Verain
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Posts posted by Verain
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I do think making a 6v6 would be really rough if there's any four mans in the queue. I'm also not sure a 6v6 is a great number. It's probably playable but barely. I'd like some deliberate 8s, now that the matchmaker can obviously make 12s, and I'd definitely want it to actually pop an 8s when the queue starts to thin out instead of sitting there stonefaced for hours, when there are, at least SOME of the time, enough people to pop an 8s with.
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I wouldn't want legacy or account stats to replace character stats. The stats are decorative, and they are the long tail of progression for some players. Even I separate my play by character- for some, this would totally ruin a part of the game that is primary for them, for me it would be a pretty serious annoyance. Why wouldn't you propose, for instance, a separate page for such things?
Using account things, including stats, for matchmaking is a totally separate thing. Apparently there is a legacy stat being used for matchmaking now- adding in others via a formula or hidden rating would just improve that logic from "haha poor Maulkat with her zillion billion games" to something with fewer edge cases to get wrong.
As far as hangars- I mean, sure. Most of my personal arguments against that have been based on the idea that things were separated by character. One downside of that is that it will reduce the cartel coins spent by vets on alts, but maybe that's ok, I have no idea. I do suspect that it is a monumental task technically, and if true, that remains a solid argument against it.
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I run a type 3 scout in domination a decent amount, and I've found that the combination of faster reload and improved kill zone is pretty helpful for landing more EMP missiles. You obviously lose a lot of blaster power with this stunt, but an EMP on the node can really be clutch.
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Hey folks! I wanted to quickly respond to this point made by Verain. I do not consider this to be a change in design philosophy. The "experience" factor of the matchmaker is not about the character. It's about the player themselves. To have any reasonable chance of gauging how experienced someone is at the game mode we need to evaluate the entirety of their play experience, at least to the best of our ability. Looking at character experience often give little to no insight into how much Starfighter the player has actually participated in.
I hope this helps to clarify this. Thanks!
My previous post was written without access to your post, which popped into existence from some wormhole while I was moving my trash cans around outside.
Previously there was no legacy look-up, now there is, right? I view that as a design change, even if your intent hasn't changed. I certainly don't dispute the rest of your post. Regarding the body of the post that offers justification about the change, I'll agree and go further- I suspect that from the dev perspective, this game has been descended upon by a plague of alts. Certainly from my perspective, it has been. I have like 20+ alts that pop in and out of GSF at times, probably, across the three servers that pop GSF. I constantly see characters that I've never seen before playing like players I have seen before, etc.
I feel pretty motivated to roll GSF alts, and others apparently do as well, as the barrier for gear is extremely low, and the pleasant lack of harassment (and separation of stats, for those who focus on that) are pretty substantial rewards. The costs are a few games spent undergeared (or zero games if you are willing to spend all your fleet comms), and the need to hide your character somewhere that a nosy person can't inspect them (legacy/achievement inspection is a serious invasion of privacy, imo, but that's a whining rant for another day).
The side effect of this swarm of alts is that any matchmaking is going to get totally ruined unless it looks at legacy. Once it looks at legacy, it will have a much better way of making matches, because the only people that won't work on are dedicated smurfs.
My point is basically, if legacy is going to be used for more stuff, push for more legacy links, such as requisition and cosmetics.
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EDIT: I posted without Bret's post being visible, so this post was written without his having switched into visible mode or whatever causes posts to travel through time.
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I guess I was disagreeing with Verain's use of the descriptor "solid," by which I interpreted it to mean extensive, dramatic, or fundamentalIt is fundamental, but neither extensive nor dramatic.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/solid?s=t
The first 8 definitions refer to physical characterizations, which it obviously isn't, the next is "not flimsy, slight...", the next is "of substantial character". Either of those applies.
