174 replies to this topic

[Naduk]

This is awesome news
The improvements to MM speed and match quality will be great

I cannot believe the whiners in here complaining about this

[AssaultPig]

CHH Badkarma, on 06 October 2014 - 03:18 PM, said:

Better matches?
But, but I thought 3x3x3x3x3xxxx
was supposed to fix everything? Riiight.

maybe if the public MM actually enforced 3x3x3x3, it would have. But no, the queue is 75% assault/heavy so that's what you get in games

[corpse256]

The problem is guys that the matches are not fair due to the release valves packing players without the same elo or 3x4 rule not going into effect, causing matches to go sour for several games. For example on a saturday I played conquest only got wiped out quickly or sweeped every match, seemed like I was the only high end player and everyone else had no clue how to play. This will fix this problem and this was mentioned in first town hall meeting. Doing a vote system like this would help some players not get blasted right off the bat and could give this game a better match for everyone. The vote system not here to take away your game modes its here to make your games more fair and balanced, because right now its your either in a good match or your in a slaughter dome. I'd rather be in the matches best suited for me regaurdless if I have to switch game modes or not.

[Sereglach]

Personally I think people who whine and cry, or vehemently hate, or think they're "superior" for playing a certain game mode should try to get over themselves for a few minutes to realize that the purpose of this is to improve match quality, particularly for group matches.

Most other games out there, in order to have a more reliable matchmaker, do not allow the freedoms that the MWO matchmaker currently has in place for players. Also, in many of those other games (Halo instantly comes to mind) you can be utterly outvoted on your choices and preferences. Your vote is not taken into account, at all, if the majority prefers otherwise. The most some games let you pick from is "Free-for-all" types, "Team Based" types, or "Co-op vs. AI" types . . . if they even have that many options. Any other variables you're allowed to "pick" are merely weighted slightly into what the matchmaker MIGHT use to help build a match . . . unless the perfect fit is waiting for you, you're not getting it. This MWO tweak, on the other hand, still gives you a great deal of power in the matchmaking process.

Also, quite frankly, leaving a match just because you get a game mode you don't like is terrible sportsmanship, and just shows a complete lack of character on that player's part.

Do I like it when one remaining mech runs away and hides on Skirmish? No.
Do I like it when a team just hides in their turrets on Assault and never comes out to fight? No.
Do I like it when a game of Conquest turns into "ring-around-the-rosie"? No.

HOWEVER, I don't let a few bad experiences in a game mode keep me from checking all modes when I queue up for a match. You're always going to have some bad experiences in games, period. Some people make it their life's work to ensure everyone around them has bad experiences . . . because that's how they get their jollies off. There are ways to deal with them. I find it strikingly easy to ignore the "i'm a uber degree blackbelt mma champion olympian powerlifter nobel prize winning delta force super soldier mega genius who's 2 1337 4 U" keyboard quarterbacks, because it's a bloody game. At no point should you be taking a game so seriously that there's no enjoyment whatsoever, either.

However, listening to all this griping over a tweak to the matchmaker . . . it's just sad. This tweak won't prevent you getting matches you want, but isn't guaranteeing the game modes you want, either, AND it even takes everyone's votes into account and weights the chances accordingly. Basically, instead of the matchmaker weighting FIRST-"Player Hard Blockers" and THEN-ELO, it will be taking FIRST-ELO (thereby improving match quality) and THEN-"Player Votes" (which will be chosen randomly with additional weight on larger vote volumes, to give everyone a chance to get what they want). This is going to make much better matches, overall, as even talked about in the first Town Hall Meeting with Russ.

I'm not putting up this wall of text because I'm upset or angry, but because I think people need to take a minute to put things into perspective before they just blow gaskets all over the place.

. . . besides . . . if all the "super 1337" players out there are right in the game mode selections of their ELO bracket . . . then they have nothing to worry about, because they'll be matched tightly within their ELO range, first.

[MuonNeutrino]

I am very sad to see that this game mode voting will apparently be coming to the solo queue as well. I am one of those horrible, terrible bad people who hates skirmish and assault. Since the stat reset, my conquest matches outnumber my combined assault and skirmish matches by more than 4:1. And this change is going to massively reduce my chances to play the game mode I actually enjoy playing, since apparently nobody but me is actually interested in objective-based games. Skirmish and assault are boring as ****, in my opinion, and at least in the solo queue favor nothing besides making the biggest, blobbiest, slowest deathball you can, which marginalizes all of the mechs I actually like to play. I can say right now that I will likely be quitting out of any skirmish matches I end up in on alpine or terra therma, because I will stop playing this game before I suffer through any more utterly ******** standoffs on top of the alpine mountain or in the terra therma crater. This is a change that is not welcome, and it's the first change in a long time that actually attacks my core enjoyment of the game.

All of that personal displeasure aside, however, it's also a stupid system from a simple mathematical view, at least for the solo queue, because it almost completely removes any one solo player's ability to influence the game modes he plays. Your individual vote will be worth almost nothing when it comes to affecting the odds of any individual game mode being chosen, and that is a mathematical fact. (TL:DR - your vote can never improve the odds of getting a particular gamemode by more than 10%, and will usually change the odds by less than 5%, with a worst case scenario of a 1.8% improvement.)

