Now that CMM and Ranked are going away

(Your worst knifemare.) #1

How do you feel about it leaving?

(Press E) #2

Ranked needed a rework, not a removal. A lot of people loved it, and I would too if they fixed some of its major problems.

CMM is eh. The game was just fine before it was added, and considering the amount of complaints about it from the community, I doubt it’ll be the end of the world.

(Eox) #3

I’m not going to praise Quick Join coming back knowing how shitty it used to be (why the hell did you called that “superior” ?). But Ranked was nothing but glorified pubs and CMM wasn’t that good either. Complaints about those two were incredibly common. There’s were not a single day without someone tilting about balance or queue times.

It’s only logical that those two gets put aside in favor of the browser system. I’m going to miss queueing with friends, but that’s about it.

(bgyoshi) #4

To me there were 3 communities in DB:

  • Ranked/PUG players, the lowest population in all of DB.
  • Team players, people that play with friends but otherwise not… maybe just a few more people than above, since this also includes Ranked/PUG team players
  • Solo players, people that don’t care about anything and just play matchmaking or server browser, the majority of players

Nothing happens for Ranked players, they just lose a mode and are forced into indefinite PUGs

Team players are gone, they won’t play anymore. They’ll go back to playing OW or Fortnite or CS:GO with their friends, and a few might poke DB every now and then. The ones that teamed up in Ranked, can’t. The ones that teamed up in casual, can’t. Why stay?

Nothing happens for solo players (myself included). We always used server browser or CMM anyway, so now we’ll mostly just use server browser. Quick Join was hardly used in the past, it won’t be used more now. No one is going to care about getting into a fair match, they’ll just server hop with the server browser until they find a place they like. That’s how it worked before, that’s how it’ll work now.

Even if CMM isn’t the answer, I don’t know why they can’t implement partying in quick join. How it would work is:

  • Players make a party
  • You can choose if you want to play Stopwatch or Objective, 6v6/7v7, and if you want to play on the same team as the others. For example, a party of 4 could have 3 people that want to be on the same team, and one player that unchecks the option so that the game can put him on the opposing team if needed. That makes finding servers to fit all players easier.
  • Quick join takes into account the combined “skill” of all players wanting to be on the same team, plus any other queued players, and tries to match them with similar skill levels in a server (same servers you see in server browser)
  • Puts players in servers that can hold all of them, and remembers they were in a party.
  • If no servers have enough space on one team for all players in a currently active match, it puts them on a new server lobby, or a lobby waiting for players.
  • This should vacuum up parties of 3 - 6 that are queuing together pretty quick
  • The rest of the slots are open to other queuing players looking to join a match

In the end, you get the best of both worlds. You aren’t stuck in a queue waiting for a game… if you don’t get a game, you get an empty lobby that other players in quick join fill into. When the game starts and for all subsequent rounds, you’ll be put on the same team. Always. All of the holes this leaves in teams will be filled in with solo queuers. Instead of having to yell to your friends what server you’re joining, and pray it doesn’t fill up before everyone makes it in, now you ALWAYS get into a server together.

But instead, no more team play, which is what killed the game in the first place.

If you ask me, unless they pull something grand out of their hats, this is GG DB

But I sure hope it isn’t

(B_Montiel) #5

Your poll forgot an important point : people who do not care about quick join as well.

I already read many posts taking the removal of ranked and CMM as ground for divorce with the game.

To me, and I’ve expressed that opinion since day 1, even before ranked was implemented, is that any matchmaking system is pure packaging. It can provide some interesting additions for some fraction of the community, but that rarely includes most of it. On top of that, it mostly becomes fruitful once you have some core elements nicely built-in : Gameplay, performance on most pcs, server performance, content. Content became sufficient recently. I won’t divert on what I think about performance, in both fields. BUT, on gameplay, there are so many things still to address today, I would not have taken the risk to release ranked back then.

Some important gameplay factor, especially on ranked :

  • 2/3 of the merc pool is useless when playing for the win. As soon as somebody picks Phantom, a sniper played badly, Proxy, Rhino on open field maps -the list goes on and on-, he becomes dead weight for his team.
  • The lack of incentive to team work, some sort of meta of what everyone should be doing in a ranked match, and how act appropriately when facing a specific situation.
  • No solution for merc stacking

Those three issues seize the cup over everything else when we talk about balance for 80% of the players on ranked. And they obviously refused to answer those well identified issues. So its no more than logical to remove CMM and ranked then. And those issues, if solved a long time ago, would have had way greater effects on player retention than CMM or ranked ever did, and DB would not even need those two game modes as well.

About Queuing with friends, well, most of the experience I had with CMM queuing as a 5 men group turned into a CHOO CHOO MOTHERF***ER spawnrape either for us or the enemy team. And, for casual games (no scrim, pug or whatever), I way prefer to play spread in both teams. It’s funnier, average the balance pretty well (we generally play with people who roughly have the same level as we have), and more profitable to improve ourselves. Yes, I don’t like easy fun. I better try to keep it for everyone playing with me, including level 7 joe.

On a side note, I do play with friends and team work most of the time, but I’ve always used server browser, set aside ranked once in a while.

@bgyoshi that idea of party quick join is kinda ideal, but this aint going to work. A premade stack will always crush everything on a server. And I’m kinda surprised on how much you associate teamplay with queuing with friends. Either you’ve always joined the worst server possible or you mostly like fairly easy games.

(Wulie) #6

I don’t really care that they removed cmm and ranking- but I play this game to play together with my friends. Thats my primary reason for playing this game. Not being able to queue together kinda defeats the purpose…

(Xerny) #7

As long as i can be a filthy casual in any server i join and my fellow friends can join in, then i have no problem whatsoever.

Although i kind of wanted to try out ranked, since i never played it.

(Plus i clicked “Potato” because i like mashed potatoes, hm… Yummy.)

(bgyoshi) #8

@B_Montiel said:
@bgyoshi that idea of party quick join is kinda ideal, but this aint going to work. A premade stack will always crush everything on a server. And I’m kinda surprised on how much you associate teamplay with queuing with friends. Either you’ve always joined the worst server possible or you mostly like fairly easy games.

Like I said, people don’t leave games because they’re imbalanced, they leave games because they’re losing. I’ve been in as many situations where people leave because they’re being stomped as I’ve been in perfectly balanced deadlocked games that people leave because they aren’t winning.

The point of team quick play isn’t to make games more balanced, it’s to let people queue up with their friends. That’s the point.

In pretty much every FPS except this one, you can make a party of friends and queue together to join the same match or server together. That’s what people like and what we’ve wanted.

When I say team players I mean people who play on a team together. Not solo queuers who help their teammates. 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 people that want to play on the same server or on the same team.

You could could party up 10 or 12 players for a PUG and have the game put you in your own locked server if you want. It doesn’t matter, the point is that players need a way to party up and join the same server together at the same time and on the same team if they want.

People will cry about imbalance for eternity. It’s impossible to solve that problem and it’s stupid to try to. Let premade teams sit in a server and constantly clear it out because they’re stomping. It’s server browser, people abandon games all the time in it. Eventually the solo queuers will be mostly gone and the server will fill up with premades.

It doesn’t matter, just let people party and play together. The game is dead without that functionality.

(Sorotia) #9

@Eox said:
I’m not going to praise Quick Join coming back knowing how @$!# it used to be (why the hell did you called that “superior” ?). But Ranked was nothing but glorified pubs and CMM wasn’t that good either. Complaints about those two were incredibly common. There’s were not a single day without someone tilting about balance or queue times.

It’s only logical that those two gets put aside for now in favor of the browser system. I’m going to miss queueing with friends, but that’s about it.

If they can’t fix their own system than what future does the game have?

Going back in time 3 years isn’t going to fix the hemorrhage DB is suffering…

(enigmaplatypus) #10

I never used CMM that much anyway because it was so unbalanced. I will miss ranked though and the rewards from the ranked season. I hope they continue to make obsidian skins for the mercs like they where doing with the ranked season.

(Xenithos) #11

@Eox said:

It’s only logical that those two gets put aside for now in favor of the browser system. I’m going to miss queueing with friends, but that’s about it.

They haven’t said anything about it only being for now. In fact their choices to return ranked points to players almost signifies a full removal from the game. Do you have sources elsewhere?

(Xenithos) #12

woulda chose bad, loved both. But I’m mixed on the issue.

Read here.

If Splash Damage intends on reimplenting them yay. There were problems with both, and though I honestly never initially supported CMM, it was the only way for me to play with friends without having to crush them every match. There were a lot of balance issues despite the fact that there weren’t supposed to be. Just yesterday had to face a group of people in CMM who didn’t bother having a medic who spawncamped us on the last objective of Underground. With Rhinos and turtles. Yes, plural. I absolutely don’t think the answer is removing either option, and especially if they have no filler for it.

(Splicerrr) #13

I really want this game to be a competitive and team based shooter. They need to think of something more balanced and creative for a game mode other than stopwatch. Let’s be honest, grinding so called “ranked” matches is basically queueing 10+ minutes for a casual stopwatch game but just playing for skins. It really just feels like 5v5 casual stopwatch. Also,they either lack the communication skills or just keep everything a secret from us for whats coming up next. I really don’t enjoy being kept waiting, especially at DB’s current state. They never bothered mentioning the ranked rework or anything for the upcoming release and future. They NEED to have ranked back before or during 1.0, otherwise this game won’t be the “competitive” shooter they wanted it to be, and new players will find stopwatch boring to play over and over again. Removing CMM was a bad decision, because it removes the hassle of switching teams, sending steam invites and full servers when queuing with friends. I don’t see myself playing DB as often as before now, until DB fixes their game or at least tell us whats going on.

(Xenithos) #14

@Xerny said:
As long as i can be a filthy casual in any server i join and my fellow friends can join in, then i have no problem whatsoever.

Although i kind of wanted to try out ranked, since i never played it.

(Plus i clicked “Potato” because i like mashed potatoes, hm… Yummy.)

I used to be a filthy casual and enjoy it quite a bit, but I learned that playing the game the original way it was designed is an incredibly fun and rarely seen thing as well. Ended up becoming one of those weirdos that belongs in every category, and sometimes gets ticked off with the players that can’t even charge a heal on Phoenix.

(Xerny) #15

@Xenithos said:

@Xerny said:
As long as i can be a filthy casual in any server i join and my fellow friends can join in, then i have no problem whatsoever.

Although i kind of wanted to try out ranked, since i never played it.

(Plus i clicked “Potato” because i like mashed potatoes, hm… Yummy.)

I used to be a filthy casual and enjoy it quite a bit, but I learned that playing the game the original way it was designed is an incredibly fun and rarely seen thing as well. Ended up becoming one of those weirdos that belongs in every category, and sometimes gets ticked off with the players that can’t even charge a heal on Phoenix.

Tap healing Phoenix is best Phoenix. (Not really.)

(Eox) #16

@Xenithos said:

@Eox said:

It’s only logical that those two gets put aside for now in favor of the browser system. I’m going to miss queueing with friends, but that’s about it.

They haven’t said anything about it only being for now. In fact their choices to return ranked points to players almost signifies a full removal from the game. Do you have sources elsewhere?

Just a slip. I removed that.

Anyway we have no clue if Ranked might come back or not in the far future either.

(Your worst knifemare.) #17

@STARRYSOCK said:
Ranked needed a rework, not a removal. A lot of people loved it, and I would too if they fixed some of its major problems.

I actually found that as long as enough people are playing ranked at a time (like during extra rank point event), games have been balanced.

(FalC_16) #18

Will miss ranked…now the community will need community servers more than evar

(D'@athi) #19

So, no more shitty balance on shitty servers (or having to restart the game if you can’t connect to one, because you ip-blocked it), but more mostly shitty balance on mostly shitty servers? Well, whatever.
As long as you can’t blacklist servers ingame, quickjoin still tries to join servers you ip-blocked and quickjoin will let highpingers/packetlossers on servers, so they start to cough-up packetloss, nothing will change.
And talking about balance, yay, I guess we all know where the population is going, but at least min-lvl-servers.

PS: Not showing your level on servers… may we beg for it again… it was a thing… back then… when… you know… >3k players.

#20

I’m surprised of their removal. An ample amount of effort and time poured into developing CMM and also ranked, outright deleting them is quite a drastic decision. Granted it’s safe to assume the devs will put emphasize on pugs it’s going to feel a little weird having no in-house competitive mode nevertheless, with no rewards to collect or ranks to climb up. Either way hardly anything changes for me personally, I don’t queue in CMM all that much (though I had a decent experience there) and, as many of you are aware of, ranked is home of an abundance of players who have little to no sportsmanship smurfing their way up the ranks and stacking mercs to no end so I won’t miss it much.