Historically, an alt has been treated as an entirely new character, with no legacy ties. That was pretty much true, too, up until the legacy ship req tokens appeared, but even that was metered by the relatively slow arrival of fleet commendations, the currency used to purchase them. GSF is filled with alts, and any matchmaker will get confused by said alts without an account tie. Previously, we all sorta believed that such a tie was not really possible technically. There's always been an issue with a legacy tie, and it's not getting the first 2-5 games required to be substantially geared, it is that a dedicated smurf can spawn new free accounts, in the same manner previously relegated to dedicated griefers (who roll free accounts because their main accounts get shut down or penalized). I'm saying that this step represents a shift in design, and sorta implies that other steps, previously out of the question under the old design, are now worth talking about and asking for.
However, I still think that it is unlikely to have balanced games if the matchmaker is focusing on balancing the total amount of played matches on both teams.Of course I agree. Matches played is better than "no matchmaking at all". K/D (or really K+A/D) would be better than that. But if there's going to be legacy tracking, it will probably need some kind of hidden "matchmaking rating", that at the very least is updated by going up and down. It doesn't have to be visible to the players (and probably should not be), but an ELO-like design will end up with something a lot closer to a 50/50 W/L for the majority of players over time. The general idea there is, you start with everyone at some rating (which can be the same value, or a guess derived by their current win/loss ratio, or even their current games played, or, at the end of the day, you could literally randomly distribute numbers), and then every game has an expected result based on some "average" MMR of team A, versus the "average" MMR of team B. If A is heavily favored and loses, then everyone on team A loses a decent amount of MMR (with higher rated players losing more than lower rated ones), and everyone on team B gains a decent amount (with lower rated players gaining more than higher rated players). If A is heavily favored and wins, then everyone on team A gains a small amount and everyone on team B loses a small amount. Etc. This is generally how ranked pvp works, except that it exposes the ranking, much like WoW arena and other more competitive type games, and the ranking becomes the thing players communicate to each other. Even WoW arena eventually had to implement a hidden and swingy "matchmaking rating". Since GSF isn't strictly ranked, any MMR in this game would likely be hidden as well.
This is a substantial change, likely requiring new development (even assuming the existing matchmaking for ground pvp can be repurposed) and there's no two ways about it, it will never be perfect. Individual contribution to an 8 or a 12 man game varies wildly, and you wouldn't want to brand a visible rating based on what you happen to queue into. But such a thing would pick a good match more often than most setups, and even if you literally initialized with random numbers, you would eventually come up with something resembling reality.
Perhaps they could be used in some index?You could, and the advantage of a formula like that is that you don't have to look at it every couple weeks and be like "huh, funny, why is it doing that? What the heck?", like you would with anything that is just driven by data. But coming up with such an algo would be a huge hassle, there's no template for it, and ultimately it won't be driven by wins and losses, and therefore it will probably be less effective in the long term at making balanced matches. Once someone figures out that there's some behavior that allows them to get matchmade lower (and therefore win more), there will some motivation to engage in that behavior. For instance, if kills and deaths are used, a player might choose to focus on assists and crash into a few mountains while still pumping out tons of dps, control, and nest and node oppression. If you focus on wins and losses, you can't really cheese those stats.
As an aside, I want to point out that the GSF stats have pretty much always been for fun. Taking them seriously confuses the map and the territory. Matchmaking is kinda serious, and as such I would expect it to not base it on some long formula that needs to be tweaked constantly, but instead based on overarching weighted wins and losses. It won't predict a winner as well as a 1v1 game like chess or anything.
And I have no idea if something like that is in the cards. But it could be, given that the ground pvp has something similar.
There are many in these forums who consistently argue that the skill matters more than the "gear", or the ship and its upgrades, and contend that Ace pilots will win in stock ships just like they do in their mastered ships.And that's correct. But the argument isn't that gear means nothing at all. In fairness, the current system probably does weigh the gear on your most geared hangar ship pretty decently.
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If folks can think back to when GSF first came out, 12 vs 12 was normal - in fact, it was every match.
12s were more common, but it was much more common to see multiple 8s. Multiple 8s was normal at server prime time on at least three servers prepatch as well. 12s have never been even half of matches until this patch.
