EA Staff (Retired)While it appears Development has gotten the wait times back to where they were (i.e. no improvement from 2 months ago), matchmaking is simply not reaping the benefits expected by the players - actually still a step back from the players' perspective.
How long will the experiment go on before pulling the plug? Really, what's the time frame?
As mentioned in the sticky matchmaking post, players would be a lot cooler with not forcing matchmaking at end of round. Seems like a pretty easy fix, if you want to keep tweaking matchmaking logic.
Group playing again.
8:25 pm PST - player booted from Starfighter Assault game. A few players came and left around this time, so we went to the lobby to start a new game. Note: players did not lose internet connection, we were all still connected in PS4 party and able to speak with each other uninterrupted.
8:42 - we spent a long time waiting (around 15 min) to get into another game of SA, after a few attempts, we finally got in. Once in, things went fairly smoothly for a while. Decent map rotation and games filled quickly. There was an issue when someone froze in crash scene in Unknown Regions (a previously reported bug that has not been fixed) and was unable to respawn.
10:30 - we decided to switch to HvV, and trying to find games here did not go well. We had everything from issues with inviting other players, long searches, a search that froze everything and couldn't be properly cancelled (so people restarted the game to try again). We finally did get games going, but it took a long time to populate. Once we were in a populated game, it generally went a little better for the next hour or so.
Related question: I'm sort of assuming that the matchmaking test is somewhat dependent on players behaving in a way that they would if the MM was working properly. So, for example, I assume that the system prioritizes games and matches players based on the assumption that players will stay where they are placed until the game begins. Therefore, this makes me wonder how it impacts the system when players get frustrated with long waits and leave. Does that change the priority that match had for filling? I ask this because of a specific problem I have been noticing. If we are waiting for 5 more players in HvV, it seems like there are points in time where the game suddenly starts populating. 4 more players arrive quickly, then we are just waiting for one more. But then, often one of the new players leaves, just before the 8th player arrives, then we are still waiting for 1 more player. If that happens, the wait for one more players seems to be much longer than usual, so I wonder if the priority to fill our game changed, and if the one person leaving just as the 8th person coming in messed everything up. So, are the long waits creating a vicious cycle of players leaving out of frustration, and thereby creating even longer waits for everyone else?
