99 replies to this topic

[Deathlike]

Ghogiel, on 27 November 2016 - 01:59 PM, said:

Yep. There was never a group/solo player queue split. It was tag and non tag queue. It had nothing to do with solo or group playing.

Another reason it was fubar and the untagged queue dieing quickly> You needed a unit tag to join a faction as a merc. Which made little difference in the tagged queue because most players just created a unit so as to actually get decent rewards. freelancers get shafted for CW rewards, I expect most people actually want mechbays and MC from playing CW.

There are droves of people around here and dozens of threads by clueless numpties reguritating the idea that PGI "tried" to do a group/solo split in CW but it failed because there wasn't enough solo players to keep the queue going, even though we know for a fact there are way more solo players than grouped. Obviously that doesn't make sense. It's just weird, there are tons of threads about it after phase 3 WHILE it was going on and people still didn't understand how the split worked and why one was DOA.

My fav part is how Russ knew it wouldn't work but he implimented it anyway for the sake of the community wishes. Really Russ?

I do think solo players do make up a lot of the population, but don't skew that with the rainbow PUG defense... as that's always a combination of factions and much easier to fill than one than one of the same faction (for attacking).

[TercieI]

Chuck Jager, on 27 November 2016 - 01:48 PM, said:

You are right and wrong. I had an alt account started just to play both sides of the fence. This was during some of the high level BJ quirks and the release of the Marauder.

For my contract, it was easy to track down the house that the better units were listed and join the faction TS. I will be damned at who appeared as the drop callers and the friends they brought along (228). I will also say it felt like it was done as a way to help PGI implement/test the waters in how CW could be used to integrate multiple levels of players in an all out campaign.

I also am a little tickled that the caller specifically gave credit to my use of the ac2 BJ as a sweeper (game play over damage), and 1 year later I see uac2 HunchII in some comp play in the tournaments. SO maybe not practice for comp level play, but during that brief window I saw many of the same players that you looked for in group Q and in tournies. I will also say they were usually the easiest going and gave the simplest commands with congratulations to all players while being the first to go in with their Atlases.

If the contest got hot for that world the better unit players did leave for up for 12 mans. Then as now, better players will usually choose the better factions leaving less competition between the top players. This is the same for any faction server based game, and it gets boring.

FW maps are too much like chess. If you do not gain the advantage by loosing pieces and position, it is harder to fight back against a better skilled opponent who memorize efficiently predictable patterns. The classic maps at least have a bit more flow with different positions not being so far superior or worse. This makes it more fun for all, win or lose. We need some paper and scissors for the kill zone rocks in the maps.

Some comp players, yes. It's the fallacious notion that comp teams dominated/broke CW that I'm mocking. Comp teams haven't really seriously played CW due to the lack of actual competition and the fact that CW is mostly a contest of numbers. Some bug units have dominated it, but they're not comp teams.

[Ghogiel]

Deathlike, on 27 November 2016 - 02:02 PM, said:

I do think solo players do make up a lot of the population, but don't skew that with the rainbow PUG defense... as that's always a combination of factions and much easier to fill than one than one of the same faction (for attacking).

You mean a pool of 6 IS factions is more likely to produce skittle solo teams where as a CJF attack will likely be dumping a 4-5 man or more most drops?
Sure that is a thing for a couple of reasons.

I'm not sure what you mean about one being easier to fill, it sounded like you said attacks are harder to fill. Which just isn't the case. Unless you mean faction specifics, like from the IS side. I would just have to point out you are doing CW wrong in that case.
The easiest drops to get in FP, since pretty much always, is from CJF and those are usually attacks. Ergo attacks are the easiest drops to get.

[Deathlike]

Ghogiel, on 27 November 2016 - 02:40 PM, said:

You mean a pool of 6 IS factions is more likely to produce skittle solo teams where as a CJF attack will likely be dumping a 4-5 man or more most drops?
Sure that is a thing for a couple of reasons.

