1142 replies to this topic

[Lily from animove]

Magnakanus, on 06 September 2015 - 11:08 PM, said:

Hi Russ,
I would much more preferr a dynamic 4x1 setup than being limited to only 4 people. It sucks for the 5th guy to be the odd man out, plain and simple, no way around that. I really would like to continue playing MWO, but when I have to choose between excluding friends from drops or playing a different game then option 2 will always win.
Something somewhere has to give. At least one Q has to be "put on your big boy pants". Pick one and stick to it please. Solo Q is "casual", sounds like group Q will become more casual as well, so will CW be "big boy" or are you going to soften that up as well for casual players?

and how many are basically "excluded" to paly with their friends due to bein a 2 man is basically unplayable unless both are higher end skill players?

and enarly any other MMO has a amx group size by soemwhere between 4 and 6 anyways and most of the time ther eis a reason for this: content is not supportet for specific "free for all" groups. It messes with the way how the game is build. and MWO has the same issue here in the group queue. What we ideally would like to have obvously is not possible and aworking, so you need to find the most viable mechanic for a given situation. That does of course not fit everyone needs, but when a multiplayergame is havign like 84%in the solo queue while nearly all dual group players said "Grp Q has no point for them"

[Rayne Vickers]

Lunatic_Asylum, on 06 September 2015 - 08:48 PM, said:

4. Add visible PSR to everyone. Press "Q" to see it in the game.

Absolutely NOT, unless it's an opt-in.

[Magna Canus]

Lily from animove, on 07 September 2015 - 12:29 AM, said:

and how many are basically "excluded" to paly with their friends due to bein a 2 man is basically unplayable unless both are higher end skill players?

and enarly any other MMO has a amx group size by soemwhere between 4 and 6 anyways and most of the time ther eis a reason for this: content is not supportet for specific "free for all" groups. It messes with the way how the game is build. and MWO has the same issue here in the group queue. What we ideally would like to have obvously is not possible and aworking, so you need to find the most viable mechanic for a given situation. That does of course not fit everyone needs, but when a multiplayergame is havign like 84%in the solo queue while nearly all dual group players said "Grp Q has no point for them"

Real solid numbers are the only way to settle the "who is left behind and who is the majority" issue. Fact is, having 3x4, or 4x3, or 6x2 degrades gameplay significantly, down to a (very) tiny step below solo-Q levels. When you have no more than 2 groups per side the gameplay levels out to an enjoyable state. The entire point of group-Q is playing with a group you know/like and with as few "randoms" as possible.

[Kjudoon]

Psr tier should NOT be available before match and never attached to name. It will make it easier to essentially bully players by allowing an impromptu target list for some players making the game even more unneccessarilly difficult. Don't think players will do it? You underestimate the character of an unethical tryhard.

[Will HellFire]

Russ Bullock, on 04 September 2015 - 11:49 AM, said:

Question: if we went back to a game mode voting system - how would you do it differently than last time? You might need a review or dig up old posts to remember. But in short it wasn't top voted mode that you got but that mode if it had 80% of the vote had an 80% chance. So you could still get one of the other modes including for example a 5% chance for one of them.

Again this would be great because it would open the door to adding more game modes, something w have been adverse to doing as it would create more buckets.

Personally, I dont care about which mode I drop with. As long as Im with my teammates, we always deploy to kill all the enemy.

Sometimes they manage to cap base or get to 750 points before we kill all of them, but its a minority of the times.

So yeah please go ahead and do what you need to do regarding gamemodes.

[Lily from animove]

Magnakanus, on 07 September 2015 - 12:54 AM, said:

Real solid numbers are the only way to settle the "who is left behind and who is the majority" issue. Fact is, having 3x4, or 4x3, or 6x2 degrades gameplay significantly, down to a (very) tiny step below solo-Q levels. When you have no more than 2 groups per side the gameplay levels out to an enjoyable state. The entire point of group-Q is playing with a group you know/like and with as few "randoms" as possible.

that is the reaosn why the 12 man groups are the smallest population in MWO? looks like numbers of facts disagree with you here.

[Jon Gotham]

Russ Bullock, on 03 September 2015 - 02:46 PM, said:

I really want to avoid this - it will only degrade the solo queue experience at least by some amount.

