1579 replies to this topic

[Alreech]

Michelle Branch, on 01 May 2020 - 02:01 AM, said:

I think I speak for anyone here that's been around for awhile, We don't want more superfluous garbage added, we want you to actually fix the persistent problems that have been going on FOR YEARS. BIG EMPHASIS ON YEARS

No, you don't speak here for anyone that's around in a while.

You don't speak for the players like me that left MWO multiple times because of no teamwork and coordination, and came back to see hat's still the case.

AND PLAYERS LIKE ME TALKED ABOUT LACK OF COORDINATION FOR YEARS.
BIG EMPHASIS ON YEARS.

Claiming to speak for anyone is a rude way to silences other opinions, and in most cases it isn't true and makes only a bad apperance.
The same applies to using big font's and bold for shouting out. And you forgot to use !!!!!!!!!!11111

By the way, using sub VOIP channels for lances is not a new feature, it can be done quickly in Teamspeak and MWO uses Teamspeak as VOIP solution.
I was an admin for a Teamspeak Server and did bug searching for different mod projects, so what about you?

Those "invisble wall" stuff is something you found in any game, and can't be "fixed".
https://www.google.c...Q4dUDCAs&uact=5

It happens because the server uses a different mesh for collision calculation (like projectiles hitting things) than the mesh your client is using to display the object, and lag between Server <-> Client.
Sometimes the collision mesh is bigger than the visuable object = invisible walls around an fixed object like a Building or Landscape detail (large boulder, ect...).
That can be fixed for individual objects by the mappers if this bug is reported by shrinking or recreating the collision mesh.
Press F9 to get FPS & Coordinates, make a screen shot, send it to PGI.

If the collision mesh is smaller than the visible object you can shoot through the visible borders of the object.
It's still a bug, but sometimes needed to prevent movable units get stucked between fixed objects like buildings.
Try out shooting some buildings in the south eastern part of River City for a test.

Edited by GM Patience, 01 May 2020 - 09:22 AM.

[MOBAjobg]

I've been playing SQ for the longest time and dropped into 36 matches for Season 46.

The breakdown is as follows;

1) Dropped into the light class with WLF-2 that achieved 427 match score but just won 3 matches out of 12.

2) Dropped into the medium class with VGL-3 that achieved 445 match score but just won 5 matches out of 12.

3) Dropped into the assault class with MCII-B that achieved 526 match score and broke even.

I didn't drop into the heavy class yet because I gave up.

[Alreech]

FRAGTAST1C, on 30 April 2020 - 10:59 PM, said:

4. 2-man and 3-man groups end up in the same team.

Group of 3 and 2 Solos in the same Teamspeak / Discord doing a Synch Drop?

[UnkerZ]

MOBAjobg, on 01 May 2020 - 03:22 AM, said:

I've been playing SQ for the longest time and dropped into 36 matches for Season 46.

The breakdown is as follows;

1) Dropped into the light class with WLF-2 that achieved 427 match score but just won 3 matches out of 12.

2) Dropped into the medium class with VGL-3 that achieved 445 match score but just won 5 matches out of 12.

3) Dropped into the assault class with MCII-B that achieved 526 match score and broke even.

I didn't drop into the heavy class yet because I gave up.

Welcome to the club. Id suggest you pick up nothing by the biggest AC and the most SRM tubes you can find. At least youll have fair game until the next chance potatoes can vote in Polar again. I have over 20 screenshotted games where at least 6 potatoes on either side with double digit scores/damage its mindblowing.

Edited by UnkerZ, 01 May 2020 - 03:33 AM.

[Spare Knight]

Alreech, on 01 May 2020 - 03:24 AM, said:

Group of 3 and 2 Solos in the same Teamspeak / Discord doing a Synch Drop?

It appears that a Unit can sync drop a Group of 3 and a Group of 2 and they get put on the same team.

[DadeoStuart]

I am really enjoying the game play modes with the combination of group and solo queues. To be able to play along side friends in groups small to larger is great. thanks for that.



I must say that the period of 8am group play was also a good addition. please keep it up and keep the mode variety going.

