Beren Hurin
OMNI Endeavors
183
   |
Posted - 2013.02.01 14:50:00 -
[1] - Quote
tl;dr: the more battles types you want the harder it will be to find a battle to get into. At peak time I'm guessing there are currently only about ~100 matches queing for any game mode. Thus recruitment of outsiders is key for enjoyment and the game's longevity.
So just mathing here (which I'm not the best at) but lets say of the 1mill characters that are apparently on dustboard that 300k of them are real players.
Of those lets say that at the peak weekend time about 150k are on during US time zone.
Lets say 50% of these people are in squads of 4 (that's 31,250 groups).
25% are in squads of 2 and the rest not squaded. that's (18750 groups, 37500 groups respectively)
Now lets imagine that Ambush games last 10 minutes and skirmish last 20 mins. and groups spend about 2 mins between matches.
If people are perfectly matched together and all playing at once, for 150k people you can have about 4,688 games.
If you have 3 different game modes and each group/person is split evenly among them you get about 1562 games per mode. If we had 5 game modes then you get under 938 games per mode. But this is if each group is continuously playing nonstop and the matchmaker finds perfect mixes of players.
If referencing above, You search for map/mingle for 5 mins, wait in lobby for 1.5 min, actual games last for an average of about 13 mins (average between skirmish/ambush) then your 'ingame efficiency' or amount of mins in game spent playing is probaly close to 66%.
So this means the amount of actual games being played during peak times is reduced by that amount. So 4688 games becomes, 3094. With 3 game modes this becomes close to 1000. With 5 its closer to 600.
Now that's not all! There won't be that many games available to join every minute because most games will actually be being played. So we need to determine how many are available (queuing) at a time. For that I'll ballpark that at any given time the % of available games is equal to (queue-time)/(average game length) so since queue time is about 1.5 mins and I'm saying game length is around 13 mins, then only 11% of games are available to join at any one time.
So with 3 game modes you now have closer to 100 games you can join, with 5 modes you have closer to 60. And that is IF your squad size fits well with the available amount of spots. Which with squads of 6 this becomes even more difficult.
But as you can see, this doesn't even include people peeling off for corp battles, nor does it take into consideration our demands for matching randoms and PUGs, or lowskilled with highskilled, all of which reduces the matching pool size. It also is assuming peak time, and at its lowest time it is probably 10% of peak.
So MORE battle options, with BIGGER squads, and BIGGER teams, and MORE SPECIFIC matching criteria will quickly mean that the availability of actual battles goes way down.
My guess is that they would want a consistent population of no fewer than about 20k players per game mode at any time (if match size stays 32 players) and about 2 standard deviations of SP/WP/ability (or 95% of players have no higher than 2x the average or less than 50% of the average SP/WP amount). I can imagine a point at which a large veteran part of the player base continue to grind SP they will shift the skill distribution right. CCP will have to figure out a way to make their accumulated ability either less marginally useful or have more utility when invested in the 'community aspect' of the game rather than reaping huge rewards on the battlefield that intimidate new players. |