MischiefSC, on 19 February 2017 - 05:33 PM, said:
I've been chewing on how to get a MM for FW to work but it's all coming down to population. Chicken and the egg thing.
While preferred, a player pool is not the only way. The question is would players be open to these other methods.
To be clear, when we talk about MM for FW we mean on a per match basis. PGI has thrown out a general (and not very effective) balance in drop deck weight. But it does nothing to mitigate wildly mismatched teams.
In one of the town halls Russ even talked about it briefly but was not liking the intrusive nature of some ideas. As I recall things like more turrets, stronger air strikes and the like were raised. That is, in-game buffs for the weaker team. The number and kind of aids is up for grabs.
A back up to the player pool is to use a mech pool. This would be easier without respawn. Each player would have a drop deck with one each light, medium, heavy and assault (with one "preferred"). After trying the player pool and still not finding balance, the MM could bump up/down to decide what tonnage goes in.
More complicated with respawn. To have a "pool" for the matchmaker to select from you'd now need a drop deck pool. This would mean players having several drop decks possibly arranged by weight - a 200, 225, 250, 275 ton deck for example. I imagine players would not like having the MM choose their deck, so....
Drop decks could be five or six mechs with the MM deciding which four go in. Perhaps, if each deck were six mechs, the two additional would specifically slot for one light and one assault. Obviously, the MM would have some big tonnage leeway for attempting some balance. It would remain to experience to see if this works none, some or all.
(In this latter case, a pilot would be guaranteed to go in with three of his preferred deck since only one substitution would ever be done per player.)
Edited by BearFlag, 19 February 2017 - 07:41 PM.