To give players options, and not make the change too sudden. The idea is also that there’s no “end-to-end match commitment” there, so it’ll be there for players who like how the game works currently.
We have been disabling the Server Browser during our matchmaking tests though, as we need as many people stressing the system as possible. We’ve gotten good data out of the two that we’ve held; several things that didn’t show up in our smaller scale internal and PTS tests.
@Exedore… can u tell us when this change is going to happen?
like 1 week , 1 month, somewhere next year, or dunno.
would be nice to hear something like a timetable for it. thx
when its ready. noone knows the details since they depend on the issues we all can find during the public tests
the info so far from the dev stream with exedore is that they plan more public testS first, so expect at least another test this week with a good week of production time to fix the bugs and test their fixes. Likely another iteration after that.
I’d like to see an ELO-based system similar to that of CS:GO’s matchmaking system (And League, but since I don’t play League, I can’t speak for its MM system) It has balance pretty much nailed down in terms of queue times and balance (Yes I know the player base is much larger, but lessons can be learned from it). I’m sure there’s much more to the proposed casual MM system, but I believe that some more changes need to be done to DB and to the system in order for the new system to be launched as easily as possible.
The first would be to start actually balancing other maps besides Dome, as most maps are poorly balanced between CDA and Jackal, as well as fine-tuning and balancing more of the weapons (the DE .50 is still useless compared to the revolvers, and some of the movement inaccuracies could use some work), augments, and merc abilities.
I’d like to see another post on how exactly this balancing algorithm works and what parameters and skill ranges it settles on.
@Exedore I just got two questions about matchmaking.
If someone leaves during a game(within 5 minutes), will the loss be forgiven?
I know you haven’t explained the algorithm yet, however will it take in account the differences in performance with different mercs?
Ex: I’m significantly better as an assault than a mechanic merc?
This would be a big reason why the last update had a host of XP balancing changes.[/quote]
Can we get ammo badges to work again w/o breaking this ‘equilibrium’?
[quote=“Black;192099”]@Exedore I just got two questions about matchmaking.
If someone leaves during a game(within 5 minutes), will the loss be forgiven?
I know you haven’t explained the algorithm yet, however will it take in account the differences in performance with different mercs? [/quote]
The casual side of things doesn’t care about wins and losses for matchmaking criteria. ELO is for Ranked.
The algorithm looks at types of XP, so essentially yes. When we can get a longer test in and can get past the technical issues and to tuning, I still expect it to need a lot of tuning.
Good expectations but i think if you want to make this process of testing mm faster weekly mm tests are needed and avaible to everyone above level 10.
Last time i was able to play the mm test i couldn’t because of some dumb reasons like it was only avaible to veterans (who i suppose that play since the release) even if i were level 20 and i knew perfectly how this game works.
Also a minimum of level 10-15 to play ranked mm is really required and the implementation of a much needed system of mercs picking , which i think is already present in other games like OW, where you are basically told/forced to take a given class which the team needs
(maybe adding a casual system to determine who will pick a given merc if multiple requests occur).
Thanks for the Casual MM. I was really sick of pub balance where all win/lose depends on how many high levels you have.
For example:
http://i.imgur.com/aOq2rVQ.jpg
(Of course I am Thunder is me.)
But one thing, I know XP/min is very good criteria of judging one’s skill but I really gotta warn you ONLY using this is as single criteria is quite inaccurate.
First of all, Medic earns the best XP/min no matter what you do.
http://i.imgur.com/GIcRT8J.jpg
This is my ex-account Medic Pro that only plays medic, and look how much XP I got with KE81 Phoenix.
1500XP/min is DOUBLE of Thunder’s XP/min I have in my own account.
Yes, not all Phoenix or medic does good as much as me, but still medics earn XPs much better than other classes.
May be you should consider other things such as Win Rate, or Kills/min.
Second, Recon’s XP balance is somehow not balanced still(Except Aimee.)
I was going to write an article about how Vassili, especially RED EYE’s Spot XP is exaggerated.
Don’t look at my results.(I always try to activate + Min 10, but I am very sorry to stomp casual pub newbies.)
Compare my score to Fragger, or Proxy who also did very well.
