/v/ - Video Games

>using "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun

It's horrible form. Also most video gamers are male, mobileshit doesn't count.

>>16828595

and neither do facebook games

>never dare play online because I'm not good enough

>get into it with babby shit like Tetris 99 and Splatoon

>can be fun

>try some other games

>any games with server browsers that are still active have nothing but dedicated 1000+ hour players who are impossible to ever kill

>next to no new games that interest me at all have server browsers

Guess I'll never experience this shit properly.

>>16828590

Online gaming in general is cancer.

>>16828745

Yes, that's why I never played online in the first place. And you try to be "good" against someone who has played every map thousands of times, knows exactly how to approach every single corner of every single hall of every single map, with every single gun and any and all team formations because they've seen it all before. No amount of "good" can prepare you for that, and that's 99% of servers in these types of games (at least when you exclude furry RP OwO servers and MLP shit)

>>16828741

>>16828614

>>16828749

> nothing but dedicated 1000+ hour players who are impossible to ever kill

These players were beginners at some points too. At least try.

>>16828749

>>16828741

This is going to be a factor in any older game. A lot of vets are willing to teach if you can find someone that isn't jaded by people that don't immediately know every aspect of the map they're on. This still requires not being an antisocial faggot and a willingness to git gud.

>>16828741

You sound like 8 year old me playing Allied Assault online.

And I was still better than the average schmuck

>>16828764

I don't want to be social and I don't want someone to "teach" me. I want to join a game where I won't be utterly shat on and learn at my own pace.

>>16828778

I wouldn't mind learning but knowing my skill level at both games and socializing, I'd probably piss everyone off. It's why I manage way better in games that don't require or rely on voice chat.

>>16828760

I have tried, and it's fun sometimes but it can certainly be discouraging to get steamrolled so hard. It sort of makes an endless cycle of me wanting to git gud, playing to git gud, getting steamrolled and not wanting to play more than a few matches per day so never actually getting good.

>>16828783

Not him but generally I get really stressed out over online multiplayer, especially the kind where I have a team of people depending on me, so while the game itself might be fun, I mostly just don't want to be a bother to people who expect and are depending on having a skilled player on their team.

>>16828783

I got bored of the "gotta be the absolute best" ways of playing games and my life got substantially less stressful. To do the same exact methods over and over ad infinitum just doesn't appeal to me anymore.

>>16828783

>So you can't have fun because someone kills you more times?

You clearly have no idea what it means to be "utterly shat on" and probably haven't played many lobby based games at all. We're basically talking infinite K/D ratios where you can't even leave spawn or whatever else it is you do in that particular game. Fighting games are another good example where you are lucky if your opponent doesn't perfect every single round. You can't have fun OR learn in that sort of environment.

>>16828817

Get good. You sound like a woman or some other mentally ill subhuman.

Isn't the real problem the centralization of server hosting? Matchmaking may be more of a symptom than the real problem. If the developer is the only party that hosts dedicated servers, or if hosting those servers requires going through their approval at some point, then you're not going to have any real server variety to begin with. Sure, maybe you get to know some regulars on Shooty West #4 if you get to pick that server each time, but server name, config, map settings, mods/custom stuff, and that kind of thing are what draw in players in the first place. I mean, the OP image really does get at the problem, I think. Maybe matchmaking was the ultimate goal that devs were pushing towards, but I think it's not in and of itself the real issue. I, for one, would much rather just have a few servers I like and drop into rather than a "friends" list of random assholes I played with once or twice. To me, ping (another thing abstracted away) and server settings are a whole lot more important than what individual people are on the server.

>>16828907

Some of my best mates IRL are from clans I did playing FPS games who happened to live near me and met during a clan meet up. You don't get this anymore.

>>16828590

>how did it come to this?

Player retention.

There's way too many videogames out there to pick from so if you're not having fun with what you have now, you can just switch to something else.

As a consequence, the entire idea of "git gud" is ridiculous nowadays for someone that just wants to have fun. Why spend 100s of hours mastering a single game when you could play 100s of different games instead? There's really no argument here in favor of sinking these many hours into a single game unless you really have limited options.

Now for singleplayer games, difficulty is easy. You just slap a Easy, Normal and Hard mode or even more if you want more options and every player picks the difficulty that gives them a good challenge that's neither too easy nor too hard. Singleplayer lets you adjust the game to your liking so you have optimal fun with it.

Multiplayer doesn't work like that. The game is as easy or as hard according to your teammates and the opposing team and you have no control over them at all, even when playing with friends.

When you take that into consideration, server browsers are utter shit for player retention because they make it far harder to pick a decent challenge (your server might be full of noobs or pros in either team) and doubly so since people will pick the more populated servers, not the ones that would be more appropriate for their skill level. In the end, the amount of fun you can have with them is decided not by you but by everyone else and that's stupid.

The common counter-argument is "just learn to play the game and stop complaining", but I'll point back to the first point. I could spend 100s of hours mastering a single game. Or I could play literally anything else in the market, including singleplayer games. Instead of having to sink several hours into the same game before I'm even capable of extracting some fun out of it, I could have been spending my leisure time playing games that are closer to my skill level with literally anything else.

