Let's talk about the Matchmaker

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@lx3dEMONxl wrote:
@de4c0nfr05tOMG I forgot about that. Thanks for the nostalgia. Everyone would get thrown in the middle and you just moved to an open slot. Downside to that was some trolls would open their mics, join the middle, and just sit there and never move to a position and they would be blaring some gawd awful music or something to annoy until the timer ran out. Also, a lot of people would join, not see the position they want open, then back out. So it sometimes took a while to start a game just because people were picky. OR people would reluctantly take a position at D or something and then just play like a forward all game (I realize that people STILL play D like this even in the current paradigm). I definitely prefer pre-picking your position to that system. I definitely DO not like how long it takes to match in 24 as it stands though.

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Yes as it was implemented back then you could be a troll, but that's easily fixed.  Just allow more people to join the room so if you sit in the middle to troll more people can come in and will take the open spots.  Allow the ability to easily and quickly mute players right from the room, click name to mute/unmute.

Trolls will find ways to get around anything, but the game would be better with this system than without it.  Many times there would be 1 goalie as the timer was winding down, the goalie would jump up to an open D spot to salvage the game.

Something has to change though, waiting sucks!

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@de4c0nfr05t wrote:

Yes as it was implemented back then you could be a troll, but that's easily fixed.  Just allow more people to join the room so if you sit in the middle to troll more people can come in and will take the open spots.  Allow the ability to easily and quickly mute players right from the room, click name to mute/unmute.

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If I remember correctly, if there was someone sitting in the middle, the game couldn't start. That was what the trolls were exploiting. If you did allow more people to be in the middle AND allow a game to start even if people were in the middle, that would solve it. There may have been a technical issue with starting a match while people were still in the middle (like what to do with them). I can't imagine the solution for that would be terribly difficult.

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@de4c0nfr05t wrote:

Now I appreciate EA trying to innovate and try something different to improve aspects of the game, but this seems like a step backwards.

As many have pointed out, it's taking way too long to find a match for a game.

Unless you already have a full team of 6, you're looking at a 3 minute wait just to find teammates before the search for another team can even begin.

The addition of mixing Club with Drop-ins as an option to speed up matchmaking times is a nice addition, but the way the matchmaking works is not very efficient.

The matchmaker is obviously not going away and EA will hopefully make tweaks to improve it's performance, but since this game doesn't have the giant population of an EA FC or a Madden, something else is needed...

That something else is what we had in the PS3/360 era, public server browser style lobbies, sorted by server region.

This is the best and quickest way to quickly get into a 6v6 game especially when the population is low.

Before the NHL15(PS3) online servers were shut down last year, I was still easily joining full 6v6 games when there was less than 100 players online.

This would be a huge quality of life feature in a game where the 6v6 population always shows "low"

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They probably won't go back to that, but what they can do is just have C,W, D,G as matchmaking options for Drop ins and have what you suggest for Created clubs. Right now the matchmaking is too granular by position so I believe (unsure if true) it creates un needed fragmentation for the system to group people together. 

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@lx3dEMONxl wrote:
@de4c0nfr05tOMG I forgot about that. Thanks for the nostalgia. Everyone would get thrown in the middle and you just moved to an open slot. Downside to that was some trolls would open their mics, join the middle, and just sit there and never move to a position and they would be blaring some gawd awful music or something to annoy until the timer ran out. Also, a lot of people would join, not see the position they want open, then back out. So it sometimes took a while to start a game just because people were picky. OR people would reluctantly take a position at D or something and then just play like a forward all game (I realize that people STILL play D like this even in the current paradigm). I definitely prefer pre-picking your position to that system. I definitely DO not like how long it takes to match in 24 as it stands though.

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I think they should implement a viable grade system like 2K does for those pesky pretending Defenseman that want to play forward. A little work for the code team but it is necessary to keep things in position and a feedback loop that dings them for being out of position regularly similar to FC 24 and 2k24.

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@Timba101 wrote:

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@lx3dEMONxl wrote:
@de4c0nfr05tOMG I forgot about that. Thanks for the nostalgia. Everyone would get thrown in the middle and you just moved to an open slot. Downside to that was some trolls would open their mics, join the middle, and just sit there and never move to a position and they would be blaring some gawd awful music or something to annoy until the timer ran out. Also, a lot of people would join, not see the position they want open, then back out. So it sometimes took a while to start a game just because people were picky. OR people would reluctantly take a position at D or something and then just play like a forward all game (I realize that people STILL play D like this even in the current paradigm). I definitely prefer pre-picking your position to that system. I definitely DO not like how long it takes to match in 24 as it stands though.

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I think they should implement a viable grade system like 2K does for those pesky pretending Defenseman that want to play forward. A little work for the code team but it is necessary to keep things in position and a feedback loop that dings them for being out of position regularly similar to FC 24 and 2k24.

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How does the 2K grade system work?

@lx3dEMONxl  Thats why me or my brother always play ''at least'' one of the defense if not both, I have lost faith in most random defense players in drop-ins.