I'm not sure what you mean about one being easier to fill, it sounded like you said attacks are harder to fill. Which just isn't the case. Unless you mean faction specifics, like from the IS side. I would just have to point out you are doing CW wrong in that case.
The easiest drops to get in FP, since pretty much always, is from CJF and those are usually attacks. Ergo attacks are the easiest drops to get.

Attacks are harder to fill if your queue is full of solos as designed by PGI (even though it was even more limited to those that had no unit tagss). It requires 12 solo players. It's easier to fill a defense for obvious reasons... but ultimately you need consistently 24 actual players to fill a match anyways (when some factions never showing up - people leave due to ghost drops)... and the obvious culprit is with the attack groups are still tougher to create than defenses for just solos.

[Ghogiel]

Deathlike, on 27 November 2016 - 02:46 PM, said:

Attacks are harder to fill if your queue is full of solos as designed by PGI (even though it was even more limited to those that had no unit tagss). It requires 12 solo players. It's easier to fill a defense for obvious reasons... but ultimately you need consistently 24 actual players to fill a match anyways (when some factions never showing up - people leave due to ghost drops)... and the obvious culprit is with the attack groups are still tougher to create than defenses for just solos.

I see what you mean, you on about the untagged queue.. the thing that was abandoned because most people actually wanted rewards for CW and/or play as a merc XD

[Mystere]

Chuck Jager, on 27 November 2016 - 10:56 AM, said:

Believe it or not 3 years ago, before the exodus begun, the high level teams in group Q were better and more numerous. The whippings were shorter and a lot harder, but the overall quality of play by everyone was also better, because everybody understood it was sink or swim.

This is the attitude solo players of old had that the new players of today do not. Back in the days when there was only one queue, many of the former enjoyed giving the groupies a bloody nose -- or got whipped trying. Nowadays, players do not even seem to be trying.

PGI, allow solo players intrepid, daring, or even just plainly crazy enough to join the group queue. How could that possibly hurt?

[Deathlike]

Mystere, on 27 November 2016 - 03:04 PM, said:

This is the attitude solo players of old had that the new players of today do not. Back in the days when there was only one queue, many of the former enjoyed giving the groupies a bloody nose -- or got whipped trying. Nowadays, players do not even seem to be trying.

PGI, allow solo players intrepid, daring, or even just plainly crazy enough to join the group queue. How could that possibly hurt?

It's too hard to code that in... or PGI isn't willing to bribe people. Either way, it's not like the solo queue would dry up any time soon because of this... especially if it's designed to be user-opt-in, which was suggested many times over.

Ghogiel, on 27 November 2016 - 03:01 PM, said:

I see what you mean, you on about the untagged queue.. the thing that was abandoned because most people actually wanted rewards for CW and/or play as a merc XD

Dead queues tend to stay dead. Sometimes I do think PGI does stuff to "prove a point" even though sacrificing the playerbase to do that is... the worst method of doing so (not to say you'll get people playing FW on the PTS - it struggles getting 8 people in the first place).

Again... if only they thought it through and took feedback... all of which is totally Lostech.

[Sjorpha]

The problem is more likely to be too few good units in the group queue than too many, since it is a lack of equally skilled groups that undermines the matchmaker and leads to the kind of matches OP describes.

Group QP queue has always been way more competitive than CW, but the reduced match quality in both of them are caused by the same thing: low population.

[TercieI]

Sjorpha, on 27 November 2016 - 03:22 PM, said:

The problem is more likely to be too few good units in the group queue than too many, since it is a lack of equally skilled groups that undermines the matchmaker and leads to the kind of matches OP describes.

Group QP queue has always been way more competitive than CW, but the reduced match quality in both of them are caused by the same thing: low population.

Absolutely. Man, did MWOWC hurt group queue, too. Between way more practice time and all the burnout...

[Ghogiel]

Deathlike, on 27 November 2016 - 03:11 PM, said:

.

Dead queues tend to stay dead. Sometimes I do think PGI does stuff to "prove a point" even though sacrificing the playerbase to do that is... the worst method of doing so (not to say you'll get people playing FW on the PTS - it struggles getting 8 people in the first place).

