1579 replies to this topic

[spannerturner]

Here is a question for you all:

Background info:
My stepson plays a lot of Fortnite and other FPS games where he and his friends get to "drop" together. Epic owns Fortnite and some others that my stepson and his friends play.

Question:
Is this PGI's attempt to appeal to those kids, like my stepson and his friends, that are used to being able to "drop" together?

Remember, Fortnite has a ridiculously large member base and if PGI could tap into just 1% of those members, it would be HUUGE for them...

[The Teddy Bear]

Anomalocaris, on 29 April 2020 - 01:40 PM, said:

Doesn't matter. I play plenty of meta but I'm not participating in this fiasco - the results were a foregone conclusion before they started, and things have gone exactly as predicted. Not worth the in game frustration. I desperately want my solo queue back which is why I'm here. But if it doesn't happen, well, then 4/27 was my final match. Easy come, easy go.

That should count for a major part of the solo players in the longer run. Just stay out of it until they have a solution for this issue. Lower and lower rewards will hit you in the longer run, and the more solos out, the thinner the rewards will be...

[Alreech]

spannerturner, on 29 April 2020 - 01:51 PM, said:

Here is a question for you all:

Background info:
My stepson plays a lot of Fortnite and other FPS games where he and his friends get to "drop" together. Epic owns Fortnite and some others that my stepson and his friends play.

Question:
Is this PGI's attempt to appeal to those kids, like my stepson and his friends, that are used to being able to "drop" together?

Remember, Fortnite has a ridiculously large member base and if PGI could tap into just 1% of those members, it would be HUUGE for them...

Dropping "together" is possible im most online shooters since almost 15 years.
In 2012 most of the MWO drops have been in group, but many players left after PGI failed to deliver a game mode with respawns and mech selection for the map.

[Horseman]

Here's my group drop data for the evening: a four-man group from the MJ12 comp team dropping over half dozen times. We didn't lose even once and matches tended towards stomps: https://imgur.com/a/NSerSLz
PGI, fix the damn matchmaker already or you'll kill what is left of your playerbase. A four-man from a comp team is not equal a four-man running AC20 Ravens.

Edited by Horseman, 29 April 2020 - 02:36 PM.

[ShooterMcGavin80]

Magic Pain Glove, on 28 April 2020 - 11:26 PM, said:

While you might get a small bump now I am confident its gonna increase the played bleed in the long run.

Brauer, on 29 April 2020 - 08:59 AM, said:

I respect Pain Glove and Brauer as a players and now I respect them more, solid opinions.

DAEDALOS513, on 29 April 2020 - 01:07 PM, said:

I think you may have to rethink your builds because what used to work in solo pug queue may not always work here in ’grolo’ queue

Therein lies the problem... Solo queue was a place where you could have fun with your non-meta builds. Which is actually most mechs. Now there may not be such a place where you can enjoy most mechs, or god forbid, try to skill up a weird variant.


Anyhow, you remember that time when NFL football was dying? All NFL teams but one were disbanded. It made getting elite level games hard. But the elite players still wanted to play football. So the commissioner started setting up games where the NFL players could group up and go against teams of cobbled together high school and community college teams. The NFL squads maintained their high win ratios and the bodies stacked up, but they didn't really get any elite level games that they wanted.

Eventually nobody wanted to play football anymore.

My opinion:

8v8 group play.
12v12 pure solo play, with group-play opt-in feature.

More weekend events for group play to encourage people to dip into the group waters. Hopefully this will provide enough sustenance for the people who want to play group.

Edited by ShooterMcGavin80, 29 April 2020 - 02:45 PM.

[The Teddy Bear]

Can you even imagine I once thouth 8v8 would kill the solo que? Now you have the 4mans to just finish it off....

[Tarl Cabot]

Tranderas, on 28 April 2020 - 05:36 PM, said:

Solo Q hasn't used tiers in MM at least since the maintenance mode AMA in April of last year, and may have stopped as early as the first half of the previous year. I know the changes made, and I'm mocking people complaining about it as it's really the only move PGI could make to provide a reasonable queue time for all non-FP players.

Do you really do not understand that the MM utilizes ONLY Tiers, with a spread of 2 Tiers, and PSR which uses Matchscore to determine up/down movement modified by win/loss? And how it is setup makes it difficult to drop in Tiers? Sort Jarls list by number of games. In the top 100 there are players whose overall avg MS are 171+ MS and are currently Tier 1 or Tier 2. One of them actually bounces back and forth from Tier 1 to Tier 2 then back again. So players with tens of thousands of games can and do move up to the higher tiers, provided those match scores on a win, or do well enough on a lose.

