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> IMO what they should focus on is getting the ranks nailed down right and adding more diverse playlists, as those are the two main things leading to the quitting epidemic. Without Ranks there is no reason for someone to play a game type or map they don’t want to, because the game doesn’t matter (and there is zero penalty for quitting a match). And to that end, the lack of playlists leads to a high probability that one of the 8 players won’t like what is chosen. For example, I will never be convinced that there should be any starting weapon besides the Battle Rifle, so when I’m forced to play these games with an SMG start, which is an utterly useless weapon (or god forbid the plasma rifle on midship) then it is very hard to want to stay in that game, and if I get SMG’s too often, I might just quit the next one without even trying because there’s no point.
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> I really dislike the idea of JIP, at least for ranked playlists simply because the beginning of a match is too crucial to miss any amount of time. So, If I’m searching solo, and get put into a Shrine/Sanc game already in progress, and the enemy has a 5 kill lead, 2 snipers, and rockets, then I’m just going to lose rank because I wasn’t there at the start, and it wouldn’t help out the players that started the game unbalanced either so there’s no point.
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> tl;dr - If they can fix ranks and broaden the playlists so people can play what there like, at their own skill level, I have no doubt quitting will decrease by about 90%, and I don’t think that number is exaggerated either.
I appreciate the feedback (I really do) but the argument you make while presenting some honest issues also somewhat dismisses some of the important and very specific comments I made within my feedback plus your statement assumes certain things (which I will explain further) to be somewhat gospel-like and I have to disagree with aspects of that too; not-to-mention, even though I didn’t mention it there are additional details that should have been noted with the inclusion of a limited JIP system.
First off, let me address some of the important and very specific comments I made within my initial post that I feel got overlooked or outright dismissed by you (no offense taken btw). You make this statement, “I really dislike the idea of JIP, at least for ranked playlists simply because the beginning of a match is too crucial to miss any amount of time” and right there I get that your immediate dislike for the idea of JIP caused you to gloss over some of the finer points I was making within my message; for example, after my criticizing of how Halo 4 incorporated JIP into it’s matchmaking system I went on to explain that I hoped 343i realized that the matchmaking search system itself first and foremost needed to prevent sessions moving from the player-search aspect to the loading-match aspect when there would be uneven teams (Halo 4 was guilty of that because the overall system was depending on the JIP aspect to balance out the teams after the fact and that’s were that particular JIP system gets most of it’s backlash from). To summarize what I was trying to get at in my message is to say that I agree with your comment about the beginning of a match being crucial (especially, with regards to a FPS that’s heavily characterized by its arena-based gameplay), but the best way to address that particular problem is to ensure that the search process itself doesn’t end until even teams are ensured and in case something were to happen during the match’s loading process where someone or even multiple people were to get dropped for whatever reason then that loading process should get halted until replacements could be found. Of course, that introduces other annoyances such as likely longer search times and a potential for multiple match loading delays (due to halts for player replacement) among who knows what else, but I think most can agree that having balanced (at least in the form of a equal number of players on each team) is important.
Secondly, your statement makes some interesting assumptions based on your own personal perception, but how honest is that perception with regards to the majority of players playing the game? Your opinion states that the two biggest culprits of causing players to quit matches is due to the game not having visible playlist ranks as well as lacking diverse playlists; however, the first point is making the assumption that all or most players care passionately enough about their playlist rankings to impact their decision-making with regards to quitting matches. To be honest, I don’t think that the majority of players care as passionately about their playlist ranks as you or myself might. I don’t think the impact of quitting (on their ranks) factors into their thought process much when deciding if it’s worth their time to stick around verses moving onto something else. I do wish that the passion someone such as yourself or myself might have for their playlist rank was going to be the same for everyone else because lessening the impact of quitting would indeed be much easier to deal with, but alas it’s not very probable nor is the impact of quitting so easily lessened. Also, I’d like to note that playlist rankings are not the sole representation of a player true skill nor is it the backbone of how the matchmaking system pairs players – Microsoft’s Bayesian ranking algorithm (it’s TrueSkill system) is in fact the backbone of Xbox’s and Halo’s matchmaking system (Halo’s ranks are more or less a visual representation of playlist experience and success per different levels of Microsoft’s TrueSkill system - I think many people are often confused by this)
You mention improving the playlist diversity as another tool for lessening the impact of quitters and to this I also agree 100%, but I do believe there are critical issues to consider with regards to this solution as improving the diversity by increasing the number of playlists also acts as a double edged sword in a way. Ideally, any game would have it’s largest and most diverse playlist offering at launch so that the game could take advantage of it’s likely largest population to fill all the playlists and provide quality skill pairings regardless to which playlist was chosen by a player; however, in the MasterChief Collection’s case that opportunity has past us by and it also came with extreme online problems so even if it had a wider and more diverse option of playlists players still nevertheless wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of the offering. Now as the game’s population count begins to finally balance out and eventually settle-in with a steady but minor decline over time the developers need to calculate how best to approximate a diverse offering without causing a major dilution to the remaining population as to negatively harm the capability of the matchmaking system’s skill-based pairing ability. Anyways, as of right now the MCC is still trying to iron out a ton of problems so until those things are improved vastly I think increasing the playlist diversity will play second fiddle.
Lastly, some additional details as to how a JIP system can be ideally incorporated to best serve the online experience. When a player finds themselves being JIP’d into a match there should be specific rules in place which indicate how that player’s record and rank can be impacted. I’d love to go onto detail on what those rules should be, but I’m maxing out the text limit of this post.