212 replies to this topic

[Anomalocaris]

Leone, on 09 June 2021 - 12:32 PM, said:

We have a solo only Queue. We have a group only queue for the hardcore. We have a queue with respawns. And then we have quickplay for those that just want fast drops.

Seriously, I feel like a tired parent trying to explain to small children that they can't have a second dinner until they finish their dessert and snacks. We have one v one. If you wanna go solo you can't get more solo'n that. We have comp, for the most dedicated of group play. We have faction warfare. There's literally a queue for everyone. Heck they even went and release MW5 for pve!

I seriously feel like you're the kinda spoiled teenager that's looking into a full garage and finds it wanting. We got a motorcycle, a coup, a van and a truck and even a little ATV off on the side and you're the kid looking at your dad whose working two jobs and saying 'But I want a jeep!'

~Leone

That's just pedantic b.s. And I suspect you know it, but you're just trying to stir the pot.

Mixing 12 randoms on each team != an organized group of 4 plus 8 randoms on each team.

There is no evidence that adding soup queue improved player population. In fact, the only data we have says that it _hurt_ player population (dropping for 3 of 4 months after soup was added).

The simple fact of the matter is, we have a crappy matchmaker. It is bad enough that at some level it becomes intolerable for some segment of the potential playerbase. Adding groups to that matchmaker makes the balancing of teams even worse whenever the groups' average skill deviates noticeably from the mean of the solo players in the match. It is not about good groups only. It's about groups that are substantially better or worse than the average.

You can be flippant about this, but I don't think you can argue the matchmaking issues, and you certainly don't have any evidence to support population benefits of soup queue.

The arguments about a good group killing the old group queue are not cogent to the current situation for a number of reasons which I have covered but will briefly review:

1) 8v8 group queue would require 67% of the population that a 12v12 group queue would. We are currently at about 65% of mid 2016 overall population numbers (Jarl's list), and at 75% of mid-2016 average players online numbers (steamcharts). Thus, we can populate group matches at about the same level as we did in 2016 if we stick with 8v8.

2) Going to a 4-man max group, as we have now, will limit the impact of top flite players. There will be no killer 12-mans, nor even a wolfpack of 6. That killer team will be at best half of one team. They'll still have a big impact, but not much more than they would right now in soup queue.

So if you think group queue was even passable in 2016 (it was pretty good for me, I got plenty of matches from end of 2016 to mid 2017 with waits under 5 min most times, and even better in prime time), then you should be intellectually honest enough to admit that we have the population to attempt split queues now with 8v8 group. And limiting groups to 4-mans should actually improve competitiveness. And by not having to mix groups and solos, groups matches could arguably kick off much quicker.

[Khobai]

Lockheed_, on 11 June 2021 - 02:19 PM, said:

and yet they just hired a new level designer this year and a community manager end of last year

which has absolutely nothing to do with what were talking about. which is cryengine engineers.

level designers and community managers are needed for other games not just MWO. a cryengine engineer is only needed for MWO.

[Dogstar]

justcallme A S H, on 11 June 2021 - 07:50 AM, said:

The question is - what is good for their career and what is not.

Rewind 6+ years in the market at the time for the favoured engines, coders and similar. Why would you continue to invest your time in learning and upskilling in something losing significant market share?

Hmm, it's not quite as simple as that. I, for instance, have, amongst my other skills, a bunch of experience with older languages/frameworks that are still marketable. I'm also an older developer and we tend to be less interested in being at the cutting edge than the youngsters.

Admittedly I have no idea about how marketable CryEngine 3(?) experience is, it may be distinctly lacklustre, but my point still stands. It's not impossible to get a developer to learn the skills provided you are willing to pay for it but PGI seem to be distinctly unwilling to pay for code changes.

and that tells you a lot about how far they are willing to go to keep MWO going in the long run.

Edited by Dogstar, 12 June 2021 - 01:19 AM.

[Khobai]

I dont see how the game is going to do well when they still havent figured out a way to get people to spend money on the game.

I gotta think selling mech packs has dried up by now. besides why would anyone spend money on a game thats dead in development?

What I think MWO should do is advance the timeline to the invasion of the clan homeworlds. Add a bunch of new weapons and equipments to the game. Then have a kickstarter for 4 new IS mechs and 4 new clan mechs that use all the new tech. And then tie that in with improvements and special events for faction play. I dont think they need a cryengine engineer to do any of that.

People would be more inclined to spend money on the game if they showed that its development isnt completely dead.

Edited by Khobai, 12 June 2021 - 07:39 AM.

[SCRAPMETAL99]

justcallme A S H, on 09 June 2021 - 05:19 PM, said:

I have said it in the past as have others.

GroupQ was definitely not alive enough in 2018. Even go back to 2017 - just 1-2 high skill groups in GQ was enough to quite literally empty the queue in an hour even in NA prime. I know this because I was in some of these groups.

Streamers and causal units would last max 60-90mins and you could see them on discords, streams etc all breaking groups and then sync dropping in SoloQ which leads to the spiral death if population. What's to stop that happening all over again? It's a huge question to address.

so basically what im getting here is yourswelf and others like you have killed groupQ allready,and now you want to kill the quickplay what do you think your little groups are doing right now. what do you think the solo droppers are going to have any chance against your groups if the groups couldnt handle yous yh great logic there
with great power comes great responsibility..........your a comp player i understand your allowed to have fun but at whos expense really what the solo players ex youve killed groupq allready

[Dogstar]

Lockheed_, on 12 June 2021 - 02:10 AM, said:

If I'm not mistaken they even mentioned at some point that if the game does well they would bring someone on board to work on code things.

