Messages

1

Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Only 3 rematches remaining...

« on: November 12, 2014, 07:47:29 pm »

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.

Wow, apparently my ideas about what an open forum should be are completely wrong. A forum is defined as "a place or opportunity for discussing a subject". Apparently we are free to discuss amongst ourselves, but it makes no difference at all in the end. What is the point then?

I have only posted a handful of times and each time it was a well thought out post with a cohesive argument that took me a considerable amount of time to type up and prepare. The only reason I took this time out of my life to convey my concerns and share my experiences is because I like this game and I want it to thrive. I was under the impression that MUSE cared and wanted to know, but it is evident to me now that this is not the case.

A forum allows you to answer questions in a manner that the entire community can benefit from because the knowledge is shared. It is also less work on MUSE staff. You can answer a question once rather than have to answer the same thing 30 times in individual e-mails.

I still hope that this game improves and next time I log in I might have a fun experience, but after this I am done wasting my time posting on a forum that is not a place where anything gets solved, isn't a place of ideas and excitement, and isn't a place of solution and critical thinking. I guess I will just turn a blind eye and either I will like the end product or I won't. I can take a hint, my input does not matter so I will stop wasting my time and keep my ideas to myself.

Good Luck

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Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Only 3 rematches remaining...

« on: November 12, 2014, 05:44:39 am »

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.

^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.

I wish I could just make short posts..

I feel you there

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Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Problems with matchmaking

« on: November 01, 2014, 10:21:05 am »

Herein lies the main issue with matchmaker in my opinion. Currently, with the population boon of a steam sale, games are starting quickly, albeit poor quality games. Once the population dies down, as it inevitably will, I don't see how matchmaker can possibly do what it is intended to do. If it cannot create a fun game for everyone right now with 700+ people in the pool to pull from, then how can it possibly work when there are 70 in the pool?

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Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Positive feedback only

« on: October 31, 2014, 07:00:06 pm »

I also love the recommended loadouts. I  think they could be improved by allowing people to specify that they always want spanner in slot 1, mallet in slot 2, etc. This would prevent pilots suggesting a loadout and then throwing people off when they're used to certain tools in certain slots.

I also love fireworks. It makes it that much more satisfying to get a mine kill I know they are likely only temporary for the birthday celebration, but I do hope they stay.

In general, this is a great game. I'm glad I picked it up. I didn't get it on steam sale and paid full price and would do it again in a heartbeat.

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Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Problems with matchmaking

« on: October 28, 2014, 06:04:11 am »

...I have been pushing for the idea that there should be two systems: Matchmaking (MM) and Match List (ML) for a long time. The community pushed to have quick join removed for a long time, and the idea of matchmaking was supported mainly as an alternative to quick join. Why should we, the veteran players, those who are part of the reason why this game has such a good community overall, have to suffer? Why are we, the veterans, having to deal with a system that degrades the community experience, strategy, general craziness, and overall fun and entertainment value of the game, why all of this just so that the shorter-term, pick-up, play the game, all of two or some-odd times, not giving half a damn about the community get a system designed with just them in mind, stripped down to provide just a glimpse at the depth of the game? Is it not us, the veterans, those who continually help, by giving assistance, feedback, sending in well-informed reports, self-policing and discouraging toxicity amongst the community. Is it not the veterans who are the ones teaching the newbies, pushing the limits on the depth of the game, and helping nurture the community who hold up the community standards, actually care, growing and sustaining the community with a passion, one that dwarfs any found in most of the largest, most popular games in existence? Why should we, the community as a whole, get off with the short end of the stick, with the social aspects of the games, such as the possibility of meeting someone in a random lobby, someone who could eventually become a new friend, a new acquaintance, or even a person who could become in the future a new clan member, reduced or removed entirely? What exactly was Muse's point when they removed one of the most integral portions of the community the match list, the social hub of the game, by basically ripping out its heart, and trying to replace it with a lesser alternative?