Again... if only they thought it through and took feedback... all of which is totally Lostech.

Pretty sure Russ was just out to prove a point on this one, when he said he already knew the queue split wouldn't work, didn't want to do it but was catering to the feedback of the community. What we got was a grotesque rendition of queue splitting not based on any feedback that I ever saw, I suppose we'll have to forgive him if he gets confused about what people meant when they said group or unit. (F YI in case he is still wondering it wasnt anything to do with unit tags)

Edited by Ghogiel, 27 November 2016 - 03:25 PM.

[Idealsuspect]

Ghogiel, on 27 November 2016 - 01:59 PM, said:

Obviously that doesn't make sense. It's just weird, there are tons of threads about it after phase 3 WHILE it was going on and people still didn't understand how the split worked and why one was DOA.

My fav part is how Russ knew it wouldn't work but he implimented it anyway for the sake of the community wishes. Really Russ?

I have to say when CW was splitted between tag and no tag queue, quality of CW matchs ( with tag ) were significally buffed.
Stomps could happend ( mainly becose of LT ) but most of matchs were interesting and kind of tied.

When PGI did stepback about CW queue split and remerge everything, matchs quality just did an insta-major drop, potatoes did come back.


Maybe this PGI move may work if people without tag were allowed only drop in scout mode and units with less than 4 people don't have access to invasion matchs...
Quality and enough quantity in same time for both kind of queue.

But GGClose PGI needed to know their own game for take goods decisions.

[Rift Hawk]

DeRazer, on 25 November 2016 - 03:07 PM, said:

Group queue is unplayable for small groups in Tier 3/2 now.

I'm facing MJ12, Lords, EON, etc. Every game is a stomp.

It's just not fun.

Taking a break seems the only option... and that means no shiny coins for PGI till they fix this.

So let me get this straight.....

You want PGI to rush a game mode rework that could be critical to this games continued existence because your premade isn't good enough at this game to hold its own against other premades ?

Your off your rocker bro.

[Sjorpha]

TercieI, on 27 November 2016 - 03:23 PM, said:

Absolutely. Man, did MWOWC hurt group queue, too. Between way more practice time and all the burnout...

Or perhaps the game is just reaching the point of general population decline where matchmaking starts to become an increasingly unfeasible concept.

You need about 10 -30 thousand players to do automatic matchmaking reasonably wel in the typical online arena shooter, here is a good article on the subject from one of Robocrafts developers: http://robocraftgame...on-matchmaking/

So 10 - 30 thousand players to start making a reasonably good ELO type matchmaking, and then conssider that MWOs population is, wild guess, swaying somewhere between 500 - 5000 or so?

Even primetime number aren't ever going to produce good matchmaking in MWO, not matter what algorithm they use.

ELO is actually a good method, but many people here are brainwashed with anti-elo saltwater and don't understand it, especially the concept of law of averages and isolation of trends seems impossible to explain and people keep spouting nonsense about winning and losing not being useful data when it's actually the only useful data, but I digress.

In any case, the problem was never the algorithm, it was always the population. We have never had the population for truly good matchmaking here, possibly with some rare exceptions of spectacular hyped up moments.

[TercieI]

Sjorpha, on 27 November 2016 - 03:50 PM, said:

Or perhaps the game is just reaching the point of general population decline where matchmaking starts to become an increasingly unfeasible concept.

That's part of it, for sure. I know from our experience and talking to other top units that more and more, there's just not enough good groups on even in peak hours. One of the oft-cited causes is MWOWC burnout, which hit the top units harder than the general population because we stuck it out and practiced and played more than even the other units that participated in MWOWC.

[Deathlike]

TercieI, on 27 November 2016 - 04:34 PM, said:

That's part of it, for sure. I know from our experience and talking to other top units that more and more, there's just not enough good groups on even in peak hours. One of the oft-cited causes is MWOWC burnout, which hit the top units harder than the general population because we stuck it out and practiced and played more than even the other units that participated in MWOWC.

It's easier to become casual than it is to stay competitive, given the situation that is PGI and even possibly "things people want to hear" @ Mechcon.

