23 replies to this topic

[Wildweasel1]

Maybe you guys need to do some of your own matchmaking and form a group. Most of my matches whether in groups or PUG are close. When they are not close one side or the other has made a critical mistake like 2-3 breaking off from the group and having the misfortune of running into the entire enemy team.

No need to bash on the Devs though, I play the game because I like it and will keep playing it for the same reasons. If you don't find it fun maybe you should take a break and come back in a month or so.

[Asmosis]

Bad Andy, on 14 June 2013 - 12:13 PM, said:

the thing is PGI has alluded that they think there is a problem with boating high end long range weapons. Well guess what? Once you figure out the weight matching isnt very good there is a significant incentive to play an assault mech which is the best possible way to boat those weapons.

I like cbills, they pay for future mechs and cool stuff. also like exp, since that gxp also pays for cool stuff.

Given how heavily damage is weighted right now in the rewards, it makes sense to take as much firepower as you can since you have damage, component destruction, savior kills and kills themselves. some lighter mechs can compete some of the time, but in general you earn more cbills/xp using an assult mech.

Still take the other ones out for a spin now and then, but long range heavy weapons dominate right now with every mech from the spider up to the atlas sporting ppc's crammed in wherever they can.

Matchmaking itself isn't too bad, clearly its weighted more on ELO than tonnage which needs to be addressed but examples like the OP aren't that common.

Edited by Asmosis, 17 June 2013 - 02:07 AM.

[Uncleclint]

First of all, it is utterly unnecessary to hijack this thread into another "open beta - no longer open beta" discussion. We´ve read those a lot of times and they all end with: everyone is entitled to their own opinion.

Now back to the Topic:

Some weeks ago (middle of april?) there was an announcement, that tonnage matchmaking was going to be iplemented. And that was at a time, when the average quality of matches had already increased - there were more and more of the better games ( = the ones that ended with a close result, even if it was a loss but it didn´t feel like being a** r***d) and less of the bad ones (8:0).

Since 2-3 weeks, maybe since last patch it all seems to have gone back to the matchmaking state, the game was in February/March when i started to play more regularly and many people complained about matchmaking.
I could post some screenshots from last weeks games with tonnage differences of up to 160 and more. It didn´t even feel like "oh well, that´s the 2% of games i´ve read about, with more than 140 ton difference", it was more like "was that the 3rd game in a row, where our side (or theirs) got scr***d because of weight difference, or was it the 4th in a row?"

It could just be my bad luck or karma, call it what you want, but it doesn´t really look like i´m the only one to notice something.

I can only guess and hope that PGI is already gathering data around this matter and will take the steps necessary. As always, a little more information about what is going on would be very appreciated.

Edited by HAS UncleClint, 17 June 2013 - 02:19 AM.

[Tolkien]

When dealing with how often an event occurs our gut feelings can be way off. I might feel that I lose 'all the time' but when I look at my stats I can see that things are not nearly so gloomy.

What you might want to do is start screenshotting the end of match reports for *EVERY SINGLE* match you play, and once you have 30+ of them it will be possible to get meaningful statistics out of them.

I'm not saying you're wrong, as your gut feeling that matchmaking quality has fallen might be accurate, but it's best to do a sanity check to see. You've got my attention though so assuming I don't forget I might just do this myself this week and see what I find.

edit/addendum> In the command chair section the matchmaker thread has a point of interest to this conversation in it

Quote

We're adding the ability for us, the developers, to adjust our weight matching tolerances on the fly. This is giving us a controlled way to tighten up the weight imbalance between teams that players are experiencing.

Given this statement I would say it's entirely expected that matchmaking quality will fluctuate as they tune the tonnage tolerance range. That said I'd still be interested to see if their stated 74/24/2% distribution of great/meh/awful balance ranges applies.

edit2: Sorry, I forgot to mention time of day plays a part in matchmaking. If you play during off peak hours you can sometimes see the matchmaker take a long time to find a match (>5 seconds). As I understand the system it tries to find a perfect elo and perfect tonnage match then the longer it takes the more flexibility it allows.

Edited by Tolkien, 17 June 2013 - 03:08 AM.