Amen. If you introduce such a drastically different system, there are bound to be issues people have with it, no matter how polished it is before you release it. Especially when you remove so much functionality that people are used to having. That is the purpose of testing. However, testing has a finite member base and you'll never be able to get all the feedback you need from a small test bed.

If you split it up into two separate systems and then took some analytics on what people are choosing to use I think you'll find that the new MM has a spike initially as people try it out and give it a chance and then the old 1.3.7 system will be preferred by the bulk of the community. At least that's the feel I get from most people I talk to in the game about it, but I could be wrong. I stand by my assertion that the number of people waiting for a match at a given time is not large enough to make a matchmaking system work properly. I feel that no matter how much tweaking you do to MM it just can't work in a community this size.

The bottom line 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 achieve perfect balance for every match is impossible, as these are opposing forces tugging at each other. 

I feel that Muse is listening more to a bulk of emails from people who buy the game on steam sale and then complain because it's too hard than to those who have stuck around and learned the game and got good at it and have found compatible people to play with. Teamwork is key to this game and I feel that this MM system is punishing groups who have achieved what this game is about, finding a group of people who you can cooperate with to achieve a common goal. If you remove the function to allow people to choose who they are crewing with, you completely butcher the game. If we are weighing the merits of balance vs. social features, aka control, then on my scale you'd need a ladder to reach balance because control weighs so much. I already felt as if captains should have had more control in 1.3.7 than they did, not less.

fuck it. just add everyone to your watch-list, and have all the costume matches.
then let's just request a separate (consensual) friends-list and have them be a different colour.

that's the only way to cheat yourself match lists back.

just give us a separate friend-list and i will get off your back. promise.

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.

Really? Can't you tell that she's being facetious here? Friend curation and filtering are the way that tech is heading eh? Some of us don't have facebook accounts because we loathe this sort of friend curation behavior and boycott social media. The moment I see the button to link to my facebook account to populate my friends list I'm out. Ugh.
 

@Mr. Disaster, also, if you don't find the match maker to be working, give custom game and the match list a shot.  Personally I found that once I have 50-100 friends added, the match list worked well for me.  I'm likely biased I know, but I don't think I'm talking BS here.

@Bubbles

If you want to in the new system, you can without too much effort recreate the old system.  For example, if you want the old match list back, you can literally just add a bunch of people as friends.

This is unfair, I don't like this. I'm an introvert in real life therefore I have introvertic way of being also in GOIO which means I pick my friends with care. To add someone as friend I need to fly with him/her a few times, having him/her doing a good job and fun together. I think I have like ~50 people on my friend list and I will not accept this "solution" of my problem. This is no argument to me and stop repeating that because it's just....unpleasant. If you truly believe this is some "back door" from matchmaking then bring back the regular server list or do the suggestion below.

I agree completely. The idea you propose that we just add more friends certainly sounds like a work-around and not a solution. Custom games is not the answer to all of our problems by any means because custom games are not browsable by the community at large. If custom games behaved like the old lobby system in 1.3.7 then the answer of "just use custom games" would be acceptable to me.

As for some sort of penalty invoked for leaving a lobby that I don't like the looks of. I wouldn't care in the least bit. Levels mean nothing to me. There is no difference between anybody in this game, which is great and not something I would want to change. It is good that the only difference between a level 1 and a level 45 is experience and personal skill garnered from that experience. Levels are strictly cosmetic and mean nothing at all. Match count gives you much more indication on somebody's ability than level. Ding my level all you want. Add a counter in hot pink in an attempt to publicly shame me. Do whatever you think appropriate. It will still not prevent me from bailing on a lobby where MM sticks me on a ship with all brand new players.

