Haven’t looked at the lobby list long and hard enough to determine whether or not it sorts by ping and/or whether or not the character you’re playing is currently taken. It’d make sense to me it’s at least sorted by ping; refreshing the servers would just ping active ones and they’d respond and show up slower/faster depending on how far away they are. Right? Right enough? I dunno.
Preferred class I can concede, I don’t think it factors that it. But I haven’t looked at it that hard. You’re most likely right that it does show lobbies where your character could be taken so long as strict matchmaking isn’t checked.
You’re killing me, Smalls.
I understand your opinion is not their opinion. It’s both flustering and relieving to be debating with the common understanding that the devs while maybe trying to incentivize (in my opinion) a certain way to play certainly shouldn’t do such a thing. Unless I’m somehow misconstruing this as you agreeing there aren’t correct ways to have fun and they shouldn’t be rewarded over other ways of playing. Just don’t cheat and we’re good, right?
Looking at it that way I can see why it would be rewarded.
However from the point of a player without a group joining randomly from lobby it’s quite often just a difference of two clicks… Of course in this scenario the person would be silly for not doing the single click with the bonus.
The point being that, that first match, even for someone with friends, I more often than not play with strangers. And after that first match, depending how successful it was and what they are doing, I often stick with these strangers for a few games and play with them just like I do my friends. Maybe it’s due to the low playerbase but I’ve never experienced griefers in this game and often if someone is struggling I’d rather give them advice/take a bit of control over the pacing of the run if possible than to start searching for an entirely new party. That’s certainly just a big steaming pile of my opinion, but it’s hard enough to find/connect/play with actual humans.
Quickplay isn’t necessarily making you put up with random people much more than the lobby is. Sure you can see a host you know you dislike and not join him or something as you mentioned. Or vice versa with joining someone you know is good. But is that situation so common and/or frustrating that we need what most people seem to consider a nominal reward from the QP Bonus? Or is QP about teaching the players, ‘to use their setups to be as versatile, adaptable as possible?’ Or is it about helping those without groups find new players? Or is it about “putting up with” the system/rng itself? I will concede that it’s any combination of these, however I don’t concede that it’s notably different from randomly selecting from the lobby.
Furthermore, in regards to putting up with “unlucky same map selections” this argument kinda confuses me if the idea of QP is supposedly all about the difficulty of the random being thrown at you.
I know the “unlucky same map selections” is just one of the scenarios you’ve imagined. But I digress that having players use a system they know they is flawed and rewarding them in part because it’s known to be flawed in an unfun, unlucky way is pretty silly reasoning as part of the reward. If that truly is part of the reasoning.
But beyond that I really don’t agree with the idea of rewarding a player for using a map rng picker; even if the base game had a better loot system this wouldn’t make sense to me. I cannot fathom a system that ‘rewards’ players for using a system they know can be a total drag due to it’s incompetence being random.
But there-in lies both of our opinion’s and feelings.
We simply disagree and don’t see eye to eye on the following:
- “i disagree with this, i feel it is the opposite of what you are describing. if 4 people constantly pick the same roles to synergize well, and make sure their weaknesses are covered by other teammates that they have agreed on in the keep, then they would not learn to use their setups to be as versatile as possible. in quickplay people have to learn to adapt to the situation as needed, if not they will struggle and wipe, and this forces them to learn to use their chosen setups best they can.”
In my opinion synergy, communication, preparation, and execution are part of optimal cooperation. Though both our views are only significant if we believe the devs want us to play a certain way and are attempting to reward that.
- “thing about synergy, is that it requires a high level understanding of the game before you can start to synergize properly.”
There’s no way to say that I think this game is easy to understand in terms of character/career building without sounding pretentious. So I guess I’ll sound pretentious. As for synergy needing a high level of knowledge to be done I would argue you can more/less substitute effective communication and covering of roles in place of pure meta knowledge paired with expectations everyone is doing the meta.
- “the system acknowledges that a bunch of random people cobbled up will probably not do so well, therefore insert bonus to give some leeway.”
This I can agree with. Random players are less likely to succeed compared to a 4 stack of players that are used to each other’s playstyles.
However this exact situation still exists when picking randomly from the lobby, with once again, the difference being X amount of clicks. And in that exact situation it’s not rewarded. Same goes for the standpoint of a player with no group hosting a specific level he wants to beat. He is still putting up with the all the randomness of the quality of players he plays with. Because that’s the thing about strangers; meeting each other finding a good/bad player itself is luck. The method through which you meet them can only mitigate the luck by a 33% to a possible 100% (1/4-3/4 players, one is you, the host you recognize, and the others you might recognize based on the likelihood he will be playing with all the same people as last time) and that is only if you’re reading the lobby details; which isn’t selecting all that randomly from the lobby.
- “then those people without groups would fall out of the game because they don’t have people to play with, and it would be a really, really small community.”
This is one of those points where my therapist repeats to me that people are more receptive once you validate them.
I can’t say whether or not this would be true, you could be completely right. All I know is that it’s already a really, really small community at this time. And I can’t imagine why people would be upset with premade teams being rewarded unless they don’t enjoy making friends with strangers in games. I know my brother is like this, personally. However if I like someone’s skill and/or personality I add them and my list of people to make a premade team with grows.
That’s just my take on it.
I think we can at least all agree that the base loot system isn’t terrific.
What I think we don’t agree on much or at all is the effectiveness of Quickplay mitigating the problem(s) with the loot system and finding a group as a solo player. In my eyes Quickplay vs Lobby will never be more than a few click difference unless you make it so. And even then it’s not so much more beneficial, streamlined, and/or fun to use the Lobby/Quickplay button; if you’re truly picking randomly from the lobby list why should it be rewarded if they’re so similar means of connection?
If the answer to this is simply ping and quality of life I would argue that falls flat; bad ping difficulty connecting is a symptom of no dedicated servers yet, a low playerbase, and the fact we can’t see ping without a mod. Among other things too I’m sure.
If the answer to this is something along the lines of, “Because you don’t have to pick randomly from the lobby.” I will concede that’s true but only in a situation where you have a decent server pool to pick from, history with some of the hosts which you didn’t add as a friend, and a preference on what to play and who to play with in the first place. Which we just agreed, I thought, wasn’t a big deal; play what you wanna how you wanna.
Hopefully reading this wasn’t too dreadful for you; it’s darn long. I’ll try all this validation and niceness stuff you guys keep wanting more of. Don’t expect miracles though.
I loved the bounty board of VT1. It was partly luck whether or not my main was going to get something I wanted that week and that certainly frustrated me; however I like playing the various roles enough that it wasn’t too terrible. I probably would have complained about it on the forums if I went on em during VT1. Might have suggested something like rerolling one bounty on the board every week. Similar to how one of Okri’s daily’s can be rerolled everyday. That’s the first and easiest mitigation to that, unimportant and personal, frustration with the bounty board in my mind.
I’d love to see it implemented even just as it was in VT1; deeds, daily’s, and bounties sound easy to tie into each other in fun ways.