A good example here would be the DMC series, where plenty of people enjoy the game even if they never play anything harder than Demon Hunter.

This is where Matchmaking enters the game. The main objective of matchmaking, MMR or any such algorithm is to balance difficulty. It's designed to pit you against players of similar skill level to your own so you have a decent but not overwhelming challenge. It's not perfect, but it gives more casual players a better chance at actually having more fun with the game right from the start by corralling the noobs together.

This helps with player retention, which the devs sorely need to keep a multiplayer game alive.

There's plenty of complaints about it since it's opaque as fuck and can be manipulated against the players (Activision had some nice ideas to help sell more shit in their cashops).

But a lot of complaints come from bad players that dislike not being able to noobstomp again or stack the server against the opposing team so they can have an easier time playing the game. In other words, players that wanted to stay on Easy Mode and are forced out of it.

The amount of retards farming MMR or using smurf accounts speaks volumes about this, which is why I always take these complaints with a heavy dose of salt. Theirs.

>>16828990

Someone more experienced with the game could correct me on this if I'm wrong, but I think Natural Selection 2 had a nice idea here to solve this issue.

The game features a sort of "matchmaking" in the form of a skill rating that every player has and it's used to balance teams to prevent stacking.

But the servers themselves are still on the hands of the community, with some official ones run by the main devs.

It basically proves that the two ideas aren't contradictory to one another and can coexist. MMR just requires that both sides play by the same rules, so it could be used even in custom maps, but it only changes in official ones (to prevent farming maps).

>>16828749

RTS communities dont do this, I've tried but if you are not doing a strict meta with near perfect strategy you will be fucking screeched out and kicked out of games for it. Supreme Commander and CoH bring the biggest example. Have this in other strategy games but not as frequently as RTS. How the fuck am I suppose to get good if I get booted from most of my games and know playing only against bots to a certain point does nothing? People wonder why RTS is dying but that is one of the reasons, a hostile community.

Please for the love a fuck let me post.

>>16829011

Pro RTS players will scout you and immediately rush you if they see you going for boom or turtle because that's the fastest strategy to win and new players don't know the game well enough to turtle against a rush and turn it around.

RTS games are worse because of expectations since currently, most new players think they are playing a strategy game when older RTS games are more akin to action games where you control a small squad of units and quick thinking + reflexes can make all the difference, the strategy involved ain't even that complex.

Someone expecting "Europa Universalis, but in real-time!" is not going to have a good time there.

>>16828995

>The main objective of matchmaking, MMR or any such algorithm is to balance difficulty.

This is absolutely fucking bullshit and you know it, most games with matchmaking don't even use a rating system based on skill, and even when they do it's nearly never accurate and incredibly easy to manipulate or disrupt. Frequently they also base their "ranks" or "rating" based on how much you play the game, not based on how good you are, further destroying any credibility the system would have.

>But a lot of complaints come from bad players that dislike not being able to noobstomp again or stack the server against the opposing team so they can have an easier time playing the game.

Except matchmaking actually enables this behavior most of the time by allowing you to invite friends into a group to stack a team in your favor rather than forcing a group of friends to be split onto both teams when they join the server like everybody else.

>There's really no argument here in favor of sinking these many hours into a single game unless you really have limited options.

<"wow dude what do you mean you like a specific game and its mechanics? why would you ever actually like something and not just play whatever is newly released and popular? don't you want to spend large amounts of money on games you'll barely play?"

<"It's totally impossible to have fun with a game unless you master it! No really! Why bother improving or learning?"

Not to mention you're arguing devs do this for "player retention" while simultaneously claiming nobody is willing to play a game for more than a few hours.

>server browsers are utter shit for player retention because they make it far harder to pick a decent challenge (your server might be full of noobs or pros in either team) and doubly so since people will pick the more populated servers, not the ones that would be more appropriate for their skill level. In the end, the amount of fun you can have with them is decided not by you but by everyone else and that's stupid.

Nigger you've got it completely fucking wrong again how are you so fucking stupid? Matchmaking gives you zero choice, ensuring that you will only ever play on whatever the game sorts you on to, while server browsers give you the freedom to pick and choose, join a game and you're getting fucked? Just find a new server.

Just because you're too fucking retarded to play video games or work a server browser and your attention span is too short to learn and improve doesn't mean matchmaking is a good system.

>>16828783

I still remember that fated day, when I killed the most skilled player in the Cyber Cafe, and he fucking was with his signature weapon, the AWP.

We were playing dust2 1.6 and he was at A, i pop out of long with an AK and fucking blow his brains out. It was a 1v1 too. Jesus, that rush was amazing

>>16829040

>game finally clicks in

>beat someone better than you

>keep beating them into submission

>he's no longer better than you

>>16829031

Also there's barely a reason for things to be this way, most games have the tools available for userhosting.

Shit, I think steam now even lets you use their master server to just have online multiplayer.

>>16829056

>There's no reason

Microtransactions and Esports

>>16829001

I used to play NS2. It's actually one of the best examples of a game that desperately needs matchmaking instead of a server browser. I don't know how things have changed in recent years, but that MMR system was barely ever used for that purpose. It was only ever used to balance teams with the addition of certain rarely used server mods.

