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Presently, MWO's actual wait time is incredibly variable (ranging from 10-200+ seconds), and it's causing a lot of frustration--both for players that choose to sit patiently for the match to start, and for those who do not. Personally, I (along with my 30-40 MWO teammates) hit the "Search" button and immediately go do something else for a couple of minutes. When I come back, sometimes the game has started, sometimes it hasn't, and sometimes I'm already dead--but for me and all of my friends, that's actually preferable to staring at a motionless screen for a couple of minutes.
Fact 2: The longer the countdown (now 70 seconds), the more people will "tab out" or leave the room entirely to do other things. This increases the likelihood that people crash out (further increasing the delay) or are AFK for some portion (or all) of the match.
Obviously, this is frustrating to people that stay in-game, because they have to do without 2-6 mechs for the first few minutes of every match. However, to the person that walked away, there's every incentive to keep doing this: their wait time effectively drops to zero (because they were being productive elsewhere), and if they return to the computer and find their mech dead, they can simply relaunch and walk away again.
Fact 3: Other companies (particularly Blizzard) handle long matchmaking times better. If you've played Starcraft 2 competitively, for instance, you already know that the client encourages you to go do other things by grabbing focus and then playing an audible alert when your match is about to start.
Proposed Solution:
1. Implement a short, fixed countdown timer (less than 15 seconds).
2. Have MWO grab focus when the countdown timer hits 5 seconds.
Edited by FuzzyLog1c, 19 December 2014 - 03:16 AM.
