Competitive Matchmaking in dire need of improvement

@ctbear1996 said in Competitive Matchmaking in dire need of improvement:

@snuffeldjuret Well, some people find it's fun to play 5v5 without fire support, but the majority is not, that's why it has a low player base.

If you reply to me, why not actually address what I wrote?

@snuffeldjuret "This is about player retention. How do you get people to keep playing the game? Those who really enjoy coop and versus want to keep playing if those modes are great, do they need a competitive mode catered to them? But what about those of us who get bored by coop and versus too quickly? What can NWI do to retain us?"
Competitive in INSS will never become as popular as other twitch shooters because the game is never meant to be a competitive shooter unless you tweak every little thing to be casualized like R6S or PUBG did, then you will attract more players.

@ctbear1996 said in Competitive Matchmaking in dire need of improvement:

@snuffeldjuret Well, some people find it's fun to play 5v5 without fire support, but the majority is not, that's why it has a low player base.

Fire support was never in INS2. It was in DOI but it was used by half the time. This is not a valid argument as to why there is no one in competitive. I can give you real reasons.

  1. There will ALWAYS be more casual players than competitive, ALWAYS.
  2. The comp queue is bugged
  3. Ranks are being reset
  4. You get much less XP and Mikeebucks in comp (this needs to be fixed to make it equal to how much you earn in casual games).
  5. Firefight is not an easy mode for casual gamers to understand right away

#1 cannot be addressed
#2, #4 and #5 can be addressed
#3 We just have to wait

I asked you what you would do to make competitive more appealing and you went on to discuss why competitive shouldn't get special treatment.

Whether you like competitive or not doesn't matter. There is matchmaking in the game. This shows that NWI wants there to be a competitive scene. So I think the discussion at hand should be how do we get more people into competitive.

@ctbear1996 said in Competitive Matchmaking in dire need of improvement:

@snuffeldjuret "This is about player retention. How do you get people to keep playing the game? Those who really enjoy coop and versus want to keep playing if those modes are great, do they need a competitive mode catered to them? But what about those of us who get bored by coop and versus too quickly? What can NWI do to retain us?"
Competitive in INSS will never become as popular as other twitch shooters because the game is never meant to be a competitive shooter unless you tweak every little thing to be casualized like R6S or PUBG did, then you will attract more players.

Whether or not insurgency is meant to be a competitive shooter is irrelevant. Pretty much everything can be done competitively, even if it isn't the main purpose. What you have to look at is strictly what is beneficial to the game and not.

I am not talking about making competitive as popular as CSGO or sandstorm coop/versus. To address what I wrote, you need to try to understand what I wrote. Otherwise I honestly don't know why you are replying to me. My question is "What benefits can a competitive mode in sandstorm have?" and "How can we maximize that benefit?"

@ctbear1996 said in Competitive Matchmaking in dire need of improvement:

Competitive in INSS will never become as popular as other twitch shooters because the game is never meant to be a competitive shooter unless you tweak every little thing to be casualized like R6S or PUBG did, then you will attract more players.

I am confused now...

Insurgency won't be competitive unless it is casualized like R6 or PUBG?

Without any help, we had 32 teams play in an international world cup for Source in 2015. We did that before getting blasted on Source's front page. Can you imagine what is going to happen now with NWI focusing on competitive? Easily 64 teams.

On labor day weekend (two weeks ago), on Monday there were 150 people in competitive queue and there were 1,500 in COOP and 1,500 in PvP.

150/3150 * 100 = 4.76% of the population was in competitive.

That's insane. Especially with the queue bug and no incentives. Imagine if they beefed up incentives, fixed matchmaking bugs, and maybe added a tutorial video kids watched before they queued for comp?

Let's extrapolate that percentage for release. Let's be conservative and say on launch there are 20,000 people playing. That's 952 people in queue. Even if it was at 1% that's still 200 people in queue.

In the beginning of the beta there were so many queued for competitive but people got tired of the bugs for matchmaking queue. Even veterans are tired of waiting 20 minutes to get a non-bugged matchmaking game. If you aren't aware, currently the queue doesn't recognize when people quit the game or leave the matchmaking queue (takes about 5-10 minutes for the system to recognize they are gone). This means that the matchmaking system will put people in the game that no longer have the game even open. So a lot of the time you'll get 9/10 players in the server. The match won't start unless there are 10 people in the server. So the 3 minute timer ticks down and then kicks everyone back to queue. This happens multiple times and sometimes back to back.

To stay on topic a bit!

