97 replies to this topic

[Hans Von Lohman]

To me the rigidity of the 3/3/3/3 setup is what makes me think it won't work. I am like a lot of people and think there will be an issue for lot of players in assault mechs not finding a game.

The solution to me seems to be more types of game team mixes. Use the 3/3/3/3 setup for the default, but if a player fails to find a game, then just have a setup of just that weight class to take the overflow. Fail to find a match in a Victor, then you get sent to a game with nothing but Assault mechs...you know, the overflow of extra kids sitting on the sidelines of any team sport.

Hell, go one further and add the team mixes as a playable game type you can filter for in the launch. Skirmish-Assault or Skirmish-Medium could be a game mode you could play.

This is what World of Tanks does. They don't limit what tank you want to run, but they do rank all of their tanks into 10 tiers so you don't have Panzer-II's facing off against Korean war monster tanks.

Edited by Hans Von Lohman, 10 March 2014 - 11:32 PM.

[Riptor]

What i dont get is why it seems to be impossible to simply tell the matchmaker "look MM.. both groups have to be in a range of 20 to 30 tons of each other"

There.. problem solved.

No abritrary numbers... the teams can be as heavy or as light as they want the MM will present them with a comparable enemy (atleast in tons)

The current matchmaker is shite because one team can end up with 100+ more tons then the enemy team. Lower that imbalance and you wont need any additional BS rules of game composition and the like.

This entire thing smells like ghost heat syndrome... an abritrary convoluted mess thats suposed to fix a problem that could be fixed by simply changing some numbers.

[Sephlock]

I would think that over time, people would start using more of their lighter mechs due to being unable to find matches in their heavier mechs.

What I'm worried about is the newer players who only have a few slots and limited c-bills.

They start out with four mechbays. If they choose an assault mech as their first purchase, they should be able to fully kit it out with their initial bonus. If they choose to fully master that assault mech they will have one slot left over for another mech. if it turns out that they liked their initial assault and want to stay with the class, their fourth slot will be taken up by another assault, and....

[HammerSwarm]

Riptor, on 11 March 2014 - 04:32 AM, said:

What i don't get is why it seems to be impossible to simply tell the matchmaker "look MM.. both groups have to be in a range of 20 to 30 tons of each other"

There.. problem solved.

No arbitrary numbers... the teams can be as heavy or as light as they want the MM will present them with a comparable enemy (at least in tons)

The current matchmaker is shite because one team can end up with 100+ more tons then the enemy team. Lower that imbalance and you wont need any additional BS rules of game composition and the like.

This entire thing smells like ghost heat syndrome... an arbitrary convoluted mess that's supposed to fix a problem that could be fixed by simply changing some numbers.

You don't get what we all don't get.

They presumably have talented coders and you're telling me that they can't keep matches of 24 within 100 tons of each other?

I would think that would be easier than figuring out how to balance it so your player base equally wants to play all four mech classes.

Edited by HammerSwarm, 11 March 2014 - 08:26 AM.

[HammerSwarm]

Sephlock, on 11 March 2014 - 05:29 AM, said:

I would think that over time, people would start using more of their lighter mechs due to being unable to find matches in their heavier mechs.

What I'm worried about is the newer players who only have a few slots and limited c-bills.

They start out with four mechbays. If they choose an assault mech as their first purchase, they should be able to fully kit it out with their initial bonus. If they choose to fully master that assault mech they will have one slot left over for another mech. if it turns out that they liked their initial assault and want to stay with the class, their fourth slot will be taken up by another assault, and....

Not finding matches is a very 'stick' way to curb peoples behavior. Furthermore I don't think the player base can handle any more sticks right now.

The beatings will continue until moral improves....

I hope your critique of what it could mean to new players looking for matches in their only mechs and mine on players being locked out of the matchmaker based on a gateway class being to low a percentage of the population make it to the engineers ears.

Edited by HammerSwarm, 11 March 2014 - 08:31 AM.

[Roadbeer]

Adding on to this, as I said in another thread.

Roadbeer, on 09 March 2014 - 02:23 PM, said:

Afterthought...