[Anomalocaris]

MOBAjobg, on 01 May 2020 - 03:22 AM, said:

I've been playing SQ for the longest time and dropped into 36 matches for Season 46.

The breakdown is as follows;

1) Dropped into the light class with WLF-2 that achieved 427 match score but just won 3 matches out of 12.

2) Dropped into the medium class with VGL-3 that achieved 445 match score but just won 5 matches out of 12.

3) Dropped into the assault class with MCII-B that achieved 526 match score and broke even.

I didn't drop into the heavy class yet because I gave up.

I would like to point out that MOBA is a very solid soloQ player. Played against him many times. His lifetime win rate is about 56% and yet, even pulling much higher than his normal average match score he won less than 40% of his matches.

Think about that, this person has boosted their average match score performance by 30% over their lifetime levels to a place where he's currently sitting top 10 in match score (that will drop as the good players play more, but still) yet he can't win a majority of matches.

Is it safe to say MOBAjobg that you were dropping solo last night?

BTW, I believe that Magic Pain Glove was also below 40% win rate on his solo matches vs. 90%+ on his group matches. Another player with even better lifetime stats than MOBA and he couldn't come close to maintaining his performance dropping solo, yet absolutely dominated in group. 2 points does not make a trend, but given the dominance of good people in groups, no one should be surprised at the lopsided nature of this.

[Anomalocaris]

Couple more twitter links for you guys in case you don't follow (I don't, but I'm just documenting this [redacted]show for posterity)

https://twitter.com/...993040130449410

Russ thinks more stomps is ok to improve MM time and allow playing with friends.

He also said:

"I agree - and honestly if you spent 3 months making the worlds best skill based MM system I’m not certain you would see any better results then currently. If you have 10’s of thousands of players online and in the MM like a LoL sure. But for a niche population it’s questionable"

Yeah, he really said that. I'm sorry but such a statement is so out there it sounds like he hasn't played soloQ in years. Which is not surprising when he says:

"We try to go one layer higher than that with some PSR - but I guess my question or maybe my statement is after playing a few thousand matches of WoT lately. Is that I think MWO has every bit as good = competitive matches as that game has."

Not gonna argue about WoT vs. MWO matchmaker here because the games match things totally differently. Apples and oranges. But what I'd like to know is how many months do you have to go back to find Russ completing 1000+ games of MWO. Has he played 1000 games in the last 12 months? Last 3 years? Because from the sounds of it, and the decisions being made, I'd wager he hasn't played his own game in meaningful numbers in a _long_ time.

Other things of note. Someone mentions steam players numbers in the 400-500 range during this merge. This is right on the average for the month of April (and steam numbers have been trending up for a couple of months). Russ comments that total player numbers are around 1400 (at time of tweet I guess) which he's excited about, but notes that a couple years ago it would have been twice that. Also if you look at the Steam numbers for the week before the merge there isn't a big change in total player numbers. Despite how bad I think this change is, I still expected a big jump in players trying it. Perhaps any old players jumping back in were pre-steam.

Edited by GM Patience, 01 May 2020 - 09:24 AM.

[Constalation]

Anomalocaris, on 01 May 2020 - 03:56 AM, said:

And all you guys complaining you couldn't play with your friends. Sorry, but you were a tiny minority of players. You couldn't fill group queue because such a miniscule amount of you wanted to play.

That isn't how this works lmao. Inverse that. The population of players who wanted to play with friends decreased, because they couldn't play with friends. People aren't a hivemind and saying "you had your playground" doesn't even make sense. You conveniently ignore matches in Groupqueue where a 12man team on teamspeak would delete 3 groups of 4. Do you want more players or less players? Sounds like you just want less players.

[Redacted]

Anjin, on 30 April 2020 - 10:38 PM, said:

The flip side of that is "Ok, so **** me and all the other players that for whatever reason want to play in groups of 12 that are dominated by a more-coordinated subgroup." And if you run off enough of those players, you'll be back to "waiting a literal bloody hour" to find a game because there aren't enough solo players remaining to fill in.

