39 replies to this topic

[Keltzmaa]

It's a simple fix. Give me a checkbox that says I (or my 4 man group) consent to being dropped against 5-7 man groups. This gives you the opportunity to make 5, 6, 7 man groups and hope for a match. If enough people pugging don't care, you'll get the extra mechs you need. If too many run around pug stomping in 7s, The pool of available victims will dwindle. The system would prioritise matching with another group between 5 and 7. Then fill the rest with pugs who've checked the box.

Is it the fairest system? Not really. But it's an easily workable solution that doesn't force pugs against large premades (the original problem they wanted to solve). It lets us play with more diverse group sizes. If we find we're getting constantly matched against larger groups and facerolled, we can decide to split up and get back in the pug pool.


on a quick off topic note, they really do need a game type where groups of friends can drop against each other. The first state would remove all xp and cbill rewards to prevent abuse. The main purpose would be for training and loadout testing. It would also allow us a more controlled environment to help verify the game is working properly. As it is now, you're a liability to your group if you take time to test things like the speed, torso twist, sensor range bonus, etc are working properly. I know a lot of folks are just here for the free game but there are also a lot who want to help beta test and improve the game.

[Nightfangs]

Anything that artificially stops you from playing with your friends has no place in a muliplayer game.
Of course you can only play with 7 friends if the map doesn't support more than 8 players.
Well... you could join with anything between 9 and 16, be split randomly but equally and play for both sides...

Why can't you for example join a match with 6 players, get 2 randoms and play against a team with a group of 6 and 2 randoms as well? It can't be impossible to add that into game.

[Tuku]

Nightfangs, on 03 December 2012 - 07:30 AM, said:

Anything that artificially stops you from playing with your friends has no place in a muliplayer game.
Of course you can only play with 7 friends if the map doesn't support more than 8 players.
Well... you could join with anything between 9 and 16, be split randomly but equally and play for both sides...

Why can't you for example join a match with 6 players, get 2 randoms and play against a team with a group of 6 and 2 randoms as well? It can't be impossible to add that into game.

Well you see when you start balancing things like that....lets say they set it up so that 5 man groups are only matched with other 5 mans....6s with 6s 7 with 7 and so on.....Do you know how long matchmaking will take to find a group? Do you know how many failed attempts there would be to find a group? Me neither but I suspect there would be alot of time waiting and waiting and waiting.


Also to those who say that there should just be a consent form of sorts to have a 4 man matched with a 6 or 7 or whatever....The problem is not that the premade people would see it as unfair. In fact the problem is that the Lone wolves that get stuck on the 4 man team with the premade would have a problem with it. When you drop with a premade you would expect that its possible that you drop with a larger premade, but why couldn't the 4 man team still win agianst the 7 man ? All they would have to do is talk to their Lone Wolves.....Something like.

"Howdy, 4 man here....listen guys we will be relaying orders and targets in chat as much as possible so watch for our map markers and waht we put into team chat and we may just win this. "

Granted that wont happen every time but i know it has worked for us before. We have wiped sync dropped 8mans off the map. It was a hard fight but it worked.

At any rate though the problems with matchmaking....why it isn't just simple for pgi is because of the Lone Wolves witch end up making up most of their player base. Make them at least kind of happy at the very least or we clans and merc corps and house regulars dont get a game to group up in anymore.

[General Taskeen]

I think it would make more sense if a 5 group is matched against any 5 or more sized group. Or as some suggested, just have more match maker options, like a check box that either matches a 5 group evenly or unevenly (a vice versa for any sized group 5+).

[Group Options]

[X] Match Player Size Group
[ ] Match Any Size Group

[Players In Group 6/8]

If Found
*Server searches for other 6 Man Group*
*Match Found*

Else not Found
*Error: Match not found, Try searching again*

(6 Man group decides to launch with "Match Any Size Group")

Edited by General Taskeen, 03 December 2012 - 03:04 PM.

[Tuku]

Good work guys keep the ideas comming (also a shameless bump to keep this thread toward the top )

[Tuku]

Hmmm another idea that I just had is a 2 teired system .

2-5 mans are only matched up with 2-5 mans and 6-8 mans are matched with 6-8

[Tipps]

I really think this needs a bump. When my friends and I first got into this game last July/August there were 5 of us and we could all play together. That stopped being a thing, but luckily there is usually one person missing/busy most times we play so we just go with 4... until two days ago. One more of my friends finally caved and decided to see what Mechwarrior Online is all about (he loves it by the way) and there are almost always 5 of us wanting to play and one person has to be left out every time. The nights we have a full house and we get all 6 of us on isn't so bad because we can split into teams of three, but even that sucks.

I would really like to play Rompy-Stompy Robots with all my friends. I don't see us getting to an 8 player team any time soon either.

What would you guys think of the matchmaking being something like:

2-3 players getting matched and/or with a second 2-3 player team + lone wolves
4-5 players getting matched + lone wolves
6-7 players getting matched + lones wolves/wolf
8 player teams getting matched

Just a thought.

-Tipps

Edited by Tipps, 09 February 2013 - 11:20 PM.

