But that still negatively affects other players by making it more likely that they experience an imbalanced matchup. Scaling is already in place to expand your pool of potential matches as your queue time increases. Accelerating that scaling artificially would screw up the balance of equal matches vs. queue times that's built into the algorithm. |
Because if you say "I don't care, match me with anyone", you're potentially screwing over a less-skilled person who may have found a more balanced matchup in the time it would have taken for the algorithm to expand your player pool enough to get matched with him anyways. |
That post doesn't make sense though, because it's completely contradictory and it's ignorant of the challenges associated with matchmaking algorithms.
First of all, it says "the majority of CoH players don't play CoH for the competition" and follows it up with "getting instantly owned is the opposite of fun". Which is it? Competing is simply the act of trying to beat someone else in an activity. If you don't care about competition, by definition you don't care about winning or losing. Except the post says people do care about it because people don't like losing. Which means people are competing. Make up your mind.
It's also incredibly unrealistic. Sure, you could put hard limits on skill gaps, but that means the very real possibility that players at extreme ends of the skill spectrum (very good and very bad) may not find games even after multiple hours of searching. That's unacceptable. Equally unacceptable is matching players regardless of skill level, because while it drastically reduces wait times, it also reduces match quality.
The correct solution is somewhere in between. Some system that balances finding even matches with limiting players to reasonable queue times. If only Relic implemented a system like that...
Wait a minute... |
It's sad that their solution is giving out a single password for forum access. It's really not hard to link forum accounts to Steam accounts. |
Sure, except adding basic stuff like that won't seriously improve the diversity of the factions. They're not bland because you can't build sandbags or tank traps. The problem is far deeper than that. |
Common sense and the power of observation?
Also the fact that back in October 2013, after they had released their first batch of DLC commanders, they were planning on releasing 4 commanders per month. |
This was a conscious design decision made to push commanders. Undoing it would require serious redesign work, which is extremely unlikely to happen. The blandness of CoH2 factions without commanders is its biggest design issue, and one that Relic hasn't seemed too keen on addressing, as doing so would undermine their entire business model. |
You can't control the opinion of the masses. If people think the NDA is stupid, you're going to hear about it, and no appeal to "honour" is going to change that. If people thought this NDA was totally reasonable, there wouldn't be any problems. This is more of this Relic-guided "it's the community's fault, not ours" mentality that shows up time and again, from that toxic community members post by Noun to shit like this. It just doesn't make any sense how far some people go to deflect blame around here.
When Valve announced their paid mods plan for Skyrim, I thought it was a great initiative, and I didn't understand the incredible backlash they received for it. But you know what? My opinion of something isn't the be-all-end-all, and the majority made it abundantly clear that they disagreed with me, and Valve acted on that majority opinion. It's not about what is "right", or "moral", or "honourable", it's about what the majority of people perceive. If the majority of people think the NDA is bullshit, appealing to "honour" is just wasting your time. |
Narcissism is a hell of a drug. |
If that's the case, then there's likely a server-side queue that builds up commands if they fail sending, up to a certain point where the player is finally dropped for good. This is a poor way to implement a proper reconnect feature because it's a major security vulnerability. If you let the servers queue commands for disconnected players indefinitely, a malicious user could attack the server infrastructure by constantly connecting and disconnecting from games, or matching with collaborators and letting a game run indefinitely with a few players disconnected until the server runs out of memory. This is actually probably a problem with the observer system too, since the server is likely just storing a replay file and serving it to users. I wonder what they've implemented to prevent neverending games from consuming too much memory.
There's also the fact that this method would only work for minor internet outages like the one you described, where you've lost connection but are still physically in the game. If you crash or close out of the game, you will lose the game state and those queued commands will be useless. |