Not sure what the rest of you think, but personally I would enjoy being able to be in competitive queue while playing versus. If the re-queueing issue could be mostly eliminated, you would remove the destructive choice between versus and competitive. Destructive as in either you sit idle waiting for competitive or that people who want to play competitive stick to versus. Could be a simpler solution than to be in some kind of deathmatch warmup thingy with all the others in the queue.

@snuffeldjuret

I don't think you should be able to queue while playing versus because then it ruins the versus games.I thought about this and decided against it.

I think allowing people to run around the map or do a TDM style on a map would be more beneficial and people wouldn't mind being in queue for a long time. This would take more work but it's better.

COD4 had a "strat mode" where you could throw infinite nades and when you threw the nade your players view would follow the nade and when it exploded it would sit there for 2 seconds for you to see where it landed. After it exploded it would bring you back to where you threw the nade. That would be cool too but definitely a lot more work.

@link said in Competitive Matchmaking in dire need of improvement:

@snuffeldjuret

I don't think you should be able to queue while playing versus because then it ruins the versus games.I thought about this and decided against it.

I think allowing people to run around the map or do a TDM style on a map would be more beneficial and people wouldn't mind being in queue for a long time. This would take more work but it's better.
...

I would not say that it is certain that such a system would ruin versus. People leave a versus server mid-game all the time and I haven't noticed how that hurts in any significant way. How often do people leave like that compared to how often people would leave with such a system? I don't know. It is for sure problematic with the few times the last guy alive going for a "hero cap" leaves though :P.

Maybe the optimal solution would be to add deathmatch to versus :). I guess that would/could be very similar to what you said with "I think allowing people to run around the map or do a TDM style on a map". Not sure if you have anything specific on your mind with that.

In Australia/New Zealand people aren't queuing because of the reason link stated.

Queue bug.
Spawn bug.
Stats reset at end of beta.
Still learning the game/maps.

I play versus firefight and a lot of people are playing it and enjoying the mode, we are just waiting on NWI to fix the issues.

I Agree with Link that there should be more credits earned during competitive.
It should scale to the level of difficulty.
Right now i can play a push game, be the commander, cap objectives and get 20 odd kills with the help of fire support and clean up on credits. (i assume coop is the same).
Trying to get the same points in a comp game is impossible.

How about splitting the XP to the actual "playlist" you are playing?

It doesnt say anything when a player levels up in coop and jumps on a firefight server with his coop rank, its the same the other way around.

When iam playing e.g. competitive, I would like to know the comp rank of the guys I play with, nothing else. The rest can be checked in the steam profile.

When waiting for other players it might for now just be enough the be able to run through the map with teamvoice on - for testing things, talking about strats and so on.

The players online indicator might be bad now, but turns into a good things once there is 50+ players shown. I say, keep it in.

There could/should be some special cosmetics stuff that once earned in each one of the three playlists, can be used/shown in the others. Thats a good thing. XP gain can stay as it is, when the ranks are only shown in the relevant playlist/gamemode iam playing. Because its not comparable across the playlists, only between players in same playlist.

It is a bit early to come to conclusions about this.

Incoming wipes
Until the game was delayed, a lot of people were aware that their entire progress would get wiped. That would also include anything related to ranked/competitive play. So it is natural that people said to themselves that they will not invest time when their progress would get wiped in 3-4 weeks. I would guess that it might be a bit better now, since people now know that its not 2-3 weeks, but a couple of months now.

Technical problems
I found playing "casual" already frustrating enough at times. Issues with the performance and the hitreg issues were and are already something that keeps people from playing the game in casual, so it is natural that it is worse in competitive.

@mefirst said in Competitive Matchmaking in dire need of improvement:

Issues with the performance and the hitreg issues were and are already something that keeps people from playing the game in casual, so it is natural that it is worse in competitive.

But those issues are way less prominent in competitive. Performance is way better, same as hitreg. Less players -> better performance and less load on the server.

Less prominent does not mean nit existing. Something you also don't mention is the connection/ping of the players. One player out of ten players (10%) with a horrible connection can potentially cause the same or even worse issues than a server with 32 players where the people have average connections. You could even argue that it is worse in 5vs5 since it is more likely that you will personally encounter the player which a bad connection.

This is especially a issue when matchmaking mechanics are not working properly and it is mixing people from different regions in order to create matches.

@benz I think @MeFirst brings up a good point. It's more of "why bother".

For a lot of players they see a lot of issues with public casual games and then they look at the "competitve" button and go "why bother". People don't want to be more serious about a game that has bugs/performance and it's a fair point. If I wasn't getting good FPS I would be frustrated. Throw me into a more serious competitive mode and I'll just get even more frustrated because I am trying to win and play serious.