[Champion of Khorne Lord of Blood]

Idealsuspect, on 27 November 2016 - 11:44 AM, said:

Totally wrong. When CW gets queues split solos players were able to play in group queue as solo just need to have or be a part of an unit.. ONLY freelancers weren't able to join group queue ( and of course mercs or loyalists without units ) In fact PGI did split queue between unit members and people without unit, they didn't split queues between groups and solos. Matchs were better without thoses casuals people and CW was fine at this state. But PGI did step back for few people who did left the game after anyway, they did rebroke CW also GGClose...

I know it was tag and no tag, but matches were much better in the tag zone because the people with tags at least cared enough to join a unit, showing they actually wanted to work together as a team, even if they didn't drop with their own team. The tagless never even tried to get in a unit, there wasn't much you could expect out of them except maybe trying to spam LRMs at about 1300m.

I was perfectly happy with how PGI split them, what I hated was that they did it in the middle of the week and reverted it in 3 days and never did an event for it to show tagless players what they could do.

EDIT: It was clear PGI just didn't want the split, else they wouldn't have done it in the worst possible way, indirectly tried to get people away from it, and reverted it in a knee jerk reaction.

Edited by Dakota1000, 27 November 2016 - 09:04 PM.

[Carl Vickers]

Dakota1000, on 27 November 2016 - 09:00 PM, said:

I know it was tag and no tag, but matches were much better in the tag zone because the people with tags at least cared enough to join a unit, showing they actually wanted to work together as a team, even if they didn't drop with their own team. The tagless never even tried to get in a unit, there wasn't much you could expect out of them except maybe trying to spam LRMs at about 1300m.

I was perfectly happy with how PGI split them, what I hated was that they did it in the middle of the week and reverted it in 3 days and never did an event for it to show tagless players what they could do.

Lol All that really happened was a bunch of people had to create solo units. It made things better for units for a week, then all the solo's worked out to get around the queue rules, all they had to do was create a solo unit.

If PGI had split the queues same as QP queues are split I feel the split would have been successful but instead they split the queues in a way designed to fail and then lay the blame on the community for being wrong about the split.

To stop unit members abusing the solo queue by sync dropping, all PGI needed to do was make it so that if more than 4 members of a unit were trying to sync drop on the same planet, after 4 the extras get shuffled into the next queue.

So simple and easy but as we know, we cant have nice things, want to buy a mech pack?

[Johnny Z]

Ghogiel, on 27 November 2016 - 03:24 PM, said:

Pretty sure Russ was just out to prove a point on this one, when he said he already knew the queue split wouldn't work, didn't want to do it but was catering to the feedback of the community. What we got was a grotesque rendition of queue splitting not based on any feedback that I ever saw, I suppose we'll have to forgive him if he gets confused about what people meant when they said group or unit. (F YI in case he is still wondering it wasnt anything to do with unit tags)

Wrong. The queue split for FP was done for the exact same reasons that it was done for regular queue. There were players saying it was the way to go the entire time just like for regular queue up until now.

It had the same problems for small groups as it does for regular queue if it had gone through. Of course it didn't because it wasn't based on being in a group but instead having a guild tag.

Its pointless with FP using lobbies instead of queues anyway. Until queues are used to make quick matches no one knows what will happen.

The players that want to get together and group up don't want to wait around once they finally do that, and the players that just want to drop when ever they get around to it don't want to wait around either.

The entire queue split for quick play wasn't legit in my opinion anyway. It was so some players could more easily engineer how matches outcomes were decided in my opinion. Divide and conquer and all that.

One of the last matches before the queues were split I was on a team of random players against a premade. I was shot down by my own team to make sure we lost. I never took fire from the other team. Another player on my team also took friendly fire from the same players(leg, they started on my leg to but then things escalated ). Things have since changed on how matches are fixed but point made.

There are drawbacks to both ways but one queue is best I think, but not sure. This way synch dropping in regular queue isn't as effective and farming in group isn't as effective.

