76 replies to this topic

[Gagis]

This is true, regarding competitive players having opposed this, but it also does seem like the casual players are enjoying themselves and playing more than before this change. I suspect player number data will reflect this.

This does not mean that PSR is not broken and would not need to be fixed ASAP, but this still seems to have been a step in the right direction.

Edited by Gagis, 02 May 2020 - 09:05 AM.

[Brauer]

Gagis, on 02 May 2020 - 09:04 AM, said:

This is true, regarding competitive players having opposed this, but it also does seem like the casual players are enjoying themselves and playing more than before this change. I suspect player number data will reflect this.

This does not mean that PSR is not broken and would not need to be fixed ASAP, but this still seems to have been a step in the right direction.

I haven't been counting exactly, but so far my impression is that the community is roughly split 50/50. I've seen plenty of casuals decry the current state of matchmaking.,

[Willard Phule]

I'll be completely honest, the only difference now is advanced knowledge of which way a stomp is going to go. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that if a team has 4 guys with the same unit tag in the alpha lance, odds are it's a premade. If it's on your team, odds are pretty good your side is going to win. If it's not, then try to take as many with you as you can.

The gameplay hasn't changed, it's still the same non functional matchmaker.

[Captain Stiffy]

LOL all of this is because it's GAME OVER

https://steamcharts.com/app/342200

Nobody wants to talk about that or the consequences of that, in that light.

A global pandemic hit forcing most people to stay indoors and MWO gained a HUNDRED players. 100. ONE hundred players. Game over.

I take that back. The gain is basically nothing since Nov.

Edited by Captain Stiffy, 02 May 2020 - 09:23 AM.

[VonBruinwald]

Gagis, on 02 May 2020 - 09:04 AM, said:

but it also does seem like the casual players are enjoying themselves and playing more than before this change. I suspect player number data will reflect this.

I wouldn't count on player numbers at the moment, we've got countries in quarantine, events, sales and small groups coming back to give the changes a try. We're gonna see a spike, it's more a case of will they stick around.

[Captain Stiffy]

VonBruinwald, on 02 May 2020 - 09:23 AM, said:

I wouldn't count on player numbers at the moment, we've got countries in quarantine, events, sales and small groups coming back to give the changes a try. We're gonna see a spike, it's more a case of will they stick around.

nopers https://steamcharts.com/app/342200

[Sniper09121986]

Brauer, on 02 May 2020 - 08:49 AM, said:

Based on my reading of the forums over the course of this whole discussion the largest group of players in support of this hasty merging of the queues were casual players, and the largest group speaking out in opposition of this were high level players (both those who are active in competitive play and those who are not). Sooooooo..........

And it was not only high-level players in opposition but simply those who stick around long enough. WE HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE. It must be the third time I say this within the context of this discussion. Before the matchmaker and queue separation there were not just 4-mans, but full 12-mans farming solos. That is why the queues were split in the first place. The fundamental situation now is no different to how it was then. It really did not take a genius to realise how this was going to work out from the outset. PGI recreating the situation now in the hopes of getting a different result - being the definition of what, exactly? One can hope they will try to downsize the max size of the group to arrive at a more manageable solution (maybe as low as a 2-man) if not reverse the whole thing outright, in-before this thread gets locked as well.

[Arugela]

Captain Stiffy, on 02 May 2020 - 09:18 AM, said:

LOL all of this is because it's GAME OVER

https://steamcharts.com/app/342200

Nobody wants to talk about that or the consequences of that, in that light.

A global pandemic hit forcing most people to stay indoors and MWO gained a HUNDRED players. 100. ONE hundred players. Game over.

I take that back. The gain is basically nothing since Nov.

Maybe if they got it working on proton for linux players or mac players it would bring in a few people. Is there something simple like getting boost or whatever up to date or proton could do something so it can run correctly. It basically works atm, but gets an unexpected error.

Edited by Arugela, 02 May 2020 - 09:59 AM.

[VonBruinwald]

Captain Stiffy, on 02 May 2020 - 09:26 AM, said:

nopers https://steamcharts.com/app/342200

A 20% increase two months in a row isn't bad.

[Anomalocaris]

VonBruinwald, on 02 May 2020 - 09:55 AM, said:

A 20% increase two months in a row isn't bad.

I think the point is that all the stay at home orders have probably boosted player numbers somewhat. 20% sounds like a lot, but 100 players sounds like a little. Too many confounding variables to tell how its related to game play. If everyone lifted their quarantines tomorrow, even if the merged queues were super popular, you might not see any change in players but it would be because of the quarantine, not lack of players for new queue. Now, if we stay under quarantine and number of players drops with new queue, that would be a bad sign.

[R Valentine]

Ironically, it was the casuals who wanted this change. Having imposed their own self exile from group queue, in spite of the fact that 8v8 was largely successful in the short time we had it, they demanded a space where they can group with their friends and avoid the tryhards. The only problem is, such a space doesn't exist and it never will. It was not group queue that joined solo queue. It's the other way around, because now all of the old problems from group queue have come to the forefront. The abandoning of PSR considerations in match maker, the absence of weight balancing, completely borked lance placements, and sync drops of 8 players or more as opposed to just 2 or 3. What we lost was solo queue. Such a thing isn't in the game anymore. What we have no is group queue with a 4 player limit + PUGs, only instead of the opt in that we asked for, solo players are forced into it.

[VonBruinwald]

BLOODWOLF333, on 02 May 2020 - 11:07 AM, said:

Was googling for games with "good" match makers and seems lots of other games have this issue as well. World of Tanks, War Thunder, etc. How do you quantify human beings by "skill"? We see the Tier xp bar doesnt work. Should players be ranked according to avg match score? An alt account whos first game does 300+ match score would shoot them up to a high Tier so, that would require a more complex formula.

