62 replies to this topic

[Expfighter]

Can we PLEASE do something about TEAMS in matches? tired of being matched up against 3 and 4 man teams all running lights. they are well coordinated via outside commo and they make a team of solos just QUIT the game after being devastated 12-0.

If they want to team up like that, make them wait until a match of full teams is available

[martian]

Expfighter, on 17 September 2022 - 07:47 PM, said:

Can we PLEASE do something about TEAMS in matches? tired of being matched up against 3 and 4 man teams all running lights. they are well coordinated via outside commo and they make a team of solos just QUIT the game after being devastated 12-0.

If they want to team up like that, make them wait until a match of full teams is available

PGI sides with the premades. Therefore, it is unlikely that they will remove them from the Quick Play.

Actually, some time ago PGI developer said explicitly that he knows that solo players will not like being farmed by premades ... and that he does not care.

[Saved By The Bell]

Low tiers should play alone. If they make the low tier team, they would fight against high tier team. High tier team, even only 4 man, could kill all 12.

Most of fight terrible because of it.

Edited by Saved By The Bell, 18 September 2022 - 12:12 AM.

[PocketYoda]

martian, on 17 September 2022 - 10:31 PM, said:

PGI sides with the premades. Therefore, it is unlikely that they will remove them from the Quick Play.

Actually, some time ago PGI developer said explicitly that he knows that solo players will not like being farmed by premades ... and that he does not care.

Well thats a smart way of ending the games life span..

[Expfighter]

Nomad Tech, on 18 September 2022 - 04:14 AM, said:

Well thats a smart way of ending the games life span..

Exactly right, if the dev actually said that, then he should be fired for killing the game!

last night i was in a match with my Dire Wolf-A, i was on a totally solo team, against a team with 1 4-man team and another 3-man team, we started fine but then the team of 4-lights (3 Jenners and a spider) started rolling and just annihilating everyone on our solo team. I was actually the last mech standing with 3 kills in a 12-3 match. Of course, my slide down tier 5 continued (I was tier 2 in Aug before the new tier system killed the game) as our team sucked and didn't do Jack.

i just log off when that happens as do ALOT of others

Edited by Expfighter, 18 September 2022 - 08:27 AM.

[Expfighter]

Lockheed_, on 18 September 2022 - 09:21 AM, said:

It's actually prolonging the games life span to have groups in QP.
If you'd remove groups and no one could play with their buddies anymore and people would leave in droves.
We have groups in QP in the first place simply to retain those players and keep the game going.

Considering the whole"groups are killing the game" issue that keeps coming up, there's certainly a big advantage when a group works well together and that can lead to one sided matches. The opposite is also true for bad teams that seem to operate on one collective brain cell.
However it seems like the issue gets easily blown out of proportion by players blaming everyone but themselves for doing poorly. It's an easy excuse having not to look at one's personal performance, builds, situational awareness, positioning etc.
While groups do cause issues it's not gonna be the thing that is killing the game.




the matchmaker only allows one 3-man + another 2-man. The only way to get a 4-man is if they are the only group in the team

Then either you don't know what you are talking about OR, the matching making screwed up OR, they changed it to allow it because to fill the match because that's what happened.

And i am NOT blaming anyone for my play, sometimes i do run into a murderball and nothing can prevent that and sometimes something else happens but i do get kills in almost every match with my Dire-Wolf build

Pirahna may want to keep those teams, but they are sacrificing the MANY casuals that play solo for that and that is their downfall

[Vlads Brain]

I think a good compromise would be to rate the premade by tier level of its members then not let it into a lower tiered match so that lower tiers lances wouldn't be 'punished'. Of course given the low population numbers its unlikely any tightening up of the matchmaker is possible unless people want to wait even longer for a match and currently you can wait a few minutes in the queue even during prime.

[Gagis]

Expfighter, on 18 September 2022 - 10:04 AM, said:

Then either you don't know what you are talking about OR, the matching making screwed up OR, they changed it to allow it because to fill the match because that's what happened.

And i am NOT blaming anyone for my play, sometimes i do run into a murderball and nothing can prevent that and sometimes something else happens but i do get kills in almost every match with my Dire-Wolf build

Pirahna may want to keep those teams, but they are sacrificing the MANY casuals that play solo for that and that is their downfall

How do you think you know which players are in a group? You can only guess based on how well they play together and/or unit tags, both of which can be purely coincidental.

