@FatsharkJulia@FatsharkKitefin I decided to break this topic out into it’s own thread to help visibility. I understand your comms on this will still require the team to fully return and I eagerly await what you’re able to tell us.
The discovery of this issue started with how poor Auric felt after the battle for Tertium update. I say discovery because, as you will see, players are still learning that campaign quickplay is even a thing and have varying theories about how poorly it’s affecting quickplay and matchmaking in general.
However, I am now personally satisfied with the state Auric has returned to and think any remaining issues lie in overall balance or various bugs with matchmaking, spawns, and the topic at hand.
If you feel differently about the state of Auric in terms of challenge, please take your comments to this old thread or open another so we can focus on specifically campaign in quick play here.
When I was offered the chance to skip the campaign with the update, I incorrectly commended FS for thinking of those of us who don’t care. Then the slow realization came that my choice was being disregarded, ostensibly to supplement the choice of others who want to play the campaign, but felt the need to do so on Auric, so I was being dragged into story missions against my will. The point was raised that this is very likely because, without QP as a possibility for all players, the likelihood of matchmaking into a story by only those that chose to play it is small and would be a poor experience.
That’s a fair enough thought would be fine if these story missions didn’t come with essentially a “low intensity” modifier, less dense hordes than an old Auric heresy, and no other modifiers possible on top.
This was acknowledged as a bug at about the same time I communicated with @FatsharkJulia about it and she agreed to talk with the team and pass along the feedback:
My personal recommendation to “solve” the issue is just to limit campaign missions to difficulties below Auric.
IME it’s happening significantly less now than like a month ago. I think people have played through the content. I don’t mind it when it’s once in a blue moon. Just make sure I can never QP into an empty campaign lobby and I’ll be satisfied.
Quickplay still tends to drop you into empty campaign mission lobbies, even in Auric. That’s one of the main issues with quick play at the moment and is probably partially responsible for the backfilling issue too.
Charitably, I hope it’s a side effect of them testing allowing you to choose the missions you want, and at worst, are keeping an entire set of server instances spun up for campaign missions only even on Auric and don’t have anything in place to prevent quickplay from selecting them.
