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After they bopped Skull Town, KC played terribly. What I took away from it was that having POIs relatively evenly distributed in popularity and fairly close to each other creates third party hell. It seems to me that most maps actually need a Fragment/Hammond Labs type area to thin the herd and have the highly-aggressive (and generally fairly coordinated and skilled) players eliminate each other early.
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Feb 5, 2021 17:03
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:After they bopped Skull Town, KC played terribly. What I took away from it was that having POIs relatively evenly distributed in popularity and fairly close to each other creates third party hell. It seems to me that most maps actually need a Fragment/Hammond Labs type area to thin the herd and have the highly-aggressive (and generally fairly coordinated and skilled) players eliminate each other early. "fairly coordinated and skilled" ... "Dropping fragment" Hmmmmmm
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Feb 5, 2021 17:23
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https://twitter.com/Respawn/status/1357744343407239168
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Feb 5, 2021 17:42
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Skyarb posted:"fairly coordinated and skilled" ... "Dropping fragment" I admit that "generally" is doing a lot of work there. 
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Feb 5, 2021 17:43
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I want to see the players who got really good at nullifying nades by dumping items on them
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Feb 5, 2021 18:18
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aw lame change with the pit and mirage party boat not being final circles
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Feb 5, 2021 18:24
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MarshyMcFly posted:KC was definitely the smallest map last season. It’s a little bigger this season but WE is probably the best map for not getting third parties all the time because Olympus has vehicles which make the pacing of the game faster. Yeah I think if they did a balloon pass on Kings the third partying would go down significantly. Currently its pretty much the only map where you can go balloon to balloon the entire game.
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Feb 5, 2021 18:35
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dogstile posted:Yeah I think if they did a balloon pass on Kings the third partying would go down significantly. Currently its pretty much the only map where you can go balloon to balloon the entire game. Funny enough, during the devstream they claimed that they already did do a balloon pass.
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Feb 5, 2021 18:43
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They could extend what they already do with survey beacons and replicators - keep all the balloons but only spawn a random subset of them each game.
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Feb 5, 2021 18:43
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Could make ballooning louder so you hear it coming from further away.
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Feb 5, 2021 18:46
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repiv posted:They could extend what they already do with survey beacons and replicators - keep all the balloons but only spawn a random subset of them each game. that would suck if you picked a drop point far outside the ring that happened not to have a balloon
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Feb 5, 2021 21:31
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They could also realize people want to press w, and stop trying to prevent it.
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Feb 5, 2021 21:37
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Just had a game with the same lovely pub two games in a row and a TTV wraith try hard back to back. The second game I killed him lol.
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Feb 5, 2021 21:51
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Hackan Slash posted:They could also realize people want to press w, and stop trying to prevent it. I prefer to actually have fun and shoot at people in the late game so I'll pass on this. Nothing worse than a chaotic coin flip early game and a dead victory lap late game.
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Feb 5, 2021 21:51
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Augh why are people who already have 4k/20 on Fuse in my lobbies gently caress off!!!
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Feb 5, 2021 21:53
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J posted:Augh why are people who already have 4k/20 on Fuse in my lobbies gently caress off!!! Anecdotally, because their playerbase has already cratered. On Tueday pretty much everyone who played Apex on my friends list was playing it. On Wednesday it was about 30% of the people. Yesterday it was the usual gang of pretty hardcore players who go all season and all have decent badges. What you've got to understand is if you're an average player, you're actually a bad player after around 2 - 3 days of a new piece of content launching as only the committed players hang around. The solution for this is just accept that you're going to get run over a lot of time, or find a nice regular group of good players who don't mind carrying you. Edit: the other thing to accept is that if you're playing outside of prime time gaming hours (i.e. when kids are on) you're going to have a worse time as well. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 22:01 on Feb 5, 2021 |
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Feb 5, 2021 21:58
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Anecdotally, because their playerbase has already cratered. On Tueday pretty much everyone who played Apex on my friends list was playing it. On Wednesday it was about 30% of the people. Yesterday it was the usual gang of pretty hardcore players who go all season and all have decent badges. "cratered" https://steamcharts.com/app/1172470
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Feb 5, 2021 22:22
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Well I'm on console, but I literally bolded and italicized "anecdotally" because that's exactly what it was. I also noticed that Thursday's lobbies were significantly harder than Tuesdays but, y'know, go off king.
