The Future Of Dirty Bomb - Community Survey RESULTS

[MarsRover]

[quote=“Watsyurdeal;142796”][quote=“DMaster2;142791”][quote=“Watsyurdeal;142736”]
Either way my response is the same, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to play with friends, and there’s no reason to put so much effort into balancing pubs like it’s Ranked.[/quote]
There is a point, because casual obj will always be the most popular game mode. For the reasons i posted above. And if you don’t balance the most popular game mode, things won’t be nice and people will complain. No one enjoy constant spawncamping like what i see in stopwatch.[/quote]

It’s about as balanced as it’s going to get, there is no reason I or anyone else shouldn’t be able to play with friends on a pub, and there’s nothing wrong with Stopwatch. What you described is a map problem more than anything.

[/quote]

Of course it can be better if it had global MM. Balance will be better and skill gap will be significantly lower between people chosen intentionally than between 12-16 random people that happened to join the same server. This is an undisputable fact. Why do you think ranked works that way? Why doesn’t it just mash people randomly together?

It has more advantages that would make pubs better. Separating “bad apples” from the rest of the community by matching them together - people like frequent AFKers. Filling empty slots faster. It could easily match premades with other premades and fill remaining slots with solo players, or if warranted by stats go the CS:GO route and match premades with higher ranked solos. And so on, I don’t want to repeat myself

Even without global MM pubs can be better by tracking player performance with individual mercs, taking squads composition into consideration, etc. Amerika has a series of great posts about that here and probably also on SD forums.

You keep repeating that somehow a similar MM system will turn pubs into ranked. That’s not true, you completely ignore all other differences. On this you base the argument that it’s not worth doing because ranked exists. Not only is this derived from a false assumption, it’s also independently wrong in my opinion. Every mode should be improved if it can be improved. Especially one that is the key to the game’s continued existence and growth.

Yes, there’s also much to be done in terms of educating players - better tutorial, better in-game hints than “teammate repairing”. Yes, we need community servers. Those thing should be done in parallel with improving pubs.

[watsyurdeal]

[quote=“MarsRover;142893”][quote=“Watsyurdeal;142796”][quote=“DMaster2;142791”][quote=“Watsyurdeal;142736”]
Either way my response is the same, there’s no reason we shouldn’t be able to play with friends, and there’s no reason to put so much effort into balancing pubs like it’s Ranked.[/quote]
There is a point, because casual obj will always be the most popular game mode. For the reasons i posted above. And if you don’t balance the most popular game mode, things won’t be nice and people will complain. No one enjoy constant spawncamping like what i see in stopwatch.[/quote]

It’s about as balanced as it’s going to get, there is no reason I or anyone else shouldn’t be able to play with friends on a pub, and there’s nothing wrong with Stopwatch. What you described is a map problem more than anything.

[/quote]

Of course it can be better if it had global MM. Balance will be better and skill gap will be significantly lower between people chosen intentionally than between 12-16 random people that happened to join the same server. This is an undisputable fact. Why do you think ranked works that way? Why doesn’t it just mash people randomly together?

It has more advantages that would make pubs better. Separating “bad apples” from the rest of the community by matching them together - people like frequent AFKers. Filling empty slots faster. It could easily match premades with other premades and fill remaining slots with solo players, or if warranted by stats go the CS:GO route and match premades with higher ranked solos. And so on, I don’t want to repeat myself

Even without global MM pubs can be better by tracking player performance with individual mercs, taking squads composition into consideration, etc. Amerika has a series of great posts about that here and probably also on SD forums.

You keep repeating that somehow a similar MM system will turn pubs into ranked. That’s not true, you completely ignore all other differences. On this you base the argument that it’s not worth doing because ranked exists. Not only is this derived from a false assumption, it’s also independently wrong in my opinion. Every mode should be improved if it can be improved. Especially one that is the key to the game’s continued existence and growth.

Yes, there’s also much to be done in terms of educating players - better tutorial, better in-game hints than “teammate repairing”.[/quote]

Yea but that’s the thing, you guys want matchmaking when there already is a Ranked mode in the game and ready to go.

And the only reasons I have seen thus far as to why people don’t play it is

1. The matches are too long
2. I can’t drop out of the match when it’s convenient
3. Party Matchmaking (which is a pointless argument because the only reason it does that is cause the player pool is so small, I imagine it does the same thing as CS GO does and increases the skill search so parties of a lower ranked players have to play with solo ques of higher ranked).
4. The matches are unbalanced, which again is highly debatable because the game sorts the teams already on Objective mode pretty well, and people still complain. There’s only so much the devs can do on this part, the rest is up to the players.
5. Friendly fire, which again is a player issue, and it’s not like Counter Strike where you get auto kicked, you can forgive people or if you don’t do anything it auto forgives, they are only punished if you type it in chat.

