62 replies to this topic

[adamts01]

I haven't played in a couple weeks. I'm taking a break till the new CW comes out. I've noticed gameplay gradually sliding downhill as more people fill up their XP bar that shouldn't. It'll just keep getting worse till PSR is changed. I couldn't handle it anymore. People seem to have streaks of bad teams, but I think they balance out with streaks of less bad teams. You just remember the bad games more than the slightly less bad games.

[JC Daxion]

Appogee, on 25 February 2016 - 12:23 AM, said:

This proved to me once and for all that all the time I spend trying to help PUG teams do anything intelligent is just wasted. I may as well just not bother.

That's me done with Mechwarrior Online for the day.

I have days like that.. No mater how much you try to help it is hopeless.. Sometimes people just don't pay attention either. My last match, caustic, and nascar.. I was in an assault,, and i started telling them just 2 mins in i was getting blasted from behind, and kept telling them to stop, and turn around.. Finally maxing out my MASC, i caught um and got around the corner.. (we started upper base, i started getting blasted before i could make it around the first corner.)

the team had a lot of newbies for sure.. but eventually they turned and started to fight.. we were down a few mechs, but came back. At the end of the match it was me, a light, and something else.. timber? tdr? something heavy.. Pulled it out 9-12. Had to change tactics a lot, and lucky for me the players near the end happened to be good. Ended up being an over all decent match, as i lucked out and just lost about 30% of my armor by the time i made it to the group and decent cover.


the last few days i have had tons of great matches, coming down to the wire, and many that could of gone either way till about half way through. Over all good matches outside of a couple rolls. Tier 3 here..

I say luck of the draw.. But you said the most important thing.. those nights that just suck for you, Stop playing, it is better to take a break, and sometimes for a while.. Im always taking a week off here and there to play other things and keep it fresh. So much easier to deal with some bad play for a few matches when it's over time. Play 50 matches in a day and it can really grind your gears..

Just hope you don't break my loosing streak... 23 matches in a row.....

Edited by JC Daxion, 25 February 2016 - 02:44 AM.

[Wolfways]

I've had a couple of matches with "top tier" units.
You know the ones where the team hides behind buildings and someone says "wait until the last 3 mins then we attack", and you just want to suicide to get it over with...

[Appogee]

Paigan, on 25 February 2016 - 01:40 AM, said:

If there are so many noobs and even if MM were just random, shouldn't the enemy team have just as much noobs, hence making your win rate about 50-50? Maybe 4 losses in a row is just bad luck.

It's not just 5 in a row. (That was just today). It's been a week straight of very mismatched teams and losses. I get a win every now and then. To me this is "unusual over a sustained period".

Paigan, on 25 February 2016 - 01:40 AM, said:

MM just sees two teams and stuffs player in them.

MM is supposed to be creating two equally skilled teams...not two random groups of players.

But when you look at the examples such as the one I cited, where the opposing force is stacked with Tier 1 players, and my team has mostly Tier 4 and below (I asked them ... and then there was the woeful performance) then it seems like MM just isn't working at all.

Edited by Appogee, 25 February 2016 - 05:22 AM.

[Appogee]

MechWarrior849305, on 25 February 2016 - 12:51 AM, said:

Numerous threads 'bout MM, Tiers, Bad Teams, about being "THEMOSTVIABLEPLAYERINTHEPUGUNIVERSESURROUNDEDBYAWFULLPUGS". That's .... amusing

Actually, this thread is about "is the matchmaker actually working at the moment".

Like it says in the title.

And then I gave some very specific examples of why I wondered whether there might actually be a bug and the matchmaker not working ... just like it was recently realised that all the manouverability quirks haven't been working since December.

[MrMadguy]

Another thread about it. Please, learn to read nearby threads, where it's already explained, why current MM is so terrible:
How do you get out of a losing streak funk
Tier 1 bad balance

Edited by MrMadguy, 25 February 2016 - 05:03 AM.

[Appogee]

MrMadguy, on 25 February 2016 - 05:02 AM, said:

Another thread about it. Please, learn to read nearby threads, where it's already explained, why current MM is so terrible:

That is a three day old thread entitled "How do you get out of a losing Streak". Even if I thought it was sensible to read back through 5 pages of historical threads to see whether someone might have asked whether the matchmaker was currently working, I may not have realised from the title that it was actually on a related subject.

