@Mr. Disaster, yeah I know. And you know that I respect your opinion always, and that we had numerous discussions on this prior to release.
I think with the match system, it's not perfect. Looking at last week's data, we objectively did better on time to match start, and did better than the old system on match balance (I can go into how we computed the stats, but let me do that through voice comm. It is really freezing in our room, I kid you not.) But we didn't do as well as we expected, which was disappointing to us, and we started to investigate why. And the long story short is that, some of the same issues we had in the old system about balance vs community features are affecting the new system as well. But now this is the really tough question. 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. To be quicker, if you want to help us teach new players, you'll have the old match list back pretty much right away. If you want to friend join, you can, crew form you can, leave matches at will you can, scramble you can, ship swap you can. But these things hamper the new system like they do the old match system.
So I don't disagree with you, but probably only in terms of the extent. I think we've taken a step forward and likely a half step back. But that half step back is also trying accommodate you guys' requests for better community and social features. So it's tough. It doesn't mean that we're not trying really hard, but it's tough.
And there are different perspectives at play here. For example, the old match system worked well for you, because you've had extensive experience and familiarity with it. Then for me the question becomes, ok, can the new match system support your use case of match list browsing, and I sincerely think yes. Granted, there is a bit of social engineering here, but this is not unlike what Steam tries to do, which is to filter and curate things with friends. We got this idea from testers, and adopted it. I think it's quite brilliant (giving full credit to you guys for coming up with the original idea) because it does a better job filtering the matches, assuming people don't mind adding some friends that they enjoy playing with. It's a little bit more work up front, but I believe that the result in the long run is a better one.
Mr. Disaster, we know that you are criticizing because you care, and I think it should be fair for me to say that we're always listening. I know we don't always make decisions that you agree with, but we're trying. And we try to think things through and listen to people's opinions as much as humanly possible contrary to what some people believe.
All I can do is to try to continue to improve the system, to make sure we support use cases for vets like you, and to continue to strive to juggle them against issues such as balance. I absolutely appreciate you candor and we can take the criticism, that's what we are here for.
Thanks a lot. Howard
