Garrett Blacknova
Codex Troopers
1876
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Posted - 2013.03.07 13:47:00 -
[2] - Quote
Travi Zyg wrote:segregating by region is so lame in games these days...This idea specifically is what ruined the community in games like Armored Core 5. Would have had such a better long life if we were connected to the JP players. I'd rather play with a bit of lag and deal with it than ALWAYS play the same smaller group of people.
I'd rather see sensibly-balanced ping tolerances in Armored Core, because that would allow everyone to get consistent games with people, with slightly more lag than US and JP players get in the game now, but with much better ping than you have to deal with in the EU region when people actually in Europe are playing with/against players in New Zealand and Australia (treated as part of the EU region by the game in spite of being closer and having better ping to US servers in games where there's an option).
In Assassin's Creed, they had the balance almost right when they first released Brotherhood (the first game in the series with multiplayer). If they hadn't broken it and retained the broken state in spite of losing players, I'd be pointing to the latest game in the series instead, but unfortunately, Ubisoft are bad enough to make EA look amazing by comparison.
In the High Moon Studios Transformers games (War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron), they've done a pretty good job of this and NOT ruined it by being idiots and listening to unreasonable complaints about matchmaking time. In fact, they did what Ubisoft should have done, and pointed out that the playerbase wasn't large enough to support a playable game with faster matchmaking.
Unfortunately, for many aspects of DUST, this system isn't going to work. For the HighSec/matchmaking based games, it would be possible to include a certain degree of ping-based matchmaking, but in LowSec and any other form of Corp battle, you need the freedom to play with and againts anyone with access to the game, which means it needs to have tight enough netcode to handle the high volume of players it supports even when they're coming from opposite sides of the world using varying qualities of internet connection. This is also a problem in HighSec when you have a 4 (supposedly increasing to 6) person squad, and each player is from somewhere else in the world.
You can't do regional matchmaking when we're ALL influencing events in the same single-shard MMO universe. And it's not even practical to use proper ping-based matchmaking in some situations, so it's a bit of a tricky situation that CCP have to deal with. This is probably part of the reason why DUST is using server-side hit detection, because laggy players would have a horribly unfair advantage if it was client-side. Particularly a problem when a squad is made up of people from NZ, England, USA and the Phillipines. Regardless of who gets a good ping, SOMEONE in that squad is going to be laggy (usually me). Because no matter which server we connect to, it's going to be a long distance from ONE of us at least. Sometimes two. But in spite of that, DUST is rarely laggy enough to be a problem for me, even in squads like the one I described above. In laggy games, I sometimes have trouble hacking things, because the hack keeps resetting intermittently (particularly frustrating when I get it up to one bar short of completion then have to start over), and occasionally my girlfriend has a similar problem with her aim cutting out while trying to stay scoped in with her Sniper Rifle (I don't snipe often enough to have been hit by this myself). |