With all due respect Russ, we have an extremely vocal and aggressive pro solo section of the community-which are rabidly anti group/teamwork...surely you have seen the daily threads created?
This is bad news for the idea you guys initially had of a community driven game, because currently it isn't due to our playerbase being so rabidly pro solo/anti group. CW is struggling due to this, we have a playerbase that REFUSES to talk or group or interact as a community...
Allowing those who want to "opt in" to group queue can only be a good thing to be honest. I fail to see how it would degrade solo queue...it might be say 50 people short, so what?
The group queue would then get those solo players who are open to teamwork and social play...it might even lead to units picking up those stray players:)
Surely we are at a point now where group/social play should be being promoted-not restricted? We don't have the numbers of WoT-you can't operate like them mate! You are not going to make your revenue via player turnover....
I know you guys are trying your best and it's an insanely difficult job-but you should bear in mind that groupers in games tend to be the long timers who tend to spend the majority of the income.
My friends list is now VERY barren, hardy anyone comes online these days. All of these players were unit/group players. A good 75%+ of them were $2000+ spenders too....we are talking around 15+ people here....

Do you have anybody employed that specifically looks at player behaviour/trends?

Edited by kamiko kross, 07 September 2015 - 03:58 AM.

[Kjudoon]

how to set up the group queue opt in.

Put a checkbox when ungrouped saying "Group Queue Opt In" in the choices right next to mode and server. Now the person drops in both simultaneously, the same way all the servers and modes checked are included.

Issue is now solved with awesomeness.

[NextGame]

group size limits sucked before, and they will suck again when you bring them back. All it achieves is to alienate & stop people from playing the game as they are unable to be able to play with others that they wish to play with.

Edited by NextGame, 07 September 2015 - 05:31 AM.

[Magna Canus]

Lily from animove, on 07 September 2015 - 03:45 AM, said:

that is the reaosn why the 12 man groups are the smallest population in MWO? looks like numbers of facts disagree with you here.

I play daily and am in 1 or more 12 man groups daily of mixed membership, so I don't think that they are as rare as you would like them to be.

[TheCaptainJZ]

I rarely play in the group queue and when I do, it's just a 2-man. We lost most of the games and they tended to feel quite lopsided. There were no "big groups" on either team. I think the largest was 6, but sometimes there were 2 4-mans or 2 6-mans. It's hard to say for certain since groups could include members of different tags, but it seemed like the MM, in trying to jigsaw teams, often had the even-numbered or easiest to fit together on one side. The important note here is that the match was more imbalanced than the actual team makeup seemed to be. One outstanding problem with the group queue is how it affected Elo and now PSR. In the solo queue, I'm a better player so when I join the group queue, my score puts me higher than I should be for group queue. First step should be to separate those two numbers if it isn't. For sure. The other big hurdle in group queue is the simple lack of players compared to the solo queue. The more players you have, the easier it is for MM to balance. Pure and simple. But we don't have direct control over that.

Now, I'd hate to limit players from playing what they want so I think the first solution should be to allow solo players to opt in because having that spare person would probably solve 80% of that jigsaw problem. Second step should be to implement a team tonnage min and max. To do this, implement the team lobby feature from CW. After that, the next course of action should be to randomize game mode for the group queue. I don't know if you really want to make it a voting system or just make it pure random. Any course of action PGI takes, should be small adjustments. I'd say test it, but there's no way enough people will logon for it to give them useful data.

Edited by TheCaptainJZ, 07 September 2015 - 06:38 AM.

[CLANBOY FFI]

This post Russ is about players and i ask you to read it.

I LOVE THIS GAME. I have in fact Spent about $4000 dollars on it. I mention this not to deploy one- upmanship but to let you know I try to support PGI as i can. That said, I am thinking of quitting as i just cant stand 10 / 12 unit drops that crush our team in 60 seconds. Time after time after time. I used to love the 4 man groups as it was a test of skill and not just a murder death ball against a quivering group of pugs.

My Unit The FFI pride our selves on taking new pilots and putting them in our groups to help and teach them how to fight a mech. We have made many firm friends and are sad to see their spirit get crush after a hour of getting wiped out by 228 and other elite groups. They end up going inactive, a loss not just to our unit but to PGI.

Use the CW for 12 man deathballs and put the fun back in the game. You have tried to hard to please many people and lost the one thing that matters the most. The FUN of fighting a mech, not the squashed in 60 seconds.

So i say 4 man groups even 1-1-1-1 is fine as we would take turns on class.

Regards

[Ano]

I'm one of those un-united solo players some of you seem to dislike so much. My point of view on this, FWIW:

• Group size limits are always tricky, but a hard limit of 4 people seems like it could hurt some of the most committed players. Some of the other ideas (to do with even sizes only and/or opt-ins from the solo queue) might be worth trying first.
  