So please, don't ask forum participants to become forensic accountants every time they want to post a thread.

Your second thread is about how the matchmaker and PSR works. In fact, I already know how they are supposed to work, and the flawed logic behind them. This thread was to ask whether they are actually not switched on at the moment.

[Doman Hugin]

Unit's and group que have disproportionaly inflated a lot of peoples teir, this is visable as a larger disparity in skill in the higher teirs.

NB: Good players in units are stll good players and are where they should be.
How many solo only teir 1 players do you know?
Units are not bad, but unit group play effecting solo teir play isn't a great system.

[STEF_]

In the last week, it seems to me there is no MM at all.

But I have my theory (tin hat on): being tier system a grind bar, there are a lot of new players (steamers?) that in 2 months managed to reach tier 3, and so, despite being a still in the newbie phase, they can be found in every drop.

Tier system design by PGI is very terribad.
MM is regrouping players together basing on how much they are playing.
Does it have any sense?
To me it seems terribly stupid.

[mogs01gt]

Players are starting to play more and more passive which is why they get their **** pushed in.

If you arent pushing, you're dying!

Edited by mogs01gt, 25 February 2016 - 05:22 AM.

[KHETTI]

Doman Hugin, on 25 February 2016 - 05:19 AM, said:

How many solo only tier 1 players do you know?

Ahem, Hello, pleased to meet you.
Okay so yes i'm in a unit, and yes i do play with my unit in CW, or have done in the past, but , well i stopped as rolling teams of lonewolves isn't what i hoped for out of CW.
Apart from that (btw i've been in MJ12 for maybe 3 months or so), i have dropped solo since closed beta, and i know i'm not alone.

[Doman Hugin]

Khetti, I know there are some.

So in your oppinion was sort of percentage of you are there?

[Rushin Roulette]

We are talking about a matchmaker programmed by PGI here are we? I mean, this is a company, which has proven time and time again that they try logic, but always end up distracted chasing the squirrel half way thorugh.

The most obvious explanation would be that the MM ties to get 24 players with similar tiers (ie. "4 Tier 1", "4 tier 2", "14 tier 3", "2 Tier 4") then just randomizes who comes on what team without bothering to match the tiers on the teams. This way you can theoretically end up with the teams as "4 tier 1"+"4 tier 2"+"4 tier 3" against "10 tier 3" + "2 tier 4".

I would love to be proven wrong with this theory, but going from track records this is deffinitely a possibility.

Edited by Rushin Roulette, 25 February 2016 - 06:18 AM.

[Paigan]

PORONOPAPOS, on 25 February 2016 - 06:26 AM, said:

I agree with Appogee, in fact I was about to open a topic about the MM after having a similar experience for the last 2 weeks or so . Some of you guys think this is just bad luck but what I see is a lot of bad/new players in matches supposed to be only higher tiers ones.

- In the past I used to see regularly in almost every team I dropped at least 2 names I know from the past or from the forums and known as good players. Lately I drop in teams where I don't recognize any name. And usually some of them die early in first 1-2 minutes, rest run to hide instead of trying to fire back at the enemy, so the match ends quickly...

-an example : I drop in a match in Oceanic server playing Firestarter, Manifold map. I move behind enemy team and find 2 of them, a Jager and Orion (or Hunchback, didn't bother to notice..you will see why), that were standing still side by side shooting my teammates. I went behind them 70-80 m away and started shooting the Jager's back, I killed him with no reaction from him, his teammate didn't even notice Jager died, so I continued shooting and killed him too. None of them realized someone shooting them in the back.... How can so bad players drop in a supposed to be high tier match unless MM is seriously wrong lately???

Maybe Stefka kerensky's theory about "steamers" is what causes thi problem with the MM.

Spoiler

</p><p>well, I'm one of them, I went to T1 playing 99.9% of matches solo, less than 100 matches played with friends in group qeue.

I see you occasionally in matches, just like I see other familiar names.
All that you describe is true, but it's like that for me since I started in Dec 2014.
Some die in the first minute, some teams do nothing but hide (we won yesterday 12-2 with a classic "all hide behind the citadel". It was glorious!).

Sometimes I'm on the stomping team
Sometimes I'm on the team getting stomped.
Sometimes it's a really interesting, close game (like two days ago: 11-11, showdown between two badly damaged mechs. Our guy bit the dust, but still gg)

I don't know. Maybe MM just likes me .