I just tried playing a few matches with a friend me as a high level engi, him as a high level pilot, and we were paired with two people with less than 20 games to make up the rest of our boat each time. While I don't mind teaching people the mechanics of the game and repeating myself 30 times every once in a while, I certainly don't want to do that every match. It gets old arguing with new players about the reasons we don't want a gunner on our boat (but the uselessness of the gunner class is not the topic here). Usually when I want to play a game I just want to relax and have fun. That was easily accomplished by taking a look at the few lobbies that are going and figuring out which match had the veterans congregating in it and joining up, or spectating for a little bit while I waited for a spot. Now all the veterans are spread out across various lobbies serving in indentured slavery as tutors. MM is causing this game to become significantly less fun than it used to be because as it is right now it's just too damned frustrating to play more than a few matches.

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Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Problems with matchmaking

« on: October 25, 2014, 02:24:25 pm »

If it is going to be split into two systems or a hybrid system I still feel you will need to have a match list of all the custom games running and waiting. If you split it so that only custom games are advertised to preserve the balance that MM attempts to achieve that would probably be sufficient. The lack of a feature to view lobbies is one of my main complaints about the new system. I don't want to add every person in the game to my friends list to retain functionality I had before. I have seen other games where MM is the default method for finding a match but they still give you the ability to view all the matches and you can join one manually if you desire(Hawken comes to mind). This doesn't seem to break anything in those games, but GOI is unique with it's small community and heavy slant towards teamwork. There aren't really a whole lot of equivalent games to compare it to.

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Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Problems with matchmaking

« on: October 25, 2014, 01:40:02 pm »

@Shaelyn,Greenbreeze

None of the restrictions proposed above actually disallow you to play with your friends. Instead of friend joining lobbies or mid-match, one of you would simply have to wait a bit for the other to finish and then queue up together. Voila, now you're both playing together AND promoting healthy game balance and quality. I don't have any idea as to why everyone considers this such a huge compromise that would apparently destroy the so-called community aspect of the game and whatnot.

As for the 'but I only want to play 4 harpoon mobulas and mm wont let me!' argument, the answer is custom games. Get your friends who enjoy that kind of thing, host a custom game, have fun the way you want to have fun. You want it to be public because you also enjoy meeting strangers while doing your thing? Amazing, utilize the global chat and advertise your custom lobby.

If these were serious reasons for a self-respecting game not to have matchmaking or to impelement is so badly crippled, Dota 2 wouldn't have matchmaking because some people want to play 'all mid rikimaru-only' games, and some others can't stand the thought of their friends being in a game which they can't join right away. These examples are outside the norm and not what the average game is supposed to look like or actually looks like. To be absolutely honest I feel like the game's potential's been held back because of our (the community's) very very weird expectations.

No, the restrictions do not make it impossible to play the game with my friends but they do not make it easy either. I find the whole experience to be rather frustrating. I am used to having a certain level of limited control and trying to figure out a way to do something that was easy to do before only to find that now it cannot be done is quite frustrating. It seems that lobby waiting time has been replaced with MM limbo waiting time. Starting a match with the old system resulted in it filling up with a mixture of people from your friends list and random people you never met before eventually if you were patient. Now you can't expect a Custom Game to ever fill. Custom matches are only good if you have enough people around that you know and can get them all to fill a lobby with you, which is pretty rare for me.

I agree that custom matches is where you should create a 4 harpoon mobula lobby, however I disagree that you can expect to fill that lobby through global advertisement. With the old system every person who viewed the lobby list would see my game listed in there and I might get enough takers. If I have to advertise in global chat that greatly reduces the number of people who will see it from the get-go. Not everyone bothers to look at global chat, but almost everyone who wants to play a game will see a game I have listed in the lobby list. This also allows me to do something else while I wait for the lobby to fill if I want, instead of spamming global in an attempt to fill the last boat.

I don't think it's quite fair to compare Dota 2 matchmaking to GOI matchmaking. A quick google search tells me that as of 2012 the user base was over 2.5 million with around 350k simultaneous users. I would say that is a substantially larger pool to draw from for a matchmaking system and it's no wonder that they can better refine the behavior of their matchmaker.

