178 replies to this topic

[Suko]

I haven't played in years. But I decided to hop in and check the forums. I'm getting a chuckle at how this topic and the the responses to it are practically identical to 4 years ago when solo players were saying that Comm Warfare (or whatever the hell they call it now) was unplayable. Ditto for the small 2 man teams being used as canon fodder in the old group queue. And the "solutions" I'm seeing posted now are the same thing I saw recommended back then.

Just FYI, telling solo people to "join a group" isn't a solution to how to make the game enjoyable for solo players...That's just telling solo players there's no viable gameplay for them to enjoy in MWO (which may be the truth?).

[morosis]

Suko, on 16 December 2020 - 09:57 AM, said:

I haven't played in years. But I decided to hop in and check the forums. I'm getting a chuckle at how this topic and the the responses to it are practically identical to 4 years ago when solo players were saying that Comm Warfare (or whatever the hell they call it now) was unplayable. Ditto for the small 2 man teams being used as canon fodder in the old group queue. And the "solutions" I'm seeing posted now are the same thing I saw recommended back then.

Just FYI, telling solo people to "join a group" isn't a solution to how to make the game enjoyable for solo players...That's just telling solo players there's no viable gameplay for them to enjoy in MWO (which may be the truth?).

Now given what you just said, consider that solo quickplay was by far the most popular game mode before the soup merge, and the vast majority of the playerbase lived there.

So, what that means is: in the past year, we have implemented an "improvement" to quickplay that has effectively torpedoed the only aspect of the game that was popular, and marginalized or evicted the exact people that made it popular.

it is mind boggling.

Edited by morosis, 16 December 2020 - 10:09 AM.

[Knight Captain Morgan]

FindersWeepers, on 16 December 2020 - 09:10 AM, said:

Let's say your bank leaves a security exploit open, and a thief swoops in, finds the exploit, and takes all your cash.

Who's to blame? The thief? The bank?

I feel the solo+group queue merge is similar

When people stop putting their money in the banks and the banks fold and the thief breaks in but finds no money in the vault, whom does the thief blame?

[Heavy Money]

What groups are delivering these stompings? I've gotten stomped plenty of times, but its never been from a consistent group.

[Bawshko]

Heavy Money, on 16 December 2020 - 10:17 AM, said:

What groups are delivering these stompings? I've gotten stomped plenty of times, but its never been from a consistent group.

The dreaded pug/queue stompers are from people that play high-level competitive. Groups like JGx, O0PS, EmP, things like that. I don't know because I'm not a part of those groups but from my experience playing with 95th percentile + players it's not so much them wanting to stomp the queue, but instead matchmaker delivering these one-sided stomps. And, if you're playing at offpeak hours, you can run into the same premade, again, and again, and again...

Edited by Bawshko, 16 December 2020 - 10:23 AM.

[Vorpal Puppy]

I don't get it. Why is it so hard to create a good matchmaker? I play during NA prime time and can tell at least 75% of the time which team is going to win just looking at the player names before we even drop.

You can mostly forget the weight classes of the mechs as long as its sorta close, just look at everyone's Jarl's rankings and balance the teams accordingly. For those cases where you have a group of uber-elite 99%'ers, you got to make one change to the current system. Remove the guarantee that everyone grouped up will end up on the same team! They will just be in the same game. Overall this will only effect a tiny percentage of the population - 90+% of groups will always get to play together. Most of those elite pilots whose groups get broken up will have more fun shooting each other, trying to see who can carry harder, etc. than clubbing seals anyway. And for those whiney few that care more about their stats than what's for the overall good of the game, well, they can go back to clubbing pugs in Faction Play.

[Nightbird]

Vorpal Puppy, on 16 December 2020 - 10:51 AM, said:

I don't get it. Why is it so hard to create a good matchmaker? I play during NA prime time and can tell at least 75% of the time which team is going to win just looking at the player names before we even drop.

You can mostly forget the weight classes of the mechs as long as its sorta close, just look at everyone's Jarl's rankings and balance the teams accordingly. For those cases where you have a group of uber-elite 99%'ers, you got to make one change to the current system. Remove the guarantee that everyone grouped up will end up on the same team! They will just be in the same game. Overall this will only effect a tiny percentage of the population - 90+% of groups will always get to play together. Most of those elite pilots whose groups get broken up will have more fun shooting each other, trying to see who can carry harder, etc. than clubbing seals anyway. And for those whiney few that care more about their stats than what's for the overall good of the game, well, they can go back to clubbing pugs in Faction Play.

You can thank the uneducated community for the current PSR+MM fiasco. They didn't do the math, threw a dart blindfolded, and got what we have today.

https://mwomercs.com...ost__p__6337266

I predicted it would fail, and it did.
https://mwomercs.com...ost__p__6339434
https://mwomercs.com...cy-with-graphs/

The TL:DR is that neither PGI nor the community possess the skill the fix the Matchmaker, just live with it.

Edited by Nightbird, 16 December 2020 - 11:10 AM.