Let's take the best-case scenario, where your vote is diluted as little as possible because everyone else in the game only picked one game mode to vote for. If you have no preference and vote for all 3, there are a total of 17 votes - the 3 default ones, your 3, and the other 11 players' 11. If you choose one particular game mode to vote for, there are instead a total of 15 votes - 12 from the players, and the default 3.

Let x be the number of other players that vote for a particular game mode, say conquest. In the case where you vote for all game modes, the odds of conquest being picked are (x+2)/17. In the case where you *only* vote for conquest, the odds of conquest being chosen are now (x+2)/15. In other words, the chance of conquest being chosen if you vote solely for it, relative to the chance for it to be chosen if you have no preference, is improved by a factor of 17/15ths. Obviously the actual percentage improvement this represents will vary with x, the number of other players who vote for conquest, and will be largest when x is largest. In the absolute best case where all 11 other players also vote for conquest only (which probably will never happen this side of the heat death of the universe), the improvement is from 76.5% to 86.7% - an improvement of 10.2%.

And that is the *absolute best case* - your vote will *never* swing the outcome by more than 10%. If you take a more realistic scenario with a wider spread of preferences among the other players, the improvement quickly drops to less than 5%. In a worst case scenario where every other player votes 'all', your vote improves the odds of getting a particular game mode by a whopping 1.8%.

This is not a system of player choice. This is a system where a solo player will be forced to play games whose distribution of game modes is identical to the distribution of preferences among the general population of their elo bracket to within 5%. Your preferences will give you your preferred game mode one extra time out of every twenty games you play. This is, frankly, bullshit.

[Bob Jenkins]

I want to be able to select my game mode. I only wish you would publicize ELO or however you are deciding teams in matchmaking. If I have to wait 6 minutes to join a team that can't stay live longer than 4 minutes, please let me know why.

[Darth Futuza]

I have no idea if I like this or not.

[Mystere]

My new friends:

ESC ... Quit Match

or simply:

ALT-F4

Edited by Mystere, 06 October 2014 - 07:27 PM.

[-Natural Selection-]

You know is going to be another reason for people to hate 12 man groups right?

If they dictate the mode, then guess that's all I will be dropping with.

Edited by Mickey Knoxx, 06 October 2014 - 07:51 PM.

[N0MAD]

Im telling PGI right now if i get dropped into a conquest match i will just leave the match.
I do not pay money or give my time to play something i hate, sorry my playtime, i will not be forced to play something that irritates me.

[Naduk]

N0MAD, on 06 October 2014 - 07:39 PM, said:

Im telling PGI right now if i get dropped into a conquest match i will just leave the match.
I do not pay money or give my time to play something i hate, sorry my playtime, i will not be forced to play something that irritates me.

I hate with a passion skirmish mode
Its stupid and does not represent war in any way
Its arena combat pure and simple

However there are 2 things i hate much more than skirmish
Absurdly long que times and grossly unbalanced teams

I am willing to play on what ever stupid game mode you think is the best from time to time so that i do not need to experience 15min wait times for a game that has a guaranteed 3min maximum survival time

My unit is small and consists mostly of noobs
I just taught 3 of them last night how to tell when armour is missing from an enemy (shoot at red was enough prior)
my small squads have faced elite champions such as house of lords multiple times times per night, per week
Its not even a contest for them but the match maker is forced into this position by hard lock choices and people like you who's heads are filled with bricks

I am sick of losing players i recruit because 0-12 matches are the norm with 15mins waits in between each bad experience

Edited by Naduk, 06 October 2014 - 07:58 PM.

[Hellzero]

I don't like the idea that I would be forced to play Skirmish as it tends to make a light mech and its life without ECM rather... sloped with all those Assault/Heavy mechs built for Skirmish. But would I bite the bullet and see what it would do to the MM?
- Yes, I'd be willing to see how it plays out before shooting down what it holds.

3x4 was never meant to "fix everything", it was never stated that it would; ever played *certain f2p tank game with its MM*? Ever seen what they complain about it in the forums? We're quite civil regarding it in here... the MM is a problem in any and every MM implemented game; and it "never will be fixed" so everyone would be happy.
***

Saying this, I'll abstain from making any judgmental comments before seeing how it actually works.
- People tend to be prejudiced & condemning by nature, I intend to be more patient in this... PGI has been getting it together, let's see if this makes the game better; or worse; after its out.

(people condemned the Clan mechs & their appearance before they were out, and now people would not want to live without them, "they nailed it", just to remind people)

Edited by Hellzero, 06 October 2014 - 08:00 PM.

[Triordinant]

Naduk, on 06 October 2014 - 05:36 PM, said:

I cannot believe the whiners in here complaining about this

Don't worry. The vast majority of players never post on the forums. Some never even look at the forums. But I'm pretty sure most will exit the match if they're forced to play a game mode they don't want to play.

