831 replies to this topic

[Todo Sandybanks]

I remember back in the days of open beta when 8v8 meant more combat for each person. Now with 12v12 you end up alot of the time with maybe 6-7 people kicking ***, and the rest not able to do anything because of the overload of people. like was mentioned in the OP we already have a player coverage for everything except 8v8. I voted YES. And this is why.

[StahlJagdhund337]

I am going to say no. I would rather see 8v8 added. Not used as a replacer. I would like to see it added as a different game mode for quick play.

[SideSt3p]

IMO: Let people choose to queue for 8v8 or 12v12 in QP. 8v8 in Alpha/Beta wasn't fun...

[Brain Cancer]

I also see 12v12 as being beyond the average player's capacity to really take in- that is, situational awareness plunged post 12v12 change. Why? Because most people have trouble keeping more than 7 items tracked at once.

https://abcnews.go.c...tory?id=9189664

Unfortunately, this also means that failure to track things results in players blundering blindly into killboxes and getting vaporized. 8v8 isn't just easier on the engine, but the average player's ability to keep track of the entire battlefield.

[WarHippy]

I voted maybe, but I lean toward no. If team sizes were dependent on the map I could see it, but generally speaking I would prefer to keep 12v12. 8v8 doesn't fix the problems people think it will and it is only going to alienate the players that want and are used to 12v12.

[MechaBattler]

What do we really lose by switching it? Seriously. It's not like we're experiencing some great immersion from fighting 12v12. At least with 8v8 we get a boost in performance. Which is worth more than a vague sense of greater combat. Though I wonder of it's effect on the matchmaker. Doubt it'll really improve it, but not sure that it would be worse.

[StahlJagdhund337]

To all the players complaining about map size. The maps are fine in this game. The large maps make light mechs useful. They are also fun for extreme range sniping and poking. The large maps make long range weapons worthwhile. Large maps give more leeway to actually strategy like flanking. There needs to be a diverse set of maps that are large and small. Otherwise you are going to get Mechwarrior online COD4 with only small maps.

Edited by StahlJagdhund337, 07 June 2018 - 01:59 PM.

[Doomich]

I think we have not enough players population..
I want to be wrong

[xUnbreakablex]

Paul Inouye, on 06 June 2018 - 04:02 PM, said:

1) Enter queue as group of 10.

erm...how will i enter the que with a group of 10 if there are only 8v8's lol. I;m just curious about an 8v8 on a map like new forest colony, alpine peaks, even terra therma. Big maps that could make matches run longer when your team is playing hide and seek with the enemy. Might need to shave a few clicks off the maps

[failtastic17]

I say no. I've seen a Locust pilot get 9 kills out of 12 possible, and 3 were solo kills. It will mess up the balance, it will be even faster for teams that aren't just being carried. (1v1 and 2v2 is already fast) If you take out some players, then a good team will steamroll and the match will only be three minutes long. Two of which would be getting in range to wipe out the other team. Plus there's a chance that it won't really fix anything while making the game more boring. Yes, it will make each player matter more. I don't think the benefits are worth what the end result will be though. It won't change the strategies much either. I don't want to have to go to faction play, which has an even longer wait time since Solaris 7, just to have 12v12. Don't forget your ambitions early on. Put the effort into other things. Like making sure mechs are the right size, getting Solaris 7 flushed out. Things like that. You can do other forms of optimization and get some more voice acting in there.

[Vorpal Puppy]

Voted no, but am willing to do a month run of 8 vs 8 to give it a test. My mind can be changed - I'm just afraid its going to make skilling up new mechs harder unless the economy is bumped up accordingly. Fewer mechs to kill equal fewer C Bills, less exp, but similar match lengths most likely.

[Paul Inouye]

Just an update...

EVERYTHING in this thread has been read up to this line:

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Please continue.

[Mytheron]

I wouldn't mind 8v8 being a separate option but i'm reluctant to have that change made without knowing its direct effect on matchmaking times and where quick play solo would go. Perhaps if there are options for 8v8 and 12v12 in group que but quick play is left at 12v12 then that could work.

Ultimately, as a solo player, I love the 12v12 for the epic feel of the game, and wouldn't want that game size relegated to only faction warfare. Worse, if 12v12 were faction warfare only, you'd have no experience with that size of game outside of faction warfare.

[Brain Cancer]

The most hilarious part here is that in order of popularity, it's 1) QP solo, 2) QP group, and then waaaaaaay down the line is FP and Solaris.

