Powercores aren't happening imminently.

:/

Powercores are not imminent, but limited tiericide is.

Looks like I have my cpm2 list done. Shotty you super duper sure you don't wanna run? I can easily change what I plan on saying in this upcomming vid.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, Jolly, but I'm sure for sure.

PS: Very much looking forward to seeing your list.

I'm truly impressed with how patient and altruistic some of you guys are, but there's a good chance I'm backing out of a 5 v 12+. More likely to do so if on the strong side than the weak. I play Dust to shoot the bad guys; 15 minutes without bad guys is 15 minutes wasted.

Thought these concepts were interconnected. Wonder if they figured out a way to accomplish a decrease in number of models in play without introducing powercores (?).

Had a 12 vs 0 the other day. Don't worry though MM is fine according to CCP.

But the match didn't begin at 12 v 0, right? Folks leaving battle are turning what could've been decent matches into severely lopsided matches. Can't blame that on Scotty. That said, folks leaving battle is a symptom of a greater underlying issue. Fingers crossed for fixes soon! Hoping for fewer beatdowns on account of squad size changes.

I'll make a lil quitting montage. Record beginning of each match for one week. Toss seem all together on Saturday. Most boring vid ever, but people will watch it just to see if they are in it or someone they know.

Thought these concepts were interconnected. Wonder if they figured out a way to accomplish a decrease in number of models in play without introducing powercores (?).

But the match didn't begin at 12 v 0, right? Folks leaving battle are turning what could've been decent matches into severely lopsided matches. Can't blame that on Scotty. That said, folks leaving battle is a symptom of a greater underlying issue. Fingers crossed for fixes soon! Hoping for fewer beatdowns on account of squad size changes.

^All of this.

The amount of match leaving is huge, and some modes suffer from it more than others (in my own personal tests Dom has the highest leaving rate of any mode). Many people have begun to adopt the behavior of leaving when in the barge after looking at the other team thus leading to more lopsided matches.

In my own run of tests (which are anecdotal due a single player not being a large enough sample size) well over 80% of matches started full or near to full (12 minimum on either side) and even or nearly even (disparity of 2 or less between sides) but averaged between all game modes only !1/3rd or fewer of those matches ended with the numbers they at when they began.

There are problems to be addressed no doubt but substantial aspects of those problems are not based in the matchmaking systems, rather they are derived from player behaviors which makes them harder to account for.

The new squad sizes will make the mechanics of the matchmaking more granulated and thus easier to polish, and hopefully that will have a substantially positive net impact but I will be blunt, I do not think there is any thing that matchmaking alone can do to counterbalance player behavior trends. I suppose we will just have to wait and see however, hopefully it will help and if nothing else will highlight other sources that feed into the inclination many players have towards leaving battle (as that choice seems to be motivated by more than one source).

\o/

See, i think you're thinking like CCP a bit here. Let me break down a few things that really frustrate me about MM.

• First, I completely agree, Domination is the worst for loosing players fully busted with current MM. Now i play just Skirm. What does this say about their MM changes such that I no longer play my favorite game mode?!
• Barge?! What is the barge you speak off? Despite MANY MANY requests by players to have the warbarge back I almost never see it anymore. I have no idea how you get a chance to see the players in the warbarge such that you could leave. At most i get a flash for 2/3 seconds of the barge.
• Pre the MM changes battles started 16vs16 almost all the time.
• Post the MM changes i get 12vs12 (+/- 1) almost all the time. The rare match i get 15vs15 at the start. Some matches fill up, some never do.
• Battles HAVE to start with 16 vs 16. This 12vs13 or whatever bs has to end. It's so annoying on these huge maps.
• Their biggest issue is they are NO LONGER filling up battles down players. If someone leaves REPLACE them. This issue was not a problem pre MM changes. THEREFORE their MM changes are BUSTED.

/ end rant

If late-joining players didn't have a huge reduction on pay, I'd stay in those matches. After all, I didn't ask to be put in a match under way for the sake of easy profit.

I could go 1/5 or 9/6 and still get 180K in both cases. So why even try?

In order

1. It says that Dom, due to its highly focused and static nature combined with the generally innate advantage granted to the defender of a point by the way maps are built is going to have a very small window of actual fighting in most battles with roughly equal teams. Further assailing the point in such a context often leads to higher average death rates than defending the same point would. People notice this, as well as who they frequently have trouble when facing, and thus often choose to bail out of the match rather than deal with an extended period of high risk/low profit game play.
The more focused or static game play is within a mode/map the smaller the window of time before the conclusion is almost forgone when MM pits two roughly equal teams against each other.

2. I see the barge more than most due to having an SSD but you're correct that's not everyones experience by any means. It's very case by case.

The rest of your points are more or less one point and to be blunt your conclusion is incorrect.
MM isn't broken, though it may be employed incorrectly at present, but that's a matter of taste and feedback. I will elaborate in my next post because the character limit is nearly spent here due to quotes.

On to part 2!

If late-joining players didn't have a huge reduction on pay, I'd stay in those matches. After all, I didn't ask to be put in a match under way for the sake of easy profit.

I could go 1/5 or 9/6 and still get 180K in both cases. So why even try?

Part 2!