There is more room for a variety of ships and approaches to the maps, both objective and death match.I don't think this is necessarily true. It's quite possible that the meta will end up shrunk as a result. Or hey, it could be bigger. But it's not necessarily more optimal to run more ship types just because there are more ships.
ALSO I want to share what seems to be a reasonably predictable thing. Whenever queues stop on a server, they seem to stop. That is to say, matchmaker goes from making 12s, to making no games at all for a few hours (we're talking late at night here, server time). If matchmaker really didn't have any unintended changes to its logic, it wouldn't do this- at least some of the time, it would make some 8s before it was done. I doubt the whole server goes to bed simultaneously, across three servers. So there will be at least 24 people on at minute M, then at minute M+13, there are not even 16? At least 9 people simul-logoff in that same window, every time?
I don't buy it. Matchmaker is reluctant to make 8s. If there's not 24 players in the pool, but there are 16, matchmaker should eventually pull the trigger, and I think he does so much more rarely than I would expect.
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Presumably Musco's post applies:
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=951165
I had assumed that "Matchmaking will more strongly take player skill into account when making teams" would apply to GSF, and we've all been discussing it as such. It's good to know what GSF is doing- I suspect the GSF matchmaker has less to work with compared to the ground matchmaker.
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We are watching the player sentiment on this. If 12v12 matches being more normal is harmful to the game mode than we will take the time to re-evaluate how matches are created.
All feedback ever given in GSF has been based on the idea that 8s are the normal mode and 12s are a rare-spawn. I do think 8s should be more common than "basically never". 8s and 12s are like pretty different games entirely.
I think putting 8s and 12s on footing closer to 50/50 is more like having 12 maps in the game, and the current mode is like we lost our old six maps, and had them replaced with six different maps.
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Another post, which is maybe in another direction.
I'm not really sure what to think about finding out that any part of GSF is legacy-based. I think it's probably better than what we had before, but it does mean that dedicated smurfing will involve secondary free accounts instead of paid subscription accounts. That's a bit unusual given how unlocking alt spaces is a paid token operation from the cartel market (further incentivized by convenience cosmetic unlocks), and as a result of that you now create an alt character who has harsher matchmaking than one you could have put on a free account.
In light of this, is it possible to share anything ELSE about GSF among legacy? The legacy-bound fleet tokens were a wonderful start, but could there be some NPC who can be told to remove req from a ship, fleet, or set of ships in some amounts in exchange for these tokens? Or what about cosmetics?
This represents a pretty solid shift in the design, from each character being individual to each legacy being individual. If that's the direction, other forms of linkage should be considered to encourage players to put GSF pieces into their legacy.
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No, K/D is hot garbage. It's better than literally nothing, but there's entire playstyles, players, and roles it doesn't account for. Chess doesn't rank people based on how many pieces they take per game divided by how many are taken, chess ranks people based on wins and losses. Any system that wants to rank players needs to start with wins and losses, because even though plenty of wins and losses are through no effort of the player in question, some percentage will be. "Wins" is also the only stat you can't cheese by some playstyle that also hurts your group.
I don't know how you would try to encapsulate player skill though. GSF obsessively takes notes like "turret assists" (which is perhaps even legacy wide in some hidden compartment!) but has no way to account for positioning, correct use of debuffs, kiting correctly versus kiting incorrectly, or even something as basic as peeling. Heck, the scoreboard doesn't even show hull damage versus shield damage, and I can't even brag about my big-probe healing on the scoreboard because it isn't on the scoreboard.
Frankly, in a game that is 8v8 (and now 12v12), even some top sci-fi tier self-learning system would take quite some time to suss out the difference between players near the edges of the distribution. Your bare minimum would be W/L and total games, your better version would be something where you have a matchmaking rating based on the average matchmaking rating of who you are beating or losing to, and above that would be stuff that inspects your actual flying stats, such as K+A, D, etc., as a tertiary note to the aforementioned rating. The GSF matchmaker would have a harder time tracking player skill than a game like League would, and way more than something like WoW's arena.