There was synch dropping onto opposite teams before the split anyway to fix matches. Fact. Its done in faction play, regular queue and group queue to this very day. Fact.(this is done in the real world in business, fact, specifically union companies starting none union companies, I know this because I basically know guys that did it in a round about way, in response to other union companies doing it, old enough history, and the complete GIANT ugly mess that goes along with that, so many similarities between this game and the real world in some ways, accident? For bad guys its all about playing with the rules and eliminating competition.......)

Do something about synch dropping is the biggest improvement to match quality that can be made.(when it comes to queues, eliminate 3rd party cheat programs would also be a big improvement, easier said than done) Take small groups out of group queue so they are not focused is the second biggest improvement that can be made.(no I have never been in one of these small groups, but I do know the score)

Edited by Johnny Z, 28 November 2016 - 12:05 AM.

[Ghogiel]

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Johnny Z, on 27 November 2016 - 10:57 PM, said:

Wrong. The queue split for FP was done for the exact same reasons that it was done for regular queue. There were players saying it was the way to go the entire time just like for regular queue up until now. It had the same problems for small groups as it does for regular queue if it had gone through. Of course it didn't because it wasn't based on being in a group but instead having a guild tag. Its pointless with FP using lobbies instead of queues anyway. Until queues are used to make quick matches no one knows what will happen. The players that want to get together and group up don't want to wait around once they finally do that, and the players that just want to drop when ever they get around to it don't want to wait around either. The entire queue split for quick play wasn't legit in my opinion anyway. It was so some players could more easily engineer how matches outcomes were decided in my opinion. Divide and conquer and all that. One of the last matches before the queues were split I was on a team of random players against a premade. I was shot down by my own team to make sure we lost. I never took fire from the other team. Another player on my team also took friendly fire from the same players(leg). Things have since changed on how matches are fixed but point made. There are drawbacks to both ways but one queue is best I think. This way synch dropping in regular queue isn't as effective and farming in group isn't as effective. There was synch dropping onto opposite teams before the split anyway to fix matches. Fact. Its done in faction play, regular queue and group queue to this very day. Fact. Do something about synch dropping is the biggest improvement to match quality that can be made.(when it comes to queues, eliminate 3rd party cheat programs would also be a big improvement, easier said than done) Take small groups out of group queue so they are not focused is the second biggest improvement that can be made.(no I have never been in one of these small groups, but I do know the score)

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Wrong. The queue split for FP was done for the exact same reasons that it was done for regular queue. There were players saying it was the way to go the entire time just like for regular queue up until now.<br />
<br />
It had the same problems for small groups as it does for regular queue if it had gone through. Of course it didn't because it wasn't based on being in a group but instead having a guild tag.<br />
<br />
Its pointless with FP using lobbies instead of queues anyway. Until queues are used to make quick matches no one knows what will happen.<br />
<br />
The players that want to get together and group up don't want to wait around once they finally do that, and the players that just want to drop when ever they get around to it don't want to wait around either.<br />
<br />
The entire queue split for quick play wasn't legit in my opinion anyway. It was so some players could more easily engineer how matches outcomes were decided in my opinion. Divide and conquer and all that.<br />
<br />
One of the last matches before the queues were split I was on a team of random players against a premade. I was shot down by my own team to make sure we lost. I never took fire from the other team. Things have since changed on how matches are fixed but point made.<br />
<br />
There are drawbacks to both ways but one queue is best I think. This way synch dropping in regular queue isn't as effective and farming in group isn't as effective.<br />
<br />
There was synch dropping onto opposite teams before the split anyway to fix matches. Fact. Its done in faction play, regular queue and group queue to this very day. Fact.<br />
<br />
Do something about synch dropping is the biggest improvement to match quality that can be made. Take small groups out of group queue so they are not focused is the second biggest improvement that can be made.

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<div>Mudhut is that you?</div>
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[Deathlike]

Ghogiel, on 27 November 2016 - 11:25 PM, said:

Mudhut is that you?

Ironically unlikely. Mudhut complains about people working together (sync drop or not)... this guy... is on a different plane of existence than we are living in (and not a good place to be in either).