Making QP solo as smooth running and playable as possible should be the goal. FP is a garbage fire whose "improvements" can be described in two words. "Long Tom". It's so poorly used that it's turned into "everyone Clan vs everyone IS", as there aren't enough people in any average faction to significantly populate the queue barring farming units.

Solaris is better, but the expected wall-meet-face occurred when scrubby players didn't instantly get dropped into a ballpit of fun small laser/LRM builds and discovered that in Solaris, bad play has no excuse other than looking in the mirror. Still, it's more salvageable than FP.

Make solo 8v8, group queue 12v12, and learn the lesson: The average player can't handle 1v1 well, nor more than 12v12, and that means content work should be focused somewhere in between them.

[Humpday]

Increased and more consistent FPS? yeah 8v8 just for that alone....

[SFC174]

Given that the vote differential never seemed large enough to support such a change in the first place, and now that the totals are creeping closer to parity, changing to 8v8 at this point seems like an unlikely move.

Of course, an enterprising individual could always launch a GOTV campaign and energize players in other forums, but given that we're already seeing a substantial portion of the player base represented in the totals (2000 votes has got to be close to 20% of the active, regular playerbase) we've probably got a pretty good statistical sample.

[Tiamat of the Sea]

Voted maybe- here's the follow-up.

Right now the 12v12 doesn't feel at all like 'divisional combat'. Maybe- maybe!- if four-member teams were enforced, it would feel like that, but even that's up for debate.

A big part of the point of dividing forces into groupings like lances, points, divisions, stars, et cetera, is that you can have smaller organized groups fulfilling separate roles and/or pursuing different objectives from one another. The fact that 12v12 play virtually never unfolds this way means that your stated reasoning for the shift to smaller team sizes being a drawback (loss of divisional, three-lance play) is inherently faulty.

If you're making your decisions based partly on that perception, then you'll be making them for the wrong reasons and you won't see the results you're expecting- which can lead to retracting those changes or making further changes that produce further unwanted results.

Before you even try to approach a decision about which way to go, with or without player input as to what decision is better, you need to have a more accurate perception of what the decision is about.

Currently, the main result of the 12v12 match size is that you have a lot of very large deathballs, and especially in solo QP, whichever team splits up more is predominantly going to lose. Exceptions are more frequent than that statement seems to indicate (every time a team follows a coordinated pincer movement, for instance, or situations of accidental synchronization between noncommunicative team members), but they are still exceptions.

At this point, shifting down to an 8v8 match size is not going to 'remove divisional play', because you don't currently have teams of twelve operating as though they were three lances of four. You have teams of twelve operating as loose constellations of twelve 'mechs, or sometimes splitting out into two to three groups of varying sizes depending on speed, not tonnage (which has some interesting effects with low-engine lights and high- and low-engine mediums and heavies). Even when the groups split up like this, there's no real lance coordination the majority of the time in the QP queue. The fact that most player groups aren't four members in total further exacerbates this effect, particularly with the tonnage difference between a team formed of two-and-three-member groups and a team formed of, say, an eight-member group and a four-member group. This is partly a matter of group coordination versus team coordination, but is also affected (again) by the 'mech speed effect on clustering during movement.

What shifting to an 8v8 match size will do is reduce the danger of sudden death to whichever 'mech or 'mechs are at the front of the engagement, since instead of risking fire from six to twelve enemies on initial exposure, it will be four to eight. The final result of this I have no idea- theoretically, it will encourage bravery and direct engagement, as well as entering the fight even when the pilot is not piloting one of the absolute toughest 'mechs available, but that's only a going theory at this point. This may encourage broader use of Mediums and Lights, it may encourage faster Assault 'mechs (since being strung out in back will leave a pilot as one of two to three assaults, rather than three to four), it may make 'wolfpack' light tactics more or less dangerous....

Even having the environment of the MWO WC teams playing against each other as a test bed won't be a reliable sample, since those groups are all going to be completely coordinated within themselves. Shifting from twelve to eight completely independent players in a quick play non-group match could go any (and likely every) direction from where the current game state rests.


To be perfectly honest, I find this use of a poll for your test topic worrying. Despite your best intentions as a team, the poll-based selection of builds for the champion 'mechs did not work out well for the stated goal (I'm sure there are players pleased by the builds that were chosen, I'm not contesting that- but it's unquestionable that a lot of those builds were very heavily influenced by what was considered 'meta' at the time of their polls, which has resulted in a lot of new players in 'mechs that are very poorly suited to new players.)