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ALSO:
We just had a game where our team had 10 people at the start, and theirs was 11 or 12.
At some point, we went up to 11 I think, but then back down to 10.
After this, we got a "matchmaker will end the game in 30 seconds" warning. Does everyone remember the "7v9" bug? Well, this bug put 13 people on their team. Our team only had 10. So it expired because 10v13 is a three man difference.
I feel there's a few problems here. Why is it adding a 13th player? Why is it adding players to the team that is already up on people? What's going on?
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Nah, I mean like, it could have preferred 12, but previously it wouldn't wait, and now it has some kind of delay. It doesn't instapop pretty much ever, even when there's plenty on, probably to give it more time to actually matchmake.
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Matchmaker doesn't seem perfect, and that may or may not be ok. More importantly, that's been discussed in other threads.
I want to discuss matchmaker's predilection for making 12s. At this point, I don't think it is a coincidence (aka, I think it's actually an effect of the patch). I'm not sure it represents an actual change- maybe matchmaker always loved 12s this much, but was never willing to wait long enough to matchmake before, and always had to labor under the split pool. Maybe nothing changed about that, but what has almost definitely changed is the number of 12s happening.
Anyway, I split this into mostly two categories, one of which seems pretty clear as something that should be addressed, and one of which is really, like, what does everyone think.
Aborted Games.
The 12s it creates are often not full by the time the game starts. I see 12s terminate due to timeout 30 seconds after launch. This isn't people leaving, this is people never getting there. It's pretty bizarre to see 11 players on 1 side and 4 on the other, with 10 seconds before the ships exit hyperspace. Even the games that don't abort often start threatening to do so, and starting with two players difference is pretty common. I've seen this at some different times of day, so I don't think it is due to a multibot griefer or exploiter, but I can't absolutely eliminate the possibility. Regardless, the devs will have metrics on this, and they absolutely need to look into it. The 12s seem to amplify this issue, which is odd. The current situation is generally unsatisfactory, at least at certain times of day and on certain servers, but it isn't like, totally broken. But it's close to that.
12s is different than 8s
Most of GSF has been 8s. Arguably the ship balance is a little more tuned for 8s. 12s have been pretty rare, and have always felt different. Is this something that the community wants? Does it need enough time to figure out if 12s are generally better, and worth waiting for? The matchmaker seems to JUST make 12s if it can, and only settles for 8s rarely. Is that the correct amount of 12s? If not, what is?
Here's some things 12s does:
1- Increases the penalty for being spawn camped.
2- Increases the frenetic feeling of any given conflict point, based on extra enemies and allies.
3- Increases the magnitude of the disparity in at least some of the conflict points.
4- Increases the power of aoe buffs, debuffs, and damage.
5- Grows the space for off roles and support roles.
6- Reduces the impact of a given 4 man team.
7- Reduces the impact of an given player.
8- Increase the amount of focus damage an extended player must tank or avoid, increasing the value of nests and control points, and increasing the value of absolute defenses and reducing the value of percentile defenses.
Probably some others. It's almost a different game. I've always liked 12s enough, but personally I'd like to see matchmaker make some 8s some times. I think a good ratio would be more like 50/50, as I believe they are both pretty different but valid game modes.
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I'm not convinced that matchmaker has the correct ratings for everyone yet, and may not for a little while. It's also possible that it's not improved enough to make good matches, but lets be real: it's much harder to make good GSF matches, based on that stats that are tracked. If whatever internal ELO is good enough, then it will eventually be pretty good at it. With how effortless it is to make meaningful alts (same account or new account) and gear them enough, GSF is in a situation that is pretty uniquely unlike ground pvp, and the matchmaker should logically take more time to figure it out.
It's also possible that the logic it is using needs to be repaired. I think it does a little better than before the patch, but I'm just not sure yet. I've seen some dumb matches being made. It's worth complaining about, though I think we should hold off the pitchforks for a week or so to see if things get a lot better.
