Arena Servers are (Respectfully) Hot Trash
I've been playing a lot of AL Arenas on PS4 since it launched, and the consistency of matchmaking and gameplay (ranked and unranked) has been very uneven. At best, I'd say about two out of ten matches play smoothly. Main issues:
- Event Soup. Arena action is too fast for the servers. Events/actions keep getting mixed and mashed up. In close fights we'll hear the wrong kill quips, the match seems to start at different times for teammates, and it's common to see matches end several seconds before the action stops. Clear signs that the game we're seeing isn't the one we're playing.
- Sever lag. I keep getting shot around corners, and/or missing shots that clearly landed. Season 9 was bad, 10 is worse. (My connection is good, I can tell when it's bad, so don't ask me to check it.)
- Dropped Players. We'll see players enter the game, but not show up on the team. On occasion, I even get kicked from in-progress Arenas games.
- Matchmaking Delays. It might take a minute or two to start the game, even with 160 players in queue.
- Ping. It's common to see opponents "strobing", blinking in-and-out across the arena. These players seem to have an advantage in close fights.
- 3-stack vs. randos. It's very common to see full squads matched against randoms. These games are never fair, and the devs have stated that this wouldn't happen.
- "Babbysitting". When playing with one or fewer friends, I'm/we're generally matched with teammate(s) of unplayably low skill level. There need to be skill "lanes" in matchmaking. It's not my job to teach kids how to play this game.
- Smurfs. I'm a lvl 500, I probably shouldn't be matching with/against < lvl 250 or gold rank. Experience and honesty matter. My friends and I don't trust a system that lets smurfs fly, and playing with high-skill-low-experience teammates is rarely fun.
Possible Fixes:
- Soup. There's no reasonable argument for keeping Arena servers at 20-tics (if that's still the case). Arena games are a high-precision environment with razor-thin margins. Even running at 30-tics would be a significant improvement for telemetry and event processing. Devs: if you're still fixated on latency, you have no business designing signal processing systems (also, I don't know the specifics of your netcode, so sorry if I hurt someone's feelings.).
- Server Lag. Yeah, there's no single fix for this, but others are doing a better job, so I'm going to posit that Respawn can too.
- Dropped Games. Is it possible to warn a player that they've been DDoS'd or dropped? Cloudflare warns it's customers, so I'm leaning to yes.
- Ping. Ping matters more in arena games. Factor in ping when matching players.
- Matchmaking. Give players feedback on how they've been matched, and let them opt out of uneven teams. Some folks don't mind babysitting and/or getting smurf-bashed. Cool. Let us make the choice between "quick" matchmaking and "competitive" (see the next point).
- Smurfs. Allow players to additionally restrict matchmaking by level ranges. I.e.: "full" for all levels, "+- 250" for wide, and "+- 100" for narrow.
- Neb