I quite honestly don't SUPER mind the groups, but if it can't be done while attempting to balance the matches (see the posts mentioning tonnage imbalance: 900-500, 800-400, etc, 6 assaults to 2, 4 assaults to 0 -- and I only use assaults as an example -- played one game this evening, Conquest, we had 2 lights to their 7. Guess who won that), then it needs to not be done.

If it can't be done with at least weight/tonnage balanced matches (skill aside, since we all know that won't ever be fixed) then it absolutely needs to be separated back into group and solo queues. With an opt-in/opt-out system for the group queue.

Fair enough, but I highly doubt PGI is so incredibly incompetent that they couldn't simply add a matchmaking requirement for tonnage missmatch greater than X. (200 for example, or a near 1:1 ratio requirement for weight classes) They already have a system that recommends a weight class of mech to play for better MM performance. Surely they can do the same and add another message such as "Reduce tonnage by X for better MM times". I do think groups of 4 are too large though. On one hand, that is lance sized and easier to implement. On the other hand, the performance of a full 4 man lance fully cooperating is a bit rough. Opt-in sounds great considering how insanely broken the system seems to be right now. (Thats being kind really, I don't think they even have a system behind that button anymore)

Excessive Paranoia, on 30 April 2020 - 10:33 PM, said:

That sentiment goes both ways... By merging the queues there are a lot of solo players who just want to have "stompy stompy robot battles" who are going to have to suffer the imbalances introduced by the system. I'm not saying you shouldn't want, or get, to play with your friend, but to do it right they'd need to change so much about the way both the matchmaker *AND* the PSR system work to ensure the mixed matches are actually fun and worth dropping into that it just doesn't look like a functional system is even on the table. Don't forget that the introduction of this system appears to have completely thrown out any semblance of tier balancing and you've got people complaining about complete potatoes getting thrown into matches with top tier players. By your logic, all of those poor potatoes don't deserve to have fun just because you want to play...

1. I don't remember asking PGI to literally throw every single MM balance system out the window.
2. I highly, highly doubt anyone imagined that this new combined queue would be this... bad. I'm kind of impressed by how well they destroyed a potential player number booster this bad.
3. PSR semingly never worked so throwing it out honestly doesn't seem like a bad idea.
4. You are assuming that I can somehow bully potatoes. Trust me, I'm pretty bad at the game.

I have quite a bit of experience engaging groups while solo queueing in a multitude of games. I'm decidedly average, but it's not nearly as bad or catastrophically game breaking as you are making it sound. It turned into a mess because PGI failed to add anything to the game to try to match up Tonnage or weight classes at minimum. They skipped the literal bottom floor of matchmaking design and dug a hole for themselves.

I played about 10 matches today I think. HunchbackIIC, K-9 Bucket, and one sunspider match. About 1/3 were complete stomps. In one of them, my Light, K-9 punching bag dished out the 2nd highest total damage on my entire team. That failure wasn't caused by tonnage difference or groups in queue. That was just incompetence of the players on one team.

Edited by GM Patience, 01 May 2020 - 01:13 PM.

[Nearly Dead]

If groups continue to drop and play as if the other 8 players are particularly stupid NPCs, the solo players will leave. And we already know there aren't enough group players to support a game, otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion.

Talk to the solo players. Use plain English, not jargon. Suggest, don't order. Don't refer to them as ******* or idiots as if they had no speakers.

If enough of them leave, the game dies.


PGI, if there is any interest in keeping the game going, do one simple thing. Kill the tier system you have and replace it with a rolling average team score over the most recent 100 games, then divide that into 10 groups so we can have some kind of skill balance in the game. It does no good to have players "feel good" about their tier going up only to have them get stomped again and again in mismatched games. The "feel good" doesn't last in contact with reality.

[Constalation]

Nearly Dead, on 01 May 2020 - 04:38 AM, said:

Talk to the solo players. Use plain English, not jargon. Suggest, don't order. Don't refer to them as ******* or idiots as if they had no speakers.

There are a couple of guys that are particularly bad, bad enough that everyone recognizes them. Just hit the mute and block button and you never have to hear from them again. I highly doubt any of those toxic fleshbags are going to listen to any of us asking them to maybe chill and enjoy the sound of the UAC20 going off.