[morosis]

Nightbird, on 16 December 2020 - 11:09 AM, said:

The TL:DR is that neither PGI nor the community possess the skill the fix the Matchmaker, just live with it.

the people being harmed by the current solution also happen to be the people that make up the vast majority of the playerbase.

i dont think "live with it" is a good approach. unless "live with it" includes anticipating massive attrition that effectively ends the need for any matchmaker at all.

[Bowelhacker]

Nightbird proposed something? Why hasn't he told us about this before...?

Edited by Bowelhacker, 16 December 2020 - 11:19 AM.

[Nightbird]

morosis, on 16 December 2020 - 11:17 AM, said:

the people being harmed by the current solution also happen to be the people that make up the vast majority of the playerbase.

i dont think "live with it" is a good approach. unless "live with it" includes anticipating massive attrition that effectively ends the need for any matchmaker at all.

I agree it's not a good approach, but it is the ONLY approach.

You're not gonna get a solution out of PGI nor the community. What other option is there?

[morosis]

Nightbird, on 16 December 2020 - 11:19 AM, said:

I agree it's not a good approach, but it is the ONLY approach.

You're not gonna get a solution out of PGI nor the community. What other option is there?

whatever it might be, it starts with pointing out that the current approach is failing/has failed, yes?

the next step can and will only happen once that realization kicks in, and a need to do something different is embraced.

nothing can change until it is understood that something must change.

[Nightbird]

morosis, on 16 December 2020 - 11:25 AM, said:

whatever it might be, it starts with pointing out that the current approach is failing/has failed, yes?

the next step can and will only happen once that realization kicks in, and a need to do something different is embraced.

nothing can change until it is understood that something must change.

Good luck getting the community group that proposed the failure of a PSR formula to admit it lol, you can see them all around the forum defending it as working as intended or making false claims like the pop is too small for a functioning MM.

[morosis]

Bawshko, on 16 December 2020 - 10:23 AM, said:

The dreaded pug/queue stompers are from people that play high-level competitive. Groups like JGx, O0PS, EmP, things like that. I don't know because I'm not a part of those groups but from my experience playing with 95th percentile + players it's not so much them wanting to stomp the queue, but instead matchmaker delivering these one-sided stomps. And, if you're playing at offpeak hours, you can run into the same premade, again, and again, and again...

i will repeat what i have said in previous posts, because I want to be sure this thread does not come across as yet another attempt to blame the great players left in the game for the current ills of the matchmaker. I value these people tremendously. they bring the community together, they educate newer players, they provide the foundation for the comp scene, and for most of the active units that recruit friends and new blood to the game, they are a huge reason the game is still alive today and they are not thanked enough for how much they contribute of their own free time, for the benefit of the community.

that said, the matchmaker is unable to solve for their needs at one extreme, the needs of average premades in the middle, the needs of lower tier premades on the other extreme, as well as the needs of solo players, as well as tonnage balance, as well as quick matchmaking times. this lack of competent matchmaking is getting worse, and the worse it gets, the more it either drives solo players out of the game, or into groups, which exacerbates the problems further. we have reached the part of the story where the snowball of self-reinforcing problems is rolling down the mountain, growing larger with each passing day, and all we can do is wait for it to hit something so we see how bad the damage will be.

i can tell you this much: i used to only play this game solo, but after my experience yesterday, i dont think i'll ever play it solo again unless there are huge changes to these matchmaking systems.

[Bigbacon]

morosis, on 16 December 2020 - 11:42 AM, said:

i will repeat what i have said in previous posts, because I want to be sure this thread does not come across as yet another attempt to blame the great players left in the game for the current ills of the matchmaker. I value these people tremendously. they bring the community together, they educate newer players, they provide the foundation for the comp scene, and for most of the active units that recruit friends and new blood to the game, they are a huge reason the game is still alive today and they are not thanked enough for how much they contribute of their own free time, for the benefit of the community.

that said, the matchmaker is unable to solve for their needs at one extreme, the needs of average premades in the middle, the needs of lower tier premades on the other extreme, as well as the needs of solo players, as well as tonnage balance, as well as quick matchmaking times. this lack of competent matchmaking is getting worse, and the worse it gets, the more it either drives solo players out of the game, or into groups, which exacerbates the problems further. we have reached the part of the story where the snowball of self-reinforcing problems is rolling down the mountain, growing larger with each passing day, and all we can do is wait for it to hit something so we see how bad the damage will be.

i can tell you this much: i used to only play this game solo, but after my experience yesterday, i dont think i'll ever play it solo again unless there are huge changes to these matchmaking systems.

2 man groups max, no more than 1 group per side.

[Heavy Money]

Bawshko, on 16 December 2020 - 10:23 AM, said:

The dreaded pug/queue stompers are from people that play high-level competitive. Groups like JGx, O0PS, EmP, things like that. I don't know because I'm not a part of those groups but from my experience playing with 95th percentile + players it's not so much them wanting to stomp the queue, but instead matchmaker delivering these one-sided stomps. And, if you're playing at offpeak hours, you can run into the same premade, again, and again, and again...