If you guys want Public to have matchmaking then what would be the point of Ranked at all??? There would literally be no reason to keep it, and I don’t get the point of that. If you guys want balanced matches so badly, then go play Ranked, it is just that simple.

And if you don’t like Stopwatch then tough shit, cause Objective by design IS unbalanced cause Defense is arguably easier than Offense, so whoever gets it is pretty much going to have an easy time unless they are flat out terrible with the Objective. Both teams deserve a fair shot at Defense and Offense.

On top of that there are a ton of scenarios MM will not be able to account for such as

1. Who has a Mic
2. Merc and Squad Composition
3. Who has the intention of griefing
4. No surrender option and no checking for imbalanced teams when someone leaves

All of which are covered by Ranked

Pubs should not be the serious side of Dirty Bomb, it should be the fun and carefree enviornment when you come in and play.

My solution is to…

1. Have Training ground servers and forbid players to play on any other server until they have reached certain level, let’s just say 10. And vice versa anyone over the level 10 can not play with these players.
2. A better tutorial that covers an Engineer role as well
3. Do not allow more than one person to Get up a team mate or repair, if an Engineer starts repairing the team mate is forced to switch his weapons and can not repair unless the Engi stops or completes it.

These things would be enough in my book to make Pubs more tolerable without adding matchmaking, and with the new players barred off from the vets party matchmaking can happen, and it won’t be some unfair bs like some people fear. After level 10 everyone should be on the same page, the only differences are raw DM and Strategy.

[MarsRover]

[quote=“Watsyurdeal;142902”]Yea but that’s the thing, you guys want matchmaking when there already is a Ranked mode in the game and ready to go.

And the only reasons I have seen thus far as to why people don’t play it is

1. The matches are too long
2. I can’t drop out of the match when it’s convenient
3. Party Matchmaking (which is a pointless argument because the only reason it does that is cause the player pool is so small, I imagine it does the same thing as CS GO does and increases the skill search so parties of a lower ranked players have to play with solo ques of higher ranked).
4. The matches are unbalanced, which again is highly debatable because the game sorts the teams already on Objective mode pretty well, and people still complain. There’s only so much the devs can do on this part, the rest is up to the players.
5. Friendly fire, which again is a player issue, and it’s not like Counter Strike where you get auto kicked, you can forgive people or if you don’t do anything it auto forgives, they are only punished if you type it in chat.

If you guys want Public to have matchmaking then what would be the point of Ranked at all??? There would literally be no reason to keep it, and I don’t get the point of that.

If you guys want balanced matches so badly, then go play Ranked, it is just that simple.

And if you don’t like Stopwatch then tough shit, cause Objective by design IS unbalanced cause Defense is arguably easier than Offense, so whoever gets it is pretty much going to have an easy time unless they are flat out terrible with the Objective. Both teams deserve a fair shot at Defense and Offense.

On top of that there are a ton of scenarios MM will not be able to account for such as

1. Who has a Mic
2. Merc and Squad Composition
3. Who has the intention of griefing
4. No surrender option and no checking for imbalanced teams when someone leaves

All of which are covered by Ranked

Pubs should not be the serious side of Dirty Bomb, it should be the fun and carefree enviornment when you come in and play.[/quote]

And they still would be. There is no visible ranking in casual, no badges, no seasons, no rewards, no penalties. Casual would stay the same. The only changes visible to people would be removing server browser (which doesn’t do anything without community servers), and making quick join actually working properly. Is there some kind of misunderstanding between us and we mean something else by MM? I clearly stated what it would do.

Also, to be clear - I am not one of those people claiming that current balance in Objective is bad. It is passable since the lobby changes, but it could be much better, which would make the game so much more enjoyable for everyone - newbies, veterans and everyone in between.

[quote=“Watsyurdeal;142902”]My solution is to…

1. Have Training ground servers and forbid players to play on any other server until they have reached certain level, let’s just say 10. And vice versa anyone over the level 10 can not play with these players.
2. A better tutorial that covers an Engineer role as well
3. Do not allow more than one person to Get up a team mate or repair, if an Engineer starts repairing the team mate is forced to switch his weapons and can not repair unless the Engi stops or completes it.

