Hey everyone,
Let me chime in real quick. In the case of match balance, if we are to ensure balance, and that's the number one overriding and over arching goal, then we will need to remove everything that goes counter to and hinders the match maker's ability to balance a match. These items are: friend joins, crew form, allowing people to leave pre game lobbies without penalty, having a pre game lobby, slot swaps, ship swaps, wait time, scrambling, rematches, display of cosmetic levels. I'm new to this thread, and if this has been mentioned before, I apologize for repeating it. If we slightly modify any of these elements, they can help, but if you guys want balance to be perfect for every single match, and expects the match makers to attempt to achieve, then what we'll need to do is to start taking a lot of the social features away.
I think the suggestions by Shaelyn and Gilder are really good ones, and we can definitely do that, and they could help. However, in looking at the data that we collected over the last week, if we want to optimize balance, the first thing we probably should do is to not allow people to leave pre-match lobbies. Right now, that is by the looks of it, the #1 offender of imbalanced matches (as we also implemented a delay to not put people who left back into the same match right away). The reason why we allowed people to leave was because of consideration for trolling. But this is leading to imbalances. The matches that the match maker actually balanced were at times disrupted or upset by people freely bailing out on matches. If you guys want, we could implement a real penalty for leaving pre-match lobbies, and that will help match balance. Another thing that we've seen from data to cause balance to be affected was crew forming by high(est) level players. This coupled with leaving was the number one reason for match imbalances. If you guys are willing to forego crew form into match maker for the sake of balance, we could allow crew form to be only for custom games. But this is going to be a hit for the social aspects of the game.
The bottomline is, we had to made concessions to make the match system flexible for you guys to foster, expand on, or retain the social, community, and custom features. These unfortunately impact the match maker's ability to balance matches individually and in totality.
We can't take complaints about lacking social features and lacking perfect balance at the same time, and be expected to achieve both. We are trying, and will continue to try. But being totally honest, to have all the social features you guys want, and to to achieve perfect balance for every match is impossible, as these are opposing forces tugging at each other.
Also, with the level system, please keep in mind that they are cosmetic by in large. Perceived imbalance arose when people look at crewed formed high levels and decided that the match was imbalanced at first glance. So there is also a perception difference between what a person may perceived as balanced or imbalanced, versus what in reality may or may not be balanced. This is why we removed the display of levels in the prematch lobby, as your levels by in large only tells you how much you've played, but not how well you've played. The underlying system of the match maker factors in not only how well you've played, but also how well the team as a whole should be playing.
Personally, I don't want to take away social features if I can help it, as they are what makes our system different and potentially greater and more powerful. So the 2 things we would like to try are to cap rematches, so that the match maker queue will have more pop in queue over the long run. The second thing we will try is handsomely reward (and perhaps achievement track) people for staying in lobbies generated by match maker and fight (even as underdogs). This reward could have impact on leveling as well (as in giving more leveling bonuses). In adherence to our spirit of positively reinforce the community wherever possible, I would rather do this than to punish leaving.
Another point is, B'Elanna is right. The more friends you add, the more the friend match list becomes the old match list. The way of tech is headed towards friend curation and filtering, and so are we. I think it's the right way to go.
On the point about not allowing custom game to pull from match maker, yeah we can do that. We had it designed like that initially, and changed it because we took feedback from player testers that they would like help filling matches. If the vet custom game creates and fine with recruiting players not from match maker, we could easily revert back to not allowing custom games to pull from match maker. But I don't want to keep changing back and forth though, so if this is the majority will, we can do that.
