272 replies to this topic

[Magic Pain Glove]

Ok .. As I predicted in my first post under this thread , this weekend test has confused people greatly .

Few points :

• Wording of this "Event" was a little bit confusing with a lot of people thinking it was Event Queue . Since it was named as "8V8 QUICK PLAY WEEKEND EVENT" instead of "8V8 QUICK PLAY WEEKEND TEST" or something similar.
  
• Compies are in no way at fault for this event , people throwing stones their way are only doing it so because they are mentioned in this post. Many wont but some people that have played the game since the start will remember that the game used to be 8v8 initially . Compies in no way conspired with PGI to make this event a thing , they were as unaware as the rest of you.
  
• MWO Spaghetti code complicated things since groups of 3 restriction didn't work properly and people got to experience a slightly more extreme version of Soup Queue. Where more than 50% of the team was essentially all grouped players giving (good or bad) groups a lot of influence over match outcome.
  
• Because tonnage restrictions or limits were not adjusted to accommodate the change people can see more heavier classes in the queue since that's just the nature of things and preference of most of the playerbase in general , especially if you don't place restrictions on it.

That said ... People shouldn't be judging 8v8 format based on this test because of the above mentioned points . like I said in the first post soup queue (mix of groups and solos ) complicates things greatly . But 8v8 format does have a number of advantages when compared to 12v12 and I will mention some of them below .

• Increased TTK . Since there are less things shooting at you at any given time , TTK of all mechs on the battlefield was extended.
  
• Increased game performance . Since there are less mechs and since less unoptimized effects are being spammed everyone is getting a sizable game performance boost.
  
• More individual player agency . Players individual actions now matter more now since there are less players in a match.
  
• Faster match formation . Less people needed for Match Maker to form a match results in more matches being kicked off faster and in greater quantity.

All in all people shouldn't feel alienated from 8v8 based on this brief test , certain things just went wrong , were not optimized as much as they could be and were worded a bit confusingly.

[FRAGTAST1C]

I think I can write a measured, more calculated post here after taking a few hours off from this "event".

8vs8 Pros:-

1. The fights rely more on your skill now rather than being bombarded with enemy fire just 'cause your team learned how to fight from a box of kittens. You can make a stand for a bit longer and manage to bring down a couple of enemies 'cause in 8vs8, it can be You-vs-4 instead of You-vs-7 like in a normal soup queue.

2. Faster matches, less time in spin-warrior-online.

3. You don't get your mech shredded by a group of 4 snipers in 8vs8 just 'cause you exposed to fire at someone else. This takes enemies longer to kill your mech.

PGI Cons (notice how I wrote PGI instead of 8vs8):-

1. Seems like PGI purposely sabotaged this experiment by not adjusting the matchmaker to check for tonnage balance, which is the BARE MINIMUM. I'm seeing lopsided distribution of weight among teams.

2. Groups should've been either removed entirely or at least, for some reason since PGI wants them in solo queue, make a restriction of 2-man group and then MAKE SURE THAT GROUPS ARE EVENLY DISTRIBUTED, i.e., one group per team max. Why have 4-man groups in a 8vs8? 37.5% of a team's composition should not be made up of a group. In 12vs12, a 4-man makes it 33%. Why is 8vs8 given more group composition? What's worse, a lot of the time, 8vs8 is being composed of 50% of groups.

3. PGI knows the player base, right? I mean, even in a 4vs4 Event Queue there are vast number of people who will bring sniper mechs or LRMs regardless of map. In this "event", I have seen 100t mechs refuse to move and handicap the team simply 'cause they brought UAC2 spam and the fight was happening elsewhere. Now add a group doing this to the team while enemies are more fleshed out. Or worse, you are facing a team going "vroom vroom" and the group you unfortunately got are NOT using their full tonnage limit. You are along holding the corner against 3 mechs and support never comes 'cause the group got destroyed by a well balanced team. You just end up dying once 1vs3 turns into 1vs6.

[BullDozer87]

Hate this event

[FRAGTAST1C]

BullDozer87, on 17 August 2024 - 03:08 AM, said:

Hate this event

No offense, but it's better to mention the reason for the "hate" rather than a meaningless and simplistic description of your feelings.

When you examine why you hate this event, you'll find that it's 'cause PGI dropped the ball w.r.t the most basic of matchmaker tweaks, such as tonnage balance and group size.

[Muggle Mudblood]

I think a major mistake was mentioning the catchword "Comp" several times in the description. It scares casual players away without them even giving the new game mode a chance as seen in the early posts on the topic.

It's not comp, all the other comp rulesets don't apply here at all. It's "just" changing player numbers and naturally the meta shifts like in every other game when bigger changes are applied.

