[Any veterans still flying these days?]

Strike Fighters were a really common ship choice even back when they were bad. The looks, the weapons, and the controls have always been popular, because they pretty much feel right. Prior to the big balance patch, however, everyone playing them was simply wrong- their popularity, especially among new players, hid a large number of issues with the implementation of these well designed ships.

 

Now, strikes are actually good. We are finally seeing a good number of strikes.

 

 

Also, as Drako says, almost all our efforts are on Star Forge. Satele is often riddled with long periods with no queue pops. It's still a playable place, but it's very frustrating to sometimes wait 40 minutes, especially for a game that could easily end early just because not enough players fill one of the sides. Star Forge basically has none of these issues. I wonder how other group content is on Satele these days?

[More component choices for T1 Gunship]

I dislike this approach of counting components. I think the real question is, "how many useful components are available"? The type 1 gunship has a meaningful choice when it comes to primary weapon- burst is better, but lights is not an unforgivable choice. For secondaries, there are three choices- likely the game needs a fourth railgun. Plasma is a tough decision over either part of ion/slug, but it does do some things better. Still, I'd say that this area is the one that would need the most effort, as the type 1 gunship is all about railguns, and usually it will choose ion/slug.

 

For engine components, your only real choice is barrel roll. This is largely in part due to all the other components being kinda garbage. Does the ship really need other engine components (which will probably hurt the uniqueness of the type 3 gunship), or does the ship need its existing components to maybe be worth using?

 

Similarly with shields, where the situation is not as dire as with engine components, but still a pretty big deal. A fortress T1G isn't as terrible as a rotational thrusters T1G, but it's still a terrible type 1 gunship build in either event. By contrast, the other shield choices do show up meaningfully on the T2G, who doesn't have distortion. Maybe it's fine, with the shields here.

 

I think there's one excellent T1G build and two good ones. The excellent one is:

Burst / Slug / Ion / Barrel / Disto

The good ones are:

Burst / Slug / Plasma / Barrel / Disto

Burst / Plasma / Ion / Barrel / Disto

 

If you swap burst out for lights, you don't really turn on anything that lets you actually use the lights- you can't make the ship double turning, which is pretty much what a gunship needs to get the extra time on target to make a dps laser choice work well. I think just making things besides barrel into a choice, and/or adding a fourth railgun, and/or mild plasma buffs, would all give you more ways to play this ship.

[Groups not getting priority in GSF queu?]

Unquestionably something changed, but I think it was quite awhile ago, and I don't think it was something deliberate like groups being deprioritized. Like many of the matchmaking weirdness, I suspect it was an unintended change.

 

My take on this- which could be incorrect- goes something like this:

 

I believe matchmaker now values time in queue higher than before, to the point where as a game ends, if the group isn't in queue before probably half of the total needed for a game is in queue, the group runs a serious chance of being skipped

 

I don't know that this is literally true, but it feels like it.

[Implement anti-selfdestructor mechanisms please.]

Be sure you make tickets for self-destructors in game

 

Bioware has always taken same-faction pvp and wintrading seriously. Create reports and encourage others flying with you to do the same. Because of the skill delta between GSF pilots, it's not obvious to any automated detection whether someone is self destructing deliberately, or is simply an absolutely terrible foodship. Reports can help custserv quickly differentiate between someone terrible and someone malicious.

[Knights of the Fallen Empire (KotFE) Bug]

I mean, of course they could solve it. The point is that it isn't solved inherently by their existing database, therefore, it exists.

 

It's unquestionably an open bug.

[Minor changes for GSF?]

Here are some ideas I think would work well, that most vets I fly with seem to agree on.

 

Better bring these "most vets you fly with" around, cause I've never heard of any of this, and most of these ideas are poor. Unless you were just saying this to try to imply a consensus exists- that seems likely, given that your thread title is "minor changes", and all of these are huge and sweeping.

 

Proton Torpedos - remove the DOTs

No thanks, the dots are the best change we've seen. They buff the damage while giving the user time to react. They also give the user time to understand what has happened in many cases. Given that protons should and do wipe out scouts that put no effort into hit points, the dot communicates this well to new players. "Huh" the new player thinks. "That was really close, I died to the dot, not the initial blast. Maybe I should take Reinforced Hull, lets see if that will let me survive- oh hey, it will! Or maybe I could press hydro spanner when I get hit, and the healing from the hot will let me survive the dot, which wouldn't be true if it was burst damage... oh hey, cool, that works too!"

