Developers continue to make their own problems through matchmaking...

A game within a game: The Waiting Game!

In an ongoing effort to completely miss any clue of wrongdoings, the game designers of today continues to find ways to goof up their online gaming experiences while somehow trying to convince you they're a bigger deal than ever before. Doom recently had to readjust their playlists (again), to give players what they were asking for, and complaining so much about. Now I haven't been playing any Doom MP lately, mostly because I literally couldn't from the crappy matchmaking which was unable to find anybody for my broad range of modes, so I'm not able to entirely wrap my head around all the constant playlist changes. I know at one time most modes were independant with a couple general playlists, then it got reduced towards objective vs more kill based modes (yay, 2 choices!), and... I think what they just recently did was throw Team Deathmatch in with the objective modes for some bullshit logic of "well that's team oriented, so same thing!" People were rightfully mad, and now they switched some stuff back.

In similar news, a For Honor alpha tester broke NDA to speak of the game's P2P issues, and while that is bad, he specifically talked about the issue of finding matches. Meanwhile I still hear it all the time from other teams, like TitanFall 2's team earlier pre-release talking about fixing a better matchmaking system so that you can get into games faster, and not to worry of bad playlists, etc. Back before Battlefront, they tried to spin their backwards step as a good thing for "skill" ranking and skill play. ...and then Overwatch gets away with pretending they're giving out candy whenever they come up with a playlist that *gasp* tweaks the rules a tiny bit by player count or basic rules you could really just alter up in a private bot match. Admittedly that's not a direct problem, but its kind of funny we're at that point now where online is somehow supposed to be a big deal, and yet we're grateful for "features" or "updates" that give us simple stuff we could do ourselves back in the 90's.

what a mess!

Okay guys, hold onto your butts, because I'm going to purpose a really crazy idea here. It might even be so radical, it could even be illegal in certain states. Its a real wildcard! You ready? What if... the people who bought the games, who played the online, and filled the servers and game rooms, and went to go discuss stuff with the forums, could actually decide for themselves what they want to play? If you still haven't passed out, I'd like to continue this idea: What if they could select their own maps, choose what size of a room they want to play in be it 2vs2, or a full match, and then they could even look and see various tiny modifiers like a couple unpopular weapons banned, or the gravity or health are slightly tweaked? What if every time they logged on, and went into the multiplayer to find some matches, they had a rectangular box that flooded with searches and findings on all these community driven choices, and options, with filters to help them find the right one or cancel out any full lobbies, and when they find the one that best suits their preference they just clicked on it and loaded right into that match? I know, freakin' Illuminati shit right there!

...AND IT DOESN'T STOP THERE! The cool thing about it, is that the majority of the time you let the community have that kind of control, you get some insanely weird and unique results. You could have an FPS turn into a tennis-ball game, or find that people actually like moon gravity with one shot kill weapons, or at the very least give themselves the "arcade mode" update so devs can focus on more important things. I also have these strange images from crazy fringe groups on what this arcane idea would look like. I mean can you imagine, this being found on one of today's games, or this thing that dares to have a GAME MODE selection. Then there's this conspiratory piece that suggests people would somehow enjoy playing in a 14 player server and a 40+ within the same game. Stupid idea, right? But these guys really thought of everything when fabricating this idea, including tracking the ping and region of some of these, which is weird because... I mean we just have to have the devs do that for us under tiny option pre-sets hidden away in the menus.... right? I mean we can't possibly have the community part of a game actually be in-part controlled by the community. That would just be awful, like if we had a choice between more than two loafs of bread on the store shelves to choose from; It'd be total apocalyptic anarchy!

What have I done!?

