Matchmaking is intercontinental, adding 130ms +
Reporting this as a bug since its borderline unplayable. Also inventory interactions are noticeably delayed.
Its understandable how there are not enough players in South America, and you'd rather provide some experience than none at all, but please do something other than making us play through the ocean cable which adds at least 130ms.
Thankfully you already offer an option for this in settings, which allows to prioritize connection speed. Setting this, results in long queues. In some cases one starts wondering if anybody else is queuing. For instance on a thursday night in South America, I could only queue Outpost between 2 and 8 minutes with premade trio. With fill in, narsh and sponsord darsh I gave up after 10m+.
I don't understand how this happens with 10k concurrent players online? In South America I assume at least 1000. That should be around 30 concurrent games, i. e. one starting every two minutes or so. Why is this not happening?
Could it be a negative selfreinforcement loop, where a large part of the local player pool is offloaded to US servers, because of the default setting, and then they are missing from local matchmaking, making it more slower for queuing players, making them also play on US servers etc. until the local pool is starving?
Or is it skill based matchmaking?
It would be great if you could do something about it, because the overseas mode is just not it. It works for Perimeter and Darsh where you can ambush and use range. For Outpost and Cryo its almost impossible to win any fight. Even Bots are just deducting HP without visibly hitting. I. e. I see a bot, gun him down before he gets to shoot me, but I still lose 20HP because I guess on the server he did shoot me.
Comments
Another proposal, having thought about the issue more deeply.
1) User selects preferred zone+gamemode like now.
2) User can optionally toggle Quickmatch
Quickmatch means: If there are not enough players for your preferred zone/gamemode you will get matched into any other one (not of your choice).
This way the
- matchmaking service can take the preferred zone as a "vote", i. e. you still match the majority according to their preference.
- Players who want only one mode/zone are not impacted by this
- It should be fairly easy to implement (UI only one new toggle, algorithm relatively straightforward)
Guys, please consider this option and discuss. You need something like this to prevent losing players at the bottom of critical mass here. I understand it makes no sense to build a big feature around this, as it will be obsolete when you have more players. Thats why I thought about a lean solution.
I considered forced rotations, prequeuing, fixed timetables - understandably all not good as they conflict with players preferences and risk losing even more. This proposal however does not impact any existing preferences. Its purely additive.
In SA the situation is dire: I talked to players from SA, its a topic now after infil. Especially on A servers, often at least one teammate is from SA.
We tried queuing together with Connection Speed opt turned on, one guy lost patience after 10m on a friday night.
Only downside of the proposal is that a loadout may not match quickmatchdd zone. This could be mitigated by allowing players to create a bigger loadout, and force them to discard excessive items back to vault after infil, before they can move. However even without this feature, I would def. take that little disadvantage or just plan for it when creating a loadout for quickmatch and be happy to JUST GET A (low latency) GAME.
An additional idea regarding quickmatch algorithm to honor player preferences more:
- If there are incomplete sets of players queueing with Quickmatch - instead of just letting the majority decide the map, randomize with frequencies. I. e. 10 players queueing Outpost, 5 Darsh, 3 Perimeter: Generate a number between 1-18. If its 1-10 all play Outpost, 11-15 Darsh, and 15-18 Perimeter. This way the less demanded maps still get played, with a rarity proportional to popular demand. It prevents the negative learning that toggling Quickmatch sends you into the same (most popular) zone all the time. I think this is important, otherwise the Quickmatch pool would quickly become homogenous (one map), as people would toggle it off to force less popular maps, defeating the features purpose.
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