But yeah playing against even one pro, even after spending nearly a thousand hours in the game myself, basically rendered you completely unable to play the game. If you were lucky they'd spawnkill and end it quickly, otherwise you get to wait 20+ minutes for them to build up tech while you couldn't do anything at all. I guarantee if the game had had matchmaking to keep that kind of shit out of the average player's game, the game would have had 10 times the playerbase/player retention it did back then.

>>16829081

And of course with only like 2 playable servers at any given time, if that, it's not like you can just go to a different server if things get shitty. Even if there were another server to go to though, that kind of server browser does NOT cause people of similar skill to congregate together in one server. People join whatever the fuck server is available, which means the pros are just spread out on all of them.

You can shit on Dota 2 all you want, but if there's one thing it does right, it's this. There's a "Play Dota" button that puts you in a queue for either casual, matchmaking or several other modes. You can also manually search for a user lobby or make your own game, be it normal Dota or Naruto vs One Piece Unlimited.

>>16828741

I had that happen to me on xbconnect in Halo 1 & 2 on it, but only on the team deathmatch and CTF games. FFA, nobody gave a shit, then I came to my senses because using a controller for a FPS sucks balls (I still have my original xbox, it was the last generation of consoles I gave a shit about).

>>16829081

I think the issue isn't what you said, it's just the gameplay itself is niche. How many games have hybrid strategy/FPS in them and are wildly popular? Very few. You need someone willing to be the commander, willing to take criticism (rightfully or wrongfully) for their decisions, and to have a modicum of skill. Players need to obey the commander, too, and have some skill. It's a more difficult genre. The devs didn't help with their retardation and near abandonment of it. Lack of matchmaking didn't kill that game.

"Z-FPS" is another practically dead genre, despite Starsiege: Tribes and Tribes 2 being free with community servers available. They're also more difficult for most noobs, considering there are vehicles, everyone has a jetpack, and skiing is a thing (unofficially in Starsiege: Tribes, officially in 2).

>>16828812

>>16828784

disable voice and play as you want. unless it's a "competitive" queue no one should give a shit. worst thing they'll send you angry mails if you play on console and have it enabled.

there's also the other side of the coin of playing miles ahead of your teammates but you still lose since they're retarded mouthbreathers. one of the reasons I can't play battlefield anymore when people can't even read a fucking map or their idea of defense is run&gun into the attackers spawn like lemmings.

>>16828907

>Rare to see clans nowadays.

people socialize less with social media and all the other shit around. however matchmaking works completely against building a community. all it does is throw you into a pool with randoms you might see for a single match and then never again. sure, you can add them to the friendslist and shit (although some games make even that a fucking pain in the ass where you have to manually add their playername, if you can even remember it) and not everybody wants to fill his friendslist with loads of random people.

we're at a point where fucking discord does more for building a community does than the game itself.

how fucking hard can it be to put in lobbies so people can form their own groups and can get to know each other? especially when everything's online based on accounts anyway?

ironically that's what killed a lot of small games outright, queue takes ages and you can't even set up a match or set up teams yourself to even it out a bit.

>>16828995

>Why spend 100s of hours mastering a single game when you could play 100s of different games instead?

Because you wrongly and dishonestly assume that every one of that 100 games is of equally high quality and equally fun to play.

>There's really no argument here in favor of sinking these many hours into a single game unless you really have limited options.

Good gameplay is one argument that trumps them all. And options are always limited - either by your time or your money you can spend on gaming. Playing MP games usually involves being forced to buy the game. The entirety of your argument is based on a false premise that all games are created equal.

>Surely modern matchmaking is a cancer upon this world

Wrong: modern matchmaking is a symptom of modern game design and more in general the current state of the vidya industry, and it's popular because it minimizes the damage caused by those aforementioned cancers.

Attempting to fix the issue by changing the matchmaking isn't going to work: letting players make their own servers is only going to highlight how the game is unolayable without the centralized master server, how gameplay customization is limited to nonexistent, and how the game itself degenerates into one-sided steamrolls the moment it can't rely on the matchmaking to provide teams of similar skill.

Then you have the blackpill, courtesy of >>16828995: how many good multiplayer games you used to play died? All of them? 90% of them?

Matchmaking is a matter of survival: in a market segment in which your game's success is completely reliant on mass player partecipation and most titles (even f2p!) )flop completely, you can't afford to make said partecipation any harder than it needs to be.

>>16828595

Gender neutral they is completely standard English and has been used for centuries in the context of indeterminate gender. You use it specifically when the gender of a person can not be determined, as it was in OP's picture. You do NOT use it when the person in question is known.

Example:

>My compliments to the chef, tell them they did a very good job with my steak.

>acceptable, common usage

>My buddy Ryan makes great steaks, you should come to their cookout sometime!

>weird, nuspeak tumblr thing

>>16829494

>for centuries

I doubt that. In most cases male is used as default.

>>16828994

>>16829221

Will there ever be a return to clan culture? Doubt Discord can truly replace them, so I fear they'll die out and be gone forever.