League systems work, it's why real world sporting events use them.

5 Tiers, 5 leagues and each month you swap the top/bottom 20% of each league with the adjacent. Good players move up, bad players move down. Eventually everyone will be in the appropriate tier, or bouncing between.

Of course, in computer games this doesn't work so well, people want instant gratification and shiny banners every time they play.

[Horseman]

BLOODWOLF333, on 02 May 2020 - 11:07 AM, said:

Was googling for games with "good" match makers and seems lots of other games have this issue as well. World of Tanks, War Thunder, etc. How do you quantify human beings by "skill"? We see the Tier xp bar doesnt work. Should players be ranked according to avg match score?

1. Track by recent WLR and/or match score
2. PGI has the means to track it by chassis variant - you have an account stats page you can use to track your lifetime stats for each mech variant already
3. Let's assume stats from the past 1 to 3 months are used.
4. If not enough data points available, substitute the player's lifetime stats in the chassis variant.
5. If player has insufficient lifetime stats in the chassis use the global average from all players for the chassis WLR/score and the player's global WLR/score for the category (or global WLR/score period) to estimate possible performance (this is a fallback case)
6. You have a reasonable expectation as to how the player will perform in this particular mech.
7. PGI has the means to track perormance by map, mode and chassis variant globally.
8. That could be used to generate a slight correction to the estimate from point 6 so that a "good" player in a "good" mech (but which is "poor" for the map+mode combination) doesn't get overvalued for the purpose of the team balancing, while an "average" player in an "average" mech (but which is "good" for the map+mode combination) gets bumped up in value because their mech might have a more substantial impact.

Quote

An alt account whos first game does 300+ match score would shoot them up to a high Tier so, that would require a more complex formula.

Alts who overperform would shoot up and then drop down as they eventually get matched with more equal opposition.
For the first X matches by a new player you could always assume some default values and only apply the detailed stats once they get out of Cadet.

[Spheroid]

Knight Captain Morgan, on 01 May 2020 - 04:06 PM, said:

After all, it's the "I just wanna do casual drops with friends" crowd that pay all the bills...

Citation needed. Generally accepted wisdom is that a small number of whales are responsible for a majority of income in online games. Also nothing prevents a seal clubber from being a whale.

[Thorqemada]

VonBruinwald, on 02 May 2020 - 09:55 AM, said:

A 20% increase two months in a row isn't bad.

I fear it is not only not good but a bad sign - there are tens of thousands of ex MWO-Players, maybe even some hundreds of thousands and MWO got a 100 Player spike - that is devastating!

[Warning incoming Humble Dexterer]

Captain Stiffy, on 02 May 2020 - 09:18 AM, said:

A global pandemic hit forcing most people to stay indoors and MWO gained a HUNDRED players. 100. ONE hundred players. Game over.

Well the idea was that the Quarantine (and MW5 release) would result in a lot new MWO players, and initially it did.

But it's the amount of groups out to farm them that really shot through the roof, chasing many of them right back out, and increasing the amount of times their "priority spot" is bypassed by a last second group queuing past them
The good news is MWO finally has quality now : A lot more group vs group matches then before, in FP anyway.

What it might be lacking, is quantity...

In just about any similar MMO I played before, you have to go through a tree branch of (bad and good) vehicules to reach the top performing end-game ones, and it's the tier of the vehicule you're using that decides the tier level of the matches you're fighting.

In MWO, it's a bit more messy (ok it's mostly one big mess that was never fleshed out properly).

Edited by Warning incoming Humble Dexterer, 03 May 2020 - 07:35 AM.

[Red Potato Standing By]

BLOODWOLF333, on 02 May 2020 - 11:07 AM, said:

Was googling for games with "good" match makers and seems lots of other games have this issue as well. World of Tanks, War Thunder, etc. How do you quantify human beings by "skill"? We see the Tier xp bar doesnt work. Should players be ranked according to avg match score? An alt account whos first game does 300+ match score would shoot them up to a high Tier so, that would require a more complex formula. But, we would need an actual dev team to implement or fix anything and I hear PGI took them away so, i guess MWO is just being setup for failure? Release the source code so the community can fix it and polish it like what has become of Skyrim now days.

Yeah I have never understood why they don’t just use average match score to base their tiers on, it would be so much easier I think. If you get into a tier that you are out of your skill level you will go backwards ( whereas now it is near impossible unless you intentionally tank)

[Nearly Dead]

I think it is a moot point now, two queues, one queue, no queue. The trend seems pretty obvious and inevitable.

PGI says the game is in maintenance mode, so no new development. I guess that means they will move furniture around but not buy any.

PGI is making changes to serve the players remaining that aren't helping the game as a whole the same way I kept a "69 AMC Ambassador on the road for two years, on Airman 1st Class pay. It slowly deteriorated and I patched what I could afford and lived with what I couldn't until it just wouldn't run any more. No money for a new engine and nothing else would fix it. I might have been dumb, but not enough to borrow money to put into a dying car. Not when the same monthly payment would buy a newer hopefully longer lasting one. Move on.

I think PGI is moving on.

[Sjorpha]

It's a little imbalanced in some matches when strong groups are playing and a little messy with the tonnage variance, but I honestly have much more fun in the combined queue than I ever did in the pure solo queue.

And I'm a casual pug, not the worst player but not among the best either.

Edited by Sjorpha, 03 May 2020 - 04:20 PM.

[Negat1ve Nancy]

It would be better to have a queue for Solo casuals.
I can still can play casually in the new queue
And casually ignore any groups that disagree.