Hmm, these suggestions do make sense. But there are lots of categories and if you hover over the recommended friends (I think, almost nobody is online right now so I can't really check), it tells you the % match. It's not as visually impressive as what you're suggesting, but I think it'd get confusing if people always wanted to compare by the individual categories. A Demigod player might care more about being matched with people with good computers rather than having fun. Maybe someone will think 4 or 5 categories are important, how do you mark that all up with icons?

I do like the mood settings so you can relax the thresholds a bit. You can set "Only match with like players" that will try to find something like 70%+ matches, then you can relax it to 40%+, and then everyone?

I like the suggestion of having moods...  and ideally providing a default mood setting the player has configured when logging into RtP.

I'm not sure it's just match probably that's relevant, though - for instance, Demigod is a game that is very competitive, so people might prefer competitive matches there, whereas another game they might not be as fussed with regard to that criteria.  Demigod is also very latency-sensitive, so people might want to know if someone is a '75% match', but that their connection is much worse - whereas with Sins, this element is nowhere near as critical.

The system already allows you to pick which of your 'profile' attributes are most important - for obvious reasons I've chosen fun, competition and region (lol AU internets etc).  However, there are only 10 profile elements total (excluding age), so that's 20 icons required to express 'very close' or 'very distant' on them, and you'd only show the selected relevant ones (ie I'd never see more than three) and arguably 'likes RTS/Action/etc' are more about game choice than playstyle matching.

For instance, my 'fun' rating is at maximum, so someone who is otherwise a solid match but is 'fun 50%' would get the 'much less interested in fun' icon.  My computer is 'decent gaming', so someone with a great rig wouuld show 'blue hardware' or someone with a much older computer would show 'red hardware', depending on the game as mentioned above. 

Even if they're unwiling to reveal profile settings for other players in this way - which would be fine - being able to click a button that says 'I don't care about competition right now' or 'I less tolerant of connection speeds right now' would allow you to hone-in on the 'closer' matches by the criteria you care about at the time without revealing any such information.

Excuse me?  How is putting everything at 10 relevant to comparing absolute values?  Someone with everything at 10 would probably find it very difficult to be matched with anyone.  If you're talking about the 'likes genre' sliders, they're basically meaningless unless RTP knows what genre a game is (it doesn't).  How much someone likes action games is totally meaningless when matching up a game of Sins, so it can be at 10 all people want.  I simply wouldn't bother displaying indications of 'likes genre' unless they're relevant to the game in question (which RTP doesn't know about yet).

Perhaps I wasn't clear. There are 11 profile elements total. What if someone wants to be matched by using all of them? You may only care about 3 so you'd see 3 icons, but there's no guarantee that someone won't be trying to figure out all 11.