[John Bronco]

Alreech, on 01 May 2020 - 03:15 AM, said:

You don't speak for the players like me that left MWO multiple times because of no teamwork and coordination, and came back to see hat's still the case.

I don't think you're ever going to get a lot of coordination in quick play, regardless of whatever changes are being made, such is the nature of throwing together a bunch of random people. Luckily there is faction and comp to fill that need.

[Anomalocaris]

Constalation, on 01 May 2020 - 04:33 AM, said:

That isn't how this works lmao. Inverse that. The population of players who wanted to play with friends decreased, because they couldn't play with friends. People aren't a hivemind and saying "you had your playground" doesn't even make sense. You conveniently ignore matches in Groupqueue where a 12man team on teamspeak would delete 3 groups of 4. Do you want more players or less players? Sounds like you just want less players.

Just leave the discussion then. You obviously have no intention of discussing a thing. **********.

Fair enough, but I highly doubt PGI is so incredibly incompetent that they couldn't simply add a matchmaking requirement for tonnage missmatch greater than X.

The population of the entire game decreased. Yet group decreased faster? Why? There are plenty of solo players that could play group - again, solo matches on NA server kicked off pretty damn quick . Why didn't they play? You keep saying the population drop killed group queue, but you offer no evidence. And since solo and group have exactly the same requirements to play, with the exception of group requiring you have at least 1 friend to team with, why weren't more people playing group if that's what the playerbase wanted? I mean it's not like you need a dropdeck, or to choose a faction, or anything like that. In fact, since there were no tier requirements in group, your available population for a match (and teammates) is even better.

So again, why weren't people playing it even though there were plenty of people online? Is it maybe because group queue didn't have a matchmaker other than making sure the game was 12v12 (or 8v8 recently)? Is it because groups act as skill multipliers, such that a high skill group will absolutely wipe the floor with a low skill group (whereas if you dropped all those players in soloQ they'd be more evenly mixed on average)?

You can't just claim low pop killed group queue without explaining why it didn't kill soloQ. If dropping with friends was soooo popular, there would've been a fair number of folks dropping group during peak hours when there are 1000+ players on line. Wouldn't even need 10% of that population to be grouping up to get some matches, yet no one was dropping. Hmmmm....oh yeah, like you said a 12 man deleting 3 4man groups. Nothing to do with population then at all, was it? People don't like getting rolled, and yet, now we have the same MM in merged queue.

Read Russ' tweets about tonnage and PSR. He said it would eliminate the queue time benefits of the merge (which makes it pointless even in his eyes IMO). So there's that.

BTW, I always love it when people tell me to **** off, leave the discussion, etc. It means they're incapable of arguing the point. You're entitled to your opinions and I'm entitled to mine. But facts are facts. You guys didn't play group queue enough to keep it alive, stomps are up, matchmaker in merged queue is garbage, and tonnage and spawns are screwed. Guys like you encouraged PGI to screw up soloQ so I have a problem with you on principle, but ultimately it was PGI that decided to kick the baby and they need to be reminded of that.

[Black Ivan]

Played several matches today and sorry was in too many one sided stomps. Nice that the game finaly finds matches for 2 people, but still. Not funny to loose 5 out of 7 games.

PSR is still an issue, only XP bar. We need something that actually measures how good a player is.

Edited by Black Ivan, 01 May 2020 - 05:21 AM.

[Nearly Dead]

Just came from a match on HPG where our team had zero assault mechs vs 6 on the other team. To our amazement we won 12--5.

Only played a couple of games but there was some comms in voice in both. Maybe it will smooth out.

[Excessive Paranoia]

Constalation, on 01 May 2020 - 04:33 AM, said:

1. I don't remember asking PGI to literally throw every single MM balance system out the window.
2. I highly, highly doubt anyone imagined that this new combined queue would be this... bad. I'm kind of impressed by how well they destroyed a potential player number booster this bad.
3. PSR semingly never worked so throwing it out honestly doesn't seem like a bad idea.
4. You are assuming that I can somehow bully potatoes. Trust me, I'm pretty bad at the game.

