EA Staff (Retired)Hi all - I had not been able to play any of the smaller modes for months (Xbox, Aus Ping site) until the last week when I cycled through other sites. Default ping never worked but so far I have found US Virginia to be reliable. Have managed to play Strike, Extraction, Blast & SA without problem. Tells me internet connection is slow (gone from Aus Site 23ms To Virginia 247ms) and may effect gameplay but I have not experience any lag nor dropouts. On the Aus site I can only play GA & HvsV. Cycling through ping sites might help some of you to get into games you want to play. Having said that, I don't believe that we (The Players) should have to spend time selecting ping sites. That should be an automatic function of the game and possibly a process that matchmaking should take care of.
On Matchmaking, I have had no real problems for the last 3 days. When going from one lobby to another, I have ended up in playable lobbies that filled. Sometimes the skill levels were uneven but generally evened up by the next map. Map rotation has been good and team sizing has only come into play once. Maybe I'm just lucky and have been able to play some enjoyable rounds.
I played SA with a group again last night. We experienced many of the usual problems with matchmaking, the most persistent one being that we would almost always be dumped into empty or nearly-empty lobbies that never filled up. But we experienced a problem that I hadn't seen, though some of players in my groups had seen it before. The matchmaking actually took all of us out of our SA map rotation, and dumped us all into Strike, which none of us wanted to play. (this was at 11:10 pm, PST, saturday night, oregon)
I would say that the most significantly frustrating thing about this system is the fact that we often do get into a great, well-populated and well-balanced match, then the matchmaking, instead of favoring this, actually takes us away from the populated match and dumps us into an empty lobby that doesn't fill (or takes a VERY long time to fill). I would say that if your team can't deal with this issue, the matchmaking needs to be abandoned. It's the thing so many people have been complaining about ever since this wretched EOR MM started up. Lately, I've gotten so frustrated with the waits, that I just leave the game and play something else, because no other game makes me wait this long to get into a match. If I'm doing this, someone who really loves the game and has been playing for a year, then I'm sure lots of others do, too. Christmas is coming up, and BF2 is still on the shelves, so new players are on their way, and they need to find this a good experience. If this isn't resolved in the next couple of weeks, get rid of the MM, or no one is going to stick around.