[East Indy]

Right now there don't seem to be any effective controls on team numbers, team sizes or strength, with a lot of unfamiliar and generally lower-tier players, resulting in teams with set tactics against teams that still function like <T2 pugs. Extremely one-sided and not in a natural cascade fashion.

[Brain Cancer]

Alreech, on 29 April 2020 - 02:17 PM, said:

Dropping "together" is possible im most online shooters since almost 15 years.
In 2012 most of the MWO drops have been in group, but many players left after PGI failed to deliver a game mode with respawns and mech selection for the map.

Actually, no. The first real exodus was beginning around August 2012 around the time we get repair and rearm. Those would be your pet peeves, not the playerbase. I was in lurk mode for the forums back then, but it's rare to see true salt vanish thanks to offline timelines and other such gems. The next month, they cut match payouts, meaning newbies were stuck driving half-functional robots or other painful decisions.

[50 50]

Larsh, on 29 April 2020 - 11:36 AM, said:

Random side thought. Is this a factor at all when finding a match anymore, or can this be modified so maybe players can plan ahead so they can see which mechs are currently being favored?

Pretty sure a while back the weight class restrictions on the matches was disabled.
That might have been due to wait times or perhaps it was for a mech release?

justcallme A S H, on 29 April 2020 - 01:11 PM, said:

It doesn't actually work/factors in.

It hasn't since May 2018 when the MM update occurred and class restriction was unlocked from 3/3/3/3 to basically whatever it can match. So you can have 2/2/0/8 for instance. Just to make a match.

Ah well.
There you go.

Certainly from the evidence posted here and in what I experienced last night, there is no weight class restrictions on the team meaning that the strict 3/3/3/3 we had before is simply not there.

This is a point seriously worth discussing.

Team Composition by Mech Weight Class
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I recall that the groups originally had to abide by the weight classes when it was all in one queue and they slotted into the teams accordingly. It did allow a group might soak up one or more of the weight classes, ie. a group of 3 players could take 3 assaults, but this also meant that they were the only assaults in the team with the match maker filling in the other weight classes with the other groups and solo players.

At that point in time in the game a group was also not limited in size and could form a full company to make up an entire team.

The difference at the moment is the flip side of this.
- We are limited to a lance for group size.
- There's no weight class restrictions on the team.
- Groups are limited by tonnage.

I'll also note that the change for groups to use the tonnage limit was to ease the match maker process for group queue as it became an issue trying to find combinations of groups that had the right number of mechs to fit the 3/3/3/3.
A particularly burdensome issue when there were also no restrictions on group size.

As we have seen, and it has not been restricted to this merged queue change only highlighted by it, that it has certainly been possible to have one team with more of one mech class than the other team.

The question is, what needs to be done about it?

Do we:

• Return to the strict class weight limit on teams of 3 lights / 3 mediums / 3 heavies / 3 assaults?
  This is a return to the 'classic' teams and we apply that same restrictions to groups.
  As an additional point to think on, should a group be limited to 1/1/1/1?
  
• Do we follow the tonnage limit and instead apply a limit to the overall team tonnage to try and fit under?
  This might have the same effect as the weight class limit but allows some flexibility in not restricting players to classes.
  eg: Say we had a team tonnage limit of 700 tons. (And for this lets say no limit on group tonnage). A group might take in 400 tons with ye old Steiner scout lance leaving 300 tons to fit 8 other players into the team with.
  
• Do we try something a little newer and look at matching teams according to a lance weight class?
  That is, when you take 4 mechs and work out their average weight they are going to fit within a certain weight bracket of Light, Medium, Heavy or Assault.
  Should the teams be matched according to the individual lance weights? ie. If there is a Heavy Lance on one team, there will be a heavy lance on the other team and so on.
  This approach might allow the most flexibility while still matching teams fairly closely in tonnage.

Some food for thought.

[Kitasho]

Glad to see this done, should help people get into matches. A lot of negativity as usual on the forums, I don't understand why the player base is so toxic on this game, we're losing players and a large part of that is the fact that friends can't play together.

