Ok, so this idea operates on so many assumptions at the moment that I think we need to gather some info before we can reasonably continue this discussion:
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New players face 1300s
There is server code that should artificially match new players with opponents that are way lower than the average for the first games. Now I say should, because I think it is still a good idea to double check what matches this produces in reality. I suggest querying the API for maybe 100 new players and see how their first 10 games went. Sadly I don't have time for this in a moment, but there are some people that were extensively looking into analyzing data from the API, so they can probably help here.
While we're at it, we could also check how many of the guys that played exactly one ladder game lost this one (This is maybe not really relevant for this discussion, but I find that really interesting to know). -
We have at least one suitable AI for this.
The AI absolutely must be not cheating or we teach horrible misconceptions to new players how many units they can reasonably expect after a short time.
I am actually not sure if we have non-cheating AIs that are not utter dogshit. Somebody needs to check that, otherwise this whole discussion is pointless. -
New players prefer their first games to be against AI
This is tough one. I don't really have a solution how we can find that out other than asking around if existing players would have preferred this method. But that is solution that is not really amazing at giving reliable results.
Final thoughts:
I think artifically matching new players against weaker opponents is the better solution. We already do that, but we should definietly check how good that is working at the moment and if we need to tune some values. I see that this led to problems for high rated players when the 2v2 matchmaker started, but that was a once-in-a-lifetime problem, because for the future new queues will be initialized based on global rating, so that should help. We should still make sure that the artifical matching at the beginning doesn't negate that effect, though. (I think it was even planned for 2v2 in the beginning but then because of technical difficulties everybody was falsely initailized to 0)