>>16829507

Since the 14th century, apparently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Usage

I know Wikipedia is not a source in and of itself, but unfortunately, the sources they link are books, and thus hard to link on their own. It's had varying degrees of acceptance through the times, but people have indeed been using it for centuries.

>>16829494

>You use it specifically when the gender of a person can not be determined, as it was in OP's picture.

But we know the sex in quest. Male.

>>16829507

Male as default is a romance language thing, though singular they is more to do with someone looking too androgynous for the speaker to identify.

Bonus, "personal pronouns" are Objectively incorrect specifically in English because the usage of gendered identifiers is a reflection of the observer's perspective, not the subject's.

>>16828595

You're jumping at shadows, anon.

>>16828590

>Does having a singular "Play" button really attract more players that were previously too lazy to scroll through a server list?

No. Publishers want more control, and allowing users to host their own servers gives away a huge amount of control. If you run all the servers, you can sell microtransactions that work throughout the game, you can force a progression system on players to keep them playing, and when it comes time to release a sequel, you can shut the game down so it doesn't compete with the new one.

>>16828619

Server browsers simply need to be updated a little bit. Just needs modern conveniences normalfags like such as tag based searching and friendlier presentation.

If you're not into computers, that server browser you got there is a nightmare. Valve was on the right track by having a simplified browser and an advanced browser.

>>16829507

Male is default in French, at least. Even if recently people have been trying to push for the opposite…

In the case of TF2 I find myself being a combination of all four of those gamers in any given server, I can switch from sandwich heavy to tryhard sniper to casual pyro in the span of a few minutes. Also I've never really enjoyed costume servers/gamemodes, they just feel really rocky and unfinished and I never know what the fuck is going on. I've always been a vanilla player, just give me the base game and maybe a few custom addons and I'll be happy.

Considered making my own thread for this but figured it belongs here instead

Putting everyone in OP's pic is like mixing together nitroglycerin, it doesn't take much for everyone to fucking explode on each other. In games with one-click matchmaking and no server filtering, someone is always going to get mad at someone else for some bullshit reason, and it all spirals out from there.

>L4D2 (infamously bad playerbase)

>joining games the normal way doesn't filter for custom servers, so you could be joining a vanilla 4v4 versus server, some modded to hell and back custom game, or one of those hentai rape or lewd4dead servers (yes that's what they're actually called) where it's everyone-vs-bots servers and infected are beefed up beyond belief

>can only access the server browser using an addon

>prefer to play on official dedicated because i'm vanilla and don't take the game too seriously

>playing 4v4 versus

>other team is curbstomping us

>normally this wouldn't bother me but their whole team is hyperautistic tryhards, headshot everything, bhop scripts, obviously play competitive daily, no fun at all

>call them tryhard niggerfaggots

>they IMMEDIATELY respond with a wave of chat binds calling me toxic/racist/homophobic and that I'm added to the shitlist

<the what now

https://l4d2.website/shitlist/#

>there's a whole website dedicated to tracking down players they deem bad so everyone can SteamID block them or immediately kick them when joining a game without even thinking twice

>only way to get removed if you're on it is to appeal in their discuck soyver which will most likely just get you laughed at

there's players regulating themselves but then there's this level of autism where the very thought of playing with someone that someone else said was bad/got mad at a game is unthinkable. these people also refuse to take 3 seconds of their time to teach new players how to play the game and just votekick them instead, because god forbid they play something besides campaign for once

i just wanted to play vidya gaems

>>16829592

it's a problem when the games are bad in a competitive setting, just about every new "competitive" fps is total trash.

>>16838085

Stupid as it sounds, that whole website has less than 50 people listed and I'll bet even fewer people use it. Then again L4D2 probably doesn't have 100 players these days.

Honestly it's fine for 1v1 especially. You know, for chess and starcraft and whatever. If it works properly then it's great. Of course there should be an alternative to arrange games yourself but an automated matchmaking combined with some sort of an ELO system is nice.

Matchmaking in team games is trash though. Not because it can't work on paper, but because the game devs are a bunch of homos. The "rubberband" matchmaking that tries to force 50% win ratio on everyone is the absolute worst thing in team games. It inevitably leads to a situation in which a player on a win streak gets allied with a team of noobs to play against a team of competent players who just happen to be on a lose streak because the matchmaking keeps giving them noob allies to drag their win ratio closer to 50%, so the win streak guy basically can't lose. Until of course he has lost enough games in a row to drag his win ratio down enough that the matchmaking stops giving him noobs as allies. It leads to the most toxic community where everyone's angry and for a good reason, and the only people who seem to enjoy it are the griefers. Even completely random teams are usually better balanced than these affirmative action teams. That's when the matchmaking is cancer.

Giving players server ownership means you can't control every second of the experience, missing out on valuable lootbox opportunities :^)

>>16829594

>xbox 360 ended LAN

LOL

>>16838133

>xbox 360 ended LAN

The post never said that if you actually read it the cap is pretty much saying how onlineplay beyond LAN fucked shit up and while I don't fully agree with it all the cap raises good points.

>>16838132

50% win rate is just a natural consequence of GOOD matchmaking, if you aren't either the best or the worst player in the game. Basically win more>rank goes up>opponents get harder>win less. The only time you should see a non-50% win/loss is when you are just starting out so you have to go through a lot of either wins or losses to level out.

