Admin > Dev App Testing

Goals and Ramifications of Matchmaking

<< < (8/21) > >>

Dev Bubbles:
Let me just make another point.  Before scramble was implemented, I had a debate with Qwerty, and he astutely asked me about match list performance.  For everyone who's gone through the TGS event days when we had to manually force start matches know that match list is a performance bottleneck.  We have since then done a ton of work to drastically optimize the match list performance, but as of today, it is the single biggest performance bottleneck, and it is the one system that's least scalable and most ready to fail at higher concurrents.  If we want to grow bigger as a community, the match list is the least sustainable of a system performance wise.  While I was right in that the match list can handle increased concurrents, I am also wrong at the time because it is not future proof performance wise.  And that factored into our decisions as well. 

Thomas:
Ultimately I think matchmaking is a good idea, for a number of reasons. The big disadvantage is that we do lose some choice in the matter. However, part of the matchmaking goal is to put you into fair matches, something most players try to look for anyways. You might lose the ability to randomly create some 'for fun' matches like all mine battles and flamethrower wars, but there's a custom match for that.

The biggest issues I come across in the match list system are long wait times to start a match, and imbalanced matches. The scramble option helps relieve some of the imbalance, because it keeps shifting around.


Wait times prior to a match is caused by a number of factors. First you need all captains slots full, then you need all captains to ready. Captains only ready when they're ready, and they often wait for everyone to be ready because we're full of happy go lucky friendly people that don't like force starting a match.

For a single captain to be ready, they have to be prepared for the match. This can range from a player just being happy they're in a captain slot, to a captain making sure his crew and his ally ship meet his expectations of loadouts and experience. How long this takes depends on the crew's knowledge and experience.

Most captains also want to have a full crew.


Match imbalance happens for a number of reasons, and most of them aren't intentional. Players want to be on the 'winning' team, they'll flock to the higher ranks, or they'll want to play with their friends/clans. Newer players tend to leave more often, letting more experienced players stick around and start to group more.



You toss in matchmaking, and those issues start to go away. Matches get automatically filled with players around the same experience/skill. Higher ranking captains tend to have higher standards, and these are more rapidly met by higher ranking players who know to do what their captain expects. Lower ranking players don't have that many expectations, and they'll often get a crew who's happy to do whatever.

Matches will also be fair more often. The higher ranking players will be congregated together, but they'll also be put against other high ranking players. This leads to much more interesting matches. This also allows the newer players a less steep learning curve. As they get better, they'll be put against players that are better, and slowly learn the game rather than being tossed into the deep end of the pool under the system we have now.


I've also been informed that this reduces the load on the server by creating the optimal number of matches instead of having 50 matches waiting to fill up when they each have 60% of their slots full. (where 30 matches would be the optimal number).

It might also improve the appearance of different maps (such as 3v3 and 4v4 maps). In my ideal matchmaking system, you'd just put in whether you prefer a capture point match or death match, instead of choosing a specific match you want. The increased variety would appeal to a lot of players instead of doing dunes over and over because someone needs the achievement.



Obviously it's not going to work 100% of the time. There's going to be times when teams aren't balanced, or it takes a long time to find a match. That's just life. But it certainly would improve upon what we have now (in terms of wait time and balance).


You can still group with your friends, and start your custom matches by inviting players; so I don't really see too many downsides to the system. This has been thought about a lot, even up to ways to keep the socializing factor still around. Overall I think it'll be a solid system that improves player retention and general enjoyment of the game.

Squidslinger Gilder:
Well, the worst that can happen is we don't like it, raise a fuss and then Muse responds, hopefully fixes it accordingly. Which they did for Scramble. We raised concerns, you listened and Scramble turned out to be really a good move.

I keep trying to remind myself this isn't EA, Blizzard, or Bioware. When I've tested for other game companies, you can raise more fuss that you ever could have thought possible but they'll never listen. They just put up the build, if any big bugs are found they're fixed, but as for your input on the dev, you have no input. Even if its the worst idea in the history of gaming (ESO beta, Hawken Alpha), they'll never listen. Its just talking to a wall. 

Puppy Fur:
Possibly having two different areas. One for opinions. One for bugs. As not to mix them. That way we can still post our opinions without interrupting testing results (bugs and such).

Velvet:
Thank you for taking the time and effort to provide such detailed responses. The effort you put into improving this game and interacting with its community is commendable.

As before, I maintain that removing matchlist damages a part of the game experience. As Byron mentioned, spontaneous accumulation of experienced players in one lobby isn't a particularly rare occurrence and is always pretty interesting when it happens. I think the chances of this happening through matchmaking are unlikely. If you have streamlined the lobby process enough, most people will spend the majority of their time in game rather than searching for matches. Considering the fairly low population on the servers at certain times of day I think even if there are skilled enough players to take on whichever formed crew is looking for an opponent, they'll probably be in-game and unavailable.

As for underdogs beating clan teams, yes it will happen. But I don't think it will happen enough to make the experience enjoyable for these underdogs unless clan teams intentionally handicap themselves by ships/compositions/loadouts, which seems far less interesting than agreeing in lobby to manually scramble.

I still have essentially the same question: Why is there a hurry to remove matchlist? Yes, it may be for the best for it go eventually, but is there a compelling reason to remove it simultaneously with the addition of matchmaking? I'd have thought the safest option would be a two stage implementation and deimplementation to ensure that if matchmaking puts a large number of people off the game you don't lose major chunks of the active playerbase. This would also feel less sudden and aggressive a change which may help to gradually transition players onto the new system.

And one more question. To what extent will crewing on a less skilled player's ship (who dies and loses frequently) negatively affect the "skill rating" of an experienced crew? I'm thinking from the perspective of flying with clan or friends again - in pub matches almost everyone gets a shot at piloting at some point and it would be a shame if matchmaking somehow discouraged this. That leads on to the broader question of whether a good player can get a high skill rating independently of a good team.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page