I don't know if this was covered in the 70 pages of the Launch Module feedback, but has it occurred to anyone how incredibly easy it is going to be to game the MM now?

Just a cursory look at my mech stats in my profile and I can pretty much 'guesstimate which of the 3 "buckets" of the Elo spectrum I'm going to fall into.
So now, instead of smaller groups trying to sync drop who have ~20% chance of syncing. All you need to do is build one group of 4 then have everyone else around that can't quite build a 12 man take one of the unused weight classes and also guesstimate their Elo "bucket", and all try to sync.

I'm betting we'll get a lot closer to 6+ players on a team than we have a shot at doing now.

[Redshift2k5]

sync droppers gonna sync drop. I guess I'd see them in 3/3/3/3 than say, syncing and running 6 meta assaults

[Sinthrow]

I want to have it out for a weekend before I pass any judgment. My guess is that the assault and heavy wait will be longer but that is all. We may find that the matches are closer then ever, or we may find that it is a complete waste of time.
We may see that more pilots are willing to take lighter mechs if you know that there will not be a huge tonnage gap.
One thing for sure is this will be a game changer. I hope it will not be a game breaker.

[aniviron]

HammerSwarm, on 06 March 2014 - 01:36 PM, said:

Has the idea that 3/3/3/3 creates a situation where if 1 class isn't queued as much as others that no matches may start and no one might get to play been discussed?

so if you had a population of 1 million players(all subsequent numbers expressed as multiples of 10,000) you could have significant numbers of people shut out of a match.

If you had 25/25/25/25 you'd have a perfect rolling drops with very few edge cases where people failed to find a match. This would spawn evenly leaving less than 24 people out.

Let's alter it a bit, 25/24/25/26 this would be a bit different. this would spawn exactly 4 matches, but you'd have 1,0,1,2 = 4 people failing to find a match. Factor back in our multiplier and you have 40,000 people failing to find a match.

So for every bit of imbalance in the queue you have real people failing to find a match because of this tuning.

Care to guess at the actual composition of the queues per 100 people? Have they stated that data?

I play a lot of conquest and I'd venture to to guess it'd be something like 30/25/25/20 per 100 or with with a population of 1 million players would be 200,000 people failing to find a match.

The last period we have good data for dates back from when General Discussion was still a place on the forum, which puts it at over 6 months old, I think closer to 8.

At that time, the numbers were about 10% light, 15% medium, 45% heavy and 30% assault, within a few points each way- I'd go grab the numbers, but the search feature on these forums is abysmal. Regardless of that, I have absolutely no reason to believe that this has changed significantly- lights have not gotten any buffs at all with the exception of the indirect MG buff, mediums saw the introduction of the Shadowhawk but also the neutering of the Centurion. Heavy and assault numbers might be a bit closer to even, the Victor has really taken over a lot of what the CTF-3D and CPLT-K2 used to do.

[oldradagast]

xMEPHISTOx, on 06 March 2014 - 03:48 PM, said:

The WoT MM was far more flexible than what PGI is proposing with 3-3-3-3 as its quite specific, whereas in tanks if not finding exact matches it starts opening up the parameters for the sake of finding a match for everyone in queue. I would as others assume that increased wait times will be the norm, and more so as you climb the ELO ladder. I personally would have been satisfied with a simple weight matching system as it would be far less complicated and would not increase weight times, if did would be minimal.

This is the only way to make this idea work, but I have doubts they will do it. Minimizing staggering weight imbalances is a good idea, but the end result - be it tonnage limits or the new 3-3-3-3 system, can easily make the situation far worse.

The fatal flaw of tonnage limits was basically preventing friends from playing with friends if they both happened to have mechs (or just wanted to use mechs) that together were too heavy or two light. While 3-3-3-3 gets around that problem, it will still produce issues of its own.

As others have said, teams will still run assaults. I'm not sure if they get first priority over PUG's, but if that's the case, PUG's will basically not be able to run assaults after this change goes in. Even if that's not true, expect to wait forever if you want to play an assault mech.