• While 1/1/1/1 might work for large groups, for a 4 person group that seems like it would seriously limit those 4 people's ability to play together inside the game. Are there other options? Someone somewhere floated the idea of "heavy" and "light" groups, based on 0/0/2/2 and 2/2/0/0. Would that be too complicated to factor into the matchmaker?
  
• Whatever PGI decides to do, it's easy to imagine that it might take a few iterations to get it right. If at all possible, it might be worth spending a little extra time building out the backend so that PGI can quickly/easily make changes to the way the queues are managed without being stuck to the patch cycle. That allows the possibility of trying a "crazy" idea for 72hrs to gather data without excessive patching and downtime. Could it be as simple as putting a "message of the day" window into the client, which could be shown when necessary to explain what the current rules are for the group queue, and then doing all of the other work on the backend?

As far as the "solo player" part goes, a solo player is not necessarily a player who does not want to co-operate with others, or play selfishly all the time. MWO's social features are underdeveloped, and the recruitment forums are odd, particularly now that they come under the Community Warfare heading and are divided up by House/Clan, making the search for a unit unnecessarily complex even before you get to the always difficult "what does a unit/clan/guild's description of itself really mean?" problem. I'd hazard a guess that even for solo players who know Battletech, and therefore understand what the houses/clans are, most of them are looking for a group that they can play a few games with, not to pledge loyalty to the co-ordinator/captain-general/whoever.


Some personal history for any interested:

Spoiler

When I started playing MWO it was the first online multiplayer game I'd played since I stopped playing WoW, where I'd been (eventually) a guild and raid leader in a casual raiding group. I wasn't really looking to commit the amount of time that I ended up devoting to WoW, although I'm not sure that exactly worked as planned. I also didn't particularly want to have scheduled activities -- I wanted to be able to sit down and play for an hour (or 3 hours) when it suited me, not between 8pm and 11pm GMT on {these} nights.

I did quite like the idea of joining a casual unit though, and finding a group who I could play with in a slightly co-ordinated fashion when my availability coincided with others in the unit. When looked though, I realised that there was very little in the way of social interaction in-game for solo players. In-game chat was (and is) extremely spartan, compared to what I was used to, with no obvious way to whisper an individual player or any way to communicate outside the match itself. Group/unit invites arrive with NO text content whatsoever, and there's no definitive way to find out which unit a player is affiliated with (outside a specific match) if they don't have a link to their unit's website in their profile and/or post on the forums with a unit-based signature.

I did look at the recruitment section of the forum, but found it quite hard to figure out which units would offer what I'm looking for (and would want what little I bring). Aaand, I was having reasonable amounts of fun shooting things in the solo queue.

All that aside, I don't think I play solo like a selfish idiot *all the time*, although I'm no stranger to Captain Cockup. The most fun moments in the solo queue are those moments when I realise that I and another player (or possibly the rest of your lance) are aligned and supporting each other; the addition of VOIP and the recent change to PSR has, for me at least, increased the number of matches I play in where someone is calling out match events and suggesting positions/targets etc -- these tend to be the better matches, win or lose.

[Wolfhagen]

Magnakanus, on 07 September 2015 - 12:54 AM, said:

Real solid numbers are the only way to settle the "who is left behind and who is the majority" issue. Fact is, having 3x4, or 4x3, or 6x2 degrades gameplay significantly, down to a (very) tiny step below solo-Q levels. When you have no more than 2 groups per side the gameplay levels out to an enjoyable state. The entire point of group-Q is playing with a group you know/like and with as few "randoms" as possible.

What he says.

[Obadiah333]

In other words, the return of the sync drop. excellent choice.

[Tarriss Halcyon]

I rarely play group queue. I don't use TS very often if I can avoid it, and while I was for a long time a member of a unit, said unit had two members, myself and Ronan Windrine and one of those two rarely could get on due to internet concerns and other problems. It wasn't me.
That being said, our experience as a two-man was not entirely negative, the last time we played it. Would have been around May to June, somewhere in that area before he dissolved our unit, the Ravenslayers. And we won almost as many as we lost, in part because of his skill as a scout and our shared abilities as tacticians.

Do I support opt-in solo players into group? I'm not going to say no. Players in the Group queue are more likely to be responsive to coms, and if not are typically experienced enough to figure out the message you're trying to get across without shouting expletives at them via text chat.

Do I support the smaller groups? Doesn't bother me one iota. If it happens, it happens. Might consider finding myself a new group, now that Ronan's found himself a new unit.