[The IronSaint]

I forget what game it was but if you quit games before they ended it would keep track and after to many it would stop you from joining a game for some time just like stopping people team jumping to the wining team every game of BF4 and PGI might have to implement something like this to stop the game jumpers. I like the idea of this mm but I never let others tell me what is good or bad till I try it for my self but I'm not a copy and past meta build runner so this dose not bother me at all I would like to see 3 man's and 2 man's put back in solo drop buts that's for another discussion.

Edited by The IronSaint, 06 October 2014 - 08:49 PM.

[-Natural Selection-]

Naduk, on 06 October 2014 - 07:43 PM, said:

I hate with a passion skirmish mode
Its stupid and does not represent war in any way
Its arena combat pure and simple

I am sorry but when I was in the military we did not sit on a base and wait for it to cap. It was kinda like you kill them or they kill you. Just personal experience though, cant speak for modern warfare.

[Deathlike]

OK, this is a massive screw up, and before people start complaining... let's go back to the context of this suggestion...

PGI/Russ had put up a vote maybe a month ago, essentially asking "would you mind getting less options, in order to improve the MM's matching for skill?"

The majority of people said yes (it was over 50% easily), but I don't honestly think people understood the implications of that vote.

Edit - Relevant Link:
http://mwomercs.com/...__fromsearch__1

Well, this is the result.

My problem with the actual question is what PGI is NOT addressing with respect with the modes... particularly Assault and Skirmish. Yes, I voted yes, but ONLY if they addressed said modes.

The thing is, those modes actually need improvements. Skirmish can't really be improved, so it is hard to suggest changes for a mode that is pretty simplistic.

I know some players in my unit would REFUSE to play Conquest. I just hate Conquest because of the lack of rewards... and while PGI is claiming that they will add more rewards (they haven't listed any or suggested what is in store), I doubt it would actually fix what ails it.

The quick summary of the entire Command Post is literally "you will have to play a mode you'll hate, regardless" and while the likelihood of the chance is low, but for some people... one match in the mode that they have most is one too much. That's going to hurt this game... and to some degree, is a slight admission that the playerbase isn't large enough to be MM friendly. This suggestion PGI put up WOULD help the MM, because people doing one mode in some ways ARE hurting the queue quality. That is bad. However, it would be more effective to improve ALL MODES (well, Conquest and Assault) so that everyone is LESS LIKELY to not select them. That's the best way of going about it.

I remember back when there were discussions on how the server spawned the system (gamemode and map) and understood that the map randomness is dictated by their weighting (like, currently the new map is highly weighted, thus occurring more often). I'm unsure if the same thing happens with the game modes. Currently, I believe Conquest is not running very often on the servers... for whatever the reason... it could just be a random occurrence, but I almost always run all 3 (usually leaving Conquest out when my unit doesn't want to play it). It's hard to explain otherwise, but whatever... it is what it is.

TL;DR - PGI did this to "improve the MM", but it's an admission of MM problems due to a shrinking playerbase and MORE FOCUS should be put on improving the modes, instead of just "leaving them as is" for the longest of times... since the introduction of 12v12 late Open Beta/near the "Launch" in September 2013. That's the reality here.

Edited by Deathlike, 06 October 2014 - 09:34 PM.

[Sky Hawk]

I really hope, in the near future PGI take the time to develop a hard+vote-choice combinated system..

I understand, that in higher ELO levels the players want "better quality", they want play against very similar teams.. But, in my part of the game, quality means, that you can just hope, that some of your teammates are better players as you... Because, in every match, where I am the best of my team... that's always a 0:12 lose for us... And, if both side will be so "good" as I am... than, it will be mostly a 0:0 tie. (Actually, I think for MM will be really hard work to find another 23 players, who can't really aim and drive.. like me..)

If MM send me to Conquer or Assault, is fine for me... But, please nobody should cry, if I lose against some turrets in my Jenner-LRM-Boat... or run out of time, if I try to cap some points on the other side of the map, with my under 60 kph Assault-Snipers..

I buyed and build my Mechs for "only Skirmish", because, I want to play just Skirmish, because that is what I least somehow can... If I can't.. OK, I play other modes against my will.. but, then don't yell me on chat.. "Noob!".. Because, that is an affront against them.. They are mostly much better, than I am..

Edited by Sky Hawk, 06 October 2014 - 09:52 PM.

[Xarian]

This is a good change. It leads directly toward a map voting system - game gives you 3 options, you check the appropriate boxes, etc.

Also this system will allow for new game modes to be added without further screwing up the MM, and will lead to a bigger pool of mechs for eventual tonnage matching.

[Kmieciu]

The only gripe I have with conquest mode is that, according to my stats, the rewards on average are 20k C-Bills less than assault.

Edited by Kmieciu, 06 October 2014 - 10:21 PM.

[Elizander]

If it always swings towards one mode or another an artificial weight can be placed on less popular modes or there can simply be a minimum percentage that a specific mode will appear regardless of votes. If all votes are 100% one mode then it's fine to have that mode but leaving a 20%-25% combined chance minimum for the other two modes to appear as long as they have at least 1 vote might be okay.