3-3-3-3 also does nothing to actually balance the game. It just forces longer wait times in an effort to beat people into playing other types of mechs. If they want people to play something other than assault mechs, reward mobility (instead of adding turrets), add role warfare (instead of just rewarding damage), and do something about the stupidly oversized medium mechs that are easy targets.

In the long run, 3-3-3-3 looks like it will make it take longer to get into a match while not resolving underlying game issues. Sure, the guy who's lucky enough to be able to play his assault mech will enjoy killing people with PPC / AC jump sniping, but I'm not sure what everyone else will get out of this as they had to downgrade to a lighter mech just in the hopes of getting into a game.

Note that this comes from a guy who plays all mech classes and who's best performance is in the 50 to 80 ton range, so I'm not moaning over having to drop in something other than my meta-build... it's just that if I DO want to play an assault mech, it would be nice to be able to do so without waiting forever for a match.

Edited by oldradagast, 11 March 2014 - 10:37 AM.

[Davers]

Void Angel, on 07 March 2014 - 10:53 PM, said:

First, your #1 point proves my own. There is no reason that a person who has 4 or more friends can't play with friends unless they are the odd man out. Yet, this gets said over and over again. Since only one out of every five people can ever be frozen out in this way, and not all players are desperately pining to play with their buddies (sniffle, sniffle, cue the tears,) how can you claim that PGI is "not letting people play with their friends?" The more you analyze this argument, the less reasonable it is shown to be.

2. The matchmaker is not set up to match a team of exactly X players with exactly Y players. Leaving aside the effects of such a restrictive setup, this is not the claim that is being made. What's being said, I kid you not, is that a group of 5 players on one team and 11 players on another team would be balanced at any given Elo, because "they had to play as a team to get to that Elo, while the solo players got there on their own," as one poster put it. Do I really need to explain the obvious fallacy? Do you even have the data needed to predict the rate of match failures of such a hypothetical matchmaking setup? The answer rhymes with "go."

3. Speaking of fallacies, your stated argument is invalid on its face. It both begs the question and is false to fact. The Devs have given reasons why they're going to do what they're planning - it's not "just because" they're "unwilling or unable to split the queues properly." So, that part is simply untrue, even before we get to your fallacy of begging the question of what's "proper." I have yet to see a convincing argument as to why going to the expense and trouble of fragmenting the player base (which will skew the data they use to try and balance things,) is worth having 5-11 man teams. So that's a classic argument based on facts not in evidence - the textbook form is, "When did you stop beating your wife?" On that note, I guess we can add a third fallacy - your attempt to shift the burden of proof to me to refute you when you haven't actually offered any proof.

I won't dignify the idea that you will begin treating your own opinion with distrust with a specific refutation, either.

Do... do you want to try again?

A. If the planned MM is going to try to match mech for mech (as the Devs have said it would) then I see no reason that it can't try to match group size as well. I am sure groups wouldn't mind longer que times in exchange for better matches.

B. As for going through all that 'time and expense', they sure are dedicating a lot of time and effort to cater to 12 man groups who only represent 1% of all launches, compared to the 16% of other group sizes.

Novakaine, on 08 March 2014 - 09:54 AM, said:

Tonnage limits are only valid way for a truly fair drop model.
If the limit for said match limit is 650 tons.
Then both side will get 650 to do with as each side choose.
And of course I'm talking about private matches.
That insipid 3/3/3/3 should never get out of the barn.
Oh wait minute......no teams left.
PGI hates teams
Never mind forgot where I was.

Tonnage restrictions will never work until Awesomes are always a better choice than Jagermechs or Cataphracts. There are just too many examples of mechs of lower tonnage out performing mechs of higher tonnage.

[Void Angel]

Davers, on 11 March 2014 - 07:07 PM, said:

A. If the planned MM is going to try to match mech for mech (as the Devs have said it would) then I see no reason that it can't try to match group size as well. I am sure groups wouldn't mind longer que times in exchange for better matches.

B. As for going through all that 'time and expense', they sure are dedicating a lot of time and effort to cater to 12 man groups who only represent 1% of all launches, compared to the 16% of other group sizes.

