Competitive mode: solo queue vs premade

(Strid) #1

I was checking the competitive mode to see what it looked like, both matches it was me (lvl9) and a couple of lvl 5-7 against premade groups of lvl20+.

I understand that level won’t mean much in this game and its a matter of time for people to get their ranks but still… solo queue vs premade???

Is it supposed to stay like this when more players will be coming in as open beta launches? I can’t see people willing to try solo queueing when there are good chances that they will be facing premade groups and most probably get stomped by a team that plays together and uses teamspeak or whatever…

(Strid) #2

Level 5 seems to be a very low entry level… I’ve been playing with people who doesnt even know what is the engineer role… (In my opinion, there should always be an engineer in free rotation)

Most of the levels 5-6 I’ve been playing with and against still don’t understand how the game is played, they have never played ET or Brink…

(ZGToRRent) #3

[QUOTE=Mustang;530452]If you won against people on lower ranks and lost to people on higher ranks then it’s likely you haven’t moved much.
Think I’ve won around 20 and lost about 3 and my rank hasn’t changed yet either.[/QUOTE]
Fair enough. For now it’s hard to know because ranks are not displayed in lobby/scoreboard
I won today another match and finally I’ve got promotion to gold 5 so ye, on the current state of mm, it’s quite hard to get new rank.

(Ceres) #4

I assumed they fixed that but naah. Playing with 4 people that just seemed to have installed vs dMon + Linkz was so much fun, I assure you.

(titan) #5

LOL yea i posted a while ago that they need a solo/duo queue and a 5 man pre-made queue
this was the chance to revive match making and I do worry it will just die again til this is fixed :frowning:

(Ceres) #6

On top of that, game forces you on EU and ASIA servers when you specifically selected NA, for example.

(Zenity) #7

How many games does it require to get a rank? Hopefully by next week all good players have an initial ranking, so new players coming in will not be matched up against them immediately. Of course this is only going to work if with open beta there will be enough players queueing for match making… here’s hoping.

Also, ranks don’t seem to be displayed? Maybe I just haven’t seen it yet, but if that’s so then please change this urgently. If you can’t guarantee balanced matches for now, it’s absolutely necessary that players can at least see what the expected result was. Otherwise this is going to be a torturous experience for new players.

I don’t think separate queues make a lot of sense right now, but at the very least the system should try its hardest to pre-seed teams based on a few common sense factors like premade vs solo, public rank, and level. My first MM game was solos vs. solos, but one side was stacked with topplayers… that could have been so easily avoided by mixing up the teams more sensibly.

(fubar) #8

[QUOTE=Zenity;529594]How many games does it require to get a rank? Hopefully by next week all good players have an initial ranking, so new players coming in will not be matched up against them immediately. Of course this is only going to work if with open beta there will be enough players queueing for match making… here’s hoping.

Also, ranks don’t seem to be displayed? Maybe I just haven’t seen it yet, but if that’s so then please change this urgently. If you can’t guarantee balanced matches for now, it’s absolutely necessary that players can at least see what the expected result was. Otherwise this is going to be a torturous experience for new players.

I don’t think separate queues make a lot of sense right now, but at the very least the system should try its hardest to pre-seed teams based on a few common sense factors like premade vs solo, public rank, and level. My first MM game was solos vs. solos, but one side was stacked with topplayers… that could have been so easily avoided by mixing up the teams more sensibly.[/QUOTE]

10 Games for a rank and… from the looks of it, it wont matter. Linkz won 13 games got ranked gold 1, I’ve got 14 games played - 12 wins, gold 1. oen, twidi has 13(?) wins, gold 2… etc. While there are players with 4 out of 12 wins, also… at gold 1. And apparently the only way to achieve a higher rank is by winning versus players of the same or higher rank. How many wins are unknown as of yet, but I’d assume there’s still going to be quite… a few of those “stomps” until we get placed in higher tiers. Even so, once there, I’d assume the game would still pair us with your average player if there’s no other match to be found.

On a side note: twidi, mikza, adeto and I all intentionally solo queued a lot of games today, to avoid getting stacked teams. Anti can confirm that as he’s been put into the same lobby with us on more than one occasion, but honestly… it really doesn’t differ that much, I still ended up getting 80-90+ kills in those games (You were in one of those as well on my team, iirc? :P). If anything the level requirement should be raised or at the very least matchmaking should filter out matches if there’s too high of a level difference between the players.

I’d rather not get matched than having to be yelled and insulted just for ending up to be matched versus level 5-7s, merely for wanting to play the game with my friends.

(Anti) #9

Some feedback on the points you folks have raised.

A Elo based ranked system like this is based on players’ results and the relative strengths of the opponents they face. Number of wins doesn’t necessarily mean much, many wins against bad players is slow growth, a few wins against much higher skills opponents is faster growth.

A system like this also takes some time to calibrate. By that I mean that when the ranked ‘season’ starts all players are pretty much considered equal by the system as it has very little prior knowledge of their skill at 5v5 ranked Stopwatch or the strength of their previous opponents. Over time, as matches are completed, it learns more and more about the players and better places them, with the whole population gradually being spread out over a normal distribution.

