertise to commit to playing online games in a meaningful way. Major technical and organisational hurdles have to be cleared for online gaming to even contemplate becoming a mainstream activity, probably the reason Nintendo have delayed their online plans for so long.
Consoles are games machines. Consoles don't go wrong. If consoles are to connect to the internet, they have to do so in a way that is totally idiot-proof. The stupidest person alive should be able to get a console online and play games - if Forrest Gump can't do it, the endeavour is doomed. I teach people basic computing for a living; you'd be amazed how many people don't know they have to have a connection to the internet established before they can receive email. In reality, the perfect world of a foolproof connection is pretty much impossible with current technology - a basic knowledge about the way computing devices talk to each other is required to connect any broadband device to the internet. Chances are most people won't want to cough up £25 a month for a broadband ISP just to plug their Xbox into, and will want to share their broadband connection with a PC or three, introducing a boatload of new technical problems. 50% of those who might be interested in playing games online are already put off.
On top of the money you pay to BT or NTL is the price of any gaming service at the other end. Counterstrike servers are a bloody pain to connect to, and even worse to set up, but they're free. It's indisputable that online PC gaming would be stone dead if gamers had to connect to a service which they had to pay to use. With free counterstrike servers all over the place, and the monstrous Battle.net in all four corners of the Earth free to anyone who buys a Blizzard game, it makes you wonder why the console manufacturers, with billions of dollars resting on whether online console gaming sinks or swims, can't offer their customers the same service. £40 a year for Xbox live isn't much, but it's more than many people will want to shell out if they're only casually interested. Even the necessity of a credit card to play online is going to thwart a lot of people (depending on how pliable their parents are).
The next issue is the game itself, or rather the lack of it if you're not 1337 enough. Simply put, it’s not possible to do too much to separate players of differing skill levels. People only tend to learn from and enjoy playing against other people as good as or slightly better than themselves. Pit a newbie against someone too experienced for them and they're likely to get mashed, lose interest and stop playing. First game I ever played online was Quake (I had somehow managed to wander onto a BarrysWorld server :O), and for weeks afterwards I didn't have the heart to even load the game, still in shock over the mauling I got. Ideally, player skill should be somehow measured offline by the game. Once they connect, they get directed to play with groups of people of the same ability, with the game constantly re-evaluating the player’s skill level. The only service I know of that attempts this is Warcraft III on Battle.net - the default "join-a-game" button looks for players of your win/loss record to play against. This is a good first step, but a process designed to help newbies should be opt-out, not opt-in. A chess style ranking system (similar to Blizzards own ladder scores) would be an ideal replacement for win/loss ratio's.
The last problem I faced was one of empty servers. That and people dropping from a game in progress, to leave just three of you running round a 100 square mile island looking for each other. Blizzard, a company with a great many years experience online, have come up with a solution of sorts to the problem of disconnecting players - in Warcraft III, those that remain can take control of an army left behind, assuming they were allied to the player who disconnected. This isn't a perfect solution, and doesn't map well to the FPS genre, but it helps. Ideally, disconnecting players would be seamlessly replaced by server controlled bots. Advances in AI would be necessary to make this happen, which would be a lot of hard work, but may well benefit the industry by finally ripping its attention away from constantly honing graphics. This new advanced AI could also be useful in getting a game service off the ground, by providing a wealth of opponents, and keeping it from dying exponentially. Once a game starts to become unpopular and opponents harder to find, people desert it faster, making opponents even harder to find and so on, propagating the downwards spiral. Populating servers with bots who play very similarly to human opponents would add a lot of longevity to a particular games online life. 3rd party AI development studio's, your time starts now.
Should Nintendo, Microsoft or Sony address all these issues then online gaming will be set to rocket. I would wager all three companies are aware of the problems, and no company in the world, with the possible exception of Blizzard, has any great amount of experience in what the three gaming hardware giants are currently facing. Xbox live has made a good stab at addressing some of the technical issues surrounding online play, but it's still strictly for geeks who own consoles. For any of the online strategies to go truly mainstream, they have to make an attempt at solving all the problems listed above. My guess is Nintendo's effort will be more encompassing - they've been staring at this problem for absolutely years, and have a reputation for making games easy to play. I have no idea about Sony - they may well hold off a broadband assault until the Playstation 3.