Sacrifice every quality in your game for Engaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagement. What could go wrong. People will be so addicted to Green they will put up with any amount of Red. Maybe sell some Crossover Skins to make even more money on top of a Battle Pass, with Lootboxes!
I’m a huge fan of the yellows. Reminds me of most of my time in socom 2 and bad company 2
Can we blame this on the engagement era? The first competitive game I got into was Unreal Tournament 2004, and it seemed like every team deathmatch had one or two players who were in a completely different league from everyone else so the result just depended on which team they were on. You can’t blame the matchmaking because it didn’t have any, you just picked a server to connect to and played with whoever was there.
Edit to add: TDM was the main team game mode where this was a thing; modes with objectives, bigger teams, and vehicles all mitigated the effects of individual player skill.
Playing online in most of the mainstream games nowadays is just a shit show.
I play games that are so niche that ‘matchmaking’ consists of pinging people on Discord. I’ve played the same rivals often enough that I have a pretty good idea of who’s close to my level and where the skill gaps lie.
I can play a long FT20 set with someone and there will be many individual rounds that look completely one-sided, for both of us. But because it’s a long set and not just one-and-done, we can see how normal that really is when it keeps happening in both directions. That’s something that will always be a part of games, and there’s no magically flawless matchmaking algorithm that would prevent it.
Not really sure how one sided battles is related to microtransactions tbh. All the WW1 game series games (Verdun, Tannenberg, Isonzo) and Enlisted are games I have played lately. Both to some extent have this issue at times and yet have very different pricing models. Verdun and Tannenberg is a single game to buy and that is it, Isonzo added a few premium cosmetic packs. While Enlisted is apparently really bad for grind premium stuff although tbh I haven’t really noticed because you start with a rifle and a rifle kills people. Not really noticed a difference with any of the other rifles, they all kill people.
Some teams are just useless.
Yes. I caught on to this waaaaaaaayyyy back when League just starting getting traction, esports weren’t really a thing, and I also played some Yu Gi Oh.
Both has the same sort of design, as ilæustrated nicely by this meme; the match is nearly always decided early, and for the rest of the game you’re either just styling on the opponents, or you are getting styles on.
Victories didn’t feel good, losses felt even worse, and I began to understand why people rage and break their keyboard. Games like these fuel such behaviour.
This is why I’ve never really gotten into either League, Dota, or, lately, Deadlock. The matches are just too long and most of the length is padding.
Overwatch has its issues, but at least even the worst match is over after 15-20 minutes. And the stomps are even faster, reducing the amount of time you spend not having fun on either side.
I’ve got 1000+hours in League, and 330 in DOTA, and I’ve got to say, it feels much easier to uno reverse a DOTA match due to everyone being op in their own way
One time I killed Nature’s Prophet that was 10 levels ahead of me just because I used blade mail (80% damage reflection) when he tried to nuke my Abaddon (damage heals you) and used the gold to carry the rest of the match
Yeah I dont play these games anymore. Catch me on the Space Station 14, where we pretend to work for an evil corporation while having none (except Valve) involved.
This is why I quit PvP after call of duty mw2 (reboot,)
I knew I was being manipulated. It’s why I completely have quit PvP and stick with PvE or single player.
I’d rather spend my time when I game, engaging with something trying to tell a narrative or a story … Instead of being on a perpetual treadmill of daily repetition.
Games don’t use catch-up mechanics anymore, because those take time. In the old days, if you played CTF or objective-push maps, there would be an automatic catch-up in that the side losing would get closer to their spawn. Now, that’s all gone.
And MOBA is even worse, because it has escalation mechanics. If you lose a small edge at the start, you lose big later.
The spread of “skill-based” matchmaking and ranked competitive ladders largely took away a valuable communal aspect of online multiplayer games, IMO. Getting dropped into a match with a bunch of random people you’ll probably never see again just makes things so impersonal, which can cultivate a lot of toxicity.
Some of the best times I’ve ever had with online gaming were from finding a dedicated server with settings I liked, hanging out there often, and gradually getting to know the regulars and becoming part of a community. I’ve never had that kind of feeling from a game with automated matchmaking.
This is why my online gaming has kinda died off. I don’t really mind matchmaking and I think skill-based matchmaking definitely has a place in actually competitive games, but I miss the communities that get built up around a dedicated server. My fondest memories of multiplayer games come from community servers, because eventually you just know who you’re playing with and it becomes a place to hang out.
As you say, it goes back even further that SBMM, to the large scale abandonment of the dedi server paradigm in favor of auto match making.
Nearly no online games even have actual server browsers now.
Back in the late 90s through the 2000s to early to mid 2010s…
Nearly every online game was a dedicated server, or at least you throwing open a temporary server with your own custom control over maps and gamemodes.
Many dedicated servers were run by a person or community… and this enabled communities to form around them, enabled lasting relationships to be made, hell, probably most mods or clans for most of those kinds of games arose from that, and a lot of those went on to later become massively more expansive, start their own game studio and put out their own games.
Now thats almost all gone.
You… used to be able to get onto a Battlefield server and know the regulars, like a bar.
That promotes at least a baseline of basic manners and etiquette.
Now all you can do is look at a general conception of an entire game’s community, because the player has no agency to actually choose to associate or not associate with certain people or groups.
