This mode has some potential to be interesting but the complete lack of matchmaking and the very lacking help for the losing side (esp skaven) renders it all down to nothing but a very frustrating mess.
The last round i played was happily a 4v4, but.
Other side was all 35´s
They all struck extremely close to eachother with extremely fast reactions to anyone going down
Even their skaven rounds had simultaneous horde releases.
They cleared all ambient enemies in sight in a matter of 10 seconds wherever they went.
And
My side has 1 other 35
Two 20’s or lower
The other 35 was a Dwarf ranger whose primary strategy was to get distracted by any random target as far back as possible, even if it was a enemy special player running around a rock, and he´d stay there and get piled on. Utter refusal to communicate.
It got so bad the enemy team, two of them, suggested we kick the guy because he was ruining the match just that much but at that point with him having downed 3 times the run was just over anyway.
The extreme skill disparity between the 20´s on my side vs 35s on the other result in them just getting killed over and over being permanently dead as skaven. They had no sense of timing or what to pick for when. Even when i got a troll and luckily knocked 2 people over a cliff and downed one before dying they could not manage to do anything meaningful…struggling to find respawn positions or jump shooting (and missing) as a gunrat.
That left the enemy team very much comfortable feeling no pressure, because lacking skaven NPC spawns and passive refill of horde summing was nowhere near close to enough. I think i got two hordes off over two runs.
Fire-rat is incredibly useless against a coordinated team. Poke your nose out and there´s a bullet/javelin there. Cant deal any meaningful damage because fire doesnt disturb aim and most ranged weapons seem to disrupt the fire-shooting. And with several shooters on the other side even gunrat feels really bad.
Only way to deal with such a team is hordes + disablers but…what if no hordes? Which is the case for this mode? It just feels awful
Urgently needed stuff :
Much better passive horde refill
Stronger or at least significantly more numerous hordes
Skaven specials just do not work well outside hordes, but to summon hordes you need to deal damage, which you cant without hordes, which wont come if perma-dead. Or just if enemy team has good shooters.
Tagging somehow got changed last patch and its really bad, revert please dear heavens.
Premade teams cant be allowed to play against randoms, i dont care about implementation difficulty. Its beyond incredibly unfair for the opposing side. Especially with the in practice non-existent safeguards/Balancing mechanics for a losing side.
System to deal with people leaving, people get (often reasonably) frustrated after a bad round, host quits and then the match just cancels and everyone left loses out too.
I want to highlight similar problems, but for me playing was considerably worse as heroes.
First: what’s the point of having dedicated servers if you don’t implement an automatic rejoin like in DT. I had finally found a good team for once and I got disconnected, just to find myself in another losing side as soon as i prompted qp again.
Selecting QP is putting you at a serious disadvantage, as you are basically filling slots against pre-made teams. Very often i started a 2v4 match.
Second: there need to be consequences for disbanding, otherwise, as many have reported, after a single loosing round many players just quit, worsening the chances for those that start the next round with bots (or nothing, if on the pactsworn side): either implement a surrender option or, preferably, some punishment for leaving.
Ah this i forgot in the heat of the moment, good call. And the point about QP tossing you in as replacement for quitters in bad runs against premades too.
Yeah it’s not only that, but even if you are “lucky” enough to be there from the start of the map, a premade of four is gonna start a QP and those 4 slots have to be filled, and that’s why I fear solo QP is such an unbalanced experience.
I think nothing short of an internal ranking system is going to fix things, but have we got enough players queuing? I doubt it.
It would still be worth a shot though: what I have in mind is the game matching you against players with a similar win/loss rate in VS
It does seem intentional at times.
Yesterday I was playing with a friend and we got matched with 2 higher rank players (which I think might have been another duo), while the other team consisted of 3 lvl 9 players and a level 30 guy. As soon as the game started they wrote in the chat “nice, another perfectly balanced match”. I felt their pain.
This type of lobbies where I am paired with new players (not even new to versus, new to the whole game) against experienced player (sometimes premade squad) is 95% of my time with this mode.
Combine it with game going on sale on new mode launch, no matchmaking, “everyone welcome” from the start sounds like classic cash grab - and it is disgustingly bad.
No one is having fun, not new players, not the veterans. I guess it is time for a negative steam review to warn others from buying the game, lured with the news of exciting new game mode.
