As a player, I’d like more information to make a decision about whether I want to queue up for a match or abandon my search for a match. Living in the USA, and having USA as my preferred region, if I’m put into a PVP match on a Russian server, I have ~300 ping which means one of two things will happen 100% of the time:
I will be useless to my team and have a miserable experience
I will abandon the match immediately, which just sucks for everyone
Ideas:
Show players the probability of getting matched to each server location along with their estimated ping per server. All of this should be calculable using historical time of day and day of week data.
Show players in queue when the matchmaker has “given up” on looking for a game on their preferred server, providing them a chance to exit the queue if they don’t want to play with absurd ping
When a match is found, show the server location of the match with options (A) Join Match, and (B) Do Not Join Match. If neither option is selected within 10 seconds, the player returns to queue
I want to be very clear on this. I love this game, and I understand that there’s no easy way to simultaneously reduce queue times and the probability of getting matched on a bad server. But what I cannot stand is that I have no power to make an informed decision about this for myself – about whether I want to trade lower queue times for lower ping or vice versa. _ The player _ should be the one making that choice, not some invisible system that makes zero adjustment for human preference. Feeling like you have no control is a poor experience in any video game, but it’s particularly bad in a game whose whole appeal is built around giving complete control to the player in every other aspect.
just restart the queue after ~1 minute. Preferred server gets you in preferred server queue for some time (it was 2 minutes, I think it’s shorter now) then puts you into the global queue.
just restart the queue after ~1 minute. Preferred server gets you in preferred server queue for some time (it was 2 minutes, I think it’s shorter now) then puts you into the global queue.
Can anyone confirm that it is actually 1 minute now? I still think it would be nice to have an indication in the UI of when this “switch to global queue” happens, especially if devs are going to change this threshold again in the future. I want to say I’ve gotten matched to a Russian server in less than 1 minute, although I could be misremembering.
A reference of the optimal times to queue up to would still be helpful. OR you could even have like weekly region-specific PVP events with rewards, so players in those regions can play for an hour or two without having to worry about servers. E.g. Saturday 2-4pm US central time, 50% more experience and credits for pilots who play PVP with USA as their preferred region. Do the same thing for Europe, Russia, South Asia at a time you think will generate the most traffic for those timezones. And since times/servers are planned in advance, your team would be able to coordinate with server hosts to make preparations for the increased traffic.
Made the mistake of thinking today would be fine because it’s a Saturday afternoon. Nope. Put me in a game on a Russian server with 647 ping. Constant rubberbanding and couldn’t steer my ship.
Made the mistake of thinking today would be fine because it’s a Saturday afternoon. Nope. Put me in a game on a Russian server with 647 ping. Constant rubberbanding and couldn’t steer my ship.
On 9/17/2019 at 11:33 AM, blackd0ve said:
It just threw in a game on a Russian server after 24s of queue time. If there is a strict time limit anymore, it’s very short.
Damn, same for me. Almost every time, Russian gives me a ping of 400ms or 500ms, which makes it literally impossible to deal with faster and better players… and the fact that this game was made in Russia - so most of the game’s players ARE Russian - doesn’t help, period. Closest server to me is South Asia, and I bet $10 that something like 0.2% (if I’m lucky) of my battles take place there, and even then, it’s only a 1v1 (human; the rest of the team(s) are bots). Would help if the game had more… flexible and/or specific options for server Matchmaking.
PS: Or maybe just port the entire game over to Amazon Gamelift. I can sure do with 52ms global median latency!
