Posted 26 April 2015 - 11:49 AM
Keep in mind, everyone, that this is a test event that is the culmination of the first part of the CW Beta. It was never really intended to work perfectly the first time. Half the point of something like this is to see what kinds of problems crop up.
I've done 13 drops so far, and I've earned 13 points. I did two solo drops, but the queue was super painful and it took forever due to constantly being bumped to the back of the line when an impatient random bailed on the group. All the rest I've done via LFG, which is an amazing tool. Once you get the nucleus of a solid 12-man together you can generally get much faster drops without the queue resets from random leavers.
I will say, though, that it's always painful, even with a mostly consistent 12-man PUG created via LFG, to run into a proper 12-man single-unit drop. Integrated VOIP and LFG capability make it less painful, sure, in fact pretty much every one of those drops against a proper unit premade all but a couple of our pilots still got their 80, and the premades knew they were in a fight, but still, we had no realistic hope of victory. Regardless, the matches were all fun, and whenever we were in against something other than a premade unit drop we had a very good chance of winning.
I have only two issues with the event so far:
1 - I think it might have benefitted from having three iterations of Tukayyid. Essentially three different queues. This would split up the IS population significantly, and would further encourage players to queue as Clan since they'd get essentially instant matches simply by queueing to whichever planet was lowest in attacker population. I've seen the attacker queue go as high as 20+, which tells me that shifting population around isn't the only solution to the queue problem. You also need more concurrent matches. If that means creating a second or a third queue, then maybe that's what needs to be done.
2 - Points should stack. What does this mean? Score/80 should equal your points (ignoring any remainder). If I pull a 320+ point game, I should get 4 points for the event. If I get 160, I should get 2. This is especially true when there is a hard limit to the number of matches I can even launch, based on things like queue size and prior obligations.
One last thing, regarding the IS queue. If you don't have a random leaver, it only takes around ten minutes to go from queueing up to launching, assuming a ~40 queue size. That's not bad. The problem here lies with the random leavers kicking you back to the end of the line. Improvements both to Faction Chat and to LFG, and enabling VOIP in a team lobby, would go a very long way to fixing this issue.
For example, when you form a CW group, allow us to set it as either faction pure or mixed. For an event like this, we could run a mixed group without any problems. Unfortunately, LFG only shows faction pure pilots, which severely limits the available mechwarrior pool and drastically increases the time it takes to find a full 12 players.
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Stefka Kerensky, on 25 April 2015 - 10:06 PM, said:
