Public games aren't fun

(Oloko) #1

Public games aren’t balanced at all with player skill, this is unplayable. Tried to get my friends to play the game but they all gave up because the games are waaaay too one sided. I myself just got tired of it, just no fun.

#2

There are several factors involving the balance in public matches.

First of all, the players themselves.
Some of them are good, others are rather bad and others have no clue what’s going on at all.
While there are minimum servers, these are often either empty or full or the player just doesn’t care at all.
Mixing all these types of players in one server can result in a lot of things…stomps included.
You have to keep in mind that players play what they want in public.
Nobody really cares if there are three Vassilis who can’t hit a tree and thus the entire team is missing important roles.

Finally the server sizes. Being part of the problem, they are reaching from 6 vs 6 to 8 vs 8 which is a huge cluster filled with massive explosion and ability spam.

If you add the fact that there is basically no communication at all you end up with results you have described.

Sadly I fear there isn’t a lot you can do about it as a player yourself.
You can try to give new people helpful advices or maybe ask them to switch mercs but that’s pretty much it.

(Cankor) #3

Start playing ranked matches, the switch to all solo/duo mode means you won’t get pitted against pre-made teams and you will be playing with players of your own skill level. Seriously, the matches are so much better.

(alphabeta) #4

Be careful with the “helpful advices” part lol. Last week I tried to VOIP guide my team of noobs to spam the generator on Bridge and had to listen to non-stop cursing at me from 3 “teammates” for the next 5 minutes. All because I was a “Level 45 know-it-all”. Of course we lost.

(Szakalot) #5

we will suffer as long as players arent separated more

(shibbyuk) #6

Not really in my experience. I have found that pub stopwatch games are usually pretty good balance-wise; they do take skill rating into account, provided you use the auto join function.

(Demolama) #7

Without a global limit cool down for artillery/airstrikes and heavy weapons limits like they had in W:ET, DB has turned into TF2 where all the people who can’t aim flock to boom weapons.

(alphabeta) #8

There will always be “boom” players; witness ETQW players with XP as only soldiers with rocket launchers. But why does that matter to you? Just kill them. :rolleyes:

(Cankor) #9

You could use auto join as a lower level, less skilled player (me) and as soon as you join up a very high level, highly skilled player joins your game using the server browser. Not saying the games weren’t fun (many were great, and good even matches), and it is good to play against people way better than yourself sometimes because it stretches you as a player, but it seems to be very consistent in ranked. Plus, you get to play with FF on and less spam.

(Oloko) #10

Playing ranked isn’t really an option when you play with multiple players and sometimes its just nice to be able to open the game and do a quick game without having to invest the same amount you would with a ranked game. Either way, fixing public game should be something important, since ranked match isn’t even something available to new players. So the new players are forced in getting pubstomped.

I think adding some kind of hidden ranking to players in public games too could at least help a bit with the balancing. Right now it just seems to balance using the player “score”, but since everyone just leave and join new games every time, it just doesn’t work. You get a lobby full of 0 score players and its a total pubstomp yet again.

(Szakalot) #11

[QUOTE=Oloko;547611]Playing ranked isn’t really an option when you play with multiple players and sometimes its just nice to be able to open the game and do a quick game without having to invest the same amount you would with a ranked game. Either way, fixing public game should be something important, since ranked match isn’t even something available to new players. So the new players are forced in getting pubstomped.

I think adding some kind of hidden ranking to players in public games too could at least help a bit with the balancing. Right now it just seems to balance using the player “score”, but since everyone just leave and join new games every time, it just doesn’t work. You get a lobby full of 0 score players and its a total pubstomp yet again.[/QUOTE]

there already is a hidden ranking for individual players in public games.

You have correctly identified the problem though: people dropping in/out makes it very hard to balance the game - even if the system perfectly estimates individual skill levels, it has no control over who comes and goes on the server, and newly joining players will always be randomly screwing up balance

(Protekt1) #12

Since hidden ranking doesn’t determine what server you’re joining, since you can join any server via the server browser, it is not a particularly good balancing figure.