 

The only scouts that get one shot by protons are the ones that avidly avoid any hit point boost, instead maximizing offense and evasion. Scouts being able to do this without punishment or motivation to ever do anything different was one of the greatest blights of the old meta. The proton being lethal to specifically just these scouts is perfect.

 

Slicing - keep it in the game, but provide an anti-slicer ability.

 

Having a rock-paper-scissors thing with slicing seems odd. Do you play slicing? There's several scenarios where slicing isn't going to accomplish what you want it to do already. What there isn't is a blanket immunity.

 

I'd like to see an actually minor change here- I'd like to see the engine elimination value come down some. If you instead put slicing in a situation where someone can cast 'firewall', then slicing needs to really wreck almost everyone who doesn't have 'firewall'- it would likely need buffs to make up for the cases where it literally does nothing at all (which is not very great design). The counter to slicing is to keep enough gas in your tank and to not blindly throw yourself towards every clarion that sneaks around, but I do feel it's kind of a big ask given the magnitude of engine power you need to keep around.

 

Matchmaker does need some tweaking - some days its clearly in a mood

 

Sure, but this isn't a minor change. Everyone knows matchmaker isn't great.

 

Honestly I don't think much else needs to be done

 

We still have the type 3 bomber and the type 2 gunship largely without roles. All bombers seem to scale very oddly- 12v12 veteran match will have a lot of bombers in domination and a few in TDM, but make it 4 veterans plus 8 foodships versus 4 veterans plus 8 foodships and suddenly none of the vets can afford to run a bomber. In matches where people are somewhere around the "pilot" level of play and below, ticking is too optimal, especially to players who are risk averse- whether they hurt or help their team depends entirely on how irrational the opposing team is, and that's not really amazing emergent play. I don't know how much of that is really on the community, and how much could be addressed by a dev team. It just feels odd the way bombers have turned out- they have jobs, but it's crazy how easy they get controlled unless there's a whole team of actually good pilots around to make them feel right.

 

And of course, your post isn't the only one in here. The second post offers:

Give us the ability to choose our copilots separately from the copilot ability!

 

I like that the copilots (and the factions) have meaning in some small way. I don't think this would improve anything at all- I think it's way better that if you want a copilot, you get their abilities, and if you want someone else's stuff more, you don't get that copilot.

 

I want so badly to fly with Kira as my co-pilot, but her function is next to useless in this meta.

 

Her copilot ability is a lot better than it gets credit for, but if you do feel it's too weak in the current meta, I feel asking for a buff for it would be better than asking to make Kira become a voice you can overlay on another character. Right now, Kira Carson is an actual choice- you can take her and have her ups and downs, or you can avoid her. It feels cheesy to get the perfect combination. Why does every single thing where something has meaning or form have to bend for this endless flavorless lack of choice and meaning? Who defends everything become "player choice" and a mere "skin"? It's so frustrating, every game has these voices and they just never cease their chirping, as they flit from game to game, stripping them of all sense of choice.

 

It also distracts from the real goal- balance. On offensive characters, there's almost* no situation where you can go without Pinpointing, which delivers accuracy, an extremely important stat. This means that plenty of these offensive crewman can't be used in any way. That's not an issue of "let us have their voice so we can all take have a voice divorced from the rest of the character", it's an issue of everything in this game has been based around having pinpointing since forever, it's not a great choice. That's the angle to talk about

 

 

*I've tried running without pinpointing on a type 3 scout with lower cooldown and higher arc, a specialized tensor ship set up to hammer EMPs as often as possible- and even then, I suspect the ship is better with pinpointing- it's just one of the few times where both of those things really give you something you don't have without both, and I don't think I'm currently running that setup at all.

[GSF Scoreboard Bug]

Using custom games, Invis has found that the final kill of a Team Deathmatch (TDM) is not recorded on the scoreboard. He did this by grouping with friends and having one character get all 50 kills, which was recorded as 49 kills on the scoreboard.

 

I think it's been known that something minor has been up with that, but to my knowledge this is the first solid test finding this minor display issue.

 

EDIT: Adding screenshot

( https://i.imgur.com/F9ZdRTl.jpg )

[Galactic Starfighter (GSF) Suggestions]

Win rate is better than any metric you have listed. For every player. Every player has the same objective: to win the game.

