@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.