[Mark Yore]

It makes sense to put teams evenly on either side, so if you had a three man team and a four man team they wouldn't be fighting together.

The problem with the matchmaker is that there aren't enough players to balance it out. If you keep on getting your head kicked in it's less fun and you're less likely to stay.

The same happens when weapons and mechs are unbalanced, especially for smaller game numbers, like the 8v8 for comp and the 1v1 for the last event queue. In the EQ flamers were overpowered when there was no other team member to break the heat lock. Light wolfpacks are much the same, not because of their weapons or mobility but their armour.

[Curccu]

Mark Yore, on 18 September 2022 - 11:00 AM, said:

It makes sense to put teams evenly on either side, so if you had a three man team and a four man team they wouldn't be fighting together.

The problem with the matchmaker is that there aren't enough players to balance it out. If you keep on getting your head kicked in it's less fun and you're less likely to stay.

The same happens when weapons and mechs are unbalanced, especially for smaller game numbers, like the 8v8 for comp and the 1v1 for the last event queue. In the EQ flamers were overpowered when there was no other team member to break the heat lock. Light wolfpacks are much the same, not because of their weapons or mobility but their armour.

"
GROUPS IN QUICK PLAY
The Max Group restrictions in Quick Play stopped being enforced in the June 21st patch, this issue has been fixed with the July 19th patch. As of the July 19th patch, The Max Group Restrictions Variable will be exposed for future tuning. The default setting will be set back to Max 5 people in groups as of the July 19th patch. Max Group Restrictions 5 means each team can have can have:

• one 4-player group, or
  
• one 2-player and one 3-player group, or
  
• two 2-player groups

"

In comp you got your tactics and pick the best mechs possible to realize that tactic, everyone can take same "op" mechs and choose to not take bad mechs.

In 1v1 same, if you see people taking flamers maybe make a build that isn't that hot? or understand that flamers will only rise your heat up to 90% and do nothing after that, so adapt to that with build and playing. heck take some full MG/gauss build and laugh to flamers as they do nothing.

More often than seeing premade light pack eating away enemy team I see that light pack running into enemy and dying and being totally useless. That is my experience in T1 at least.

[Gideon Bravor]

Lockheed_, on 18 September 2022 - 10:31 AM, said:

they have data on player retention, match outcomes, etc. if they would actually see the the MANY causals that play solo all leave why would they, as a business, keep groups in QP when the goal is currently to maintain and grow population?

Personally, I play solo only and I don't see any reason to leave.

If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say they allow groups in QP for two reasons:

People who play in groups consistently are more likely to be successful, and/or are hardcore fans of the game or genre. In both cases, it means they're the ones most likely to spend money on the game.

If you're losing all the time, or simply not having much fun, the probability of you spending money plummets. There are, of course, always statistical aberrations; but in general terms, I'd bet that the trend holds.

Secondly, the addition of groups to QP was necessary simply because the original group queue and faction play died out. Not having any place for grouped players was clearly seen as more dangerous to population stability, than allowing groups to run roughshod over solos in QP.

That being said, I have no doubt that the current match quality imbalance (largely caused by excessive tier spread and grouping of top tiers against lesser tiers) is one of several factors keeping the game from growing. Being farmed by groups of tier 1s is absolutely repugnant and not enjoyable to the vast majority of casual players and new players.

And yes, you can still be a new-ish player and hit tier 3. Moving through tier 4 really doesn't take that long provided you have average ability, and it's very inadequate preparation for what you'll face once you enter tier 3.

The only people who can tolerate the current matchmaking/match quality issues, are tier 1s who win more often than they lose; masochists training to be tryhards in tiers 2 and 3; or the blissfully unaware in tiers 4 and 5. The average semi-skilled, too-good-for-tier-4-but-not-good-enough-for-tier-1 player has no reason to stick around.

[Bud Crue]

martian, on 17 September 2022 - 10:31 PM, said:

PGI sides with the premades. Therefore, it is unlikely that they will remove them from the Quick Play.