>>16838136

What you're saying is very much true in 1v1. However, in team games it just doesn't work that way. Not necessarily anyway. There are griefers, people who play with touchpad, new players etc. Now imagine it's RTS game. You get matched with an ally that tries to teamkill. Your other allies see this and just leaves the game. It's pretty much an unwinnable situation, unless something even worse is happening to the enemy which of course is a possibility with a toxic matchmaking like this.

Griefers have a low win ratio. Good players have high win ratio. Affirmative action sees this and matches them together in an attempt to boost the griefer's score while trying to lower the score of the good player. The good player ends up in games that he just can't win. Simple as that. That's the type of rubberband matchmaking I'm talking about. If there's some sort of league blocks or whatever on top of that which would prevent noobs and griefers from matching with high ranking players, then it's no longer the type of shitty matchmaking I'm talking about.

>>16838147

It's not trying to pull you down or them up, it's trying to create a team that averages out to match the enemy team. If you have a griefer, odds are so do they, because that's the most likely way they managed to even out.

Matchmaking also usually tries to match players of similar rank on the same team, so if your team has a griefer you have to realize that he got that rank somehow. At some point he must have not been greifing in order to win enough to get up to your rank, and there's literally no way for the matchmaking to know when he will or won't. In fact if he's at your rank and griefs regularly that must mean that when he actually plays seriously, he's probably a lot better than you. Could be he was just carried but that's even harder to do.

>>16838151

>Matchmaking also usually tries to match players of similar rank on the same team

In that case it's not the type of matchmaking I was talking about. I'm mostly talking about Warcraft III matchmaking (before Reforged). There were people who had like 80% winrate in 1v1 but when they played 4v4 it was close to 50%. It was so horrible that basically half of the games you played lasted less than a couple of minutes because either everyone in your team just left or everyone in the opponent's team just left. Teamkillers, afk bots etc.

And of course in Warcraft III it wasn't always that bad. Like you said, it used to match teams more according to the rank. However, there was a problem that if you won too many times in a row the matchmaking broke and you were not able to find any games even after an hour of waiting. So the matchmaking algorithm was changed like a year or two ago in a way that allowed you to find games fast but at the expense of the game quality.

>>16838188

That chart brought back a lot of memories. But something about the upper-right of it feels a little off. I think the underlying problem with FPS games has more to do with everyone wanting to have loot/RPG mechanics, "pro competitive" type gameplay, or character action in their multiplayer FPS. The ones that don't are Desert Solider Shooter clones. There's no real desire for a regular old arena shooter because the next generation of FPS gamers never played an FPS game with a deathmatch mode or, and probably more importantly, a mod scene. There's literally never going to be a Team Fortnite TC, or a Counterstrike for Overwatch. You can't even conceive of such things. The last game where that was even a possibility was Half Life 2–and even THEN it was pretty remote. FPS are too centrally controlled nowadays to allow players the freedom of creativity that inspired FPS to develop into genre that it was before we entered the centralization era. It's possible we might make it back into the days when dedicated servers were a thing, but basically the entire structure of FPS gaming as it exists will need to fall apart before it happens. The fact that there's a structure to it at all is a huge part of the problem, because newer FPS players are just going to expect that structure to be there. If the next Quake from some new iD were to come along, I don't even know how they'd respond to it.

>>16838147

>There are griefers, people who play with touchpad, new players etc.

If matchmaking is decent, those will not end up on your team more often than they end up on the enemy team: again, statistically things will average out to 50/50

>Affirmative action sees this and matches them together in an attempt to boost the griefer's score while trying to lower the score of the good player.

You don't understand how matchmaking works, do you?

What you're describing not only is the opposite of how matchmaking is expected to work in practice (good players get matched with good players to avoid stomping newbs, otherwise newbs stop playing your game), it's even self-contradictory: putting a griefer in a high skill match is going to result in the griefer losing most of those games, thus lowering his win rate (and any sensible "score" related to his performance) far below normal values, and at the same time it would artificially inflate the win rates of the good players on the other team, so the system would spiral out of control instead of eventually stabilizing.

>>16838372

Every matchmaking system works exactly like this.

What are we trying to balance? Win ratios.

You got four players waiting for a match.

Two regular goobers (50% wins), a demigod (99%, the first loss is free so they don't divide by 0), and the 0% griefer.

Matchmaking pairs them up because they average out at 50% and 49.5%.

Maybe your pea-brain is hampered up on how to avoid a 25% versus 74.5% scenario.

Even games at the peak of their player base with millions of concurrent users will have pairings like this.

The matchmaking ensures that over 99% of a players time is spent playing the game instead of waiting in lobby.

With a million players these system will frequently have less than a thousand players to match together.

Slap on a bellcurve and the people at the ends get some shitty matches.

Sure there's much more to a player than his win ratio.

Leave rate, weapon choices, geolocation, hell even how close he stays to his team are just a few things they can datamine and use to create more balanced teams.