For me, it feels the game is meant to be played in lower team sizes, just like every other FPS. It fleshes out your personal deficits and your merits way more. The shift to a faster game pace also feels very good, games are no longer unnecessarily dragging and drawn out. Minimap is less cluttered as well, also very nice.

Psychology of the masses: fewer players also mean less of a herd mentality, 12v12 always reminds me of Alterac Valley in the old World of Warcraft days. Just zerg rushing on autopilot and see what happens is never a good game experience in my eyes.

I'm a solo player but the group thing doesn't bother me at all. Getting shot by their two assaults and their heavy simultaneously is not the groups fault, it's because my positioning and the angle I'm peeking/holding are just bad.

Personally, I hope you devs keep the 8v8 but most of the playerbase seem to dislike it. Unlucky.

[Bud Crue]

Magic Pain Glove, on 17 August 2024 - 01:54 AM, said:

Ok .. As I predicted in my first post under this thread , this weekend test has confused people greatly...

As is often pointed out by many, the vast majority of the player base don't look at the forums or MWO website regularly, so that was certainly the source of my confusion and ALL of those I drop with (many rely on me to tell them of events, etc. as I am one of the few that regularly checks the site, and I hadn't yet this weekend when we first started playing yesterday). When folks in game attempted to mock/explain our confusion as if we missed something in game it certainly didn't help. That being said, once we figured out what was going on, it was great.

Brought biggish fastish brawlers as a four man and it was some excellent fun. As I mentioned previously, the group restriction was not working, as we dropped as a four man twice with no issues (until a fifth joined and we had to split). I did think it was odd that regardless of group size the wait times to get a match seemed unusually high. Would have thought filling 16 players vs 24 would have been easier (even with groups "limited" to an odd number), but apparently not.

Anyway, we will all probably need to get used to it. I suspect that eventually, and frankly hopefully, this is where the game will move as player numbers inevitably continue to decline, however slowly. I think most would prefer that over Russ just deciding to pull the plug abruptly on this here "community service".

[Pz_DC]

Hell, why so many cry here?! Single problem of this event is no weight/class restruction. I'm playing solo and dont have problems with groups, till it's not "6 assaults + 2 heavy VS 2 assaults + 4 heavy + 2 light" matches.
You cry "I dont like 8-8 it's ****** event"? I cay "12-12 is tsupid wall-of-meat-mode that should never get born!". When you play 8-8 it's much more close to be "mech sim" then "stupid CS on big robots"! Players leave?! Great, less those newcomers = better matches, coz most of those don't give a f..k about WTF is MWO except, as I told, "SC on robots"...
IMHO.

P.S. Sry, but was rly mad reading all those 5 pages of kids cry! Make 12-12 and 8-8 both available, balance 8-8 more and it will be much more cool next time.

Edited by Pz_DC, 17 August 2024 - 04:46 AM.

[NoZaku4U]

I do appreciate MPG trying to offer actual analysis on the game. It must be frustrating as so often it feels he is a lone voice of reason amongst an avalanche of poor PGI decisions. That being said ...

Magic Pain Glove, on 17 August 2024 - 01:54 AM, said:

Increased TTK . Since there are less things shooting at you at any given time , TTK of all mechs on the battlefield was extended.

Not entirely sure on this one, to be honest. "There are less things shooting at you" ... how often are all 12 of the enemy mechs shooting at one friendly? I guess that one suicide scout at the beginning will live a few seconds more, but getting cored by 3 or 4 high alpha assaults will still take just as long.
And while there are fewer mechs to shoot at you, there are also fewer mechs to shoot at, so you still occupy the same amount of target value.

Magic Pain Glove, on 17 August 2024 - 01:54 AM, said:

Increased game performance . Since there are less mechs and since less unoptimized effects are being spammed everyone is getting a sizable game performance boost.

This I completely believe is true, which is sad. I get that the game is over a decade old, however there are also other vehicle based shooter out there which are older and host larger games. That old PGI coding magic.

Magic Pain Glove, on 17 August 2024 - 01:54 AM, said:

More individual player agency . Players individual actions now matter more now since there are less players in a match.

Imho, this needs to taken with a heavy dose of context. AFKs and DCs now matter more as well. Plus it is more punishing for those of us who want to test and play builds which are actually fun, not just sitting at 2000m in ECM or boating 93 SRM2s.
And as stated in numerous posts, this 8v8 test was poisoned by PGI. Groups matter far too much and tonnage is completely out of wack. Was watching a stream last nite and regularly 8v8 groups had 5 assaults on a side. Those groups of assaults hiding in the back, boating HAGs and PPC that sit and snipe which ruin 12v12 are even more effective at ruining games at 8v8.

The only thing this 'play test' is testing is the patience of the few of us who are left playing.

Edited by NoZaku4U, 17 August 2024 - 04:43 AM.