Alright, alright, I'd like to say the joke and sarcasm is over, but let me remind you this was actually a loved update at the supposed height of our advanced online gaming. That's probably the real funny part. Look, I wasn't even in on the gaming scene early, and I already know and see the great effects of actually giving a shit with the server setups. My first online game was Team Fortress 2, and one of the best things about it was discovering how it all worked. I remember finding custom maps, talking to the creator of one even, of seeing weird rules and new mixes come into play, and if nothing else I mostly just liked looking at all of my choices and going "I feel like playing on this map & mode today". Just the little things were even done better in this system. If you're worried and crying about the possibility that someone else might "boost" their progression faster so they can play with generic weapon #43 at level 60, then fine (well you'd be a nosy obsessive nutcase with a fragile ego who forgot what the point of a game was, but let's pretend it's fine that you get worked up over how "fair" the other persons stats are rather, than the fun abilities of a game and a long lasting creative community), but you'd still benefit from this system when you don't have to wait a full minute to find a CTF match and then find its taking you to your least favorite level. Even if you stripped a server browser down to its bare minimum, you can still find matches that take you to your favorite levels and modes, find the player count range you're comfortable with, and just join it. No playlist bullshit, no waiting and waiting just to be either disconnected or slapped into the middle of a losing game, and no worries over whether or not the game is "dead" when it drops just the littlest bit and you get a wait time that's 10 seconds longer. You just go in, find your game, and play.

However we sadly live in a world where only Dice seems to care about this stuff anymore, and even they don't always feel so good about doing the right thing (again, Battlefront). However for every sad excuse someone might come up with for why things are better this way, whether its because you think people are too stupid to make their own choices, or because they think this is somehow for "skills and serious play"* (because nothing says competitive like sitting on the couch waiting for your XP to get up for just participating in the match), there's a ton of problems matchmaking has opened up and it would just be fixed to go back to the way it was before. The playlists, the DLC splits, the very stability and ability to get into a match, overpowered weapons that never get fixed, the fact that certain modes go dead, etc. Those all get either fixed, or greatly improved, when you can look at a full list and just make your own choices and actually give the community room to be... well, the community. Nearly every single time a dev has to make a statement, or claim, or plea that you believe them this time they've got it working, I'm left baffled they still haven't figured out what a Server browser is, and how it would solve it all. Aside from this blog post, I don't even think I can be bothered with the energy to say it all again, I've instead just tweaked a simple old phrase because it suits the situation so well: If I had a dime for every time a server list would have solved some online game's problems... You know, maybe I can hope someday somebody gets it, and we can go back to a time where someone made a tennis ball mode on TF2 through the pyro class and physics. However honestly, TF2's very existence really might have come from the same mentality as server lists, and so to did things like DOTA. Even bots themselves, all came from a mod, which came from devs just deciding that the community areas of the game should be run by the community. Despite how easily devs have let themselves forget, I'm one of those players who won't, and I'll keep bringing it up every time a developer does something stupid... by making the decision to go with forced matchmaking instead of the wonderful stuff that gave us pyro-tennis.

*Additional fun story about this being a competitive issue. Back in Killzone 2, for some odd reason suicide bombing with rockets became a real thing. Players would rush up with the base RPG gun, and blow themselves up at point blank range with someone, either trying to take out a group cheaply, or just to grief other players. You can't exactly balance this well, and I'm not sure how you would, it was just a strange player phenomenon. Meanwhile the RPG as a general weapon was usually unpopular among more reasonable players. So it was a big and well-received trend to ban the gun through the server lists, or even the class that used it, and many people ran to those servers for that as a good thing. I imagine the only other thing we could do would be just yell and pout on the forums to "fix the RPG" without any constructive way on how to do so, and it never did get a real "fix" that stopped anyone from doing that. So... yeah, community will even fix your competitive play in the right instances. If you're only worry is still "but he got the achievement unfairly" then really go think about where you went wrong in life when THAT is your major concern with giving players more to do in a game. I'm even looking at you Devs, and the fact you think a precious achievement, or your stupid skinner boxes, are somehow more important than a constructive and resourceful community that caters to everyone's needs.