Match making currently prioritizes spin up time over full matches. As far as I am aware it could easily be changed to give filling matches a higher priority, or even make full 16v16 a requirement. The cost of that sort of change however is that it would result in longer wait times to deploy into a new match. This was largely viewed as a negative thing by the community (according to feedback) so the current method of giving deployment speed a higher priority was implemented.

The other thing you need to keep in mind is that there was no MM prior to the 'recent' update thus it was vastly easier to fill matches because new players were slotted in to matches with vets all the time. Net result of MM applying limits to that has be two fold, one is that most vet matches fill more slowly, the other is that new players have expressed a greatly improved experience as they are now facing off with other new players rather than just being feed into the KDR totals of vet squads against whom they didn't really have a legitimate chance.

If 16v16 is a hardline requirement, and community sentiment has shifted to agree with that, then it's a change which can be made. Simply provide the feedback and demonstrate that player sentiment on the issue has shifted, but be aware that it will mean longer wait times between matches.

Filling matches is the same way, there has been a lot of repeated player feedback stating that it is undesirable to be dropped into a match already underway and that the further into the match it gets the less desirable that is.
That feedback is taken into account, weighting deployment towards new games rather than putting people into games that are already partway over. Match making does compound that true, in that it doesn't just fill the slots with anyone but rather looks for those players/squads with a score that fits the void left by the players that drop, but it's not a case of the MM being broken, it is a case of it doing what community feedback requested.

There is also a final factor which is out of the hands of everyone (beyond having a port deployed of course) and that is the life cycle of the PS3. It is an old system and the population on it in general, much less Dust particularly, is waning.
That lower player count means that things like longer wait times and unfilled battles are unfortunately more and more common regardless of match making, team building, etc.

The unfortunate reality is that sometimes positive things have trade offs. Speed of deployment into matches, and matches having balanced teams or both desirable but they have a functionally inverse relationship.
Keeping teams filled until the end of match even if some members drop is desirable, but so is providing players with a fresh match - or at least one that isn't already half over - when they Q up. Again these two desirable aspects conflict which each other and must be weighed against each other.

In a large enough player population those contentions matter less because the pool of prospective players is large enough that filling in the gaps becomes less arduous, but we don't grow the player population by keeping the total lack of match making that has been the standard throughout most of Dusts history. That lack has been brutal on the NPE and the NPE not only directly effects game wide health it is also one of the weakest aspects of the game.
A port to a next gen system is needed as well, and some of these problems are rather endemic, being on old hardware, but even on a new system if the NPE tosses newbros into matches against beta vets the NPE is going to remain poor and thus retention of new players (and by extension the overall population of players in game) will remain on the low end.

Again, just to reiterate, most of how the MM weights stuff now is derived in whole or in part from sustained player feedback trends. If those trends do not represent you, and if others feel the same as you do, then by all means get that feedback displayed in a thread on the subject and it will be considered moving forward but "thinking like CCP" on this subject is pretty much synonymous with saying "reading the consistent feedback on the subject and acting on that".
Change the proponderance of feedback and the prioritization will likely follow, I know for my part I'll certainly put whatever consistent feedback there is in front of the Devs. The thing is one must be careful to provide feedback that isn't functionally "I want to go left, and right, at the same time." And sadly that is where, in reality, we sit on a number of these issues at least until the player population can be improved some aspects are functionally zero sum.
It's not a desirable state, but it is a functional reality, a reality we won't get out of by dismissing the NPE.

0.02 ISK
Cross

Please push for the warbarge to return! Also, you do get it in FW which is nice.

I'm very happy the bottom 50% is having better matches. Great for them and the NPE. However, the top 50% have complained about MM a lot from what i've seen and CCP just says there is nothing wrong, which I think a large majority disagrees with.

Regarding the opinion about joining late battles this was a big issue discussed PRIOR to these changes and I agree, i hated deploying into a battle that is over. The big issue IMO was people getting in to see the defeat/victory screen and loading back out. A common issue raised was if they increased the payouts for late deploys that most would not care about coming into a battle mid-way through. Fix payouts and that fixes people loading in and instantly leaving which we still have with the current MM.

Personally, I'd love to see the warbarge brought back with a 1minute count down. Then they can slowly fill up the last 4-8 players that are missing over that minute.

A common issue I get these days is I start right after the battle starts, which really ticks me off as I like my speed fit at the start.

I suspect you (still) worry way too much about what others think, and it looks to me like your KDR is a part of that due to me assuming you back out a lot and that I know the reasons why.

Oh, I never backed out before yesterday. Never never never. It's just got to the point where I no longer give a sh!t anymore though. I'm going to stop playing to be 'competitive' and start playing for entertainment only. If I'm not enjoying myself, I'm just gonna up and do something else, no fcks given.

Ask anyone in here and they'll tell you that when I rage, I rage seriously badly. Recently, I've been raging more and more frequently, probably because I've been playing not for entertainment, but to be 'competitive'.

Obviously, I won't back out if I'm leading a squad, and I never have. What's going to change though is my attitude. From now on, if I start raging, I'll just stop playing for a while. I'm also gonna try to avoid situations that I know will make me rage, mostly by backing out of rage-inducing matches whilst I'm solo.


I don't care if I get called a coward. The way that I've been playing up until now has definitely not been good for my health.

Who knows: with any luck, you all should be seeing a happier, sunnier Dreis around.