A: That's true, as far as it goes - but I haven't seen any plans from PGI for that, and it's a different philosophy of match balance. It would also cause a higher failure rate for any length of queue timer, since the game would be trying to match people with more restrictive criteria. This is one of the reasons PGI gave us, if you recall. If you get a significant failure rate, you have to either increase the queue timeout limit, or else start relaxing the matchmaking criteria - which gets us right back to how much a larger team will affect the matches. If you have an 11-man team, and you're the odd man out, ironically that might not be so bad. But if only half the team, or three-quarters, is on dedictated voice coms and not talking to you, that might have different outcomes - and in any case a larger team on the other end means more people cooperating to kill you unless you adopt a "hide behind the premade" playing style. In short, it's quite possible that matches would not be better.

B: I haven't said anything about "all that" time and expense - I've asked whether the time and expense being advocated is worth the expected outcomes, and whether those outcomes are reasonable to expect. It's a matter of cost-effectiveness, not volume. Possibly increasing their server load on public matches to allow larger teams is also somewhat different from implementing a system where players pay for the ability to more narrowly define match parameters. Allowing larger teams, particularly midsize teams, runs the risk of creating games where the PuG players' collective contributions feel less important - and larger team sizes become less distinct an experience compared to 12-man play. The 12-man environment, on the other hand, is largely used by competitive teams, often for such things as MRBC, Marik Civil War, and RHoD. Since many of these custom tournaments have nonstandard drop compositions (take MRBC for example,) the potential for investment in this queue to pay for itself is present. Also, I'd expect that 12-man organized play - with the teams, competitions, and social organiztions that grow up around it - would be a way for the game to gain visibility via twitch.tv and the like. So expanding participation in 12-mans might be a good investment, while blurring the lines and increasing the matchmaking time in the PuG queue might not.

The quote you cited isn't a critique of people wanting larger team sizes - it's a defense of my critique of the emotionalistic language and shoddy logic used by many proponents of larger PuG teams. PGI has given us clearly stated reasons for why they're going with 4-man teams; claiming that they "just don't want to do it," is silly, and claiming they're acting "for no reason" is an out-and-out lie. That being said, while I reserve the right to disagree and object, I don't mind hearing reasonable responses (such as your own) on the subject. It is my patience with sophistry and dishonest thought that tends to be... limited. =) Thanks for your input.

PS: (where does that "1% of all launches" figure come from? I'm always interested in reliable data, but I haven't been able to source that one.)

[Davers]

Void Angel, on 12 March 2014 - 09:23 AM, said:

A: That's true, as far as it goes - but I haven't seen any plans from PGI for that, and it's a different philosophy of match balance. It would also cause a higher failure rate for any length of queue timer, since the game would be trying to match people with more restrictive criteria. This is one of the reasons PGI gave us, if you recall. If you get a significant failure rate, you have to either increase the queue timeout limit, or else start relaxing the matchmaking criteria - which gets us right back to how much a larger team will affect the matches. If you have an 11-man team, and you're the odd man out, ironically that might not be so bad. But if only half the team, or three-quarters, is on dedictated voice coms and not talking to you, that might have different outcomes - and in any case a larger team on the other end means more people cooperating to kill you unless you adopt a "hide behind the premade" playing style. In short, it's quite possible that matches would not be better.

B: I haven't said anything about "all that" time and expense - I've asked whether the time and expense being advocated is worth the expected outcomes, and whether those outcomes are reasonable to expect. It's a matter of cost-effectiveness, not volume. Possibly increasing their server load on public matches to allow larger teams is also somewhat different from implementing a system where players pay for the ability to more narrowly define match parameters. Allowing larger teams, particularly midsize teams, runs the risk of creating games where the PuG players' collective contributions feel less important - and larger team sizes become less distinct an experience compared to 12-man play. The 12-man environment, on the other hand, is largely used by competitive teams, often for such things as MRBC, Marik Civil War, and RHoD. Since many of these custom tournaments have nonstandard drop compositions (take MRBC for example,) the potential for investment in this queue to pay for itself is present. Also, I'd expect that 12-man organized play - with the teams, competitions, and social organiztions that grow up around it - would be a way for the game to gain visibility via twitch.tv and the like. So expanding participation in 12-mans might be a good investment, while blurring the lines and increasing the matchmaking time in the PuG queue might not.