These things would be enough in my book to make Pubs more tolerable without adding matchmaking, and with the new players barred off from the vets party matchmaking can happen, and it won’t be some unfair bs like some people fear. After level 10 everyone should be on the same page, the only differences are raw DM and Strategy.[/quote]
+1 to every one of those. None of them is in conflict with global MM.

I need to respond individually to one thing:

If you guys want balanced matches so badly, then go play Ranked, it is just that simple.

I completely disagree with this attitude. Making casual better doesn’t take away from ranked. Not doing everything that can be done and ignoring flaws in the most popular game mode is not healthy for the game.

It will take a lot of work to take ranked to the same level of popularity as pubs. It won’t happen by itself. It would by now if it was going to ever happen. It may never happen. +50% base credit rate certainly won’t do it. So if your solution is “let’s change the nature of man”, then I’m sorry but a lot of people tried that for more important causes than making people better at a video game

It’s not about us, the few people discussing on this forum. It’s about everyone else - people playing for the first time, skipping tutorial and being thrown into a FFA servers, going 5/30 and discarding the game. (Well, it’s also about veterans who also don’t particularly enjoy being on the other side. At least I hope so.) It’s about people who play this game in casual and casual only. I’m certain that what I propose would make their time with the game more fun. More people sticking with the game = better ranked, more money for development.
Currently all we have is a crutch in the form of min/max level servers that aren’t even mandatory.

[DMaster2]

[quote=“Watsyurdeal;142865”]

And again, there is too small of a player pool to get a match in Ranked.

If a couple of people who are buddies and work together ruins match balance for you then that has zero to do with balanced games. [/quote]
I think we’ll never agree on this. That’s life i guess.

[watsyurdeal]

Yea but the majority of these problems with public would all be solved with community servers, instead of trying to put all this time in effort tweaking an environment that’s going to be inherenetly unbalanced due to small maps, player capacity, mix of new and veterans, and of course no real way to encourage good team composition or encourage people to work together. All of this can put into Ranked NOW before the game’s audience dies out.

I can guarantee you people will come to play Ranked if it has a strong base to work with, and I can also guarantee you that without a strong community or a bunch of sub communities this game will have the same problems on pubs it has always had.

[SnakekillerX]

Hell, I’d love a party system just to queue into a server, even if we don’t end up on same teams… It really sucks trying to get multiple people into a server (that isn’t completely empty) as it often fills faster than everyone can join it.

[B_Montiel]

[quote=“Watsyurdeal;142965”]Yea but the majority of these problems with public would all be solved with community servers, instead of trying to put all this time in effort tweaking an environment that’s going to be inherenetly unbalanced due to small maps, player capacity, mix of new and veterans, and of course no real way to encourage good team composition or encourage people to work together. All of this can put into Ranked NOW before the game’s audience dies out.

I can guarantee you people will come to play Ranked if it has a strong base to work with, and I can also guarantee you that without a strong community or a bunch of sub communities this game will have the same problems on pubs it has always had.[/quote]

I totally agree on that. Put community servers and you’ll flush most of the experienced/competitive/community oriented players there. You directly solve 90% of the balancing issues we’re currently ALL facing in one way or another because of level/skill gaps way too big on general public games. And it’s not segregating players. Once people have spent enough time on official servers, they usually browse deeper if they can find something they’ll consider more valuable.

What surprises me these days is that it’s something totally missed by everyone. This solution was pretty much straight forward since 2003/2004 where playerbases started to be high enough to require proper editor server management to fulfil the demand (which was covered, in most cases, by community ran servers solely before).

And ranked MM can totally have a place in this environment. Personally I truly hate spending most of my game time in those things. Let’s say I’d be spending 30% on it if it was running nicely. The 70% left, I’d love to spend it on a server my community manages where we bring the big guns for a quality brawl. That’s complementary the way I see it.

Sadly, they can work as hard as they want on balancing or even make an accurate matchmaking, but level discrepancies are so high in skilled games nowadays that it will shred every effort if the community is too small. Newcomers get bored because they’ll always get rekt by level 50 who can’t do anything else than joining random servers. Level 50 get bored because they can face same skill players every so often, let’s say 1/10 games they play. CS:go achieves proper mm systems because it can frame WIDE amounts of players that will have a similar level. And even if they divide the community in 50 pieces for matchmaking purposes, everyone will still find a quite adequate game in less than a minute.

In my opinion, not giving community servers is one major thing which is actually killing the game right now. And forced matchmaking would be a total no go for me.

[Szakalot]

B. Montiel said it al. /thread