Right now the community who have played ranked is still quite small, the number of matches played is relatively small too and as such we’re maybe only about half way towards reaching a proper normal distribution. It’s unlikely anybody will hit Elite rank for a week or so, until the ranking system has properly started to calibrate itself. As this process continues, or as numbers playing ranked increase, matches should get more and more balanced.

This fairly small ranked community is also the reason why we don’t yet have a five-man/solo queue split. The current matchmaker tries to put parties against parties, if enough of them are searching at the same time, but if it can’t do that it will find a mix of players. It has to do this otherwise players wouldn’t find matches as often, and we don’t really want to stop people playing ranked with friends.

It would be interesting to get community feedback on that last point. Would you folks, both those who solo and those playing in parties, prefer to see ranked locked to teams of three or less in the short term, with us adding bigger team matching later? Or would you prefer to keep it as is for now, potentially ensuring more matches are available faster?

Keep the feedback coming :slight_smile:

(Glottis-3D) #10

with player base being as small as it is now, it is the right way imho.

but what about pings, when the ping kicks in or does it (or should it) at all?
i mean if a player searches solo comp in EU+US does the game first sort the matches by solomix vs solomix, party vs party, then party vs solomix, then pings?

and waht is the exact formula of ranking is it pure ELO for starter?
(i mean does player rank depends only on team’s result, or also on player’s result within a team)

(Szakalot) #11

Sounds good, teams of 5 should look for a scrim on a private server, rather than matchmaking-stomp poor newbies. Even still, a team of 5 can queue as 2+3, and is likely to encounter each other anyways (similar skill level, same time looking for a game)

#12

What really pisses me off about ranked, is when one of your teammates or opponents quits during the lobby time, the match is not cancelled. 4v5 from the start and nothing you can do about it without getting penalized.

(Anti) #13

They get 5 mins to rejoin and if they don’t they get a temp ban from ranked. We might have to look at remaking those early quits though.

(Anti) #14

[QUOTE=Glottis-3D;529614]with player base being as small as it is now, it is the right way imho.

but what about pings, when the ping kicks in or does it (or should it) at all?
i mean if a player searches solo comp in EU+US does the game first sort the matches by solomix vs solomix, party vs party, then party vs solomix, then pings?

and waht is the exact formula of ranking is it pure ELO for starter?
(i mean does player rank depends only on team’s result, or also on player’s result within a team)[/QUOTE]

It tries to find the best fit ping wise for the 10 players. The player has choice over how far away they want to get matched though by defining the regions they’re willing to accept.

The Elo is purely based on win/loss and relative ratings of the teams, it doesn’t account for performance. Generally when you start trying to account for ‘form’ stats you increase the chance of misplacing people for a while based on freak results, which can make matches much worse.

(ZGToRRent) #15

^This

And:

  • Players can switch teams if they want
  • If whole team leave a match, then opponnents are not forced to win, they need to wait for round end.
  • You should really consider restrictions in mercs. I don’t want to play against 3 fraggers and 2 sawbonez every match :confused: People should be forced to add diversity in mercs (1 merc rule?)
(Anti) #16

Will look into that.

There is a 5 minute grace period for them to reconnect, there has to be one. If a bunch of people all get DC’d at once and we immediately give a default win that’d be unfair on them.

[QUOTE=ZGToRRent;529628]
You should really consider restrictions in mercs. I don’t want to play against 3 fraggers and 2 sawbonez every match :confused: People should be forced to add diversity in mercs (1 merc rule?)[/QUOTE]

Yup, we have plans related to this to add to a future patch.

(PixelTwitch) #17

I know us people in the pug mumble are only a very small sample size of the overall playerbase so feel free to take what I am about to say with a pinch of salt…

We all refuse to solo que because we know we are going to get smashed by pre made teams.
On the other side we are getting to the point where we don’t want to MM any more as 5 because if we get defence its 15 min of boredom.
Because the MM teams are few and far between so we are lacking on pugs today and lack on matchmaking.

The truth is, People are heading to bed now and for the rest of the day I will be playing in the server browser again because there is no point in solo queing. There have been many games where we know we have caused people to stop MM (because they said it out right)

It’s a catch 22, it is like your making out that there is no solo/5man because the playerbase for it is too small, while I would argue its small due to the lack of these features. The most fun I had in Dirty Bomb looking back was when MM was forced for the weekends. No joining matches near the end, joining stacked public servers and no running into a full team with a bunch of randoms.

I feel we need to get back to that ASAP because if we do I feel it will never increase to the point I think we all agree is needed.

(BAMFana) #18

What Pixeltwitch said. When competitive lobby functionality was added, v586, lobby boyz and a few other teams destroyed the playerbase in less than a week. Solo players quit using lobbies quickly when they’re being spawncamped by four/fivestacks every time they try it.

(ToonBE) #19

Force MM with the option of ranked and unranked. Unranked you have option between SW, Obj, Ext. All MM is 5v5. Server browser is only for private servers of individual teams/leagues.

(Mustang) #20

I also think there should be separate pools for pre-mades and soloers even with the current player numbers, I’m put off from solo queueing whilst there is a chance of meeting a pre-made.