Admin > Dev App Testing
Goals and Ramifications of Matchmaking
Urz:
--- Quote from: Dev Bubbles on February 21, 2014, 11:31:27 pm ---@Urz, first of all, with scramble. You can not care about statistics in general or my ability to analyze, and you are entitled to your opinion. But unfortunately, I do have to rely on statistics and scientific method to make judgments. If somehow that disappoints you, I'm not sure what to make of it.
--- End quote ---
I'm not doubting your ability to analyze statistics. The addition of scramble lobbies has affected my own gameplay experience negatively, and you just touted the feature as an example of "I was right you were wrong because of numbers". I'm sure there are a lot of things you could do to increase new player retention that would negatively affect your regular players (such as removing the match list).
--- Quote ---I'm not sure where I said that I'm sacrificing the ability for players to make their own decisions, but you would like to make unsubstantiated claims without bothering to try the new system, you are welcome to.
--- End quote ---
Removing the match list is limiting the player's choice in which lobby they wish to play in.
Keyvias:
Hey Urz,
You're right that removal of the match list is in fact a removal, but our goal is to build and test a system that puts players into the best lobbies as quickly as possible.
That's why we're so gun-ho about testing this.
This isn't to say players like you don't have an exact formula that will bring you into the match you want, but most of the time this is not the case. Most of the time players are not finding good matches and they're taking a lot of time to find these matches.
This will be a different style of match creation and yes it will be different. Many elements we've included since inception have been different though and we have lost players for our choices from Ui to balance there will always be people who say the old is better than the new. Overall though I like to believe that the game experience we've created has improved with the time we've put in.
It comes down to trying to do the best thing for all of our players, old and new. The current lobby system has many MANY flaws. We've been asked by multiple people on multiple occasions to make a second game inside the lobby because the wait times are so bad. We've had requests for liar's dice, checkers, and a couple others.
Gathering 16 players should not have that difficulty and it means we have done something wrong.
As far as scramble goes, it did help our retention and we received no negative emails after its implementation (Other than the fact buried non-scrambled matches, which was our mistake, but we fixed that.) so that's why Howard (and I) consider it a success.
There is no doubt that this is a controversial and literately game changing choice we're looking at, but while you feel your game is at stake. This is our life. This hasn't been a hasty nor light decision. Let's be honest if we bunk this up you guys lose a game and our team goes to ramen.
We will do everything we can to make the game great and if you have a way that solves the issues that players have experienced or solutions to the problems you see in matchmaking we'd love to hear it. Making this game better is everyone's goal here.
Dev Bubbles:
That is not what I am saying Urz. If that's how you took it, fine, I apologize. What I was trying to say was that if we are just looking at numbers overall, we can see an improvement of retention. And because we implemented the feature specifically to be measured against attrition and player levels, I would consider the feature implementation a success, because it achieved what we set out to do. It's true that we didn't exclusively release scramble to isolate just the effects of scramble, so I am making a bit of an assumption here still. But I think that assumption is pretty safe.
Ok, if you mean by removing match list, your ability to see a match list and pick matches to join is limited, that's fair. And f as a result, you don't use match making, I think that's perfectly ok. I don't think for a second that match making is perfect. If you have a valid use case, then the question becomes can we support your use case. And how easy we accommodate your use case. I think that we can try and find out. If ended up we don't support how you play the game at all, then I think that's definitely cause for concern.
Queso:
You guys pretty much covered what I was concerned about, as I figured you would. It's hard to be okay with something till you have specifics. I'm looking forward to it now. It really should up player retention without sacrificing a lot of the excellent social side of Icarus.
Dev Bubbles:
It's good to have concerns, and it just means that we need to test, consider, and address them.
We definitely have in mind the social aspect of the current system as well, and want to make sure we preserve that. That is one strength in the current system that we recognize for sure.
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