Multiplayer/PvP portal idea for the next game
As seen on Justin Wiebe’s Twitter feed and copied to the GW2 forums from there, splitting the playerbase up too much means some game modes and platforms lack players. He was asked questions about why...
Forum Discussion
@Iron_Guard8 I agree with many of the suggestions in your post. For all three games, it’s becoming less likely that you will get placed into a full/nearly full lobby, especially during off hours/days. Personally, I would put Team Vanquish, Vanquish Confirmed, and Soil Survivors modes into its own playlist and leave the other modes into the Mixed mode playlist. The reason that I would do this is because those three modes are purely about vanquishing and the duration of the matches would be short compared to objective based modes such as Turf Takeover. I’m one of the few people who doesn’t enjoy Turf Takeover very much. This is due to several reasons:
- The large amount of time it takes to complete a Turf Takeover match.
- Traveling across the map to capture points as the attacking team can feel sluggish at times, especially if you’re vanquished a lot and teleporters aren’t being built to reduce travel distance.
- Winning is strongly dependent on whether players on your side play like a team and doing all they can to capture or defend the points.
I believe that bots can be occasionally used in the matchmaking process if they are set up to even out lobbies with odd number of players, the bot’s class is chosen at random, and they would disappear as players join the lobby.
Thanks for the posts folks!
@Positronic-Rift Splitting the mixed mode into 2 different modes; Mixed Objectives which would have: Turf Takeover, Gnome Bomb, Suburbination, and Taco Bandits/Capture the Taco, and Mixed Vanquish which would have; Team Vanquish, Vanquish Confirmed, and Soil Survivors, could work too, especially with crossplay. I enjoy all the modes and when GW was at its peak, mixed mode was great to go from Team Vanquish to Gardens & Graveyards, to Taco Bandits, and so on, but I get that the objective modes can take some time (I've had Gnome Bomb games that went on for 30 minutes before), and some folks just want to shoot stuff.
While my original objective was to consolidate the modes to make a large player pool, another option would be to have 3 modes all mixed, with the regular mixed mode that has all the modes as well as the mixed objectives and mixed vanquish options. And having 3 various mixed modes does still mean that it would be less split than what we have currently in GW and GW2, perhaps it would be best to go with the 2 separate ideas here and we can just leave one mode and go to other when we want to swap game types.
As for bots, the BfN bots are largely awful and I recall a lot of upset posts over them when they were added to BfN. GW only has them in Ops, and those zombies in GW ops are mean! In GW2 the bots aren't perfect but the AI in Ops aren't as nasty as GW, and the ones in the private matches have issues but are more effective and interesting to play against than in BfN. I'm not 100% against them, and perhaps they could fill up lobbies that would otherwise be less than full, but they have to be worth playing against without being too strong.
Of course the PvE stuff and mystery portal would be separate.
Correction/addenda: We can experience the smaller maps like Suburban Flats and Jewel Junction in GW, but mostly via Ops these days. I do enjoy Ops but I miss fighting with other players over those great maps!
- @Iron_Guard8 Lumping the modes together is a good idea as the player base needs to not be split into turf or non turf as it was in bfn.
Voting for a map/mode and disqualifying the previous map until all are played sounds like a really solid system to avoid spam (cough black ops 1 nuketown cough).
Keeping pve separate but lumping them together sounds fine if it works the same way by voting. You can keep the mystery portal to introduce new modes/maps that weren't already in the base pool like they did with wallnut hills.
The gw1 AI zombies in ops literally taunted you from a distance if you missed too many shots or they got to use their abilities and I kinda miss that in gw2.
Gw2 AI was pretty competent in both ally and enemy as a sniper can single handily ruin or save your team and bfn ai lacks this by never charging.
I'm not against AI backfill in hunts or ops because having a healer bot spawn in when a real one leaves could be extremely helpful. Maybe program it to become a character you don't have on your team.
Main thing I want is at least an option to experience all modes and maps with AI because that doesn't detract from multiplayer.