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Feb 5, 2021 22:27
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I could see it going both ways in terms of the casual/hardcore players. For casual players like my buddy who mostly play COD, they see that the season 8 the updates are pretty underwhelming, the game has a lot of the same issues going unresolved (lag, slowmo lobbies, getting kicked constantly), and most people who aren't newish to the game are long tired of KC (yes I know they sorta changed it but it still has the same fundamental issues as before). Also ranked KC is especially atrocious so I wouldn't be surprised if sweats were playing more pubs.
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Feb 5, 2021 22:32
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I mean when I say "cratered" I just meant that it had a big influx of people, who then left. That's clearly not the case on the PC side - it's declining by only ~5k or so on peak hours. So you can say "hey that's wrong" about what I said, I ain't gonna take it personally. Doesn't change the fact that I had some easy wins on Tuesday but by Thursday it was regressing back to being mostly very coordinated squaded up good players, and that the game literally always follows this pattern of "more casual interest around season starts and events".
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Feb 5, 2021 22:36
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IDK how much that chart is going to tell you other than how Apex has fared since this game became available on Steam (October?). I'd be more curious to see how the long term averages of the player base over the last 2 years.
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Feb 5, 2021 22:41
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I mean it does tell me that on the PC side they are losing players a lot slower than I thought, so that's helpful.
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Feb 5, 2021 22:45
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:I mean when I say "cratered" I just meant that it had a big influx of people, who then left. That's clearly not the case on the PC side - it's declining by only ~5k or so on peak hours. So you can say "hey that's wrong" about what I said, I ain't gonna take it personally. Doesn't change the fact that I had some easy wins on Tuesday but by Thursday it was regressing back to being mostly very coordinated squaded up good players, and that the game literally always follows this pattern of "more casual interest around season starts and events". What is likely happening is you had some good matches you did well in and your mmr went up and now you are being matched against better players. Even unranked has SBMM.
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Feb 5, 2021 22:55
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I strongly dislike this new trend of creating long sight lines everywhere. Olympus was bad enough for sniper-heavy fighting, but now they've added a whole load of long sight lines to KC, a map that always felt more close quarters combat oriented.
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Feb 5, 2021 22:55
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actually i think you'll agree that getting matched against better players on my playstation means the game is cratering
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Feb 5, 2021 22:56
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Tweak posted:I want to see the players who got really good at nullifying nades by dumping items on them people were just binding 'drop item' to a key and just hitting the key to do it
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Feb 5, 2021 23:11
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Herstory Begins Now posted:people were just binding 'drop item' to a key and just hitting the key to do it Bind it to scroll wheel and just dump all of your items on top of them
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Feb 5, 2021 23:20
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Fuse is incredible and the 30/30 is so goddamn reliable
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Feb 6, 2021 00:08
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I enjoy firing Fuse's ult at some other team 300m away just to be a dick
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Feb 6, 2021 00:10
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Daztek posted:I enjoy firing Fuse's ult at some other team 300m away just to be a dick This and just popping it inside
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Feb 6, 2021 00:17
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Where are my PlayStation killers at?
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Feb 6, 2021 00:30
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George H.W. oval office posted:This and just popping it inside 
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Feb 6, 2021 00:51
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I really wish they'd do away with SBMM. My experience seems to go from playing in lobbies where I stomp the guts out of players who sit still and miss shots with off meta characters for two or three matches and then I get dropped into lobbies with the big time sweats where every end game is a caustic and gib with a wraith or blood hound or horizon holing up and dumping gas everywhere. I don't mind playing against good players at all, I do mind when there's an obvious connection improvement against the weaker players and rubber banding and hit registration issues against the better ones. I think if they want to keep milking this cash cow they should go to connection based match making and reduce the distance at which you can hear gunfire and if they can improve the directional sound and improve things like the sound of players flying in. Instantly you'd make a whole lot of players want to play more. Every new content drop I come back and within 3 days I remember why I quit the last time usually - when I mag dump into a player and hit nothing but air and then have my screen bounce around with lag because I was good enough to win my first three games in the season.