I play North America evenings to late night and have never run into groups like this. I've seen plenty of stomps, but it mostly seems to depend on one team being too timid or not. I've never been repeatedly matched against a pre-made that just keeps stomping. Even when I see a lot of the same people in multiple matches, the outcome tends to be a tossup. Often I'll know in the first few minutes if my team will do well and be stomped based on their positioning on the map.

I solo drop, and often play with a group that's all t1, and often play with a group that's me and 3 t5's who were recently cadets. I notice big differences in matchscore performance between these groups, but not really in win %. I often get 3-5kills/solo/kmdd and 800+ dmg on a losing team, and also often die instantly or spend the match hardly even seeing any targets and still win.

Not to say that other people aren't having bad experiences in their timezones or something, but from my experiences, the problem with the matchmaker is that outcomes seem so totally random. One should expect good players to swing the match or carry (like my t1 group) and for worse players to drag the team down and regularly lose (like my t5 group) but there doesn't seem to be any correlation.

Perhaps my t1 group is just not quite good enough to carry, and my t5 group is not quite bad enough to drag. But we're talking a group were everyone will get 700+dmg in a match vs a group where the other 3 struggle to break 200dmg in a match. There should be a big difference, but there isn't really.

Edited by Heavy Money, 16 December 2020 - 12:13 PM.

[RickySpanish]

Gotta stop after the second stomp OP, and try to hop out of the queue for two minutes after the first stomp. I do that on a heavy win too, because you just don't want to be a part of that sort of cluster ****. Sometimes the MM just can't handle the low pop, there's nothing to be done there.

[Scout Derek]

No1Curr, on 16 December 2020 - 11:57 AM, said:

"But if I can't group drop in QP I can't play with my friends!"

What, did you guys kill FP COMPLETELY already, and now you're gonna come wreck the bads' fun because you ******* can?

"hey uh the mode that you more or less left to us to avoid getting the crap stomped out of you dried up so now we're gonna come to your mode and stomp you, k"

FP is not even remotely the reason why people are grouping up now.

They're doing it because they either can or want to play with people they themselves know. Sure some are out there to just own people for the fun of it but some play to just shoot mechs, that's about it.

And that's coming from someone who's been on both sides of the spectrum; from being godawful and experiencing the queue when groups were allowed into solo years ago, the middle where solo quickplay was just that, and now.

The problem also extends to the fact that there has legitimately been nothing more interesting to do. Faction Play? Pretty Dead save for primetime hours. Solaris? Even more dead now, only active the first few days of the kickoff event and then legitimately no one plays that gamemode commonly save for a handful or people are there to just grind up the wins on an alt or with friends because in order to even remotely get any rewards you have to suffer 25 matches of solaris which may or may not even be worth grinding because most people get pounded into dust long after the CBT has been put into overdrive.

The population is the overall issue however multiple issues with the core game mechanics has led to the population decreasing due to a lack of development for said game.


Back onto the topic though; Population is the outlier, when you encounter a 4 man that's filled with some of if not the best players the game currently has, they will stomp the queue no matter how you put it, even without the 4 man, if a group of 4 somehow sync, they're gunna kick the crap out of the other enemy team, and, being that usually it's VERY rare at times that another group or randoms of equal skill show up, the results of the match get skewered between 12-0 stomps, or 12-11 type of matches.

Don't hate the player, hate the game, because that's what has been leading up to this point; alot of the more competent players were asking for some sort of balance to it, and yet none has been remotely delivered yet save for micro changes to tonnage which has ABSOLUTELY done NOTHING. I don't remember the exact details, but I recall a friend saying that they need to limit group size, and more than likely tonnage as well, but that's the best they could do as far as changes to groups go.

[crazytimes]

Scout Derek, on 16 December 2020 - 02:05 PM, said:

Don't hate the player, hate the game, because that's what has been leading up to this point; alot of the more competent players were asking for some sort of balance to it, and yet none has been remotely delivered yet save for micro changes to tonnage which has ABSOLUTELY done NOTHING. I don't remember the exact details, but I recall a friend saying that they need to limit group size, and more than likely tonnage as well, but that's the best they could do as far as changes to groups go.

I don't hold it against you guys at all. You're as entitled to group and play as anyone else is. Without the population to balance the MM in any way, 4 manners in QP is just not going to work right. At the same time, people want to play in groups, and there isn't the population to run different queues either.

As unfun as it is to be on the wrong end of the matches, when Ash was streaming the "let's go 98% win rate to prove group queue was a terrible idea", I was still cheering him on.

At this point, PGI are really not going to change anything though. The stats and updates on merged queue and PSR changes went away really quickly...

[Nightbird]

I already see 3 different people post it's due to low population that's making impossible for the MM to create balanced games. This is completely false. From the very beginning, the "community-driven" PSR and MM was designed favor strong groups and screw over everyone else.

https://mwomercs.com...ost__p__6339434

Edited by Nightbird, 16 December 2020 - 04:09 PM.

[LordNothing]

im a solo and i find the game playable.

of course that statement varies widely with time of day, day of the week and whether or not there is an event running.

Edited by LordNothing, 16 December 2020 - 05:32 PM.