Constalation, on 01 May 2020 - 06:17 PM, said:
While this is true, there still has to be a bare minimum player count for new players to actually fight against. If old veterans can come back (I'm hoping for a 2~3man today with a whale and a relative newbie) and fill up the queue a bit better, it would still reduce any negative MM experiences since there would be more veterans to go around... Although considering that they threw out the baby(matchmaker) with the bathwater it probably won't work out that way.
While there might be some veterans who come back as a result of this, its poor implementation is likely going to run them off again fairly quickly. The problem is that its not enough just to be able to play with your friends, but you also have to have enjoyable matches. The current state of affairs has made that nearly impossible to accomplish with any degree of certainty.
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I do remember the game before the new skill tree.(affinity based on mech variant sets owned) I played a couple soloQ matches yesterday and it wasn't nearly as bad as what you seemingly experienced. Then again maybe I've gotten a bit dull to individual player skill, what with the extra RNG my ping adds to games.
You might not be playing enough to get dropped in with the guys who are out there pug-stomping everyone. I even didn't have to face any of them, but I definitely got more than a few games where many of the other people in the match were clearly low tier and even without any recognizable unit tags, I watched the groups just plow through them like bowling balls. The problem that isn't shown with all of these screenshots that are going around is that these stomps aren't just really one-sided, many of these matches are going from 12v12 to 4v12 within a couple of minutes as people who either aren't very good or who are just casual players are getting focused down by 3-5 artillery strikes in a row, followed by a whole lance deleting them with accurate fire. Honestly, I'm going to be surprised if any low tiers actually make it through this month without at least quitting temporarily.
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Do you think there is any way to get Duos working with SoloQ? Personally, I think there needs to be some way for a veteran and new player to queue together into a more casual experience. You just couldn't do that with how GroupQ was, what with 12 man units with full meta builds. Having Sync dropping as a requirement to play together was quite literally why I couldn't get people into this game. (Along with some of the grind before the income buff)
The issue isn't the amount of people really, its that the matchmaker doesn't attempt to balance anything at all, not even the 16 solo players. If this is going to be done correctly, PGI
ABSOLUTELY MUST create a matchmaker that not only balances the 16 solo players in the same way that the solo queue used to before the 28th, but then it also must balance the included groups, both against the other group, and the other 16 players in the match. In most games that I've played that mix groups in with solo players, the "power level" of the group (I used that term because there are a variety of metrics used like average W/L, ELO, or even just who's got the more advanced vehicle / weapons) is set as the highest of the members of the group.
So for example, if I were to group with you and I'm a tier 1 while you're a tier 5 (no clue what you actually are, but just an example), then our group would be put into the matchmaker at tier 1 where we'd face another group who was in the T1 matchmaker, and then the rest of the players in the match would also be in the same T1 matchmaker bracket. On the other hand, if you (at T5 again) were to group with a new friend who was also T5, then you'd be put into the matchmaker at T5 and face only other groups / solos who fell into the same MM bracket.
This system would not correct for the fact that many people at T1 don't actually belong there, nor that a group of GOON for example would likely still be far more proficient than a 4-man of random friends who just happened to have a T1 in the mix, but at the very least it would give the matches some semblance of balance that they are currently completely lacking.
EDIT: BTW, the fix I describe here is that
absolute bare minimum that I believe PGI must do if they want to merge the queue without deep-sixing the game entirely. I won't claim to know why people left the group queue before the solo queue, but what I can say is that the main complaint literally everyone I knew had with the group queue when we played it often (this was before it was difficult to get a match in a timely fashion there), was that it had zero balancing... there was nothing stopping a coordinated, top-tier, 12-man from getting faced off against a mish-mash of 2-4 man groups who were all really just casuals who wanted to play together. Bringing that issue into solo queue and shoving it down the throats of the people who enjoyed the status quo there before this is nothing more than trading one problem (people can't play with their friends) for another problem (solo queue players leave in droves because there is no semblance of balance anymore and that makes their game experience just plain miserable). If PGI do nothing to fix this issue, at the very least they are likely to lose the entire contents of tiers 4-5, plus likely many (if not most) of the upper tier players who'd managed to fail upwards thanks to the broken PSR system. Then they are likely to lose many of the higher tier players who belong there, but explicitly drop solo queue to avoid the exact situation we're seeing now. If there are enough people left over after all of that to keep the game going, then good for PGI, but I suspect that I've just described a rather large portion of the current player base, so I (like many here apparently) believe that this will likely be the beginning of the end...
Edited by Excessive Paranoia, 02 May 2020 - 03:50 AM.
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