I hope so, I really do, I'm just pessimistic about it at the moment based on past history. It would be great of PGI have turned over a new leaf.

[YueFei]

With regards to player population dropping because of bad matchmaking and losing? I don't think players mind losing so much as "down-time" spent per loss.

Look at fighting games, and how the player community behaves there. It's common there to try to re-match over and over against an opponent that keeps beating you, in order to try to learn and improve until you can beat him. Players don't mind losing, since matches pop up near instantly, you fight multiple rounds with each round lasting ~30 seconds or so, and a whole match lasting 3 or 4 minutes. There's very little "downtime", so the consequences of losing have far less impact on your ability to participate and have fun.

Contrast with MWO where searching for matches takes longer, the initial movement into position in a match takes longer, and if you die early you're stuck having to repeat that whole process again, so even if you disconnect immediately and try to find a new match, you're still gonna be stuck waiting a few minutes to find a match, wait for it to start, and then move to contact.

People complain about TTK in MWO, but did you ever see anyone complain about TTK in Bushido Blade, or Hellish Quart, both games where you could die in 1 hit? It didn't matter in those games because 2 seconds later you were playing again.

I don't really see a way to solve that "down-time" issue with MWO's current setup and game modes.

[Khobai]

People complain about low TTK for a reason. Because having low TTK doesnt feel like battletech. A huge part of Battletech is your mech getting slowly attritioned and having weapons get critted out and locations blown off before your mech finally succumbs to all the damage. Dying from 2-3 massive alphastrikes to the CT while the rest of your mech is barely touched does not properly simulate Battletech. Thats the problem with allowing aimed alphastrikes and having mechs with huge CTs.

I definitely dont think the issue of TTK being too low should be ignored in favor of making it faster to get into matches.

lower quality games are still lower quality no matter how fast you get back into another game.

They need to increase TTK somehow either by reducing the amount of PPFLD flying around and/or by increasing mech internal structure and then adding defensive quirks to the mechs that need them. I believe a x3 (instead of x2) internal structure increase is necessary at this point because I dont think defensive quirks alone will solve the problem.

Edited by Khobai, 12 June 2021 - 03:02 PM.

[Leone]

Some people just cannot understand that world doesn't revolve around themselves.

~Leone.

[justcallme A S H]

SCRAPMETAL99, on 12 June 2021 - 10:54 AM, said:

so basically what im getting here is yourswelf and others like you have killed groupQ allready,and now you want to kill the quickplay what do you think your little groups are doing right now. what do you think the solo droppers are going to have any chance against your groups if the groups couldnt handle yous yh great logic there
with great power comes great responsibility..........your a comp player i understand your allowed to have fun but at whos expense really what the solo players ex youve killed groupq allready

Back in 2017 the amount of high-skill players & active units in the game was significantly higher than it is now. There was a high number of elite/very high skill players in the game. 100s of them, 300-400++ all of them were pretty highly active. You'd see elite players Solo, GroupQ almost every game.

These days you're lucky if it's 50 and you barely see any.

Currently Elite Groups are an extremely small propotion of the population now and even more so the amount of games that they are in.

I will say it's been great to be able to play with friends again. Sometimes Vxheous and I drop in a 2man while he is at work/on break. We get on, chat / catch up while shooting mechs as we are damn great friends. Just so happens because we are good at it we win most matches.


Lets not forget the key point playing with friends concept applies to the entire community.

So do you think we should remove that abilty because of a handful high skill player groups? That account for a fraction of the matches each month? Do you really think that's the way to go?

Even though I don't like SoupQ - As I've pointed out many time - I cannot ignore the fact it's let many players get that that social aspect back into their MWO gameplay and that is what keeps them coming back to the game.

I thought Groups would have a far more disatrous effect on the queue. I was wrong on those statements as the majority are just casual / play with ya mate type groups who really aren't impacting matches at all.

[justcallme A S H]

Lockheed_, on 12 June 2021 - 03:22 PM, said:

they are releasing the second new mechpack in a month,

Just looking at peoples comments in the forums, discord etc. people are still buying stuff.

Daeron commented the new Warden pack, in the first 48hrs - was double was the Stryker pack was. They were very, very happy with the numbers (no idea what they are ofc).

If PGI are happy it's gotta be good and obviously quite viable despite what nay-sayers think they know.

I mean I know heaps, HEAPS of people who have purchased both packs and even more than went with the Warden pack. I grabbed both and my wallet has been shut for many years.

The evidence mech packs are still selling is everywhere. However people only see what they want to see at times.

[Vxheous]

justcallme A S H, on 12 June 2021 - 08:20 PM, said:

Daeron commented the new Warden pack, in the first 48hrs - was double was the Stryker pack was. They were very, very happy with the numbers (no idea what they are ofc).

If PGI are happy it's gotta be good and obviously quite viable despite what nay-sayers think they know.

I mean I know heaps, HEAPS of people who have purchased both packs and even more than went with the Warden pack. I grabbed both and my wallet has been shut for many years.

The evidence mech packs are still selling is everywhere. However people only see what they want to see at times.

That reminds me, I should go pick up a warden pack, though money's tight atm.

[LordNothing]

pack comes out a few days before my birthday, so im just going to ask for it and some weed. im going to need both (im turning 40).

Edited by LordNothing, 13 June 2021 - 12:25 PM.