I play almost exclusively Big Team Slayer, so the problems I describe may not be as noticeable in game types with only 8 players instead of 16, but these are the problems I’ve noticed:
Problem: Several minutes can pass between the end of one game and the start of the next even with 30K people in the playlist. It will search so long trying to find two more players when it already has 14 that players start leaving. Then it’s searching to find even more players. It finds a few then more people get tired of waiting and leave. Eventually it may give up and start the game with as few as 10 people, which is really stupid since it could have started the game minutes earlier with more people. I timed the process once and six minutes passed between two games.
Solution: After giving people five or six seconds to back out, if there are at least 12 people still hanging around from the last game start a new game and add people later. This should be one of the benefits of join-in-progress.
Problem: People are assigned to teams too early in the process of preparing a game. I frequently see a situation in which people leave during voting or some other aspect of preparing the game, and then when team assignments are revealed they are not even. In one game recently we started with 1v5, and that was in Big Team Slayer.
Solution: Don’t assign people to teams until the last possible moment before revealing team assignments.
Problem: When a game is interrupted by a network problem, it doesn’t restart exactly where it stopped. Often (if not always) when the game resumes I’m in a slightly different spot and looking in a completely different direction. If this happens when I’m in the middle of some CQC the disorientation is often enough to get me killed. More than once I’ve been in the middle of putting a clip into someone and one or two shots before finishing him off the game pauses and when it resumes I can’t even see him because I’m facing a wall.
Solution: Preserve and restore state information when games have to be paused.
Problem: “Incoming” doesn’t make sense to me. The implication is that someone who is incoming has been found, but I’ve seen a bunch of “Incoming” labels pulsing for a very long time. In some cases those tiles eventually disappear and the game is back in search mode. Are these players coming in from China on rickshaws? Because if they aren’t, by the miracle of modern technology if they are incoming they should come in fast.
Solution: If people have been found, bring them in. If they haven’t, don’t tell us nonexistent players are incoming.