>>16838641

Your stupid toy scenario falls apart the moment you have 8 regular players, 4 pros, and 4 griefers, all it takes is 4 games worth of players looking for a match and even your retarded "just get 50 at all costs, bro" algorythm starts functioning properly.

Each end of the bell curve is matched with itself, contrived scenarios in which your game does not have enough players to put together 4 matches are laughable, and it's abundantly clear that you either don't know what you're talking about or want excuses as to why you always match with other bad players.

I bet it's the second, since you say dumb shit like

>Sure there's much more to a player than his win ratio.

>>16829081

>ns2

>playing against even one pro, even after spending nearly a thousand hours in the game myself, basically rendered you completely unable to play the game

I can't recall the guys name, but I remember how this one dude always showed up and curb stomped the shit out of any server he was in. Naturally people started to clear out and populate other servers. Funny enough though, he would eventually follow to whatever new server was populated and repeat this process multiple times. It would get to the point, where I noticed several people quit the moment he joins. I always wondered if he knew people were actively avoiding him.

>>16838695

>curbstomping doesn't exist in matchmaking

My sweet summer child.

>>16828749

>>16829011

>>16829017

This is honestly why I didn't get into old school online RTS'. I didn't play them when they where emerging, and now that all the worthwhile ones playing are decades old everything is figured out. The only thing to learn is shit people discovered already. It's not even like playing a game so much as trying to out memorize the strategies better than everyone.

>>16838701

If you where older you'd know it's not even close to how it was back in the day. In the old days every game there would always be 1-3 players at the top of the scoreboard carrying like crazy and no one was even close. You didn't even need to look up strategies and shit online, because the esports meme didn't take off yet. You got there by just naturally being better than all the other players. Now with match making if you stomp that often you'll eventually get matched with players who spend all day watching pros on youtube and memorizing the meta. If there is a stomp it's usually because one dude wanted to break the meta and completely failed at it or is trying something they aren't use to.

As team sizes go up, an individual player's responsibility for his win/loss ratio goes down. So you almost can't talk intelligently on this subject unless you specify if you're dealing with small-team games like RTS or large-team games like most FPS. Matchmaking is also one of those things that sounds perfectly common sense, but needs to be demonstrated as actually providing better outcomes than the alternatives. It's also not obvious in a large-teams game what is the best metric(s) for ensuring good matches. Balanced teams, after all, are not the end-goal. And then, how does one matchmake away bad behavior like griefing and disconnecting? If someone decides to grief, there is no matchup that will stop them. If a player griefs only when they have a bad match, there's no way to predict that behavior ahead of time aside from relying on player reports, and that player will still behave badly when they get what they think are bad matches.

>>16838715

>Now with match making if you stomp that often you'll eventually get matched with players who spend all day watching pros on youtube and memorizing the meta. If there is a stomp it's usually because one dude wanted to break the meta and completely failed at it or is trying something they aren't use to.

back on the olden days you had lobbies and the playerbase was smaller, so there's a good chance you knew who you were playing against/with, which was an automatic deterrent to behaving like a cunt.

there was also no retarded progression shit tacked on so most people played for fun, not to grind wins for dailies or MUH RANK.

>>16828590

>Surely modern matchmaking is a cancer upon this world, but how did it come to this? Does having a singular "Play" button really attract more players that were previously too lazy to scroll through a server list?

If you want my anecdote, I played AFPS and 90s styled first person shooters that didn't have matchmaking and only had a server list. Eventually, you had complaints from all over the web like forums, YouTube comments, that only "pro's" play the game anymore and all the new players, casuals, other players that can't find skill matched opponents get crushed. I have thread archives of AFPS general back in 2016 where even anons on /v/ complain about this.

Naturally, the solution for games of the next generation was to have matchmaking to either help balance the teams or arrange matches for evenly skilled players, but I'm not saying that the implementation is necessarily a good idea.

>>16828590

>>16843599

About pic, here is probably what happens after a year or two:

>hardcore gamer(s) still plays and form a (semi-)competitive scene on the forums that persists to this day

>there may be a lot of them, but if there aren't, then they generally play most often

>almost everyone else moves onto another game

>you might find a few stoner gamers and wacky gamers on a random server during the weekend as their home server shutdown from inactivity

>>16843599

What you're suggesting isn't really a flaw of a server list, what you're saying is the issue of a cripplingly dead game.

>>16843612

Does any game really live forever though? After one or two years, people generally move on to the new thing.

>>16843618

Tons of games do, hell even Quake 3 even how fucking crusty and ancient it is can be fun to fire up a server and fill it up with people.

You just simply aren't going to have fun flopping into a server populated by people that have ceased to meaningfully be human with the degree of auto pilot they run on camping spawns and items (who likely aren't even having fun themselves and only continue out of a weird sense of identity they've ingrained in themselves).

>>16843622

Quake 3 was precisely the game that people, including anons, complained was too full of veterans that crush new players.

>>16843624

No shit, dumb dumb, that's why you don't play on an established quake 3 server.

>>16843627

Except people who just downloaded the game and open up the server list to virtually anything aren't going to know the idiosyncrasies of the playing scene. Additionally, the genre is dead by most anons' standards.