Do I want to see the flat-balance? Not at all. 1/1/1/1 or any variation on that theme isn't good, and it doesn't represent the Battletech Canon. Furthermore, it doesn't resemble any other MechWarrior or Battletech spinoff game at all. Sometimes you get a fast recon unit facing a heavy combat unit. Such was the ways of the Inner Sphere. In that instance, the recon unit was by no means written out immediately. Hell, you could still win if you played smart. It's the same here.

Enemy team have all the ECM? Then stick together and use the most reliable sensor of all - the Mk. I Eyeball. If you see it, com in your location, and open fire. Even in solo queue, I can't tell you how many times just that basic maneuver has saved me, including the once-in-a-lifetime insta-kill on an enemy RVN-3L that was trying to snipe (he must have had low armor, because all it took was a single C-Gauss hit to kill him, no idea where it hit because I had no target lock, just the sight of a small brown target shooting blue beams and standing still for the full duration). And so on.

What about some of the other suggestions, such as battle value? Better.

Also, I have no idea of his username, but I received a random unit invite from a Kuritan player soon after 0120 disbanded. It was directly after one of my best games in a Warhawk (think 6 kill match with a UAC5, ER PPC and two A-LRM packs). Didn't accept it, obviously, but because I had no idea who he was. Sad that when you receive a unit invite, it doesn't tell you who the unit you've been invited to is. Isn't that part of most other games?

Edited by Tarriss Halcyon, 07 September 2015 - 08:06 AM.

[KodiakGW]

I really haven't noticed extremely long wait times. I think I've waited longer for people to figure out which chassis they are taking than I've spent in queue.

Personally don't care, but limiting to four man will help with newer players who want to run with vets instead on solo PUGging. It would be nice if 2 man groups could do a seperate queue. But, it sounds like many would be upset at the four man limit or putting two mans in solo queue.

How about group queue being set to sizes divisible by four. Four, eight, twelve. Each having even number of weight classes. Might help with the group queue matchmaking speed, and we'll stop seeing spreads like 1/2/5/4.

[Lazor Sharp]

Why O Why, cant these 2-3 Friends, join a like minded unit, and play with some other Vets, and possibly make new friends and learn the ropes, while not being Stomped so much in 2-3 Friends HELL.......

If ya don't like one unit, find another one, any where from the most casual, to the most comp........

Group Q and CW should be mostly made up of 6 to 12 man units / groups playing as a Team in a team based game, most all the time... Vs. mostly being played as various combinations of 2 to 5 man groups playing as simi solo PUGS as we have now.... giving the MM fit's trying to make good fun matches for the widest range of sizes for UNITS/groups in each tier....... Vs, for unit play, many more 6+ unit / groups in each tier, for the mm to chose from to put like tier units with the same tier easier....

Edited by Lazor Sharp, 07 September 2015 - 10:32 AM.

[TFun90]

I would endorse a return to "Alpha Lance Warrior" - groups of up to a full lance dropping into the solo queue. Naturally, such lances would need to be pitted head-to-head against an equal lance, in terms of size, PSR tier, class, and/or tonnage. The two lances will seek to engage eachother head-to-head, to win the PUG battle through leadership of their own PUGs, or wiping out enemy PUGs if they are out of position. Best of all, conscientious Mechwarriors will adjust the quality of their drop deck as the opposition demands. After a given number of wins, the VTRs and HGNs went away, and the variety came out to play.

This scheme would allow for small groups to play casually at their Tier 4-2 PSR level, and all-out Tier 1 competitors to bite off as much as they need to chew. This would also introduce elasticity to the matchmaking process, as small groups could help fit jig-saw scenarios for group queue, as well as bolster solo queue options.

For that matter, have you tried allowing one solo queuer into the group queue to alleviate odd-man bottlenecks? At least as a Tier 1 PSR player who drops a significant quantity of solo queue, I wouldn't care if MM puts me in a group queue match when necessary, as long as it's not just a one-way ticket to "Getting whooped by a 12-man" city.

I am opposed to a hard 4man limit, the whole point of an online multiplayer game is to play with friends when you can. I'm not sure how well forcing people to play lights would go, either.

[BlackHeroe]

As i found out the Solo Queue seems to be better then before. Im seeing much more differnt people, i never had seen beffore, and on the other hand there are also some (but not all) of the players i regularly met before.
The balance has improved, but sometimes looks weird (if there atre several 12-0 and near by matches)

Group queue looks like we get there longer searching times, and also the difference in balance are much more worse. (That one side gets steamrolled is pretty much higher). Also im group queuein yust in ceasfire or organisation times - the CW teams seem to make it much more worse on normal matches..)