Maybe for many players, selective perception (overly remember the bad things, ignore the good things) is too tempting.

Edited by Paigan, 25 February 2016 - 07:01 AM.

[Thorqemada]

Time of Day and Q-Population will massively influence your playing experience...

But lets face it - i dont care about anything of it!

Edited by Thorqemada, 25 February 2016 - 07:30 AM.

[Tanil Kane]

Does MM take anything else into account aside from PSR and tonnage?

Not all builds are equal, and a team running mechs with what is considered the meta build for that variant that fights a team with a large number of less optimal mechs is going to turn into a roflstomp.

[Alwrathandabout42ninjas]

The matchmaker has always been off lol. Been that way since the game launched.

[L A V A]

Tanil Kane, on 25 February 2016 - 07:38 AM, said:

Does MM take anything else into account aside from PSR and tonnage?

That's what they say.

In the group queue I don't think tonnage is accounted for at all... just PSR.

[Mister Blastman]

This is the second thread I've seen this brought up and I too have seen weird player matchings since the weekend. I've seen some awful teams and horrible players that I only saw when I was at tier 4 a long time ago. But the strange thing... is, as the OP says, these awful players are all on one team, starfishing and spreading across the map while the other team has several tier 1 players on it.

Stomps were frequent before... but right now... it is just bad.

So I propose Blastman's CLAW (Come Lose Away from Winners).

It is a simple system that monitors the game for player activity.

IF
A player finishes four to five games in a row with less than 100 damage

THEN
they are banished to the Island of Misfit Players!



And they stay there for the rest of the night! If they do it again the next night... they are banished for a week! They do it next time they are released... banished for a month! The maximum is one month because everyone deserves another chance to get off the island.

The 100 damage threshold can be changed to be 150, 200 or whatever the developers want to be.

WHY do we need CLAW, Blastman?

Easy!

Because some folks like to get loaded, blazed or play with spasmodic disorders that prevent them from aiming well. Note: Spasmodic disorders are OKAY. Some folks can't help themselves and suffer from horrible diseases that make playing the game a huge challenge. That is OKAY.

That's why we have the Island of Misfit Players! So they still get to play--and play with other folks who have their same deficiencies above and beyond the bottom tiers. This guarantees they aren't pugfodder™ and have a chance at a better game!

Support CLAW... today!

Edited by Mister Blastman, 25 February 2016 - 08:18 AM.

[m]

Appogee, on 24 February 2016 - 11:42 PM, said:

I'm used to getting plonked into a team of low-tier PUGs, so that the matchmaker can convince itself that it's created an 'average' team.

But the past 7 days seem to have been especially bad.

I'm getting dropped into team after team of players who just walk dead ahead from spawn without regrouping, don't have an "R" key on their keyboard, stand behind buildings spamming LRMs into the scenery, or simply hide behind buildings waiting for ... well, I don't know what they're waiting for.

It's like I found a secret Tier 6 or something.

I'd normally put this down to the MatchMaker being mostly comprised of 'release valves'. But the past 7 days seem much worse than usual. (For example, in the past two days, I've been repeatedly dropped in teams where up to three of us are higher tier, but the rest are really really bad. And on the opposition team I see large numbers of players who I know to be some of the best in the game.

Yet, these Tier 1 players aren't distributed across the teams, they're all on the one side.

So, that's why I am asking whether anyone else has noticed PUG queue matchmaking being much worse than usual recently...?

I'm only one player. But I have played a lot over a long period, so I can detect what seems like a change in 'usual'. And in match chat a few others have noted that matches seem to be more one-sided than usual.

So I'm just seeking wider input on whether you've noticed a change recently. Maybe this is just an ongoing run of bad luck and not a systemic issue at all.

Apologies everyone in not reading the entire thread, but I am going to respond to the first post.

I came across a thread last year that discussed something similar to this in the Feature Suggestion section
( http://mwomercs.com/...ldren-under-14/ )

For myself, and I am not sure about everyone else, I have let close friends of similar age that were curious about the game and relatives that were much younger than myself 'test drive' the game (with myself present) with them at the controls in the past.

@Appogee Did you notice any names (don't mention them) that you recognized from years ago? If so then it could have been a similar situation like myself.