I would wager that if GOI had even half that number we would all love the new MM. What it all boils down to is that the size of the playerbase in GOI cannot really support a MM. It might work okay during the times of day with more activity, but to have MM during the times when there are only 50 people playing the game seems pretty silly to me.

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Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Problems with matchmaking

« on: October 25, 2014, 06:42:47 am »

just take a look around what other games with matchmaking do! Many mobas have got a way larger player base and only need to match 10 players which are sort of on par, rather than 16 which are needed for GoIO.

I believe here lies the crux of the problem. GOI just does not have a large enough playerbase to make a matchmaking system work effectively. In order for MM to really work you need a large pool to draw from.

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Feedback and Suggestions / Re: Problems with matchmaking

« on: October 25, 2014, 03:19:50 am »

I am going to preface this by saying that I am not normally one to use forums and complain about things. However, I love GOI and it's small, tight-knit community and I want to contribute to the progress of this game and let my voice be heard because I think that the MatchMaking system in it's current form is causing a frustrating game-play experience for many others besides myself.

This patch was full of good improvements but I feel they are all overshadowed by the MatchMaking system. I pretty much agree with Shaelyn in that I value flexibility much greater than balance.

GOI is a game that is all about teamwork and cooperation. Communication is key to success. I only play when I have at least one friend to play with as I can effectively communicate with friends and it makes everyone's experience more pleasant if at least half of the ship is highly functioning. Being able to, at the very least form a crew is an absolute necessity, as is the ability to join friends' matches, though I really, really miss the ability to be able to view all the lobbies. This might diminish the balance a little bit, but I feel that it helps more than it hurts.

Ship/Slot swapping is another feature that I am sad to see go. This was a tool that gave us the power to at least somewhat adjust lobbies without having to reform them. Sometimes you want to tweak the teams a little bit and then rematch. I understand that the reason given for removing this feature was to achieve balance and prevent stacked teams. However, it has been my experience that this tool is almost always used in the reverse, in that people use it to un-stack the teams because everyone wants games that are more fun to play, and one-sided matches aren't very much fun for either side.

Custom matches are essential to the community. How else can you create a lobby named "Mobula Madness" and get two more mobula pilots to join up? Forcing MM as the only option prevents people from being able to do silly things and have fun with it. Please give us the option to at least opt-out of MM. People still need to be able to view these matches so that I can get the other two mobula pilots needed to start the match. This doesn't work if it's restricted to people who have me on their friends list.

The match timer has been addressed in another topic and I want to state that I feel it should be removed entirely, or at least don't start it until half the lobby has readied up. Forcing a match to begin with an ill-prepared crew does not make for a fun match. Maybe let the lobby vote to disable the timer?

There are many times during the late-night hours for me that I check out GOI and there are less than 50 people playing. That used to mean that I could choose between about three lobbies if you combine running and waiting lobbies. I could spectate a running game that is almost over and grab a spot when someone quits after the match, usually at least one person has to go. Now with the new MM system there are still probably only about three lobbies going, but now I can't see them and I have to put my faith in MM to do it for me. I have spent over 20 minutes waiting in MM purgatory before giving up and trying again only to spend even more time before I decide to just go play something else. With the old lobby system I would be waiting in a lobby with two or three other people and we could at least converse with one another while we waited for another boat or two. I might even make a new friend while I wait. Now I am stuck looking at an endless loop of tool-tips which I could probably recite to you by now.

I could go on but I feel like I have perhaps, already been too long-winded. Suffice it to say I am not at all pleased with the new MM system and I sincerely hope that Muse will listen to it's community and return previous functionality that was stripped away from us. I just want to smack an engine with a mallet without the frustration  of MM diminishing my experience. I don't feel like there was anything wrong with the previous lobby system that is enhanced by MM.

See you all in the skies!