The fetish it has for 12s, however... I think I'm gonna make a post and see what everyone thinks about that.
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Shouldn't the last point be that this is less likely?
I'm pretty sure he means literally with, as in, on their team. Not with as in, playing a match against.
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It may be enough. I'm assume the goal isn't to have the perfect ship for every situation, and that you are supposed to choose some to narrow that down to what is likely, or what bothers you.
That being said, I do think that it could be higher than 5. I would certainly be interested in a way to get it to 6 or even 7. I'd also be very interested in more cartel ships, so I could double up on a favorite ship sometimes.
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You should join the GSF Discord. Dakhath runs it, and you can usually find people:
You can also chat in voice with this, but for whatever reason that happens reasonably seldom. You can though.
You should also
/cjoin gsf
And can use that to look for fellow pilots looking for groups.
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Lendul pretty much nails the response.
I'll add this: the attitude of "once I have proper HOTAS support, I'll be able to beat these K+M players!" skips the fact that plenty of the K+M players have HOTAS setups available or could buy them if it was necessary. If a player isn't excelling under the same exact control scheme as everyone else has, that player won't excel once everyone plugs in the theoretical now-mandatory HOTAS. It's pretty much the worst reason to want a stick-based control scheme in a pvp game, because on top of everything else, it won't even solve the problem that the guy wants solved.
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Its been just over 9 months since the post for GSF Friction Points was created and there has been a lot of feedback from the players which covered a lot of good points and gave creative ideas. Would there be any chance to hear anything along the lines of QoL updates or anything else that may be in the works?
As was pointed out, we had a pretty serious content and balance patch, that absolutely addressed many friction points. There's certainly more viable ships than before, for instance, and the balance pass was significant, running down many of the poorly balanced components and ships.
I would also like to add that I've sent in multiple tickets about player(s) who are throwing matches. Other players have posted in the Friction Points thread, created their own posts and submitted tickets but customer service won't act though.The GMs can take awhile to act, or it can be all of a sudden. I think this is also true about other parts of the game as well.
On Star Forge, going back to Shadowlands,it's been the same player cycling through their alts, week after week. They have 0's across the board unless they are sitting under a satellite for that round. Today alone, they have tried to throw or thrown 10 matches and yesterday 6. Will Bioware look into a QoL change to help the players counter this behavior?I wouldn't call it "QoL", but I concur that they could use a couple more technical details to discourage uncompetitive play. I think I can see why it is hard, however- whatever you put in, you don't want to wrongly punish a new player, and you definitely don't want to make things inconvenient for real players without actually blocking the very rare troll or two.
If I'm wrong and it's not against the policy to hold back a team and throw matchesNo, it's absolutely against their policy. The reason you are more likely to see someone griefing their team by non-contribution instead of, say, self destructs, is because the latter is punished much faster and more consistently, probably because it is much easier behavior for a GM to be sure about.
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I mean, arguably the queue for GSF ranked play is unreasonably long, much of this forum has, in a sense, been queued for years...
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I still do believe that the reason for this lies with Bioware making it too hard for Newbies, putting them against top players, who even believe it to be a valid tactic to farm them.
I feel this is entirely too much typing on the forums, when you could be providing us with dopamine brain juices and CXP by queuing against us.
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You just deny them any production or release of hormones in the brauin or elsewhere that would be there if people would get their kills alol by themselves
He's on to us, guys!
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but that keeps me from having a match too, which really is a lose for me...
German server player here too...
But i think being camped at the spawnpoint goes away once pilots get better, die less and keep the fight in the middle of the field... Being camped is thus due to sub-optimal pilotry from the camped team and not some flaw in game mechanics...
<3 <3 <3
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Don't name names in the forums.
Do open tickets, and encourage other pilots on both sides to do the same, in the event that you see players actually self destructing.
Players that generally non contribute deliberately I think have to be serious serial offenders, as the GMs wouldn't want to hit a player that means well but is just terrible or extraordinarily and unbelievably slow at learning.
The new matchmaker
in Galactic Starfighter
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