I thought Matchmaking was supposed to be more even now?

(Zack) #1

As the title says I thought an important part of the last update was to attempt to make the matchmaking games more even. I’m cobalt 1 and a few of my friends are Gold 1 and Cobalt 3 and up and yet every single game well I should say 95% of our games are either vs unranked players who have literally 25 hours in the game or against silver 5’s with barely much more. The problem I have with this is not only is it sort of a waste of our time it’s not helping the other newer players with any part of competitive play. It just ruins their entire experience and I don’t think that’s right I understand we are high levels but I mean there has to be more than like 25 cobalt players in this game I know that for a fact. Maybe the dev’s can possibly give us some statistics as to how many of each rank there is or something like that? Because this is getting pretty ridiculous in terms of even bothering to take the 5+ (usually 8 minutes) to queue up for a game on defense where we are forced to play for 15 minutes+ the time it takes to repair the ev etc. Some insight would be useful.

tl;dr matchmaking isn’t fixed cobalt teams vs unranked/silver issue needs to be addressed before this game only becomes strictly pubbing.
@MissMurder @stayfreshshoe

(_retired_) #2

Good that you made one about matchmaking since I made one thread about pubs at the same time. :lol:

(Pecka) #3

Totally agree, the expanded search thing is just not working at all. AT ALL! We are on eu and so the matches are found faster. But well, we get a match found in one minute and it’s mostly low gold, silver, unranked players. It’s really frustrating for both sides… join a match, in three minutes 2 opponents leave raging about mm or us being cheaters, messing around doing trickjumps for 12 minutes, do first objective. Rinse and repeat.

(_retired_) #4

Wouldn’t like to start another thread about team balance except I will. I’m being curious. I’m talking mostly about pubs…
Because my impression it’s like 1 out of 20 at the moment. If some of those matches aren’t full but I join ongoing match it still LOT of time to wait for that “good and balanced” match.

And those who say player levels don’t matter…Yes, they do.
Currently I’m pretty sure I can predict easily which side will win if the other team has max ~10 level dudes while another one has guy on his 30 level (especially like Fragger/Vassili) and several over 10 level guys. I think levels do matter and a lot after seeing this. Because people know the maps, how to position in different maps and how to make the team work in each of them. And if there are under 5 level dudes, you can often just write them off as “not present”. Thing is that some min 10 level servers are pretty bad as well…

I don’t know what’s wrong but there’s definately something badly badly broken in the team balance of pubs. And let’s not even start with matchmaking. That is just fubar.

Also the leaving players are problem. If you think it’s just low level guys who leave, no, it’s those who would you need most on the most difficult parts and of course just more noobs join the same team that is already losing…badly.

The difference especially between teams is so clear especially in certain spots or bottlenecs.
Bottom line is that it doesn’t help to have the right amount of medis or engis on the team who do their job, neither that people might know how to aim from other FPS, if they don’t know how each maps usually play out.

I like 6-8vs6-8 matches more since there’s more things going on but I would like to see some kind of “unranked mode” for these so you would have stricter rules compared to “normal casuals” example you would have to finish what you start, or autobalance option or anything that tries to solve this issue.

So…do you feel you get your time’s worth of fun with good and balanced games?
Because this has been going for too long and the balance is total joke.
I don’t play that much and I just simply don’t have time on my life for this, waiting for that one match or those few moments of fun.

Some new merc with gasmask and hot cocktails + gamemode that focuses on fragging won’t change the underlying issues anywhere. Or maybe it is just me…that’s why I’m asking.

(watsyurdeal) #5

Honestly…I think most games are fairly balanced, sure there is a difference in skill level, but the biggest difference is between teams who actually play well together, and those who don’t.

People seem to think their k/d means anything, but really, just do your damn jobs.

(Pecka) #6

[quote=“Watsyurdeal;97032”]Honestly…I think most games are fairly balanced, sure there is a difference in skill level, but the biggest difference is between teams who actually play well together, and those who don’t.