>>16843633

Make Server

Make Thread

Post Server

I'm pretty sure I remember that thread, and the issue was the OP had the MONUMENTALLY RETARDED idea to casually waltz into an already populated server and try to invite people to go with them.

>>16843638

That's not a live playing scene means to the general gamer. That's just making a server for /v/.

>>16843643

well then shit for brains if you got such an issue with it, find a thousand odd people to actually fill up some quake 3 servers. Otherwise deal with the concept that the game's scene is fucking dead.

>>16843651

1. I don't play Quake 3. This was an example that you have brought up as an old game with a playerbase, which now you say it's dead.

2. My point was that a game's playerbase ages in a way that starts to necessitate some form of skill matching, and the implementation in modern games is matchmaking.

>>16843647

Did you seriously put a BTC address in hopes to get free BTC, on an image that someone else may have drawn?

>>16843656

Nigger a 4 hour queue is not going to solve Quake 3's issue of the only people willing to regularly populate a server being 100k hour autists that stopped actually having fun a decade ago.

>>16843662

Nigger. Read. I said skill matching. I didn't say matchmaking was a good solution nor was it going to solve a game I don't play's problems.

>>16843664

Skill matching doesn't help either.

Or does the fact that most of the games these days having oodles of people bloating the playercount with multiple accounts just to not have to deal with "skill matching" systems and their related bullshit.

DOTA 2 lopped off FOURTY THOUSAND ACCOUNTS, even if you're generously assuming each account could have been broken down to people with 3 extra accounts each, you're looking at ten thousand people knocked out of the player pool because your retarded ass thought you could solve the skill gap by making it a feature.

>>16843671

4/biz/ or general cuckchanners like to put their BTC address on random lewds or porn in hopes they'll get donations or free BTC even though they're not the ones who drew the image. It happens more often when bitcoin's market price rises.

>>16843687

Works on my computer(tm) if you want it scrubbed off.

>>16843698

>gimp

nice

>>16843647

I dunno if the mouth or the hands ruin the image more. That's really a new one for me.

>>16843673

>people bloating the playercount with multiple accounts just to not have to deal with "skill matching" systems and their related bullshit.

That's smurfing, which is a form of cheating, and it is punished as it should be.

People will always try to game the system, one of the few great parts of skill based matchmaking is how it makes everyone hate those cheaters as they have to throw games on purpose to manipulate their ranking.

>>16844513

All those problems can be fixed by finding a new server, and there are plenty of them when players can host their own servers, which often have their own plugins and tools for progression and shit.

You can have vanilla servers which rotate official maps based on gametype, or you can find a community server that does one map 24/7 for fucking around as a community.

Player run dedicated servers are more like internet treehouses where you can go and hang out with friends and play games.

>>16844535

Some community servers do all the cancer you say doesn't happen, especially clan servers which will kick non-members to make room for clan members.

>>16844539

Worst of what I've experienced was being asked to leave because the clan wanted to use their server for a training match.

>>16829507

This.

>>16829557

Bullshit. Maybe it appears in some fucking bibles or whatever but those talmudic sandnigger translations have shitty wording in every fucking language in existence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English#Pronouns

Do you see "they" in singular pronouns? In old norse it's also plural only. He is the default if the unknown person is not known to be a woman across all languages in Europe. In German you also have "man" which is used in recipes like in English "one" or "man" which was used in English like that too. It's derived from "Mann" meaning a man. Also in German and Danish and a lot of other Languages you have a lot of professions ending in -mann which are adjusted to -frau (woman) and in their made up "gender-neutral language" you now have to write "Kaufmann- oder -frau" instead of just Kaufmann or in the worst case "Kaufkraft (m/w/d)" because two genders???????? You transphobic fuck!!!!!!!!!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they#Usage

>Singular they has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error.

These people are right. Maybe you should have listened to them instead of denouncing them.

>>16829674

>Bonus, "personal pronouns" are Objectively incorrect specifically in English because the usage of gendered identifiers is a reflection of the observer's perspective, not the subject's.

You can see whether someone is a man or a woman. No one can change that.

>>16836445

>Even if recently people have been trying to push for the opposite…

So you gay frogs are trying to make female the default gender? Sounds pretty retarded imao.

Isn't that confusing af when you read "she" and you assume it's a woman and they meant it as "he" in the sense of "one"?

>>16829494

Or:

>My compliments to the chef, tell them he did a very good job with my steak.

U MAD NOW?

·>>16844797

>yeah you can make the assumption

I'm not making an assumption by using the generic Maskulinum, nigger.

>Nigger did you not even read what I said?

If you are 2cbe24. Was it supposed to be about weird Frenchfag grammar or something niggerish like it?

>>16844809

>My compliments to the chef. Tell them him, he did a very good job with my steak.

Oh fug, I overlooked that

>>16844771

>You can see whether someone is a man or a woman. No one can change that.

That's literally what he said you dumb nigger.

>>16844809

No, you illiterate shithead, the issue is you trying to impose linguistic rules from another language into english, without actually thinking about what you are doing, fuck you almost made a point when referring to the modular form of "tradesmen" but you cocked it up with retarded hypersensitivity to not explicitly saying he or she.