[Ghostwreck]

Tipps, on 09 February 2013 - 11:17 PM, said:

I really think this needs a bump. When my friends and I first got into this game last July/August there were 5 of us and we could all play together. That stopped being a thing, but luckily there is usually one person missing/busy most times we play so we just go with 4... until two days ago. One more of my friends finally caved and decided to see what Mechwarrior Online is all about (he loves it by the way) and there are almost always 5 of us wanting to play and one person has to be left out every time. The nights we have a full house and we get all 6 of us on isn't so bad because we can split into teams of three, but even that sucks.

I would really like to play Rompy-Stompy Robots with all my friends. I don't see us getting to an 8 player team any time soon either.

What would you guys think of the matchmaking being something like:

2-3 players getting matched and/or with a second 2-3 player team + lone wolves
4-5 players getting matched + lone wolves
6-7 players getting matched + lones wolves/wolf
8 player teams getting matched

Just a thought.

-Tipps

Bump

[DeeFran]

I agree with Tipps

[DeadlyNerd]

Guess it wasn't enough of a hint to how imbalanced drops are when a premade is dropped against pugs when PGI removed the 8man premade option against pugs.

[Tipps]

I'm not entirely sure what a fair and balanced solution is, but having a friend sit out while the rest of us play kind of sucks. I did offer a few suggestions, and so did a few other people.

[Stuii OCAU]

I too desire 5-6-7 man teams, it's extremely annoying being the 1 or 2 players who miss out on proper teamplay because of this arbitrary limit

[Woska]

Yes, it would be nice to find a way to include such groups. I have a group that plays together on a sort of regular basis. We're trying to find more players, but if we all end up being available at the same time and have the wrong number of people, we're out of luck.

[oneroomdisco]

i agree. pre-made groups with only 4 or 8 is STUPID

[DeadlyNerd]

I'm not saying anything against pairing up 5,6 or 7 man groups against other 5,6 or 7 man groups. All for it.

[Demoned]

to bad there isn't going to be a option for those of us that wouldn't mind filling spots for 5-7 man teams.
to make them to a 8 man team.

after all what are lone wolfs for if not that very reason.

[Sergestorms]

I also would like to see something done. Out of my group of friends there are usually 5-7 of us available in the evenings to play.

It would be nice to have a fair system to allow the 5,6,7 player groups a chance to play together.

[Teop]

Need the solution for 5,6,7 & vs friends play options. It's pretty simple to add options for the following

1) willing to play with lone wolfs, onther pre-made groups - this would all the groups to auto configure - since the players are choosing to enable this option no woirres they take the risk of a longer match or failed match time to get the chance to play wiht friends

2) willing to play against larger groups (could even include size ranges) - lets a group take on a larger group -- player choice if a 5 man wants to take on an 8 so what they decided to take the risk (could adjust XP and C-Bill awards if needed)

3) willing to play against smaller groups - counter point to above

4) friends vs friends - should be an any size match up with no XP/CBILL cost or reward - should be of any size 1-8 vs any size 1-8

Bottom line is it should be the players choice, if you want to be snarkey about it make it so only people wiht active VIP status can have the options. Its getting really annoying to have 5-7 of us online and to keep trying to hit the launch from 2 groups hoping we get lucky and randomly link up together.

[Mudhutwarrior]

All for it when they alow solo only drops or at least built in VOIP. Right now pug stomping is the majority of matches I play. They say ELO matching balances so if the case is that the stompers are just as bad as we are then just having voip and a set team is overwhelmingly imbalanced. Teams should fight teams and PGI needs to do something seeing as this has been an issue since the beginning. Its totally demoralizing to new players. They learn close to nothing but to hate the game. Trying to type and teach while being overwhelmed by a kill team bent on quick and easy xp is impossible.

[Caladore]

I have 9 friends who play MWO. Every evening, we have at least 5 of us playing, but only on one occasion since the launch of beta have we actually had 8 of us on at the same time. As a result, we cannot all play together. We try forming 2 groups and launching the matches simultaneously hoping that we get lucky enough to be in the same match. Sometimes this works, more often it doesn't. In my opinion, the inability to play this game with more than 4 of my friends is, by far, the largest flaw in this game.

I completely understand your argument that a 7 man group vs 8 man PUG is not fair, but there are other options instead of just forbidding any group larger than 4. Like Teop said, give us some options that would allow larger than 4 man groups that would also help maintain the balance or at least let people make the decision to go up against a "unbalanced" group.

Give me a few options like:

• same size team vs same size team with lonewolves to fill the rest. This allows a 5 man team +3 lovewolves fight another 5 man team +3 lonewolves.
  
• With the option above, the lonewolves would have to pick an option saying they're willing to be grouped with a 5-7 man team. This way they would know what they are getting into. Unfortunately, you've decided that no one would want to do this. I say put in the option and see what happens. If it really isn't fun, you'll have the stats to back it up.
  
• Allow 7 man vs 8 man groups. I've played only a handful of 8v8, so I know how competitive it is. A few of those matches, someone's connection dropped, so it was really 8v7. You didn't terminate the match due to it being unbalanced or unfair, so why not allow me to select the 8 man group, fill it with 7 people and launch. We've had 7 people online quite a few times and know we would most likely get defeated, but we're willing to accept the disadvantage just to play together
  
• Give us the option to play friends vs friends in a private match. Give us no rewards if you're concerned about cheating. Just the ability to play with and against my friends would be reward enough.

Ultimately, I want to be able to play with more than 3 of my other friends at the same time, but your group rules have taken a lot of fun out of the game for me.