I have quite a bit of experience engaging groups while solo queueing in a multitude of games. I'm decidedly average, but it's not nearly as bad or catastrophically game breaking as you are making it sound. It turned into a mess because PGI failed to add anything to the game to try to match up Tonnage or weight classes at minimum. They skipped the literal bottom floor of matchmaking design and dug a hole for themselves.

I played about 10 matches today I think. HunchbackIIC, K-9 Bucket, and one sunspider match. About 1/3 were complete stomps. In one of them, my Light, K-9 punching bag dished out the 2nd highest total damage on my entire team. That failure wasn't caused by tonnage difference or groups in queue. That was just incompetence of the players on one team.

If I'm to believe what I've been reading here, the merge seems to have been accomplished by making solo players into groups of 1 and then maximizing group size at 4 with the whole thing actually using the group queue MM instead of the solo queue MM. If this is indeed true, the system has literally thrown out any attempt to balance the teams as the group queue (iirc... I could be wrong, but I did play a lot of group queue years ago) only concerns itself with making two 12-mech teams out of the available groups and make absolutely no accounting for anything other than group sizes. If they were going to do this correctly, they would have had to create a true merged system that allows one group of up to 4, who then either have their averaged tier, or the tier of the highest tier player, used to match them into an solo queue game where the same is done for the other side. This would have at least resulted in a decent approximation of a T1-T5 match while allowing a group to participate on each team.

As for point #2, many of us imagined this to be exactly as bad as its turning out to be. I've played this game on and off all the way back to beta and this is actually the way it used to be way back at the beginning (it's been so long I actually had to confirm it through searching, but I do vaguely remember it, along with lights getting tripped if they went within 50ft of a heavier mech...), and it was a constant source of complaints... for exactly the same reasons. Groups would drive the matches while the solo players would just kind of be along for the ride. Completely one-sided stomps were common, and there was just a lot of unhappiness surrounding it. Eventually they split solo queue off into its own entity and that's the way its been until now. I was kind of wondering why they didn't just revert to the old system, but its occurred to me that back then we had a hidden ELO system instead of the visible tier system with PSR, so I imagine the old code just wasn't compatible. Whatever the case, those of us who remember the old days knew exactly how this was going to turn out because we'd literally seen it before... it wasn't good then, and it isn't good now.

(EDIT: BTW, back then we even had a pretty decent ELO based matchmaker, not the glorified XP bar we have now, and even with a better (IMO much better) segregation of skill levels, it still lead to all the same problems, though at least then you didn't have high-skill groups stomping low-skill solos.)

Finally, I'm not assuming you would be the one bullying per se, but a coordinated group will always have an edge over uncoordinated pugs. Even setting that aside, we're not seeing only groups like yours where its just a couple of buddies dropping together for a few matches, but very often now we're getting groups of the very best units in the game dropping together into matches and literally farming the solo players. This would be bad enough if it were just tier 1 units dropping into tier 1 matches, where at least the other 16 players were likely good enough to at least hold their own, if not contribute, but there are apparently tier 5 players getting faced off against some of the best units in the game dropping as 4 mans... To me (and apparently many others), that sounds more like a recipe to get players to quit the game than any serious attempt to improve match quality.

Edited by Excessive Paranoia, 01 May 2020 - 05:57 AM.

[Larsh]

Constalation, on 01 May 2020 - 04:33 AM, said:

The population of players who wanted to play with friends decreased, because they couldn't play with friends. People aren't a hivemind and saying "you had your playground" doesn't even make sense. You conveniently ignore matches in Groupqueue where a 12man team on teamspeak would delete 3 groups of 4. Do you want more players or less players? Sounds like you just want less players.

Anomalocaris, on 01 May 2020 - 05:10 AM, said:

The population of the entire game decreased. Yet group decreased faster? Why? There are plenty of solo players that could play group - again, solo matches on NA server kicked off pretty damn quick . Why didn't they play? You keep saying the population drop killed group queue, but you offer no evidence. And since solo and group have exactly the same requirements to play, with the exception of group requiring you have at least 1 friend to team with, why weren't more people playing group if that's what the playerbase wanted? I mean it's not like you need a dropdeck, or to choose a faction, or anything like that. In fact, since there were no tier requirements in group, your available population for a match (and teammates) is even better.