I can understand Aimee getting 100XP per Assist and 40XP with Spot because SNITCH is one of the hardest skill to use, and also easily countered by Bomb-Squad augment.
But Vassili who throws 17sec CD sensor which last 3seconds longer than its own CD, and RED EYE?
Amount of XP you can earn with them is PURE CRAZY.
You really have to roll-back Red Eye and Vassili’s XP before my Red Eye’s XP/min reaches 1200.
I already have 1100/min right now.
Fire Support’s XP/min with those new badges were awesome, and I really do appreciate Thunder’s Concussion Assist XP buff as one of the best Thunder main, but I don’t think Vassili/RED EYE’s XP/min is balanced right now.
I have plenty of crazy score results for example with Grandeur/PDP Red Eye, so if you want more examples, I’ll show it to you.
I mean, really, the amount of Support XP you earn with just pressing E… totally abnormal.
Just a number question : How much players/region do you need to make the system work perfectly ?
Quick calculation, very approximative, yes, but at least it gives an idea :
There are 3 game modes available, stopwatch, objectives and execution. On average, we can say that a sw game will last around 20 minutes, objective and execution game around 10 minutes.
I don’t know how the mm will work directly, but I consider here that the game will divide the pool of available players into 4 categories.
To avoid boring the players in matchmaking search, I chose that they absolutely need to have a party in less than 3 minutes. So, rounded up, that’s 4 starts every 10 min for obj and execution, 7 every 20 min for sw for every player category.
So, with a 5vs5 format (just for the example), that’d require 4410 = 160 players for objectives, 160 for execution, and 7410 = 280 players for stopwatch playing at the same time PER REGION. That’s 1800 playing or willing to play mm overall (considering 3 regions, EU, USA, ASIA/AUS). Add on top of that ranked which would require just as much players as stopwatch, you need 2840 players playing or searching mm games at the same time.
And those numbers sound to me very optimistic compared to what would be really required if you expect to get a real balance through a matchmaking system. But they still represents around 80% of current game population during low peak hours.
Considering that there’s a good 5/10% of recorded players being idle in steam stats tracker sites, and that there’s a good third of the current game population that WONT play mm by default, you’d certainly need more players to make it work. And I don’t think public mm will improve the game population immensely on its own. Player retention yes, or 10% more players at best. But you still would not have the minimum player pool to make the whole pub + ranked work correctly.
Imo, for all those reasons, you can’t just bring this new feature alone. This would automatically shut it down in the nest.
B.montiel makes good points.
I still think that matchmaking that works mostly in peak hours would still be totally worth it.
just hurry up to make this stuff work! and make it fast!!
http://steamcharts.com/app/333930
just watch the playerstats…decearsing decreasing decreasing
Fortunately, it’s not the single criteria. 
[/quote]
Also, xp/min isnt a single criteria in itself yet it is treated as one. When the support, combat and game xp get lumped together and treated as a single number you get unnbalanced teams. A team full of high ranking support xp players vs a team of combat xp players has no hope.
I posted too soon, hadnt read the whole thread. Im glad the system has been updated to include the different types of xp as different numbers. Good work Exedore and team.
Fortunately, it’s not the single criteria.
[/quote]
Thanks for the reply!
Now all we need is Red Eye’s Spot XP nerf.
I hope this new MM system will lead us to bright light. Cheers!
[quote=“cardinalCook;192327”]just hurry up to make this stuff work! and make it fast!!
http://steamcharts.com/app/333930
just watch the playerstats…decearsing decreasing decreasing[/quote]
If you’re looking at the 7 day chart, it’s just fluctuating by the day as people in Europe and the Americas get off and people from Asia and Australia get on as it gets later in the day. If you look at the 1 month chart, it’s pretty stable, and looking at all, it shows a pretty stable increase until April 2016, which was when Rogue en Vogue launched and 4 mercs were on rotation each week followed by several patches and bugfixes resulting in less content additions.
Just had a 6vs6 on Underground… we couldn’t even get past the first objective even after one of their players left, and the “worst” merc on their team still had more XP than the best on ours. Yay… 
Hold my beer, I’m going back in …