 

To improve on win rate, you need to consider who is winning and who is losing. This enters the realm of rankings, ELO style or otherwise. The game does have this in some pretty good manner for the ground game, but it doesn't seem to have a good internal metric like this for GSF. If they added this, it would be the best stat for matchmaking: it's the industry answer for match making, after all, across pretty much all games.

 

But without it, win/loss is your best, and it's not a question.

[HAVOC SQUAD - optimusheath / Exile-srw]

Holy moly, get better man :/

[Despon's Guide to Killing Gunships]

Especially the part about not flying at them in a straight line.

 

When the big GSF patch went in a couple years ago, strike fighters and scouts got an extra bonus when in F3 (strikes get the bonus in any non-F4 setting, but that's not important here). The important thing is this- if a scout or strike is flying at an angle to a gunship, with F3 active, it's harder to hit them in the current game than it ever was back in the day. No compensatory changes were ever offered to gunships- if a ship flies entirely traverse, they are extremely hard to hit, and any movement relative to the nose of the gunship is at least harder than normal to hit, even if the ship is netting a bunch of forward movement.

 

Gunships are support ships. If you attack a gunship and no one peels you from that endeavor, the gunship should end up dead or peeled, period.

[Can we limit the mouse movement when using multiple monitors?]

I don't have nearly as useful an update as you do, but I will add that I eventually stopped using any cursor lock programs at all, as the game doesn't really require or reward you for hammering the cursor all the way to either side (it doesn't punish you for that either, and it's fine play- you just don't lose anything by not moving the cursor far enough to go off monitor).

[Can we please block players that we do not want to go up against?]

I agree on this.

 

I want to block anyone who uses a gunship because they are overpowered and quite frankly annoying to play against. You stand no chance against them using other ships. It's just so boring when one guy has 20 kills and the next has 7

 

Like this has to be trolling, right? I mean, there's no other sensible explanation.

[Well, well, look who climbed out from under a rock...]

Lots of builds to try, you're gonna have a blast.

[The Ultimate Guide of Guides for SWTOR 2020]

The Damage Overcharge map for Battle for Iokath is at:

https://imgur.com/a/zchJPHC

 

You have linked to my Cosmetic Guide instead (the cosmetic guide is also correctly linked below it).

[Strike Fighters = Unbeatable?]

Even with BLC's though, I still have a hard time engaging Strikes. I can take them one on one in a turn-heavy dogfight, but if I decide to play chicken and go heads up against one, I lose every time.

 

I mean, the strike fighter is the "space tank" of the game. If you engage him at his strength- staying underneath his nose and comparing hull, shield, and static dps numbers- at medium and short range- you'd expect to have a terrible time as a scout. But yea, you can still out turn them and stuff.

[Strike Fighters = Unbeatable?]

It certainly seems like it at times. I'm a T2 Scout main and a Rapids user and I have a really hard time getting through the shields of a Strike sometimes.

 

Does this sound like something that should be really good versus a strike? Rapid fire laser is not an amazing dps gun, and requires you to stay on target quite tightly. It's strengths are:

+Decent ability to land a minor hit when chasing around corners, hurting shield regeneration

+Low cost to fire

+ignores armor (hull damage reduction needs nothing to this gun)

+good dps for a stationary target undernose

For this reason, it's rather strong at chasing bombers around nodes, but should it be nearly as good at strikes as it is at bombers?

Note that quick charge shield explicitly negates the top advantage- shield regeneration. The weapon has no access to shield piercing, a solid pick versus strikes. It has no access to instantaneous burst (that would be burst laser cannon), nor extreme dps (that would be light laser cannon)

 

For years, RFL was a meme-gun, a joke. Now, it's a good gun. I run it if I expect to see armor on a node. But I do not recommend it on type 2 scout. Consider Light Laser Cannon or Burst Laser Cannon, if your gripe is not being good against strike fighters.

 

A Strike running Quick-Charge Shields can be a very tough nut to crack, surprising given the raw firepower a Flashfire/Sting can put out.

 

Everyone praising the raw dps of a flashfire is assuming said flashfire is not running RFL.