The quote you cited isn't a critique of people wanting larger team sizes - it's a defense of my critique of the emotionalistic language and shoddy logic used by many proponents of larger PuG teams. PGI has given us clearly stated reasons for why they're going with 4-man teams; claiming that they "just don't want to do it," is silly, and claiming they're acting "for no reason" is an out-and-out lie. That being said, while I reserve the right to disagree and object, I don't mind hearing reasonable responses (such as your own) on the subject. It is my patience with sophistry and dishonest thought that tends to be... limited. =) Thanks for your input.

PS: (where does that "1% of all launches" figure come from? I'm always interested in reliable data, but I haven't been able to source that one.)

1. The 1% is in the same article that states groups are only 16%. You DID read the article, right?

2. People are emotional because they thought they were getting the 'next gen heir to MPBT:3025'. Something that many held up as a shining achievement of campaign style MW. PGI never promised this, but when things are kept intentionally vague people fill in with what they want or fear. And nothing has been more vague than CW.

3. If the players in the groups are willing to wait longer in que, why should anyone else care? Also, it would be unacceptable for a 12 man group to launch against anything less than 9. An 8 man group should never drop against a group less than 5. If those parameters can't be met then the search should FAIL, not open up to smaller groups. Players want good, challenging games. Pug stomps are neither for either side.

4. If PGI wants to help out 12 man groups they need to demystify them. They need to just be another group size. Then people won't be so scared to do them. Encouraging 12 man groups and supporting them, then taking them out of the general game population to play in their own separate leagues is not healthy for the game overall.

[Gyrok]

If PGI wants to demystify 12 mans, they need to understand that the current meta has a steep learning curve for new players.

Every single attempt to eliminate/curb the current meta only poses a minor inconvenience in some way, shape or form. Additionally, you need new players running 12 man drops and having fun. If they drop into a match and get an organized Clan faction, or a organized house faction, or even one of the better merc corps teams running 12 mans...well, let us just say I have more than just a few 12-0/12-1/12-2 screen shots from 12 man teams we have run when we came upon a PUG group from ComStar or NGNG that was messing around. I cannot imagine their results would be dramatically different for the other groups previously mentioned either.

On that point, no one likes to get face rolled constantly, and many of those players cannot afford or have not yet gotten victors and highlanders and kitted them out, much less spent the requisite time playing the mech to be considered proficient if not expert at operating it.

Therefore, as long as the meta runs toward ballistics + PPC assaults and heavies, there will likely not be an appealing choice to run 12 man drops for PUGs, even with a separate queue. That will only end up being the "practice grounds" for the groups that do not want to pay per match...

In fact, I might wager that the pay per match thought process might be over run when they see that many people refuse to pay per match period. Premium time requirements seem to not bother too many people on that front, and I think that would honestly make premium time more valuable than it currently is...likely driving up the numbers of people buying it.

Edited by Gyrok, 12 March 2014 - 11:54 AM.

[Davers]

Gyrok, on 12 March 2014 - 11:52 AM, said:

If PGI wants to demystify 12 mans, they need to understand that the current meta has a steep learning curve for new players.

Every single attempt to eliminate/curb the current meta only poses a minor inconvenience in some way, shape or form. Additionally, you need new players running 12 man drops and having fun. If they drop into a match and get an organized Clan faction, or a organized house faction, or even one of the better merc corps teams running 12 mans...well, let us just say I have more than just a few 12-0/12-1/12-2 screen shots from 12 man teams we have run when we came upon a PUG group from ComStar or NGNG that was messing around. I cannot imagine their results would be dramatically different for the other groups previously mentioned either.

On that point, no one likes to get face rolled constantly, and many of those players cannot afford or have not yet gotten victors and highlanders and kitted them out, much less spent the requisite time playing the mech to be considered proficient if not expert at operating it.

