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GreenBreeze:

--- Quote from: shaelyn on November 11, 2014, 11:21:41 pm ---however, installing that limitation is really just treating a symptom of a bigger problem: this community was not ready for matchmaking.  we don't have enough players to support it.  that's the real reason we're having balance and/or speed issues.

--- End quote ---

^So much this.

While I can see Caprontos' point that matchmaker might make more newer players stick around so eventually we'll get a bigger community of experienced players, I don't think that is very realistic. It takes a certain type of personality to gain so much satisfaction from a game like this that requires so much teamwork that they keep coming back for more again and again. Some groups of players get what this game is all about and fall in love with it. The fact of the matter is that most people who pick this game up will do so while it's on steam sale and will play it for a while and probably have fun with it for a while and then they will put it down and never pick it up again.

Everyone has a different experience, but my experience with Guns of Icarus Online since v1.3.8 was deployed has not been of the quality that it was in previous versions. I used to play this game often, and for hours at a time. I had several real life friends who were also into the game and between them we could pull together two or three or even a full four people to hop on a boat. Post patch we still played and put up with matchmaker's shenanigans for a while.

The feeling of loss was palpable. We had so many things taken from us. Some great things were given to us too, such as the lovely suggested loadout feature. However, no longer was it an easy task to do the things we commonly did. Sure, there were workarounds to achieve similar results, but it seemed so silly to have to move to a spectate slot in order to change teams, and captains could not swap teams with another captain to balance the teams better(at least this was changed back). Matchmaker would now decide everything for us, and should achieve balance, but we all know that's not the case, only now it's much harder for the people to take the matter into their own hands and solve the problem themselves by rearranging in the lobby.

The old lobbies had a way of balancing themselves out just fine by letting the players sort themselves out and start the match when they were ready. The lobby timer in the matchmaker made games required us to leave games several times right before the match began because not every boat was really ready. We don't want to be forced to start a game with an unprepared ally ship, or even an unprepared enemy ship. All of my friends long for the days of the good ole lobby browser. It was much easier to find a game with fun people to play with in it, and there was zero frustration involved. We have yet to let matchmaker determine our fate and been as satisfied with the results as the results we were able to achieve on our own with the lobby list.

Now once we finally find a good game, we only get a maximum of three rounds in, that's not even enough matches to go through the list of junker fits we run, let alone delve into some of the other ships. After the hassle of forming up and finding a quality match we are forced to go through the process again, very frustrating, and usually a night-ender.

We have been told that custom games are the solution to our problems. The only problem with this is that you must already have half of the lobby full before you can open it to matchmaker to fill. Being a group of usually one boat maximum, this limits us to using the matchmaking system most of the time.

We are on our mumble server nightly. At least every other night I make the attempt to roust up enough folks to perhaps begin a game of blimps. As of late I cannot get any takers because the fun part of the experience is being negated by the parts that are frustrating. Negative experiences weigh much more than positive experiences in most peoples' minds. We tend to remember negative things much more vividly and for a longer amount of time. Unfortunately, too many negative experiences have compounded in our recent encounters with this game and it has caused the people I know to lose interest. This saddens me because I really like playing this game and I sincerely hope that the next time I can convince people to play it with me a lot of the kinks will be worked out of the system and we will have a positive experience.

In the meantime, the non-blimp playing portion of the [HASH] clan community would like to thank Muse for their implementation of a matchmaking system because it has allowed us to accomplish a great deal in the last month in our other video game endeavors.



--- Quote from: Caprontos on November 11, 2014, 09:09:16 pm ---I wish I could just make short posts.. :P

--- End quote ---

I feel you there :P

GeoRmr:
I'm not sure why but it seems to me that the devs have fetishised matchmaking to the point where it has become more important to them than actual content, (many members of the community strongly advised that they don't attempt it when it was merely a notion before it even got to the drawing board) its like they believe that all people want in a game is the perfect matchmaker and that having one will increase player retention - I'm not saying it won't increase player retention but I truly believe that if they were to do some simple things like, make more maps (regurgitating old ones doesn't count) or fix some of the long standing bugs such as inconsistencies with the spotting mechanic,  it would work out a lot better for them.

Keyvias:
Geo I would argue that some players have fetishised the match list to the same degree.

As the person who went by hand through all the reports of newbie on my ship, the feedback of of why are these games unbalanced, why do I have to have a novice on my ship, why can people join second pilot, why does the lobby sometimes lag and have issues.
There are an amazing number of problems that were in the match list that have been simply forgotten.

The match list took 0 time away from making new maps, ships, and guns. The engineering time for matchmaker was from our database engineer and UI engineer.
The people who make those things were making them and are currently making them.  The art team has built roughly 16 new ships at my last count and they're in Co-Op mode.  The reason there have been less content patches is because that work is going into building an entirely new game's worth of assets, game modes, and content.

So, here's my greatest issue.  The idea that old lobbies were balanced is simply not true, even with scramble the number of times teams would get completely trounced was very often.
You may not have experienced it, but that's because you guys have friends and are the pros.

It's a PvP game, there will always being players losing, but our goal is to make fair and interesting matches for everyone or as close to it as possible.

sparklerfish:
So let's have matchmaking for novices, ban them out of high-level lobbies, and let them not get stomped and feel the joy of "omg anyone can win even if we suck!"

If all that matters is that novices don't get stomped, focus on that, rather than trying to bring the rest of us down.  Give the rest of us our old game back.

Keyvias:
It's not just novices getting stomped.
We didn't just take feedback from novices when we built the system, hell most of the system was developed with feedback from players with over 1,000 games. The people that came into the dev app and gave us feedback, almost every single one of them vets.

I feel like we made our side on this pretty clear. I've talked numbers, feedback, I've talked changes, improvements, faults, fixes, and everything brought up.
Do I think you're going to convince me over a forum?  No. Do I think I'm going to convince you over a forum?  No.

I've written this next section about 8 times and honestly I can't think of a right way to write it.  I apologize for that.

I am not going to rewrite arguments about matchmaking on the forums.
This isn't a place where anything gets solved. This isn't a place of ideas and excitement. This isn't a place of solution and critical thinking.

I've laid out why the system is better than the old one.
Give me a reason why the old one is better, other than "players get to choose which round they're in" because my answer is 100's of emails on where players made the wrong choice and severely pissed off everyone, from vets, to newbs, and casuals to competitive. More than that, I have quite a few personal stories about how the old match system gave me or some other ship a terrible or ineffective crew.

Tell me use cases you can no longer do with the new system compared to the old system and how they impacted your gameplay.

Tell me how you would solve the problems that came up every single day and match with the old system.

Send this to keyvias@musegames.com and I'll read over it, I'll consider it, and I'll answer it.



Post it here and I won't see it.
I'm not going to check this thread anymore. I apologize to the people that brought in great ideas, but please email them to me so I can keep finding ways to put them into the system (allow ship scramble in crew form is currently on our work board. Thanks for the awesome idea!)
If you're interested in giving feedback with the goal of improving the overall matches, you know where to send it.

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