People seem to think their k/d means anything, but really, just do your damn jobs.[/quote]

Depends on in what ranks you play, once you get few people together who are med skill and higher, most of the games are not really balanced anymore ;(

I am confident the expanded search would help here, and everyone is okay to wait longer for match… Just make the new feature actually working and it should improve the situation.

(Grave_Knight) #7

Even in number, not necessarily in skill. Of course it doesn’t help there are so many players looking for an easy win and abandon matches rather risk losing. Some of my best matches have been with Scarfino, rarely do people leave, and that’s because they’re not there to win or lose, they’re there to play with Scar.

(Zack) #8

[quote=“Watsyurdeal;97032”]Honestly…I think most games are fairly balanced, sure there is a difference in skill level, but the biggest difference is between teams who actually play well together, and those who don’t.

People seem to think their k/d means anything, but really, just do your damn jobs.[/quote]

Not sure what rank you are but being Cobalt 1 with a team of all cobalts vs unranked/silvers it isn’t even remotely close to being balanced.

(Zack) #9

The only time my teams have ever gotten an even remotely decent game was when like 4 people from Prow would queue up other than that I haven’t played a team with more than 2-3 cobalt’s on it in weeks possibly more close to a month…

(Ardez1) #10

While yes, matchmaking is trying to be more even, but there are some issues with that.

First matchmaking can only work with the people who are actually queuing for it. This limits the ability to make fair games. Secondly ranks are misleading because many many people were placed in Silver 1-Gold 4. This means that any existing ranks are much closer then they should be. There wasn’t a large enough spread during the placement matches.

So there are multiple reasons why the matchmaking isn’t as fair as it should be.

(HoopleDoople) #11

Competitive has a few major problems that are blatantly obvious:

  1. Too small of a player pool. The competitive experience is so awful that most people won’t play it unless they have a mission. Even then many will just delete their mission immediately. This causes match making to just give up and throw together whatever players it can find.

  2. No system in place to handle leavers. If a player leaves the match while in the lobby, the match should never start - that’s just common sense. If one or more players leave mid-match, the short-handed team should automatically be given a vote to surrender after a minute or two. Even if the vote fails, all remaining players in the server should be allowed to leave without penalty - ACTUALLY without penalty. This means they still get experience, credits, a possible case drop, and mission progress.

  3. Allowing players to group. As difficult as it is to implement a proper skill rating system, allowing groups makes this literally impossible. Grouped players have an inherent advantage of easier coordination and cooperation. The larger a group is, the more likely it will outperform its composite rating. There is also the issue of players of very different skill grouping together. This guarantees one or more of them will be far more or less skilled than really belongs in the match.

  4. Allowing players still in their placement matches to get in way over their heads. As a gold ranked player basically every match has a few placement players who don’t even fulfill the basic functions of their role (sharing ammo, healing, etc.) and finish the match with single digit kills. As annoying as it is for me to play with or against these newbies, I can’t imagine how terrible their experience must be.

All of these must be addressed before competitive can ever start to succeed. Pub play needs its own help, but that’s another matter.

(Maverix) #12

I had a round where one team had all gold ranks, while the enemy team had all silver ranks. I couldn’t believe it. I stopped playing comp since then, and I remove any mission that requires me to play comp.

(TheAcidpiss) #13

that’s just helping it die, ive had some unbalanced games on comp also. but this still in beta and the player base is low, so of course things like this will happen. (though in all the comp games ive played ive never seen it as bad as you describe).

I had a game yesterday with 3 fellow G4F guys and we played against (FE) I think they are called?
they had 3 elites and two colbalts, we had 1colbalt and the rest of us were mixed gold levels.

They smashed the living shit out of us!! LOL I enjoyed the lesson though tbh.

So after the match we searched for another game and guess who we matched against?

THEM AGAIN!! LMAO

the result was similar to say the least :slight_smile:

(SereneFlight) #14

More even ≠ even

(riptide) #15

Ranked matchmaking is forever broken. The only way it will ever be good is if the player base for it DRAMATICALLY increases.