I play OpenRA.
Late in the evening, I sometimes get a training session with a “pro”.
We know who they are. No ranking, no skins, just the registered name. It’s enough to inflict terror…
Good stuff.
Overwatch is the worst for this.
Game one: We absolutely steamroll and as tank I do more than both DPS players put together. Yay.
Game two: We get our asses kicked and some Ana who doesn’t know to switch or group up when they’re getting dived spends the whole endgame screaming how awful our tank is.
I pretty much stopped playing games altogether because I am addicted to the yellow. Close matches are awesome, no matter if my side wins or loses.
When I tried BO6s MP for a while after launch (main zombies usually but the MP historically was worth some time investment) and while it absolutely felt the worst in terms of EOMM on a personal level I noticed the game was almost always close for whatever that game mode counted, so I started paying attention
Very VERY quickly noticed what was happening: EOMM pulling it’s bullshit so people on whatever team was getting stomped would dip (no notif people leave and who looks at the scoreboard that regularly unless you notice something like I did) and then after maybe 25% of the match of one side being seriously down suddenly they’d get filled with a team either way over-skilled or blatantly cheating, managing to pull the score back in time to make it look "close’ even though it was a stomp one direction for 25-50% of the match followed by a stomp the other fucking direction
100% agree! Sure, it might be disappointing if you spend 15 minutes in an intense back and forth before eventually losing, but it feels good! If one side is going to absolutely dominate the other, though, at least let it be over quickly.
I don’t mind losing if it was a fun battle and that is generally the bit you remember. I have gone 15+ kills to no deaths in war thunder and lost before but its still one of the more memorable games. The enemy just keep on coming as they stomp over your entire team and you stand alone (likely due to a little bit of skill and huge amount of luck) and hold back the tide but in the end they still manage to capture the objective and you lose.
Absolutely. If all you care about is the win at the end then maybe you don’t actually enjoy the game, you just enjoy dopamine.
Is this complaining about skill-based matchmaking?
Seems to be more complaining about the lack of it. The better the skill based matchmaking is the larger those yellow slices would be. But a lot of gaming companies know about the gambling mindset of players who want to roll the dice and hope they get in the lobby where they stomp the other team so they’ll make the matchmaking not as good and make it a coin flip on whether your on the stomping team, so the yellow slice becomes smaller.
I believe the biggest issue is more to do with matchmaking trying to provide engagement rather than good assessment of players’ skills. This is obvious when you see systems where winning gives you a good amount of points/tank regardless of the opponents skill level, which just foments even more the want for easy stomps rather than good games.
No, it’s complaining about how some games are so swingy that even with skill-based matchmaking the game always seems to be a landslide in one direction or the other.
I remember getting really annoyed at the LoL community as anytime you were in that balanced section they just wanted to surrender and get to the ‘your team stomps theirs’ sooner. Certainly not missing that game, every time one of my friends play it, the annoyance in his voice skyrockets.
I think marvel rivals is the worst! They make you “win easily” by placing you vs actual bots… Not sure about other games tho but Rivals is so obvious
I hear people say this but I’ve yet to see it, usually just toxic people calling the losing team bots
I play a lot of MR, got matched with bots twice and both times I had to lose 3-4 times in a row. I can not see how bots is a issue with the game.
I’ve never once had to wait more than 5 seconds to start loading in to a match no matter what time of day or night it is. Literally no other game has ever done this. They’re prioritizing their time-to-game over having actual players in your match, and this definitely means filling slots with bots. How egregious it is will depend on the time and day and current online player count. But when I’m instantly loading a full game of 10 people at 3am on a Tuesday I know something’s fucky.
Other people have done actual research into the matter but I had my suspicions, just from playing the game, by the third day or so after release.
There are steam forum posts about this.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/2767030/discussions/0/591757960657544586/ this is a great example. Not sure if it’s still the same tho
Yeah after reading that I used tracker.gg to look at my match history and it seems like around 1 in 10 quick play matches were bot matches, I watched the replay of one and it was pretty obvious. No competitive matches at least
This is only the case if you’re getting stomped in quick play. Comp matches don’t have bots fortunately and I’ve had plenty of close games
Comp matches do have bots quite literally after a losing streak
Do you have a source for this? I’ve only seen and heard of bots in quick play matches
Yeah but its annoying, especially when I first tried it with a friend
Lots of games have poor matchmakers whether by malicious design or outright laziness. Over a decade ago Ubisoft specifically pattented a matchmaker learning tool that watches how long you play, how many matches you play, and how many losses you “put up with” without quitting, thereby deciding how often to sprinkle in steamroll wins. They swore it was “just to patent it and that no projects are planned to use this”, but when does the industry not lie through their teeth.
The truth of the matter is that actual good matchmaking is extremely difficult, and it only gets harder the more players you have in a match.
Shhhh, its just the lazy devs who also work super hard to make it terrible. /s
Everyone thinks their game of choice has bad match making, but it’s just salt most of the time and doesn’t pan out when actually tested and measured objectively. If match making was perfect they would win 50% of the time, but perfection is impossible because the system can only work with the players online right now. Those players aren’t equally good every day, either, nor are they equally good against all other players, or on all maps. It’s a moving target.
That doesn’t even touch on cross play, or premade teams, which further complicate it.