[Ruediger Steiner]

If your goal was to tell non comp players to not play MWO till the next patch day, congratulations. You have been successful.
I bet you even managed to tell some people to never play MWO ever again, after they got humiliated.



Why did it have to be QP? Why not EQ? I don´t get it.

[Valec]

Tenshi 0, on 16 August 2024 - 02:19 PM, said:

Love it when PGI runs events that show the community how bad at the game they really are.
Go play against ai in MW5 (you can turn the difficulty down)

Wait, so you WANT people to quit playing MWO? Are you okay?

The sheer amount of people complaining in a game with this low of a population should call for a early ending to this poorly thought out event.

Edited by Valec, 17 August 2024 - 05:26 AM.

[Artemus Prime]

I wish they would tighten up the tier gates at least to +/- 1 instead of +/- 2. It's basically concentrated SOUP Queue where 4-mans have more influence over the match, "It's always Alpha Lance!" >: (
It is nice to get matches that don't have a 4-man on either side, in which case a solo-player has more agency and it doesn't feel like a clusterfvck like 12v12 does.

Edited by Artemus Prime, 17 August 2024 - 05:40 AM.

[Aethos]

Magic -

TTK is way down now. We didn't have 60 pinpoint alphas or 80+ laser vomit alphas 12 years ago the last time we had general population 8 man. There is no friendly cover fire because there aren't enough friendlies. There are much more 1v1s and they are over very fast for the previous two reasons, mainly the ALPHA's these days.

The que is not faster. Sat exponentially longer during peak play hour last night.

Here's a thought - This should be in the event que and actually let full 8 man groups play each, and only 4 or 8 man's; that way The units that are going to play comp or units that are thinking about playing comp get actual free practices, which is what this was kind of trying to be, but all so failing in execution. (these are like farce free practices) If the goal was to increase participation in the next tournament by never-played-comp-before players, I really don't think this is going to work. It's going to have the opposite effect.

[torsie]

It is weird, I think 12 mechs is more fun.

Maps seem super empty, in normal match you have 12 people of different speeds and sizes all over the map, now the tonnage is usually very similar and people keep much closer together.
Instead of finding one or two players, it is now empty map and then you walk into 8 people at once.

I would say it is even worse in T1 where already most people play hide and seek, now it is just 8 people on opposite sides, not moving, waiting for someone to stop hiding, explode immediately and that team then loses.

And maps are very big for this, even something like snow canyon feels it takes 5 minutes before you find the other team.

I would say time to kill is lower, rather than higher (or the other way around I think I mixed it up).
There is only 8 mechs now, so you will never have situation with 5-6 mechs sitting in open, it will be 1-2 and 8 people shooting at them, games end super fast from single small mistake or just bad luck.

Edited by torsie, 17 August 2024 - 06:06 AM.

[martian]

InnerSphereNews, on 15 August 2024 - 09:25 PM, said:

8V8 QUICK PLAY WEEKEND EVENT

Greetings MechWarriors,

We're sure many of you are excited for Comp Queue opening with the patch next week in preparation for the MWO Comp Championship Series 2024! To help you find your Comp groove, tomorrow we will be starting an 8v8 Quick Play Weekend Event at 12PM PST/7PM UTC which will run until the patch on August 20th. For the duration of this event, maximum group size will be set to 3.

No, I am not excited for Comp Queue and I do not understand why you had to mess up the Quick Play because of it.




When you introduced the Event Queue, you said this:

InnerSphereNews, on 20 May 2022 - 06:09 PM, said:

EVENT QUEUE MODE
The launch of the Event Mode Queue is here! This gives us the ability to mix and match our Game Modes, Maps, 'Mechs, and Special Modifiers to provide variety and create new gameplay experiences that will change regularly.

What you did with the Quick Play queue is "exactly" what the Event Queue was supposed to be used for.

[Tiy0s]

Well this thread is much more lively than I expected it to be! A few thoughts before I go back to bed to sleep in(it is Saturday after all!) since I was the one who wrote the event:

- Putting comp in the description may have been a mistake on my end. Competitive players had nothing to do with this, there’s no influx of competitive players in QP at the moment, the pool of players now is the same it has always been. I just wanted to do an 8v8 QP event and this was a good excuse to do it.

- The game absolutely runs better in 8v8. Most people don’t realize it, but a mech is an incredibly complex asset. Far more complicated than a character model from another shooter. A mech is often composed of over 20-40 different models and the game must keep a live tracker of every component and critical slot of every mech while it’s alive and on the field. Comparing it to a game like battlefield where you see massive battles isn’t quite a fitting comparison. Removing 8 mechs from the field will absolutely improve your FPS if you’re struggling on one of our more intensive maps(Solaris or Free Worlds comes to mind).