Therefore, as long as the meta runs toward ballistics + PPC assaults and heavies, there will likely not be an appealing choice to run 12 man drops for PUGs, even with a separate queue. That will only end up being the "practice grounds" for the groups that do not want to pay per match...

In fact, I might wager that the pay per match thought process might be over run when they see that many people refuse to pay per match period. Premium time requirements seem to not bother too many people on that front, and I think that would honestly make premium time more valuable than it currently is...likely driving up the numbers of people buying it.

You are more pessimistic than I.

Not all 12 man drops are total meta. But there is the mentality of 'this is a 12 MAN DROP, we NEED to bring MOAR META!'. If we make the 12 man drops 'not special', the more diversity we will see. We have a unit in our TS, the 1st Sierra Rangers, who drops exclusively in Marik mechs. So no Victors, Highlanders, Cataphracts, or Jagers. Doing 12 mans with them is a blast.

[Kageru Ikazuchi]

Good points ... I'm not trying to snipe / cherry pick your post, just picking the one point that I would like to comment on ...

Void Angel, on 12 March 2014 - 09:23 AM, said:

A: ... higher failure rate for any length of queue timer, since the game would be trying to match people with more restrictive criteria.

What I think PGI should do to control / monitor / mitigate this ...

• In addition to the new MM rules (3/3/3/3, one team per side, Elo buckets), add one more rule: opposing teams shall be of approximately the same size (+/- 1 for starters).
  
• Start with 2-4 man teams (what we have now) and gradually increase the limit ... maybe by 2 every month.
  
• If the disparity in group size causes signficant delays in queue times for larger groups, then increase the +/- 1 to +/- 2, etc.
  
• If the win-loss ratio for groups of differing sizes (say a 6-man vs. a 4-man) is consistently and signficantly different, then there needs to be a method to compute Elo (which is not a measure of skill, but a win-loss prediction) differently for larger groups, to help the match maker make more even games.
  
• Ultimately, the goal should be that a team could gradually fill up and change sizes over the course of a playing session, augmented by solo players as required, and would be matched against more-or-less equal teams, regardless of the number of people grouped together ... all the way up to 12-man teams.

At this point, the public 12-man queue becomes redundant.

[Void Angel]

Davers, on 12 March 2014 - 09:45 AM, said:

1. The 1% is in the same article that states groups are only 16%. You DID read the article, right?

Of course. I also went back over it when the datum in question was cited - to no avail. Where, exactly, in the article does it give this information? I've done a word search for "1" "one," "percent," and "per cent" and come up empty on all counts.

[Davers]

Void Angel, on 12 March 2014 - 05:18 PM, said:

Of course. I also went back over it when the datum in question was cited - to no avail. Where, exactly, in the article does it give this information? I've done a word search for "1" "one," "percent," and "per cent" and come up empty on all counts.

Actually, it's mentioned in the NGNG interview with Bryan Ekman

http://mwomercs.com/...-3-aired-22214/

This is the summary.

[Void Angel]

Sweet; I try to read all the stuff they release, but I miss stuff. I really wish they'd put all their interviews in the Command Chair.

[INKBALL]

I fear that game will gets more ''meta'' again: You can't say a 20tons = a 35 and neither a 40 tons = a 55...

So, we will fight against 35-55-75-100 and maybe some -5 tonners (with more hardpoints or with jj or mech specific situations).

So it wont really balance the weight, it will just bring it to a more ''meta'' situation.

Solutions 1: Put a lobby with a maximum team weight so ppl can change mechs until they set ready and launch (you could have 120 secs or so,), if they weight 900 over a 800 maximum, 100-105ton will removed from the drop (depending of tje possibilities), preferably one mech, but possibly 2.

Solution 2: Let the matchmaker balance weight, put a 20-30tons difference max (and can even balance with a elo bonus/malus via difference in tonnage(example 1 ton=5 elo), so finally it would remain elo balance).


Finally, i think 3/3/3/3 is as bad as no weight balance.
Have a nice day,