If you don't know what someone is in english, "they" can be used as a generic alternative. That's not suggesting that it's a legitimate alternative when an observation is made that would lead you into having an actually understanding the subject you are addressing, because as stated earlier. That's incorrect.

>>16844820

see >>16844809

I didn't get what he was referring too.

The english personal pronouns are the same as in a lot of other Germanic languages that way.

You could also say the Italic languages are wrong.

>>16844822

>"they" can be used as a generic alternative.

And as I stated earlier it's only used for plural and sounding retarded.

>That's not suggesting that it's a legitimate alternative when

No, it's never. It's just plain wrong. One person can not be "they", just like multiple can't be "he".

>>16844831

You don't know english as well as you think you do.

>>16844834

Thou should learn thy language better. You is plural ;)

How can one think Middle English proves they to be singular?

*proved

>>16844838

Thou is archaic.

They is both a plural and indefinite pronoun.

You are still an idiot.

>>16844858

>homosexual

>using kike language

FAGGOT

>Ought you both to seal thine mouths?

Thou mean "your mouths"?

>>16844846

>plural and indefinite pronoun.

Yeah. It is indeed an indefinite plural pronoun.

>>16844875

Pluralities are necessarily indefinite.

>>16844885

>Have thou everst decided what thou art what look as to?

I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

>>16844611

>Play with the autistic retards which are notorious for exploiting the (automated)reporting system to avoid losing rank

Why are you even complaining about matchmaking then?

You have a far larger problem being actively exploited, shouldn't you be mad at that instead?

>Make another account so you don't have to deal with the faggotry at that particular level

Right, you're not complaining about the actual big problem because you're a tard.

A new account will end up in the same level of the old one, report spam is a problem regardless of rank, and to top it all off your new account will be matched poorly so you'll have curbstomp matches until you get back to the rank you were trying to avoid.

>>16844913

>getting filtered this hard

>>16844632

>Worst of what I've experienced was being asked to leave because the clan wanted to use their server for a training match.

well, they usually pay for it, so…

>>16844539

> and there are plenty of them when players can host their own servers

Not that easy when you need expensive server hardware on a high bandwidth datacenter line to not cause everyone to lag like shit and run the game at an acceptable tickrate. Even if you have all that, a server is worthless if there's no one playing it, and non-matchmaking games can't retain enough players to fill more than a few servers at a time. Any kind of bad situation instead drives players to just quit because there's no where else to go.

>>16828619

>If you want players to lose roughly 40 - 50%

DINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDING

>U WANT PROGRESSION

>U BUY THING NOW

MMR and the various ranking systems are bullshit because of this.

Imagine being decent at a game and have almost an entire team of decent people, but then "matchmaking" puts someone who's complete shit to "balance" things out.

Meanwhile the other team is mediocre at everything, but because they have no weak link, they are able to feed off your shitter.

This breeds niggers who can't run complex plays and shifts the core game mechanics into who can nuke the hardest, the fastest.

If I lose in a matchmaking game, it's not because of my lack of skill or my choices, it's always the black box algorithm behind the scenes. And it's frustrating. It's especially frustrating if you do extremely well, then "matchmaking" forces you into a string of loses to balance your ranking.

If I lose in a game of my choice, it's because of my choices. It's far less frustrating to lose, and can be hilarious at times.

Now couple in mass censorship and liberal banning whenever you call out shit on your team and you have a real clusterfuck of why am I even playing this shit to begin with.

>>16845645

>Not that easy when you need expensive server hardware on a high bandwidth datacenter line to not cause everyone to lag like shit and run the game at an acceptable tickrate.

Dude most games can be hosted just fine off of a consumer level pc.

What you're suggesting is like, hosting a 100 man server, which, isn't normal operating circumstances for most cases.

>>16845647

It's funny how everyone in this thread has their own idea of what game genre matchmaking is bad for. So far, I've been assuming FPS, and I've seen at least one arguer assuming RTS. This anon seems to be talking about dota or some shit.

>>16845690

Matchmaking is shit for essentially every genre over user choice.

>>16845716

I'm not disagreeing at all. It's just interesting to read the complaints each person has about matchmaking and try to deduce what genre of games they play that matchmaking has fucked up. A person would think that everyone could better air their grievances if they were all talking in the same terms. It's not fatal.

>>16828619

Even in libre, open source games matchmaking is kind of terrible, i.e ignoring microtransactions and lootshit. For teams you get the shit experience of not properly coordinating with your teammates, while it was slightly more tolerable for 1v1s.

Mind that I don't think the main metric of matchmaking, win rate, being a good metric of player skill. It might be more rational to assess whether two players are on par by how they trade damage with one another, the resources, they accrue, etc.

>>16845716

Is it that bad for a 1v1 game though. One where you can actually use an ELO system and just match people with similar numbers

>>16850659

That may be the one situation where it'd be preferable, but even then there could be a list where you could choose an opponent

>>16850659

It's certainly an easier problem in that case, because then (I assume) you also know that the player's rank is from 1v1 games with other players. That's critical, because it means your metrics are simpler to design and therefore more likely to be representative of how well a player actually plays.

>>16845488

>Just skip the ranks bro

Nigger that isn't how it worke