- My matchmaker adjustments were hasty to say the least. When this is done again(who knows when that will be) we will probably adjust the matchmaker to be more strict in ELO/weight variations since we’ll have more wiggle room with less players in each match. Games certainly happen a lot quicker, we can see that on the backend, so we could stand to attempt more fine tuning of player distribution per match.

- In line with my previous point about matchmaker, the issue of 4 man groups being allowed will not repeat the next time.

- I’ve seen a lot of talks about Time to Kill, player agency, how matches play out, etc. Obviously a big thing will be that matches are shorter and you’ll get into new ones quicker. In a match, average TTK should stay roughly the same, but instances where you find yourself randomly facing down six mechs after turning a corner and getting obliterated in 2 seconds should be much rarer. A 2v2 will take just as long, but the chances of instant death have gone down a lot. Another thing is player agency. I’ve played a lot of 12v12 games where I have scored well over 1200-1500 damage and lost. Which is nothing bad about the game mode, it’s just how 12v12 works. I’m 8.3% of the team, me alone having a great game isn’t enough to win it always. In 8v8, I’m 12.5% of the team. A 4 kill 700 damage game is good in 12v12, but in an 8v8 game that goes from good to probably winning the game for your team. Every action you as a player takes(and your teammates as well) has so much more impact.

For some people, they love that. They stop feeling like a cog and become the rising star. For some people, they don’t like that. They don’t want the burden of winning on their shoulders and are just here to enjoy the fight and play the stompy robot game with giant battles. Both are equally valid mindsets, but it’s easy to see how diametrically opposed they become in a choice of 8v8 and 12v12.



So that was a lot of words. I guess the question is where we go from here?

It is my belief that, when properly tuned, 8v8 will be better for MWO than 12v12. To put some conspiracy theories to rest, this was not some test to see how much the community likes 8v8. It was just a fun little event on a whim. Both 8v8 and 12v12 have their drawbacks, but I believe 8v8 would lead to a net benefit for the game if done properly.

Don’t sound the trumpet yet Gabriel, apocalypse isn’t here. I’m just listing my thoughts aloud.

Group and solo queues being merged(colloquially known as soup queue) is here to stay, that’s not changing. If we go to 8v8 groups would have to be limited to 3, but that’s not going away. What we could look at is increasing both the minimum and reducing the maximum tonnage for groups, clamping down on the groups that bring a bunch of heavy weapons to stomp and the groups that bring 4 lights and drag their teams down.

Maybe we’ll see more 8v8 down the road, maybe we won’t. If we do, I’m confident that we can get it right with more experimentation. If 8v8 one day becomes the norm, I will personally make sure there are plenty of 12v12 event queues with massive groups enabled. Something like max groups of 6 or 8.

Like almost everything in a live service game, not everything is known at the start. A lot of it comes from testing and listening to feedback. So thanks everyone for giving your feedback here and elsewhere, I am reading it all.


I typed too much, I can’t go back to bed now. I’m going to go make breakfast.

[FRAGTAST1C]

Next time you run a radical change to the quick play mode and force it on the only game mode that PGI has made practical to play in, make sure you start that event on Wednesday so that you have Thursday and Friday to respond to the valid complaints and make changes BEFORE the devs go home for the weekend.

8vs8 does work better but hasty implementations just sabotage the entire endeavor and now, all we have is players pointing out valid flaws like lopsided tonnage balance, group restriction not functioning as intended and several others who don't like change 'cause, "Change!! Kill it!" mentality.

[Pz_DC]

Tiy0s, on 17 August 2024 - 06:12 AM, said:

...a lot of text...

You know, nothing makes me want to donate in the game like those words/comments do! Good to see someone who's really care about MECHwarrior to be itself, but not just "another game about big stompy robots" IMHO.
Thanks, I've done in this threat - need to go to vocation, and, sadly, will lose remained part of the fun GLHF, cya.

[Artemus Prime]

Tiy0s, on 17 August 2024 - 06:12 AM, said:

I typed too much, I can’t go back to bed now. I’m going to go make breakfast.

C'mon, we all know you used ChatGPT for that
(I'm joking XD)

[martian]

BullDozer87, on 17 August 2024 - 03:08 AM, said:

Hate this event

I agree.

Edited by martian, 17 August 2024 - 07:09 AM.

[ArgusXT Harry]

Quoting my self from the other thread "... please implement weight limits. It's one thing to simply get out-tonned in 12v12 but it is much worse in 8v8 when one team drops with 5 assaults vs. 2 - bit of a bummer.

This used to be a thing in MW4 (I know, a different game) but it makes all the difference - you could even choose the right mech or loadout for the map!"

But, I also appreciate the devs weighing in on the issue. Basic server/VM behavior is that fewer connections and models means better game performance. Networking/connecting is a different issue. But, I'll repeat, IMHO, the ability to respond to a map and/or tonnage restriction make all the difference and may render the 12v12 or 8v8 discussion moot.