The most recent test was fine.
Competitive Matchmaking Discussion
- Thread starter Geit
- Start date
When was that one held?
Yesterday afternoon into late evening.
Was that in Europe time or 'Murica time? If it was 'Murica time then it worked because us EU guys were sleeping. If it was EU time then Valve made sure their servers won't crumble under heavy load, like when half of Europe's TF2 players wanted to play matchmaking.
It was EU to US time.
I was talking to Jill about it, and things were far better than the previous test.
Test No. 3 was a literal disaster. If a game did finish the tf coordinator server or the item server went dead like right before the end, so no stats were recorded at all, and after that you'd have to wait for like 20 minutes for the main menu button to even show up, and then good luck getting on a server, because that didn't happen either. I played 1 match right at the beginning when it still was a little quiet and not a lot of people were queueing up, but as soon as that game finished I couldn't even queue up for a 2nd game. When I finally did get in the 2nd game 2 players on our team never connected to the server, yet they weren't replaced by other guys, so we would've played 4v6 (and later 3v6 as someone timed out) had it not been for the fact that everybody just left to try again. That didn't happen either because again, tf coordinator servers went south.
I've heard stories of #3.
It bad.
It bad.
Hmmmm
I think #3 was bad on purpose, as more of a joke to the community, but we havent realized it yet.
HL3, TF3, Portal 3?
Remember, 3 is the worst number for valve, so maybe it was thrown as a joke?
Probably not but its something to laugh at.
I think #3 was bad on purpose, as more of a joke to the community, but we havent realized it yet.
HL3, TF3, Portal 3?
Remember, 3 is the worst number for valve, so maybe it was thrown as a joke?
Probably not but its something to laugh at.
I hope Valve are reading this, or you're relaying things to Jill @Fr0Z3nR.
YM's thoughts about matchmaking:
More to come....
YM's thoughts about matchmaking:
- Needs class picking before join, so as a party we can sort that shit out while we're in our lobby
- Visible class preference, so we can see what each other prefers etc. I never want it hard locked to meta, but as a single player I don't want to be put into a server with a medic if I want to play medic, and as a player in a lobby I want others to know easily which classes I like playing so we can all pick a class we like, without forcing someone to play their 5th or 6th best class simply because they joined later.
- Some kind of indicator for how I'm progressing and what I need to work on to get better ranking. A mysterious green bar that drops when I'm clearly the best player on an utterly hopeless team is NOT GOOD UX. Do I have to play a certain number of matches? Get enough medals? HOW? HOW DOES IT WORK!? It seems far too easy to get put in a bad team and lose rank than it does to gain rank. (I don't think my bar has ever gone up despite racking up medals and winning matches)
- Needs a 'Rematch' button after playing, so the rare GOOD team can be battled again. Cause fuck me I'd rather play 20 games against one good team than 19 games against shit teams and 1 game against a good team.
- Abaondonment is CRAZY HARSH currently. CRAZY HARSH
- Being in a party with non-low priority players should cancel out your own low priority to an extent (ie people can vouch for you)
- 'Safe to disconnect' needs to be on screen always when it is, and at the end before it's safe to there needs to be a "not safe to D/C yet" message. This is CRAZY IMPORTANT because currently the consequences for abandonment are CRAZY BAD
- 2nd and 3rd rounds need that metal door and a 5s count down because DANG the hard jump from humiliation to the next round is super abrupt and jarring.
- Needs some "These friends are in lobbies" feature and a "request to join" button so I can rock up on my own, see who is in a lobby and send a request to join. Spamming friends "are you playing? got spare spaces?" uuuuggghghhhhh MAKE IT EASY VALVE, MAKE IT EASY
- What medals are given for is super unclear.
- End-Game poses needs to use better weapon choices, I play medic and instead of my medigun it always shows my needlegun... whhhhhyyyyyyy. Log the item used most during the match and display that?
- Put the stats in a graph. Seeing the average/season/last match numbers are cool and all but I want to see my progress over time! If matchmaking is an effort to bring personal betterment to TF2, it should show progress. (also graphs are the fucking shit. Everybody loves a graph, name one person who doesn't like graphs... you can't!)
- I want a way to see my friend's medals/stats/progression over time.
More to come....
Just for reference but not to negate anything you said;
This would be easily abused where a group would just have one of their players abandon to avoid the loss counting and face little/no penalty since only one abandoned.
There's a [?] you can hover over next to your medals that explains it. (Medals are given if you do better than the average at your rank over the last few games worldwide)
I think out of all of those, my biggest gripe is that green fucking bar. It. Just. Isn't. Moving.
Like how fucking well do I have to play to get it to move? If it's currently frozen due to being stress test times, it should say so :s
More comments:
Like how fucking well do I have to play to get it to move? If it's currently frozen due to being stress test times, it should say so :s
More comments:
- Scribblers need to be aggressively weeded out. They ruin the drawing at the end. Lines shouldn't be anonymous so we can report scribblers and penis drawers.
- Someone disconnects with 10 seconds to go and suddenly THE WHOLE MATCH COUNTS FOR NOTHING. Jesus this is bullshit right here. We played a great two rounds, back and forth over mid but we played better and won a good match, someone on the losing team disconnects with <10 seconds before we win and now nothing counts? UUGGHYSIFGIFGHSFGSFGYFGHSDEIKFGHSUFGS
I know, but that's still very unclear. Better than average is a binary thing. You either did better, or worse. So what makes it bronze/silver/gold? Is it X standard deviations away from the mean? Does bronze mean I was above the mean, silver mean I was 1σ above mean and gold mean 2σ above mean? Or is it some arbitrary value above the mean? It seems like simply allowing the match to go on for longer will result in more medals. Longer matches -> more chance to get points/damage/healing. So if you're on a boss team and win matches quickly you're going to get no medals ever? That's sad.
One thing that Valve could do is award medals on kills per death, kills/assists per death, damage per minute and healing per minute. That way the teams that roll still have a chance to get medals. Also it would help prevent spawn camping to grind medals rather than actually playing the game, as I have heard that has happened (not sure how often that happens though).