[VeeOt Dragon]

personally i don't know if i like this or not. i'll be the first to admit that i'm a middle of the road player at best (with hand tremors targeting can be difficult). i haven't been playing since the start though i have been playing for at least 3 years i think. i think that there are two factors to a loss of player base. the first is the meta try hards that are just toxic to newer players (gods forbid someone bring LRM) making them not want to play. the second i would say is the way the matchmaker works. like i said i'm a tier 3 player at best even after 3 years. i find that i had far more fun in those lower tiers were you would run into strange builds and people would use tactics other than nascar not to mention people with skills closer to your own. my few dips into group play have not been pleasant ones, far to much toxicity an overly competitive players. with the player base constantly shrinking we needs something though i'm not sure what that thing is. i would rather have the MM changed so that it goes on player skill and not tier. i'll play a bit during this test and see but i'm not optimistic.

in the end what we really need is a better MM in solo and perhaps some advertising to get people to even know the game exists. (i know in one of my discords i mentioned the game and a lot of people didn't even know that it was a thing or thought it had been shut down a while ago). theres nothing PGI can do about toxicity, play behavior, or whatever the latest "meta" is. the best we can hope for is to bring new interest in the game and fix the MM (maybe increase that lock circle back to what it was before the last LRM change but thats just an LRM PUG talking (it effects Streaks as well so there)) we need t bring the fun back to the game.

[Liveish]

Played 5 Solo drops last night, and 4 out of 5 was better game play due to the random no name groups in them.

Was not 100% nascar or everyone have there own grid game, which was a nice change and might make me play more.

[Nearly Dead]

Some observations, possibly out of date since I have been doing other stuff in the hope that things will get better and people will chill out on the group/solo hate.

I saw 9 FOX unit players in one match, on one team. I assume that was a unit plus a lucky sync drop. Or PGI is simply as inept and untruthful as everyone here says.

Before I got disgusted earlier I dropped on Canyon where a player got literally hysterical because there were three 228 (?) members on the opposing team. It was like we were dropping against Seal Team 6, in real life, with live ammo. It totally disrupted and demoralized the team and, huge surprise, we lost. Two matches later I dropped on the same team as those players and they were fun, friendly and we lost in a fairly close match. I noticed no signs of demonic possession at all.

There seems to be little or effort to put the right mechs in the right lances. I know some players can hit tab for two seconds and see the weight and loadout of every mech, but all I know is that when my 40 tonner is the fastest mech on our team, and is lanced with the assaults, something is wrong.

I assume that wait time to launch is on someone's PE and by God they are going to hit that metric and get their max raise.


My overall feeling is that I don't want to play a game if the only way to not hold the team back is by playing one of a few meta mechs and executing a "speed run" set of attacks for each map and mode and executing them like a 12 year old who has memorized a side scroller.

Just an ordinary solo player that probably no one would miss, but to paraphrase Tom Peters, "The customer who complains is your best friend, because for every complaint, ten customers have already walked away swearing to never give you another dime."

[Liveish]

Anomalocaris, on 29 April 2020 - 01:40 PM, said:

Doesn't matter. I play plenty of meta but I'm not participating in this fiasco - the results were a foregone conclusion before they started, and things have gone exactly as predicted. Not worth the in game frustration. I desperately want my solo queue back which is why I'm here. But if it doesn't happen, well, then 4/27 was my final match. Easy come, easy go.

So you did not test it out, how closed minded are you?

Kitasho, on 29 April 2020 - 04:39 PM, said:

Glad to see this done, should help people get into matches. A lot of negativity as usual on the forums, I don't understand why the player base is so toxic on this game, we're losing players and a large part of that is the fact that friends can't play together.

The people are bitching are the very very top or the anti skilled people.

The very very top no mater what mode they play are going to win way more than they lose, back in the day when group Q was strong most groups handicap them self by running 4 mans, not 8/12 to get a better game, you cant really do that anymore... lucky we have comp games for those people.

MWO 2020 is not a compitive game in public Qs

For me the changes are postive,
I get to play with mates.
The game play when dropping solo has been better thanks to the groups.

[DAEDALOS513]

ShooterMcGavin80, on 29 April 2020 - 02:40 PM, said:

Therein lies the problem... Solo queue was a place where you could have fun with your non-meta builds. Which is actually most mechs. Now there may not be such a place where you can enjoy most mechs, or god forbid, try to skill up a weird variant.

Ya that could be an issue.. personally I enjoy taking most mechs out just fine.. been having a blast with the Ember again and most recently the BJ-3.. keeping up with 4man damage perfectly fine, so it is possible. But I can see how taking out bizarro builds and non-meta can be more difficult for some now because of the new grolo queue..

..but as I said previously.. one other benefit of dropping grolo is that it lowers the learning curve. Newer players won't waste as much time with non-viable builds (also wasting cbills) with the misconception that they have a good build on their hands because it does decent in solo queue.. they'll figure out it's cr*p sooner now and in turn learn how to put a great build together much quicker now

[Anomalocaris]

live1991, on 29 April 2020 - 04:54 PM, said:

So you did not test it out, how closed minded are you?

