What this game really needs is matchmaking
Wingflier
Join Date: 2013-03-07 Member: 183769Members
Join Date: 2013-03-07 Member: 183769Members
To my knowledge, the unbalanced nature of the average NS2 game is the one issue that UnknownWorlds has done nothing to address.
There are plenty of popular FPS games out that there 1. Require a fee to play and 2. Are very hostile towards new players.
However, the similarities you will find between almost ALL popular FPS games out there is that they have a working matchmaking system.
This is the one issue that causes the most frustration for new players and veterans alike. The fact of the matter is that it doesn't matter how many cool new things you add to the game, it doesn't matter how good you make the tutorial, it doesn't matter if you add free to play, it doesn't matter if the graphics are legendary, it doesn't matter if you make the bots so realistic that you can't tell them apart from real people - As long as the game continues to placate and encourage teamstacking and enormously imbalanced teams, it will fall through the cracks.
When I think of the most popular FPS games out there today: Halo, COD, BF3, CS:Go, etc. - They all have matchmaking. Yes, I know they are a lot different than this game but that's not the point. What is the most popular RTS game currently on the market? Starcraft 2. And what does Starcraft 2 have? A wonderful matchmaking system. You take either side of the hybrid genre this game is based on, and by default, the games that are doing the best, have good matchmaking. They are not free to play. They are often extremely difficult on new players. The analysis from the community of why this game is losing users is simply dead wrong. Add matchmaking, do another a free weekend, and watch it grow.
Yes I realize the cost of adding a system like this may be quite considerable, but it is much more important than anything you've added so far. If a MM system had been included in the game at launch, the playerbase would look so much different right now.
I'm sorry, but as a person who has been playing since mid-NS1, it's very easy to tell when a game is over at the 5 minute mark. Why stay and wait another 20 minutes for the game to end, just so I can (most likely) participate in another game that's a stomp? Stomps aren't fun for the winning or losing team, but as I said, I've seen no attempt to address this crucial issue.
Thank you
Comments
I currently see two possible problems with this:
1. It is not so easy to measure the skill of a player, this is not an exact science. As far as I can tell, the skill-calculation in the current patch is not very refined (I might be wrong). IF the calculation bases the skill-rating of a player just on his K/D or something like score-per-minute, then I think this may not be enough. I think you need to factor into the calculation, in what kind of game a player achieved this result (Score 200 in 30 minutes on a public server is something much different than Score 200 in 30 minutes of a tournament match).
2. Enforcing fair, skill-based teams on a server hinders friends from playing together. So a matchmaking like in CS:GO, where you can setup a party of people with which you want to team, would be much preferred.
TL;DR: I think a matchmaking system would be great. We need to find out how to measure skill properly first.
If they were to make a matchmaking system, I really hope you still could also join servers as you do now, and only the people who want the matchmaking would use it.
they would never do away with the server browser, and if matchmaking did ever come into place, i can only imagine it would pool together players of equal ratings, then throw them into an empty community server in which they all ping equally too, so essentially the community servers would still be used
or they could pool everyone into the not so much used official servers hosted by them, which would be easy to moderate as well since they own the servers so they could deal away with any potential cheaters (even though this game has no cheating problem)
I'm more concerned with performance though but have zero doubt in my mind player retention would increase with matching, something about ranking up that makes some people go nutty in the head
The Matchmaking feature would not remove the custom servers
In the Matchmaking Menu (which would be optional, of course), you could choose your side (Alien or Marine), and the MM system would give you the team you wanted. You could also choose both sides if you wanted to find a game faster obviously.
yes, matchmaking was probably the biggest reason we started working on player ranking, which still needs more work before we can start with new features
But the system needs refining first, at the moment it has no skill weights and it's easy to farm rating among other things.
BUT improve the random vote to use the mm-data and create even teams.
Now BF3 does have some server side matchmaking as a custom mod but far from every server uses it and most got it setup in such a way that stacking with friends is still possible and it will never pull friends apart to balance a game. Aka it's useless in 99% of the cases for BF3.
I don't really see the purpose in global matchmaking right now, not with the playerbase being the size it is. I'd love to see proper server side matchmaking though that actually enforces it and isn't afraid to re balance mid-game if needed.
Also have to make sure there's no way to go around it by rejoining the server.
Ultimately balancing it is still going to be hard for NS2 as team-play and a good commander can mean so much more then just 1 leet player who can get frags.
As I see it, all you need to start a 6v6 at any given time is 12 players who signed up for matchmaking. Provided you have a somewhat working skill-level system, you can order the teams in a way that the average skill level is the same.
Yes it might get problematic if you have only one comp-type player and the rest rather rookie players, but I think in most cases you could get better games than the average pub game.
One comp-type player can definetely be overpowered if he is teamed with rookie type players and facing 4-5 mid-skill players who teamwork ok.
Of course, the larger the player pool to select teams from, the better matchmaking will work, since you can partition the pool by skill level, so that rookies never have to play with the comp players.
To be fair, should only match make females with females and males with males.
Troll off.
UW working on a matchmaking is a good news.
But a smart in-game auto-balance (based on a main ranking) could be an good tool too.
Just got to find a way to avoid the frustation of losing our personnal res.
PS: sorry for the dirty english...
I don't want matched with the female marines... The voice is too annoying to harness any affection from me
I really like this as it is done similarly in pugs and works fairly well there. Just need an accurate representation of skill to compare with and it's golden.