With the crafting changes coming in soon, I think matchmaking should be the next area of focus. I don’t know if matchmaking is struggling to get players together, or the player population is simply too low, but its taking me ages to find damnation games lately. Here’s what I’d like to see:
Lobby Browser - This is number one on my wish-list. Show me a list of games, if there aren’t any available then I’ll know to start my own or try again later. No more camping in front of the mission select terminal, constantly queuing and canceling.
Quickplay - With the above implemented most of the issues would be solved, but quickplay is still a nice convenience option. However, it shouldn’t automatically initiate a new match if an existing one can’t be found. Let me know there are no games available, and prompt me with the option to start my own.
Social - My hazy understanding is that this is already being worked on. The merge strike groups option and the previous players tab have already been acknowledge as bugged (the former was even pulled) and will be fixed. I just wanted to bring it up here, as having the option to play more than one map once you’ve found a full group would further alleviate the issues.
There’s other things I’d like to see, like the option to change character while joining a map as in Vermintide or DRG, but I’d like to keep things focused. These changes feel reasonable, and would massively alleviate the tedium of matchmaking in its current state.
I think they try matching people into low ping servers when possible, and that probably eats up a lot of the que time. Implementing an open lobby tracker to jump in might be difficult given how frequent the turn-over would assumedly be.
I also think there might be some big issues with their match-making decision tree. I think they might be prioritizing queuing up 4 into an open lobby before throwing people into open matches–this morning I was in a PUG mission with only one other person: mission failed, I qued into the same mission again and ended up with a solo-player near the same spot we were in earlier. All things being equal I would’ve assumed that solo-player should’ve been dropped into our match
I think getting rid of the lobby timer might help, that way people can just wait in a lobby to fill up before departing.
Beyond that I have no idea how to fix the current match-making system. Quick-playing into an empty lobby shouldn’t be a thing. Also sucks getting matched into the “mission failed” screen, or even loading straight back into the Mourningstar.
Everybody’s playing Malice because it’s p!ss easy and quicker to farm materials there, and there are tons of bad players on Heresy failing runs repeatedly because they think it’s not much different from Malice.
It’s difficult to find a decent Heresy team ; I imagine getting matches for Damnation would take even longer.
No cross region play (unless you join another squad in another region).
So, you’re looking at maybe 3/5th of the active users currently playing being in your region during your prime time.
These users are then spread out over 5 difficulties where there’s few playing 1 and 5, some that are playing 2 and 4 and most are playing 3.
This was predicted back in… December that it would happen.
Also because people who got to the harder difficulties earlier/exclusively played them are quitting out of annoyance with the servers/gear acquisition/bugginess/actual broken matchmaking/limited map pool/mission board.
Wanting to play Darktide as a Damnation exclusive player is like pulling teeth. It wasn’t worth it for me anymore, especially when I was to the point where damnation didn’t feel very difficult anymore when the game was actually working. Fighting the game systems more than the gameplay isn’t exactly fun.
There needs to be range queue. Instead of queueing for only a single tier, one should be able to select a range of difficulties to queue. For people rushing farming runs or missions, they should be able to queue 1-3, not just 1, 2 or 3 individually. Similarly, for those looking for a serious experience, they should be able to queue for 4 AND 5 simultaneously. On the other hand, if you’re truly desparate for any game period, just select all difficulties to queue for.