And while I am a believer in having a server browser, there is some merit to a closed end system like with ranked. But ranked has had it’s share of issues. I don’t know if the new ranked changes have changed anything, but balanced matches require more than just somehow dividing up a pool of 10-14 people based on their “hidden ranking”. The best match making results would come from a server of equally skilled players. The least acceptable would be what we have now, dividing a room of randoms based on skill into two teams.

I’m still in favor of having server browser, and perhaps ranked fills that higher need for balance, but maybe there should be an unranked match making system in between.

(Demolama) #13

Well when a map is determined just by who has the better killers the game becomes boring. Either you are on the stomping team or the stompee team. Unfortunately, the root of this problem stems from map design choices that make killing the only option to victory.

(AssortedStuff) #14

At some point I was naive to think this was the case but apparently not. It would help.

It seems team sorting is just done randomly :frowning:

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(acekiller345) #15

Game hasnt been fun for a while, thanks to all the god damn spam. Fletcher, Nader, Arty. No skill mercs that let you get kills by just pressing E.

(Demolama) #16

Yup, this is where the global limit would have helped. But SD also said that they really don’t want to limit a player’s choice of mercs because they paid real money for them.

I mean anytime there are more than 2 of the same merc you run the risk of them being OP and dominating the other team.

There really needs to be a lottery system like MOBAs, even though this game isn’t a MOBA. If one player chooses Arty for their squad then it should be blocked out for the rest. They would therefore have to pick another fire support for EV maps. But the problem again is not everyone has access to the same mercs.

Thus, the FTP model has really hurt the ability to balance this fps game.

(ZGToRRent) #17

It’s not possible to balance pub games cause we still have “everyone can join” servers. The easiest solution is just splitting community a little bit by removing this kind of servers. Example:

Beginners where all new players are forced to play until lvl 7
Experienced min. lvl 7
Veterans min. lvl 20

Simple solution where most people should be happy :slight_smile:

(Rhinehold) #18

SplashDamage does have a metric that they use to assign a ‘skill value’ to a player, based on past performance of the play for the past 12 games. The problem there is that depending on the matches you were playing in those 12 games, the metric may over or under value your skill and it will mess up ‘balancing’.

Another issue is that people can come and go as they want. Often times many players are a bit selfish (imo) and if their team isn’t dominating or even winning, they’ll just leave the server to find another game where they may randomly get put on a better team, leaving the rest of the players on their team screwed, a man down, and starting a cycle of people abandoning the server… Personally, I think there should be a small penalty for leaving a public server mid game. If you are leaving because you need to go do something else for a bit, then the penalty would be over by the time you play again, but if you are just hopping servers trying to find the right team to carry you… well, you would have to suffer the penalty of doing that.

However, other games don’t do any kind of balancing at all, like CS:GO publics, and they do just fine. The problem is that too many people think that public matches are the ‘main mode’ of Dirty Bomb. It isn’t, nor should it be. Publics are for just going in and having fun, knowing that you are going to win some and lose some. Finding the fun in the game BEYOND winning or losing is what people need to learn to do.

One way to fix all of this is to treat all ‘games’ like they do in ranked, you join a game, once the game is full the game starts, if you leave you are penalized… An ‘unranked’ system like this would bring in more people to playing them since they don’t have to worry about getting some bad ranking, so more willing to try and gets them familiar with how those games work, so more likely to play ranked once they start feeling comfortable with it. Then it would highlight that publics are what they are, just randomly joinable servers where you can play through the game mode and learn to deal with what you end up with.

(Nail) #19

except the lvl 6 that wants to play with his lvl 8 buddy, and there’s thousands

(BioSnark) #20

and so you allow them to be invited, as should be the case in the current min ( but not max) level servers.