What's to try out? I've played group queue. This is group queue but worse. Because the matchmaker has been thrown out the window, cadets are dropping with Tier 1, there is no tonnage balance and the best 4-man will pretty much decide the match. You don't have a choice about whether you want to drop with an organized 4-man. It's the luck of the draw whether they're going to roll you or carry you. Because it's essentially the group queue matchmaker (which is actually just a program that fits integers together until it reaches the number 12), you're actually handicapping your team if you choose a lighter mech even as a solo player.

This is in no way an improvement for a solo player like me. I didn't have problems getting matches before (avg wait time less than a minute most nights). The existing matchmaker sucked, but it was random enough that it was reasonably fair if you played enough games. And I'd get chances to test myself against other good players, but rarely were the teams stacked with 4 good players at a time.

And why do people keep saying that the inability to play with friends is a big reason for population drops? Group queue has been around for years. Yet for some reason solo queue keeps chugging along while group queue died. Do you really think population drops disproportionately affected group that much? Or maybe it was all those "play with my buddy" groups of 2 and 3 didn't like getting their **** pushed in by organized teams over and over so they stopped group dropping. So quit telling me that inability to group drop is killing the game. You guys stopped group dropping a long time ago when the player base was much larger.

[Little Pencils]

First off I will preface that I don't like this. I know some are implying it's no different then when people would sync drop but I would argue at least back then there was still a chance sync dropper would be on opposing teams so it was a wash IMO.

I know supporters will argue "just get on coms, if you don't like it then do call drops", I'd argue I don't want to and I'm sure a large portion of the population doesn't want to dedicate themselves to tryharding and herding cats when they just want to play stompy robots, solo queue is not Faction warplay which I'm already avoiding specifically for that sort of behavior.

You want to hear my solution? Split the groups, ie. if 6 people form a group let them enter the same game but split them 3 to each team, while your at it increase the group size back to 12 and drop tonnage limits. PGI already dropped their the responsibility of actually policing and dividing players by skill with the mess that is PSR and now they're not even dividing by tonnage with letting groups in to solo. I mean WTH is this?



Two assaults and a 4 man on one team. 2 assaults, 7 heavies, 1 medium, and 2 lights vs 0 assaults, 2 heavies, 4 mediums, and 6 lights? The Anni said he wasn't group dropping but that still doesn't explain how teams are SO uneven unless my team was all group drops except me but this is ridiculous.

[50 50]

DAEDALOS513, on 29 April 2020 - 05:26 PM, said:

Ya that could be an issue.. personally I enjoy taking most mechs out just fine.. been having a blast with the Ember again and most recently the BJ-3.. keeping up with 4man damage perfectly fine, so it is possible. But I can see how taking out bizarro builds and non-meta can be more difficult for some now because of the new grolo queue..

..but as I said previously.. one other benefit of dropping grolo is that it lowers the learning curve. Newer players won't waste as much time with non-viable builds (also wasting cbills) with the misconception that they have a good build on their hands because it does decent in solo queue.. they'll figure out it's cr*p sooner now and in turn learn how to put a great build together much quicker now

You would think that this is where a working PSR would also come into effect as players who do want to enjoy goofing around or working with experimental builds, even just learning new mechs will shuffle towards the casual side of the spectrum where as the more competitive players would shift to the other.

Provided the match maker then builds the teams accordingly there would not be a problem with both sides of the spectrum enjoying themselves and those that mix and match getting a bit of both worlds.

Right at the moment we, or at least I am, have to look at this test as a step towards resolving wait time issues.
We know the match maker and PSR needs a serious overhaul and we know team composition in terms of mechs needs to be looked at.

But, given it is actually possible to get a game as a group now in my timezone (AU) I'd call that a success.

Personally, we should be able to have groups in a merged quick play mode and I don't mind the lance limitation.
We should not deny players from being able to create a group and join in.
Where people seem to be getting caught up is the perception that a group is always going to be some top tier competitive players and there will be stomps.
Creating a group is not limited to certain players, you don't have to be in a unit or have X number of mechs or achieve certain results...... everyone can make a group.
Why should the game prevent 4 tier 5 players from creating a group so they can play with their friends?

The sooner the match maker can sort players into matches according to PSR and have a proper dynamic system that will move players up AND down in their rankings the better.

[Wutudunu]

the worst solution implemented in the worst way!
when the last pug is gone, group que times will be the normal for quickplay