More Broken Gameplay! ( Video Included )
Playing a sweaty HUT game against someone in Rivals. I play defensively given the fact he was just LT abusing the whole game. Get to OT and he rags my twice into his D-zone, trying to get it so my AI...
Forum Discussion
@EA_Aljo wrote:
@TheUnusedCrayon wrote:
@NoManuelAutoonlyI really wish you could have played drop-ins back when they had the lobby system. You had about 3 rooms labelled by their regions (so like "North America", "Europe", etc.) and you could create custom rooms to play in with passcodes to get into if you wanted to set up games with a group of people.
North America for sure was filled with maximum capacity (50 people) all day so there had to be a North America 2 room put in automatically which typically had like 15 people in it which was enough to have a drop in game on its own and on good times that may even fill up to 50 as well.
When you're in the rooms you could chat so lots of guys would discuss looking for clubs and setting up club teams and organizing try-outs and all that stuff. It really made the community great for finding games and people to play with. There were enough games set up in each room to eliminate the trolls from showing up and contaminating every game.
You could see how full each game was so you could easily go to the game that was near full (10/12 players or 11/12 players) and then you just joined that, wasted like 10 seconds of your life and boom you were in a game.
Now we are forced to wait for 2 minutes for a game to not even fill because the matchmaking is segregating everybody online. Lobbies were amazing.The chat was also full of toxicity and offensive content. That definitely wouldn't work today. You also had to deal with racing to a position. Forwards filled up first which means you often had a forward playing defense that wouldn't defend at all. In some cases, someone who had never played goalie would take that position just so they could play and it went poorly to say the least. The trolling then was just as bad as it was now, if not worse since there were no anti-griefing measures. I agree it was quicker to get in to a game, but you often didn't get the position you wanted and still had to deal with unfortunate teammates. I know it takes longer now, but you can at least play your position. Not that this completely prevents trolling of course. It happens and will most likely always happen. This goes for just about any online game.
As someone who has played religiously since the inception of OTP - I honestly cannot remember the general vibe in lobby chats being toxic. I'm sure it happened, but I think maybe the toxicity of the lobby system is being overstated.
The race to position was definitely an issue and EA has addressed that.
However, the drop-in lobby is still a crapshoot due to players not wanting to play with other players of a certain level - whether it's too high or too low. So, more often than not, you'll see teams populate quickly, only to have players drop out after seeing the player levels of their teammates and/or their opponents.
For Drop-in Lobbies specifically, I'd like to see player levels hidden until the game starts and then find ways within the in-game presentation to showcase player levels. This would discourage players from leaving while in the lobbies. I actually think there's a bug that's triggered when players enter and then leave a lobby that results in positions not being filled despite a queue of currently active players searching, but I don't have a lick of evidence to prove that other than when players enter and then leave, often times those games don't end up 6v6.
EA_Aljo
Community Manager
Community Manager
@KidShowtime1867 wrote:
@EA_Aljo wrote:
@TheUnusedCrayon wrote:
@NoManuelAutoonlyI really wish you could have played drop-ins back when they had the lobby system. You had about 3 rooms labelled by their regions (so like "North America", "Europe", etc.) and you could create custom rooms to play in with passcodes to get into if you wanted to set up games with a group of people.
North America for sure was filled with maximum capacity (50 people) all day so there had to be a North America 2 room put in automatically which typically had like 15 people in it which was enough to have a drop in game on its own and on good times that may even fill up to 50 as well.
When you're in the rooms you could chat so lots of guys would discuss looking for clubs and setting up club teams and organizing try-outs and all that stuff. It really made the community great for finding games and people to play with. There were enough games set up in each room to eliminate the trolls from showing up and contaminating every game.
You could see how full each game was so you could easily go to the game that was near full (10/12 players or 11/12 players) and then you just joined that, wasted like 10 seconds of your life and boom you were in a game.
Now we are forced to wait for 2 minutes for a game to not even fill because the matchmaking is segregating everybody online. Lobbies were amazing.The chat was also full of toxicity and offensive content. That definitely wouldn't work today. You also had to deal with racing to a position. Forwards filled up first which means you often had a forward playing defense that wouldn't defend at all. In some cases, someone who had never played goalie would take that position just so they could play and it went poorly to say the least. The trolling then was just as bad as it was now, if not worse since there were no anti-griefing measures. I agree it was quicker to get in to a game, but you often didn't get the position you wanted and still had to deal with unfortunate teammates. I know it takes longer now, but you can at least play your position. Not that this completely prevents trolling of course. It happens and will most likely always happen. This goes for just about any online game.
As someone who has played religiously since the inception of OTP - I honestly cannot remember the general vibe in lobby chats being toxic. I'm sure it happened, but I think maybe the toxicity of the lobby system is being overstated.