 

I also have far less weapon power issues with Rapids, so much so that I can comfortably use Frequency Capacitor and Blizz and not have any problems

 

I don't feel "Why does not Frequency Capacitor, the largest capacitor, not simply eat the other capacitors?" is a good approach here. You shouldn't feel the need to run a specific capacitor and let that influence your weapon choice- rather, you should select your weapon, and then choose the capacitor you are pretty sure is best for you there. For burst laser cannon, this really shouldn't be frequency capacitor (it should be range or damage). For rapid fire laser, frequency is a risky pick- you get that raw multiplicative 15% fire rate (versus the 10% damage being added in additively with something), but each individual rapid his is so damned small. Consider light laser as well, of course- burst laser canon and rapid fire laser literally could not be further apart.

 

Worse, Protons have ridiculous range and can one-shot a Scout that isn't using Reinforced Armor.

Or hydro spanner, as you go into. Generally, a scout needs to be willing to sacrifice either top tier railgun defense (lightweight armor) or offense (copilot) to be able to tank a proton. Note that the scout still has access to a 2 and a 3 button that break missiles.

The real problem here shouldn't be actually getting hammered with protons an unreasonable amount (fly more defensively if that is happening), the real issue should be the effects of being forced to fly defensively.

 

They're not unbeatable, but they're certainly much tougher than they once were, and so as a Scout I generally try to avoid them unless I see a teammate engaging one and I can safely assist against it. Otherwise I tend to stay away from them and go after Gunships instead.

 

I think this is a pretty fine call, for two reasons. First, a scout on a gunship usually deroosts it much faster, and will frequently kill it much faster, than any other thing you can bring to bear upon it. Second, a scout remains solid at swapping to a second target, and remains solid at flying defensively: you can have several dps strikes uselessly pursuing you on a scout. They will peel you, but they will have a harder time killing you.

 

I'm thinking of switching it up though, going Rapids/Pods and either EMP or TT on T1 Scout, and then Bursts/Clusters/TT on T2 Scout.

 

This sounds pretty solid- in this case, each of your scouts is becoming more focused on a given situation. You'll probably like the results of this, is my guess.

[Galactic Starfighter (GSF) Suggestions]

If the devs could use better metrics to better balance the matches then I think that would help quite a bit.

 

I feel the if the devs used a second metric, to say nothing of actual plural metrics, that it would help quite a bit. Based on how it seems to lump players with a few hundred games in with players with a few thousand, while doing its best to treat actual fresh players differently, I think it's fair to say that the goal of the current system- helping actual fresh players be paired with strong teammates more often than chance would dictate- is kinda being achieved. The issue of course, is that no one who has ever complained on the forums, the GSF Discord, or reddit, is actually one of these fresh players. Having skulked around on alts an inordinate amount of time, the most common theme that I see is this: "Player or players stomp queue for hours, eventually find a premade that they have a thin chance of beating, complain about this fact".

 

I've said in other threads what I hope for matchmaker to eventually incorporate- win/loss (the only metric you cannot cheese in the winward direction), or a ranking solution, even if not strictly adhered to. The advantage of win/loss over every cheesable metric (k/d, damage, assists) is pretty obvious, and win/loss is already tracked. Ideally, however, you'd use something that takes into account who you won versus, as the various hidden matchmaking ratings across video gaming tend to do.

 

SCALING MATCHES

 

There's several large problems with scaling matches.

 

First, games have an amount of time that they "should" last. This is invariant on the number of players. A few years ago this was 15 to 20- currently it is more like 10-15. This isn't GSF-wide, or SWTOR-wide, or MMO-wide, it's industry wide. So in general, screwing with match length deliberately isn't acceptable. You could, in some of your sample cases, get the game to the correct time length by having one or two fire off, in the same way that some game modes split have team A attack and team B defend, then flip this around.

There's another more SWTOR-reason for not offering games that scale down so dramatically- when calculating how much reward per minute you get in an MMO, you have to count time-in-queue in some fashion, then the entire game itself as exclusive time (you can be doing story while sitting in queue, but you can't be doing story or picking flowers while in Kuat TDM). Any time-based things would need to have robust answers to this, such that a 4 minute game would be slightly less than one third as good as a 12 minute game. The problem is, this is not at all straightforward- some rewards are based on the win or the loss, such as daily and weekly quest completion and conquest objectives, others are based on medals acquired, and if players in a 4 minute match are scrambling for medals, well, that's a big issue. This idea doesn't strike me as intractable- merely very complex.

 

So, lets handwave all the reward stuff and pretend there's a good solution to the timed thing.