The best people can hope for is player/community owned servers. This will give players a home that is around their skill level. Think Quake 3/UT99 days, if you’re a bit younger TF2 has the same thing.

Then we would actually be able to make use of the “favorite server”. Well at least for something more than making all the min level 10 servers show up in one place.

(HoopleDoople) #16

Ranked matchmaking need not be forever broken. It will never work very well with the very worst and best players, but you don’t need that large of a player pool to make it serviceable. If you can roughly divide players into pros, average players, and scrubs, that alone should suffice to give you a reasonable shot at balanced teams.

The problems I detailed earlier are what makes matchmaking currently broken. If they were corrected and the overall algorithm slightly improved, competitive could indeed work. It would just need some big incentive to get players to give it a fair shot and let the system establish an accurate ranking.

(3N1GM4) #17

[quote=“HoopleDoople;97149”]Ranked matchmaking need not be forever broken. It will never work very well with the very worst and best players, but you don’t need that large of a player pool to make it serviceable. If you can roughly divide players into pros, average players, and scrubs, that alone should suffice to give you a reasonable shot at balanced teams.

The problems I detailed earlier are what makes matchmaking currently broken. If they were corrected and the overall algorithm slightly improved, competitive could indeed work. It would just need some big incentive to get players to give it a fair shot and let the system establish an accurate ranking.[/quote]

While true, the issue is that there aren’t enough people playing to do so. If there are 15 (3 teams of 5) cobalts (or pro), and 25 gold players, it will result in 2 games of gold vs gold, 1 game of cobalt vs cobalt, and 1 game of gold vs cobalt… THIS IS THE PROBLEM. That is not fair at all. Then couple that with game end times, those teams will generally queue at similar times and will end up facing each other over and over again.

(Lumi) #18

@Zack

An explanation could be that your region just doesn’t host that many cobalts. The other cobalts you’re talking about can be in a completely different region and playing at different times than you and your friends. Might be as simple as that…

(HoopleDoople) #19

[quote=“3N1GM4;97172”][quote=“HoopleDoople;97149”]Ranked matchmaking need not be forever broken. It will never work very well with the very worst and best players, but you don’t need that large of a player pool to make it serviceable. If you can roughly divide players into pros, average players, and scrubs, that alone should suffice to give you a reasonable shot at balanced teams.

The problems I detailed earlier are what makes matchmaking currently broken. If they were corrected and the overall algorithm slightly improved, competitive could indeed work. It would just need some big incentive to get players to give it a fair shot and let the system establish an accurate ranking.[/quote]

While true, the issue is that there aren’t enough people playing to do so. If there are 15 (3 teams of 5) cobalts (or pro), and 25 gold players, it will result in 2 games of gold vs gold, 1 game of cobalt vs cobalt, and 1 game of gold vs cobalt… THIS IS THE PROBLEM. That is not fair at all. Then couple that with game end times, those teams will generally queue at similar times and will end up facing each other over and over again. [/quote]

Well, one of my points is that groups flat out can’t be allowed in standard competitive. When matchmaking is forced to put players from different ranks into the same match it still needs to be able to split them up fairly between the two teams. Maybe we could get away with allowing players to partner with one friend, but beyond that matchmaking is guaranteed to break. If and when DB grows I’d love to see a team competitive mode that only allows full teams. I know it sounds unfair, but its better that some people get an ideal experience than everyone gets an awful experience. Until then, it’s probably best for the devs to utilize the forums to help interested players find a team and schedule scrimmages.

(Zack) #20

[quote=“Lumi;97190”]@Zack

An explanation could be that your region just doesn’t host that many cobalts. The other cobalts you’re talking about can be in a completely different region and playing at different times than you and your friends. Might be as simple as that…[/quote]

Yeah that’s a good possibility but playing in EU with other people of the same rank as me isn’t as easy to accomplish as I’d hope. It would be nice to queue up in EU to play some decent players over there though that’s for sure.