Given what occurred there, I'm inclined to expect your decision to take this poll as not only the entirety of the playerbase input on the subject, but also as a considerably heavy argument in one direction or the other, and I'm concerned that you may not only weight the poll's result as more valuable than it actually is, but also make your decision on the basis of either no actual estimation or an incorrect estimation of the actual effect the change would have.

Please don't take this as some kind of indictment of your motivation- my experience with MWO has taught me that Piranha Games, as a whole, has good intentions and tries to keep the fun and health of the game in mind. However, my experience with MWO has also taught me that Piranha Games tends to jump the gun a bit on changes to the live game, and make large value swings in one direction before inching back the other way, which is frankly not the most efficient or most functional possible way to approach game balance.



On a side note, at what point is the 'defending' team in Escort going to actually get either an on-map or pre-match indicator of their primary's route? It seems like kind of a ridiculous oversight to tell someone, 'Guard this VIP, but you can't run ahead along their path because nobody knows where they're actually going, and anyone who does know won't tell you.' Heck, even just an indicator in the ready screen as to which side of the match you're actually on would be a start.

[TheVikingArtist]

So personally I like the feel of large scale combat so I like the 12v12. But if it were optional I would enjoy it. Maybe if you could queue for 1, 2, or 3 lance QP. I know it would certainly be easier on new players, my friend who just started playing is not really enjoying being cored out every time he turns a corner to see the whole enemy team.
Really I like FP more than QP as a game mode but the queues are slower for it, if along with this change we can encourage more FP for people who like the large scale fights I'd be all for it.

[Ascaloth]

Can we have old Forest Colony, Frozen City Night and Dragon bowling?
No?
Then no.

I use quick play to farm pugs and fill my pockets with space bills only. Less players mean less damage to be dealt, less mechs to kill, thus less money to receive from it.
Big nope.

"Hurrr but 12-man is chaos it's not competitive"
If you want competitive go scrim. We have the comp play mode, private lobbies, Solaris. Quick play is the ol' good no-man land where you chill and farm bills.

[Grayson Sortek]

Paul Inouye, on 01 June 2018 - 01:22 PM, said:

It’s been a while and there have been many discussions surrounding 8v8 for Quick Play and we communicated that we would cast a poll on the subject and here it is.

From a logistics/match making perspective, 8v8 has numerous advantages including faster team creation for both solo and group play in the match maker, faster connection times (less ‘Mechs being loaded), improved framerate, improved memory usage and less taxing on your local CPU.

From a player organization perspective, 8v8 means less management headaches getting 8 players together rather than 12, deck building would have a much higher impact in terms of what ‘Mechs are fielded and how they’re played. The ability to be carried through to victory is less likely due to the fact that in an 8v8 scenario, every ‘Mech matters more.

The drawbacks affect the game in a different way and are just as important. We would be losing the feel of full divisional combat (12 ‘Mechs in 3 lances). Switching to 8v8 will not be a simple switch and team size reduction. UI, Match Maker, Economy, game mode adjustments, map adjustments, etc. A switch to 8v8 will also impact on our ability to address other parts of the game such as Faction Play.

Overall, we would be looking at covering all team size areas via the following:
* 1v1 and 2v2 are covered in Solaris 7.
* 4v4 in Scouting
* 8v8 will be covered in Quick Play and Comp Play.
* 12v12 will be covered in Faction Play.

So the big question is, and the reason for this poll, would you like to see Quick Play switch to 8v8?

Hey Paul,

I was just wondering if you guys considered making it a drop down option in QP and seeing what the data tells you people prefer? Or do you think it would royally jack the matchmaker that you have right now because the player base would be too split?
*Caveat* Obviously there will be a bias in the data in the beginning as people check it out for a little while and then possibly switch back to 12v12.

What you REALLY do NOT want happening: Spending a bunch of time and resources on switching to 8v8 just to have the community at large hate it, we both know forums capture a fraction of your player-base, then having to waste a bunch of time and resources switching it back to 12v12.

Maybe instead invest some of that time and those resources into features that people commonly ask for?
*cough* PvE random missions like convoy assault with 3 of your friends. (Forgive me for this one, but I'm assuming based on what I've seen from MW5 that you have some AI that could be used for this)

Good luck with whatever you decide to go with!