Yo SD, I had some time to kill today, so I’d like to give my take on the issues with matchmaking in Brink and how to fix them.
In Pub Standard, the biggest issue is that an 8vs8 game can quickly regress into an 8vs0 game in a matter of 1 to 2 matches. This is even more likely to happen if one side is comprised of a party of 4 to 8 higher-skilled Brink players. A team of good, communicating players will ALWAYS trump a team of 8 randoms in Brink. If those opponents leave because of whatever reasons, now we’ve got 8 humans vs 0-3 humans and 8-5 bots. Then, when a person or two joins the 8vs0-3 match, they take one look at the team imbalance and then GTFO. This bad issue is compounded since the bot AI in Pub Standard is a joke for almost anyone except total newbies.
This matchmaking issue is killing this game for many of its experienced players. Thankfully, I have a pretty large group of Brink friends on my XBL playlist, so we have started to run some private matches vs each other. But if we’ve only got 2-7 friends online playing Brink, we either have to try our luck against the randoms in Pub Standard and hope to find some opponents that stick around or we play Campaign vs HARD AI bots.
I know you’re at the semi-mercy of Beelzebub, err, I mean Bethesda and if they aren’t gonna fund you, you’re not gonna do any additional work. That’s totally fair and understandable. (On a side note, I appreciate the gun balancing issues that you’re currently working on.) But, if there’s any money left in your “Post-Release Bug Fixes” account, I’d hope that you could use some of it to fix the matchmaking, as it is truly broken for consoles. I’ve played this game for around 100 hours now and most of the other bugs I’ve run into are minor/trivial. I would rather the matchmaking be fixed than all of the other outstanding minor bugs together.
Here’s what I’d do with the current game, if I had limited, but sufficient funds:
For Public Standard, offer two initial choices: Create Match or Join Match.
Create Match allows a person to start an empty public server and places them in the warm-up screen. The game cannot start until a specific amount of people join each side (I’d say 5 or 6 minimum) and at least half of the players on each team Ready Up. Perhaps have a Automatic Start Time of 20 seconds if both teams are at 7-8 players. Why make everyone wait to Ready-Up if the match is already full?
This Create Match option would give ample time to invite friends to the match since it’s starting empty. Since this option places everyone into the Warm-Up screen lobby, players don’t have to worry about starting the game vs low-AI bots and hope other people join later. Everyone can choose to start the match once the Start-Up Screen/lobby fills up with players.
For any players (and their friends) who don’t want to wait to fill up a Start-Up lobby and they don’t care about playing vs humans, then those types of players can start a Private match or go to Campaign mode co-op and play against bots. :rolleyes:
Once a match has started, any open spots will be populated by new-and-improved variable-AI bots. The bot AI varies depending on the XP differential between the two teams. The bots can start out on Medium AI, but can either scaled up to HARD or down to EASY depending on how their team is doing (More about these bots below). If any players leave, they get replaced by another bot. So, while a match might end up as 8vs0 if the losing team all rage quits before the match is over, the remaining players will finish the match vs some HARD AI bots and then go back to the next match’s Warm-Up screen/lobby.
Join Match allows a single person to find an available, open match. They may get put into a warm-up screen/lobby or they may get put directly into a running match. Either way, this allows a person to join a running match without having to wait for people to populate their Start-up lobby. For the matchmaking logic, I’d first search for matches that are waiting in the lobby that are 50% full or greater, then running matches that are 50% full or greater, then games waiting in lobby less than 50% full, then running games less than 50% full, then create their own match.
Other items I’d add to improve multiplayer matchmaking:
AFK’ers get booted after 3 minutes of no response. Nobody likes to see a spot being taken up by some player just chilling out at the spawn the entire match. I’d rather have a MEDIUM AI bot running around soaking up bullets than an AFK’er at my spawn.
“Any Rank” choice when looking for skill-levels in servers. If I am a Level 3 (Rank 1) character and I start an “Any Rank” match, I’m allowing it to be played by any players of any rank. IMO, this should be the default setting.
“Variable, Scalable Bot AI” needs to be implemented, as a basic fix. The HARD AI bots, while still not much of a challenge for 4-8 experienced Brink players, can still be 100x more fun than the lame Pub Standard default bot AI. Have a script running which constantly monitors the difference in XP gains between the two teams. If one team is earning much more XP/min than another team, than the losing team’s bots get ramped up accordingly. Ramp up whatever bots skills are necessary to either kill the opposing humans or attack/defend the objective.
Side Note: The bots’ priority list needs some refinement. Experienced players/teams know the best way to disrupt the bots from attacking/defending their objective is to go capture ComPosts or side Objectives. While those items are valuable to any team, the fact that the bots send 2 or more teammates to go capture ComPosts or do the side Obj’s makes completing the main Obj for the human team much easier. The remaining bot force is missing those teammates who are too busy try to cap ComPosts and side Obj’s to be very effective. Early in a match, I’d say “Go for whatever you want, bots”, but later on, with only a few minutes or Obj %'s left, the bots should all be full force on the main Obj and ignore the side stuff.
Use the best host available. If Sally from Saskatoon, Boris from Bulgaria, or Henry from Hoboken created a match (where they are the host by default), and their connection is lower than a majority of the players who have joined the match, then pause the game and switch hosts. Most of us will be happy to wait the 30 seconds for the host migration rather than keep playing in a laggy match all game. Sucks for Sally, Boris, and Henry since they lose their “Host Advantage”, but no need to punish all of the other players due to a poor host net connection.
That’s all I got for now. I may edit some stuff for grammar, readability, etc later.
OK, back to working on the videogames my company makes…