What do these scaled matches get people? What great victory is won for the community?

The only beneficial thing that I can see is the ability for matches to continue popping absolutely 24-7 on all servers. A game with only 8 players on it, versus the current minimum of 16, could likely be made more often- constantly even. This doesn't strike me as amazing, but it does strike me as pretty good- the game is healthy on most servers, but has issues on servers with crashed population, after all.

But the cost?

It requires intense development time. It requires serious balance issues, as 4 man teams result in serious meta shifting issues (ships that are fair in 8v8 can be totally useless or kinda OP in 4v4- the meta in 4v4 is smaller than 8v8 or 12v12). Domination requires special rules or it devolves into 1v1s (pure 1v1s, the game is absolutely not balanced around). TDM has less serious issues, but is still quite serious. If only one actually good pilot is on, he can swing a 12v12 on live, but it almost feels fair. He can swing an 8v8 much more reliably. A 4v4, a single good solo pilot will almost always result in a win for his team, and a loss for the other team. And of course, if it puts a premade 4 versus 4 solo queues, the match will be a massive stomp, more so than seen on live.

 

All that being said, I do think scaling matches could be done. I just think it would take developers monitoring and tuning for a smallish gain, and it strikes me as unlikely to be something that will happen- it's certainly not at the top of my wishlist.

 

For me personally, I am not able to use voice chat when I game since

If you can't use voice chat, you should lose more often than if you are able to use voice chat. Voice chat is helpful in any meaningful game based on teamwork and reactions, and if you can't use it for any reason, you lose more and win less than if you were able to use it.

 

One thing you might look into would be something where you could translate button presses into chatter in Discord, similar to how addons can help with callouts into /bg chat in WoW. You can't automate anything into chat in SWTOR /ops (that would be a TOS violation), but if some three button chord on your keyboard typed "two inc C" into Discord, I suspect that wouldn't mess with SWTOR's TOS, and might help you play in voice with people when your household is asleep. I'm not aware of such a product; it just seems likely to exist.

I've also played with a few people who whisper into voice over the years for precisely your reason; it's not at all unreasonable to folks on the other side of the voice chat, if that is your concern.

[Strike Fighters = Unbeatable?]

I guess May to December is not the silliest of necros. At least it is like the same year and all.

 

War Thunder is decently more realistic than GSF, and what it simulates is pretty different. You can turn altitude into advantages there, etc.

 

An interesting idea and all, but there were probably several reasons why it wasn't in the cards.

[Stike Fighter Hacks]

It's happening on Satele Shan now.

 

It started on Satele Shan. The video that we linked you to, where it was explained and stuff, was by Audson, on Satele Shan.

 

The Strike seems to only get off two primary shots for an insta kill.

 

Do two shots instantly kill you? If you are low enough that two shots will kill you instantly, then the strike that shoots two shots in a small window will kill you. Otherwise you would have had to wait a half a second for the second shot, to kill you. You would die in half a second, or perhaps less, if you are two shots from death.

 

This is like, how the math works.

 

Probably something the dev staff should look at when they come back from their halloween/thanksgiving/christmas/new years break in May 2020.

 

So, you're of the opinion that piledriving is unbalanced? Or are you actually of the opinion that piledrivers kill in two shots? The first is a reasonable opinion to have (as is almost any balance opinion), the second is based on a false premise, and therefore unreasonable.

 

Do you understand what piledriving is? Have you tried it? Read about it?

[GSF - Turn Capital Ship Defenses Back on in Team Death Match]

Dakhath has the right of it. I'll say that if there was some situation where the blasters would turn on (with warning) if one team was really outscored (turning off if the score got back there), that could maybe work but... would it really help anything?

 

Back when capital ship turrets were a symmetric part of the game, unbalanced games would be more likely to go to time, as the outplayed team would be hesitant to leave their capital ships. In many games, players who didn't care or overvalued their chances would fly out and provide a constant stream of feeding. That was a good argument against cap ship turrets, but it wasn't what got them canned.

 

What got them canned was a premade strategy wherein a team would queue up a full 8, get ahead slightly in score, then just fly back to their cap ships. With capital ship turrets defending them, they were utterly unable to lose or be damaged in any meaningful way.

 

They could have solved the latter problem independently but... why?

 

If a team is reliably pushed back to all three of their spawns, do you expect that they can turn around and win that game? If you can't spawn on a scout from a non-camped spawn point and go hunting for positions for when a damage overcharge happens, how will providing turrets help any thing at all?