Yo, just talking from personal experience here, so I'm sure I can't speak for everyone. But, this issue can be explained with evidence, but I think it can be a bit murky as well since we can't dive in to each other's heads to explore why we play, or don't play.

But, just my 2 C Bills here.

*Flashback - insert wavy image here, and color correct to sepia tone*
My group used to play regularly about a year and a half ago. Didn't matter if we had a group of 3, 6, or 12. We were able to find a group match in a pretty decent amount of time. (roughly 2 - 3 min).

But, as popularity dropped after skill tree, and more dropped with the release of MW5 it was harder for our group to get a group game going. If we dropped in that 3, or 6, man group we would end up waiting 20 min for a match. This was also on Friday nights around 8pm EST. And because of that, we lost players who didn't care to wait that long. Once we found that 12 mans could still find a group game in a decent amount of time, it was too late for us since many left to play other games. It pretty much became a snowball effect as people left due to not being able to play as a solid group

To help alleviate this, we have done sync drops. But, that only works so well. We would still like to be able to find a match with a group of 3 or 6, but when running sync you run the gambit of:
- Not finding a match together.
- Tiers of your group mates being too wide, so sync will never match you.
- Being in the same match, but on opposite teams.
- Being in the same match, but in different lances.
- If you win the lottery, you get in the same match, with the same lance.

Due to not being able to get a stable group with some friends, most of the group left discouraged.
*End Flashback*

I don't want to discount your findings from your group, since I haven't had much time to know you here, or play with your side to know how things are. But, I wanted to share what has happened with my group over the past year and a half of decline.

Here's an image of an overheating Nova that doesn't mind it to brighten everyone's mood.

Edited by Larsh, 01 May 2020 - 08:20 AM.

[Horseman]

Snowhawk, on 01 May 2020 - 02:21 AM, said:

Hmm… are you sure? As far I know the groups are limited up to 4 players on each side.

I have seen the same thing as Frag did:

Spare Knight, on 01 May 2020 - 03:11 AM, said:

A 3 man and 2 man on the same team.
Never mind, it will only let me link a photo. Not upload it. Tried to link to it in OneDrive and it would not allow a jpg.

Drop it on imgur.

Anomalocaris, on 01 May 2020 - 04:28 AM, said:

"I agree - and honestly if you spent 3 months making the worlds best skill based MM system I’m not certain you would see any better results then currently. If you have 10’s of thousands of players online and in the MM like a LoL sure. But for a niche population it’s questionable"

It's almost like he doesn't understand the actual issue is the MM failing to equalize the teams by properly distributing the same 24 players it already had.
Nobody is asking PGI to invest giant amounts of effort and applying machine learning algorithms to accurately predict individual build performance or anything like that... just use a reasonably accurate performance estimate based on the player's recent history and you'll still get something better than what there is right now.

[Brauer]

Horseman, on 01 May 2020 - 06:52 AM, said:

I have seen the same thing as Frag did:

Drop it on imgur.

It's almost like he doesn't understand the actual issue is the MM failing to equalize the teams by properly distributing the same 24 players it already had.
Nobody is asking PGI to invest giant amounts of effort and applying machine learning algorithms to accurately predict individual build performance or anything like that... just use a reasonably accurate performance estimate based on the player's recent history and you'll still get something better than what there is right now.

To be fair it is hard to confirm if this is a two man and a three man on the same side in a match, or if it's just a coincidence. I assume PGI could check the match ID and confirm this if they cared to, but otherwise we'd need more evidence to really know for sure. Course given PGI's track record there's plenty of reason to wonder if there's a bug or something allowing more than 4 grouped up players on a side.

[Dee Eight]

Snowhawk, on 01 May 2020 - 02:21 AM, said:

Hmm… are you sure? As far I know the groups are limited up to 4 players on each side.

Yes he's sure... PGI simply stated that the maximum was 4 people in a single group element, it didn't say that the maximum people grouped up together in different elements that could end up on a team was also 4.