The race to position was definitely an issue and EA has addressed that.
However, the drop-in lobby is still a crapshoot due to players not wanting to play with other players of a certain level - whether it's too high or too low. So, more often than not, you'll see teams populate quickly, only to have players drop out after seeing the player levels of their teammates and/or their opponents.
For Drop-in Lobbies specifically, I'd like to see player levels hidden until the game starts and then find ways within the in-game presentation to showcase player levels. This would discourage players from leaving while in the lobbies. I actually think there's a bug that's triggered when players enter and then leave a lobby that results in positions not being filled despite a queue of currently active players searching, but I don't have a lick of evidence to prove that other than when players enter and then leave, often times those games don't end up 6v6.
It was also a different time. There wasn't as much focus on online toxicity and offensive content. The chat box wasn't exactly puppies and kittens. If we still had it, I imagine it would be quite abusive as this has only gotten worse over the years.
As far as levels go, I wouldn't mind seeing them hidden. Even though, I don't get why they should be such a deterrent. There are many excellent players that are at low levels just like there are a lot of not so skilled players with higher levels. I do understand that just seeing a team of players with higher levels than your own can be intimidating, but I wish it weren't such a deterrent. My club went from being pretty hardcore to being more casual now. People have had kids and careers in the last 14 years so now we have lower levels than we once did, but still compete very well with teams that have significantly higher level players.
TLDR: Levels don't necessarily reflect your skill at the game so it would be nice if people didn't just bail at the first sight of higher level players.
It's 2022, you guys at EA realize there's a thing called profanity filters right? The chat was no where near as toxic as you're making it out to be, pretty tame actually.
Yes the text chat can be filtered. And tbh it doesn't have even be a thing. OTP can be regulated, There are solutions to these issues. Drop-in is a dying population because nobody wants to play using the same 2 hoodies in an outdoor arena for 6's. Keep that a 3's thing since you can change jerseys there...
Most of us in the OTP community knew one another and had nothing but respect towards. It was the 3-6 trolls that ruined it! Now the trolling is increasing in World Of Chel for drop-in because they are simply bored of it...
@EA_Aljo wrote:It was also a different time. There wasn't as much focus on online toxicity and offensive content. The chat box wasn't exactly puppies and kittens. If we still had it, I imagine it would be quite abusive as this has only gotten worse over the years.
You could add profanity filters, different lobbies sim/arcade or heck even pre written messages. All of these would be better option than now.
As for the toxicity, I have been here on forums +/- 10 years, yes it has gotten worse, but so has the game too. You could draw exactly correlating graphs on amount of unfixed bugs/removed features and levels of toxicity. Maybe there’s something to look at? It’s easy to point finger on community in this, but in the end it’s EA that’s responsible creating the community.
- EA_Aljo
@Greyinsi wrote:
You could add profanity filters, different lobbies sim/arcade or heck even pre written messages. All of these would be better option than now.As for the toxicity, I have been here on forums +/- 10 years, yes it has gotten worse, but so has the game too. You could draw exactly correlating graphs on amount of unfixed bugs/removed features and levels of toxicity. Maybe there’s something to look at? It’s easy to point finger on community in this, but in the end it’s EA that’s responsible creating the community.
I can't agree that we are creating the toxicity. We're not forcing people to say terrible things to each other. While it's not fair for us to blame the community, which I'm not doing, it's also not fair to say everything is our fault. There have also been a huge amount of changes based on community feedback. Yes, some bugs are still around while many others have been resolved. No game is going to be 100% bug-free. We are always striving for this of course, but it's also a pretty ambitious goal so we try to handle the most critical ones as soon as we can. Unfortunately, some need to wait. I just don't see lobbies returning as being the savior to drop-in issues. Trolling has been a problem since EASHL started. When I was just the guy on the couch playing daily, I saw it all the time. It was really not much different than it is now in regards to the kind of teammates you had.
Profanity filters are fine, but obviously people still find a way around them.
- @EA_Aljo one thing you guys also could have done is add more anti-griefing measures but you also haven't done that either. There have been lists on lists on lists of great ideas to prevent trolling and exactly zero of them have been implemented since the original anti-griefing stuff came out.
And guess what, that anti-griefing method actually WORKED!
It eliminated probably 75% of the trolls from the game. It was a good base to be built upon and was actually well-received aside from the obvious tweaks it needed to stop kicking people playing the game correctly.
And then nothing.
To pretend the toxicity of the community is the issue is absolutely laughable as an excuse. The excuse is laziness and funding from whomever is doing the directing because many of us know some of the devs were ACTUALLY ON BOARD with returning to lobbies back when they would actually speak to us. They were aware of the many flaws with the system.
The only person I've ever heard about lobbies being toxic is from you.