[PILE DRIVER - Type 1 Strike Fighter Burst Damage Build]

I'm bumping this thread because many players missed it and are back for the expac.

 

It's been addressed, but a second way to piledrive- not as dedicated as the first- is to use heavies and rapids. This has the advantage of not needing to delay any weapon swap button presses (you simply heavy swap rapid, then keep pressing swap), and the disadvantage of having a smaller effective window and less total damage.

[Some tips about the "component deselect" bug]

The "component deselect" bug has been around since a specific patch that I forget (if someone would remember, it might help someone fix it later, maybe). But it's been around almost as long as GSF itself.

 

The "component deselect" bug is extremely hard for a given person to reproduce. It may be easy for you to reproduce, however- this thread is about making it happen less often.

 

The "component deselect bug" happens like this: you log on one day, and you check your ships. Mysteriously, your, say, ion railgun, has neither the tier 4 nor the tier 5 component selected. This happening to a five-upgrade-tier component is by far the most common version of this. Rarely, your minor component will come deselected. Very rarely (and likely not for years at this point), an entire weapon can come deselected.

-The deselect never happens while you are logged in, only once you have logged out

-The deselect often happens to the same component repeatedly

 

So, what's my advise here?

 

If you see component deselect on a given ship in a given hangar position more than once, move that ship to a different hangar position. So for instance, if your proton comes deselected on your Imperium sitting in the second spot, move it to the fifth spot, and see if it comes deselected there too. Try every spot! Keep notes!

 

This is not guaranteed to fix it- but for some of you, it will absolutely fix this problem. I have several characters who never see this problem (unless I change their hangar), but used to be plagued by it.

[Stike Fighter Hacks]

You are likely referring to "piledriving", using the weapon swap to make use of one primary weapon while the other is on cooldown.

 

Audson listed this here in Feb 2018:

https://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=944782

 

The piledriver doesn't actually allow you to fire both weapons at once: it does allow very narrow spacing between the primary weapons, whenever the weapon swap cooldown is expired. I don't know if that's what you think you are talking about with the 0.6 second delay, or if you are aware of piledriving and think you are seeing something else.

 

You very likely are not- you are probably just seeing piledriving happen normally.

 

You seem to have been confused on this topic before (March 2019):

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=962055

 

And this exact thing was discussed at that time as well.

 

Conventionally, if people were utilizing mouse macroing, it should still stagger the shots between the primary and secondary laser weapons due to the 0.6 secs

 

Not really. There's two types of piledriving.

 

Heavies and Quads begins like this:

Heavy, swap, Quad (this looks like the heavy and the quad are simultaneous)

At this point, "heavy" is on cooldown, "swap" is on cooldown, and "quad" is on cooldown. The pilot now waits for the second quad, at which point, he swaps back to heavies.

Quad, swap, Heavy (this again looks like the heavy and the quad are simultaneous)

At this point, the pilot begins spamming weapon swap as fast as he can. Weapon swap has a shorter than 0.6 second cooldown- I think it's 0.3 seconds- and after seeing the H+Q then the Q, then Q+H, the pilot will end up waiting until the weapon swap is ready again, at which point he will swap and immediately fire the quad (at this point, the quad has been off cooldown for a very small amount of time), and the heavy will go off cooldown while he is waiting for the weapon swap to come off cooldown. This part will normally not look like the lasers are simultaneous, as they won't be as close to each other at at the beginning, when all three things were off cooldown (the heavy laser was off cooldown, the quad laser was off cooldown, and the weapon swap itself was off cooldown).

 

Anyway, I think this is what you are confused about now, as before. Please watch the guide and enjoy piledriving!

[Thank you Devs!!!]

I'll also chime in with a big thanks here. Being unable to "/who over" had made it annoying to find out if games were popping, and how many. It was by far the biggest UI-related frustration with GSF, and now it's gone.

 

Thanks!

[Games ending early are absolutely unsatisfactory]

For the record, what we are seeing now is nowhere close to what happened when I made this post. The devs have addressed whatever matchmaking issue we were seeing back then.

 

Perhaps matchmaker could be a little more clever at getting enough people in line before it pops a match, or a lot more clever at rerouting people coming late to the party. But the issues we are seeing are unlike what we saw before- the game was barely playable at times back then.