Only 3 rematches remaining...

[sparklerfish]

Can we come out and say what everyone is thinking but hasn't actually said?

Matchmaking, enforced removal of people from lobbies, and all of these other "balance" changes serve the needs of newer/novice players to the detriment of more experienced players.

Experienced players get frustrated and play less often or just refuse to play in pub matches.  This makes a smaller pool to draw from for matchmaking, making it serve our needs even LESS well.

Instead of giving us back the control we used to have to construct matches, more control is removed to help offset the failings of matchmaker to meet our needs.

I don't need a system to tell me if a match is balanced or not.  I've played enough to know.  I don't need a system to tell me when a lobby is failing and needs to be abandoned.  I can tell when everyone is leaving.

You're losing your biggest supporters by making these unpopular changes and no amount of regurgitated statistics is going to change the fact that people are having unsatisfactory experiences.  You can't sit back and say, "well, you're wrong about not having fun, because the numbers say otherwise."

[Caprontos]

Can we come out and say what everyone is thinking but hasn't actually said?

I'm not thinking that.

Honestly I think I've been less frustrated with match maker then I was with the old match list. It isn't prefect, but it does a decent job for where its at. It is a bit different then I expected it to be..

I also certainly find a lot more games now then before. I can play a game in the time it use to take to find a game... So that alone is a nice change. and yes I have fun in most of the lobbies (from either system).

Maybe its cause I play mainly engi, and not pilot/gunner so I don't have to deal with a lot of things idk. I can see a lot of issues with match maker for pilots, and some for gunner that engi doesn't really need to deal with.. Maybe I am having better results then others and.. my luck will run out haha- or my standards to have fun are lower..

Also I feel all the people saying "I need a custom game to have a fun experienced lobby" .. Its always been that way really. It was rare to find an actually balanced high skill lobby with the match list. You had to plan for it and manually set it up to do it most of the time.

As for just fun lobbies (no experience required), idk that depends on you I guess. I can't decide whats fun for someone else.

Basically, I don't think match maker is a lot different to the match list, its a change sure but the outcome to me isn't much different. Regardless if I play with friends or random lobbies..

The biggest change is instead of picking a lobby I want, a lobby is picked for me.. but then I can always leave and try again if its really bad.. So I can still pick.. Sorta like the match list where I remember just jumping from game to game down the list, trying to find one that didn't suck.. Sometimes not finding one at all.. Though I've opted to leave once in maybe 20 games since the hotfix with match maker for a better lobby.

I am not trying to arguing your point of view/opinion btw, and I know a bunch of people who agree with you an that's fine, muse should be aware there are people who feel how you do.. So they can try to address everyone's issues/concerns and make things something most people are happy with.., but if we are just saying how we feel about it match maker currently "but didn't say it", then I can say to right? Even if it's a bit different..

Also I want to add.. I wasn't for match maker before - from the start when they said they wanted to do it, but when I decided to play again after a vacation, and learning they did it.. I decided to play with it, with an open mind and not be to judgmental about it.. and I think they proved it can be a good thing, imo.

I think it needs work in some areas, but they can't improve it instantly.. I hope in a month or two its improved and I hope match maker leads to more new people sticking around...

If it does make the community grow, then match maker will be their best update. If it doesn't then.. history will laugh at you muse.. maybe.. I really hope match maker is giving new players better and more experiences then the match list did.. If they stay we will have a lot more experienced people to play with in time..

Anyways that's enough opinion from me, I will put my suggestions for how to improve match maker in there own topics, as they come up if they don't already have one.. or maybe an email..

I wish I could just make short posts..

[sparklerfish]

Sorry to claim to speak for you Caprontos; I know I don't speak for everyone, just trying to articulate a view I think a lot of the people posting share.

Basically, I don't think match maker is a lot different to the match list, its a change sure but the outcome to me isn't much different. Regardless if I play with friends or random lobbies..

The biggest change is instead of picking a lobby I want, a lobby is picked for me.. but then I can always leave and try again if its really bad.. So I can still pick.. Sorta like the match list where I remember just jumping from game to game down the list, trying to find one that didn't suck.. Sometimes not finding one at all.. Though I've opted to leave once in maybe 20 games since the hotfix with match maker for a better lobby.

At least with a lobby list you could hop around until you found a lobby that looked like it would be suitable rather than gambling each time with the matchmaker.  I could know exactly which lobbies I'd looked in and who was in them and determine if there was one I thought would provide me with a good match.

[shaelyn]

hmmmmm.

I stand somewhere in the middle.  I've gotten used to matchmaker and getting what I want out of it...or rather, working around it.  if I actually used the matchmaker, solo'd it, I'd probably still hate it.  but right now, with a few tweaks to crew form to make it easier to fly with my clan, and matchmaking and I get along well enough.

my experience, though.  overall, the 3 rematch thing is an inconvenience; I don't find it a huge deal.  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 I guess what I want to know is, when we're big enough that matchmaker can finally balance matches as intended, will the limitations be lifted?  or are there any alternate options for the interim?

and the uber important stuff that I doubt there's an answer for right now:  when will we be big enough?  and how long will it take to get there?