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Feb 6, 2021 01:06
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That's not quite SBMM, that's EOMM.Gunder posted:I strongly dislike this new trend of creating long sight lines everywhere. Olympus was bad enough for sniper-heavy fighting, but now they've added a whole load of long sight lines to KC, a map that always felt more close quarters combat oriented. That middle area of the map that has Containment and the hillside fort is a loving death trap.
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Feb 6, 2021 01:12
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I like to call the hillside fort third party hill
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Feb 6, 2021 01:44
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I used to like octane, now I love him. Finally got a 4k damage game with him this season.
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Feb 6, 2021 02:08
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SKULL.GIF posted:That's not quite SBMM, that's EOMM. I understand the difference, and Respawn have sworn up and down they don't use an EOMM system, but every match making system in every game that uses SBMM seems to end up having the same roundabout effect as an EOMM system anyway. It's more pronounced when you're in a smaller region like I am where the player base is smaller. I'm not saying that the game actively goes "oh BlindSite has his wins, time to drop him against the best players online" but if you're gating players it ends up that way anyway when you're soloing. I know my experience is anecdotal but the same pattern seems to emerge with any game that uses skill based match making; the better you play the worse the game runs because connections get shunted down the priority order. In a whole lot of games it seems the MMR gets something of a reset at the beginning of seasons or content drops when all the players return. You get an hour or so of nice connections and mixed skill lobbies and then it just gets tougher and tougher and the connections degrade the longer and better you play, the match making takes longer too. Granted, as players drop off when the new shiny poo poo doesn't hold their interest you're obviously going to be left with the more dedicated and therefore better players remaining but you can see it in things like the match making times. Last night at peak time (friday night around 7pm) it was taking longer to find games than it did at 2pm on Thursday. I don't know how it got into the zeitgeist for skill based match making to be adopted by everyone so readily despite consumers being I would think at best split on the issue. You have dumb design decisions from Bungie where their stated goal in destiny is for every player to have a 50.50 win loss ratio and a 1k/d to games like CoD where they simply don't care who quits after a month because the vast majority of micro transactions get made shortly after users purchase the game. The whole system is less designed to retain players and more to get them to spend and when you first start a game if you're having a blast you're going to think you'll be in it for the long haul, so why not spend the money on the skin you want. I think it also leads to poor design decisions too. In apex they seem to use statistics around wins to make decisions on what to buff and nerf as well - this is why you end up with everyone running similar teams with similar weapons by the end of the week. You compress all the good players in the same games and force them to find the smallest percentages to remain competitive. Then you end up with lopsided statistics and a constant process of needing to nerf the strongest options. I know this is more a rant about match making as whole in the genre but it gets pretty frustrating.
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Feb 6, 2021 02:18
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SKULL.GIF posted:That middle area of the map that has Containment and the hillside fort is a loving death trap.
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Feb 6, 2021 02:32
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BlindSite posted:I know this is more a rant about match making as whole in the genre but it gets pretty frustrating. If it matters at all the devs have said that they are uncomfortable with anyone calling their system "SBMM" because it prioritizes speedy matches so much. The reason that SBMM has become so prominent is, ostensibly, because it massively helps with player retention. I don't know by how much, but there's a bunch of different devs who have said this. For example in this article, two Respawn devs said that they turned it off for certain data centers, and saw immediate (negative, from their perspective) results: https://www.vg247.com/2020/06/03/why-apex-legends-has-sbmm/ There's some other stuff out there too about it.
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Feb 6, 2021 02:49
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:If it matters at all the devs have said that they are uncomfortable with anyone calling their system "SBMM" because it prioritizes speedy matches so much. It doesn't surprise me that they make this claim, I'd be interested to see were the data came from though. While they may certainly try to keep match making times down, I find that the more I play the more it seems the pool it draws from has its connection parameters expanded so long as it remains in a certain skill bracket more than anything else. There's no logical reason for their claims of prioritizing finding fast games with good connections to have the outcome of putting players from Australia into lobbies with players from malaysia and indonesia during peak times. If it was 3am I'd understand - not 7pm on a friday night. They know that the newest players are the ones most likely to spend (because its kinda the standard for console and PC games - mobile games are the opposite) and its important to encourage that spending by keeping that portion of the player base having the best possible experience for that period of time.
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Feb 6, 2021 03:22
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