Dear Richard Ham,
I am unclear if you are understanding the complaint from the Xbox360 community regarding the lobby/invite friends to public matches issue. Your replies to the Machinima interviewer leaves me with the impression that you have read & listened to the complaints but your reply makes it feel like you think the user is not properly using the game or your warmup system.
Unless I am confused, a Private Match is invite or friends. While this will work for larger groups of players that have 8 to 16 Brink players actively on their XBL list, it will not work for smaller groups wanting to play vs human players.
I would like to point out that many people are indicating that the intent of purchase of Brink was to play in: online, 8v8 matches with friends vs Human opponents.
The forum users have clearly spoken of the exact issue regarding getting into public matches with friends but often the conversations get side tracked or turn into flame battles between people or hardware. None of those items resolve the issue that many adult players see as a major problem.
Let me be clear, it is my desire to gather a group of friends from my XBL friend list and invite them into a public game vs human opponents. In your interview you state that the first human should go into a public match and simply invite their other friends. Even as you say this, you have a hiccup in your voice as you understand that it is completely and most likely possible that the first player will be put into a full room and thus unable to invite other friends.
Can Splash Damage or Richard Ham directly speak about this issue?
This issue, is the reason that many people are dodging purchase or not giving positive reviews.
Thanks for your time, and understand that your community does appreciate the feedback we have received but we need more detailed information regarding your plans moving forward on this item.
Tweaks to bots, guns and other gameplay specific items are really not my concern or the concern of my friend’s who have heard great thigns about the gameplay but bad things about the party/lobby/matchup system. I am unable to consistently get my limited number of Brink playing friend’s into: human vs human - 8 on 8 matches.
Regards,
Curt (Thresher)
Transcript Below:
Machinima Interview Question to Richard Ham:
“If you are hoping into a freeplay and have a party of six people, whats to prevent you from hoping into a match that is almost already full, so I want to hop into freeplay and bring all six of my teammates, what’s the easiest way to do that?”
Reply: “Um, ahhhh, well basically um, in the…you know that, if you want to jump into freeplay and jump into a match that is already existing as opposed to starting yourself up, at this point jump in and um…start inviting your friends in. If you want to guarantee that um your friends are all going to be together, you know the best bet right now is to use a um…you know a um Private Match, um, you know 'cause then you can then send all the invites in and you have total control over everything and you know, not just um the obvious stuff em uhhh like you know like wether friendly fire is on or off or wether um, you know, ah, um [inaudible]. We have more interesting one’s like you can specify the maximum amount of players, you can specify wether bots will be there or not or if you want only humans. So you have a lot of control, the most place you will find that control is in Private Matches. At this time.”