[Hoja Lateralus]

@sparklerfish

Can we come out and say what everyone is thinking but hasn't actually said?

Matchmaking, enforced removal of people from lobbies, and all of these other "balance" changes serve the needs of newer/novice players to the detriment of more experienced players.

Don't want to be rude but I did mentioned it few times

i.e.

I think the hiding levels thing is another example of Muse catering to greenhorns rather than veterans. Because it protects greenhorns from their low status (for a short amount of time) but also "protects" them from any advices more experienced players may give. It protects noobs from veterans, but veterans can't protect themselves from noobs APART from password games. And many experienced players say that pub matches are terrible and if you want a good game you have to go as far away as you can from pubs. And it's true. Muse doesn't protect its' veterans and veterans will be lost one after another.

Rest of your post - I completely agree. Personally I play like 30% of the time I used to play in 1.3.7 and mostly with custom lobbies or at least crew of friends.

@shaelyn

if I actually used the matchmaker, solo'd it, I'd probably still hate it.
(...)
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.

Pretty much this. Agreed. I actually always thought that lobbies are fine system, but just we don't have enough players for it to work comfortably well.

[GreenBreeze]

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

[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.

[sparklerfish]

Welp, let's just delete the whole feedback and suggestions subforum because apparently this isn't a place where ideas get shared.

I e-mailed my feedback and had it shot down.  I came into the dev app for testing and shared my feedback and had it shot down.  I suppose I should just give up, then.

[GeoRmr]

The new matchmaker still doesn't create balanced lobbies so I'm not entirely sure what the point of you reminding me that the old lobbies didn't either is. Sure - we still don't have balanced lobbies, but now the lobbies are more restrictive and less enjoyable.

I was a vet, I did go into devapp, I did give you feedback, and yes I even sent you emails to supplement posts I made on the devapp board, (looking on the devapp board the broad majority of vets feedback was AGAINST matchmaking and their guidance sent in desperation to reduce the damage caused by your stubborn decision to implement matchmaking) you didn't give a shit then and clearly you don't now, fine.

[sparklerfish]

I was a vet, I did go into devapp, I did give you feedback, you didn't give a shit then and clearly you still don't.

I find it interesting that Keyvias has made it sound like the majority of the feedback is in support of limiting rematches, removing player control, and submitting ourselves fully to the almighty infallible Matchmaker (PRAISE BE UNTO HIM), whereas looking at the forums doesn't give me that impression at all.  Perhaps the people who post on the forums are all just idiots who don't understand the game and gain sick pleasure from causing other people to not have fun.

[GeoRmr]

"Our database engineer and UI engineer"

Anyone know who these devs are? Wonder if sending an email to them might actually cause Muse to notice something rather than directing it to the brick wall of Keyvias.

[shaelyn]

-sigh- this probably isn't going to change anything, and it's probably just going to feed more flames instead of cool them down, but I got it all typed up and everything...so oh well.

I think I half failed in my point.
you guys caught the point that we weren’t ready for matchmaking.  and we aren’t.
but I’m largely okay with matchmaking.  there’s band-aids all over it, because we’re not ready for it, and I don’t like it.  I like problems to be solved - completely.  there’s not a way to do that with matchmaking right now, and the changes are limiting flexibility that I’d rather see in place.
but I don’t think match list is necessarily the answer either.  it’s more flexible, but I am seeing that lobbies fill quicker (unless I’m off-peak or a part of a large team), and a lot of the flexibility I was screaming to have back initially…is back.  I can work with this, and at the end of the day, I think I’d rather work with the system we will have in the future and fix it as much as possible so that when we are ready for matchmaking, we’re already there, then go back and forth.

the thing is, if these “fixes” to compensate for the lack of player base are temporary, I’m okay with working around what I need to.  I still have a great time in this game.  it’s not completely broke or anything.  I’d rather have what flexibility is still gone at this point, but it’s not mandatory for my experience.  that’s why I’m largely focused on fixing matchmaking with the larger, more glaring issues that will hinder long-term, like the crew form thing.

if match list were reinstated, I wouldn’t change what I do or how I play.

we weren’t ready for matchmaking.  that’s fundamental to point out.  you guys are trying to address that issue using the 3-match limit, and the 3-match limit is an aggravation, but in the grand scheme of things, not game-breaking (not to me anyway, I won’t speak for all of you), and it’s not the core issue (but you guys have caught on to that).  anyway…we can work with what we got or work with what we had.  neither option is a fantastic option.

so…  -shrug-  six of one, half a dozen of the other?  that’s my point.  I don’t see one option as being better or worse than the other.  it’s just different.