Actually, some time ago PGI developer said explicitly that he knows that solo players will not like being farmed by premades ... and that he does not care.

It was worse than that. At the time they were announcing the end of Group Queue, and some of us were up in arms about it and proposed letting solos drop in to GQ so that it would shorten wait times for GQ when the group sizes were incompatible. In response Paul (or maybe it was Chris, or Russ, I don't recall) said something like: "No solos are going to want to drop with pre-mades in the group queue." So, their solution to that was to kill GQ, create the current soup queue, where...wait for it...solos are forced to drop with pre-mades. It was perfect PGI planning and logic and an absolute classic example of just how PGI "listens" to its community. Chef's Kiss.

[PocketYoda]

Make groups go by the top tier players not the bottom tier players, stop the seal clubbing, if the low tiers don't like that stop trying to pad your stats with high tiers friends..

Edited by Nomad Tech, 19 September 2022 - 09:11 PM.

[ScrapIron Prime]

You know that if you think teams are the problem, you can always hit LFG and make your own to even the scales, right?

People gotta be allowed to play with friends. Period.

[Glymbol]

Addition of groups to QP wasn't necessary. The solo queue did fine before, it would still be fine after closing of group queue.

Grouped players need solo players, because there aren't enough groups to play this game. Solo players however don't need groups in Quick Play at all.

[Curccu]

Ding Toast is Ready, on 20 September 2022 - 06:28 AM, said:

At the risk of starting a fight, or what?

There was a group only queue, and it seems to have died out for a reason. If groups are causing problems for solos, it behooves the groups to be a hell of a lot less obtrusive to the solos, because when the solos stop showing up the groups don't have anything.

Group queue was super fun you got to play against other formidable groups. It died because Russ said this game is going to maintenance mode and after that loooads of players quit the game for good.

https://leaderboard.isengrim.org/stats
If I remember correctly it was March or April 2019, you can see the drop player pool after that? I personally quit June '19 after almost all of my friends quit the game, came back to play few games now and then 2020 and so on but not to same extent than before that infamous Russ post.

Glymbol, on 20 September 2022 - 04:40 AM, said:

Addition of groups to QP wasn't necessary. The solo queue did fine before, it would still be fine after closing of group queue.

Grouped players need solo players, because there aren't enough groups to play this game. Solo players however don't need groups in Quick Play at all.

Speculations... Game didn't do fine it was literally dying out from spring '19 to Feb '20 it lost over half of it's players in less than a Year (from 24k to 10k) Most streamers who also get new players to try this game usually like to play with friends and talk ****.

So yeah solo queue works without groups but can this game survive without groups? For that question I think PGI knows the answer and they have decided that groups and solos both can play in merged queue is good for business.

[R Valentine]

PGI has universally sided with premades in every argument made since the group and solo queues were merged. So there is nothing to be done about it. You'll take your stompings and you'll like it.

[Dr Wubs]

If Tier 3 is a good place to drop people new to the game, then it's a good place for the low bar of where groups drop.

Groups in QP took less than a week before Tier 5 was being exploited. Smurfs everywhere in Tier 5. 2 LRM boats with 2 spotters. People talking like absolute kneebiters because they think they are superior.

Tier 3 comparatively has a lot less of that tripe. Tier 5 is still being preyed upon.

Let groups drop no lower than tier 3.

[Curccu]

Dr Wubs, on 21 September 2022 - 02:31 AM, said:

If Tier 3 is a good place to drop people new to the game, then it's a good place for the low bar of where groups drop.

Groups in QP took less than a week before Tier 5 was being exploited. Smurfs everywhere in Tier 5. 2 LRM boats with 2 spotters. People talking like absolute kneebiters because they think they are superior.

Tier 3 comparatively has a lot less of that tripe. Tier 5 is still being preyed upon.

Let groups drop no lower than tier 3.

What if T4-5 player recruits some friends to try this game and of course it makes sense to them to play together and they are thrown into T3 match?

[Gagis]

The overpowered players in tier 5 are usually legitimate new players who, being actually new, are willing to learn and don't already think they know everything, so they learn and rise to high tiers super fast.

Old players stuck there would too, if they could accept that they are doing things wrong.

Edited by Gagis, 21 September 2022 - 02:57 AM.