WhyNotZoidberg_AU

I appreciate the response but I do feel there's something broken in the MM algorithm on our data centre's.

As I feel very strongly that this isn't a population issue, this is a MM algorithm specifically under our Australian data centre's issue, I am willing to challenge Massive in a $300 AUD (Australian Dollar) bet.

My challenge is for Massive to:

• Get 3 people to connect to Australia servers via a VPN, forcing connection via code or best done in person in Australia
• 3 different providers would be nice (and I mean ISP's just to isolate further)
• Queue a match making mission via the map -> random mission
• Do this before the next maintenance

The win state is:

• All 3 individuals must connect to games within Australia servers (ESC -> Server Shown) - with other Oceanic players. (not 3 separate solo sessions)
• If there exists low population, those 3 individuals would likely connect to the same random mission

If Massive is capable of providing video evidence then I will concede my stance and the following:

• I will never post another post about the MM state in Oceanic and accuse Massive's MM algorithms/AU data centre MM server
• I will then donate $100 dollars (Australian Dollars) to 3 winners for Steam games/items to this very community (Total $300 dollars)
• I will allow Massive to post under the weekly maintenance next week a name and shame me moment

I will be very happy to be proven wrong, I am happy to put up half my weekly pay on the line for this challenge and eat cup noodles for a few weeks to pay my bills.

If Massive finds there is an issue, I don't need the $300, this community doesn't, all we ask is for an official acknowledgement in the next SOTG or something from the voices of Massive to tell us, we were right and they're working on it. That's all we want.

Just to add some clarification: Oceania players matching with US servers is not broken. This is on purpose with the explanation above. You guys are pointing out some things that we can definitely have a look at, no question. There's also no need to proof you wrong, that doesn't actually solve anything. If the way matchmaking currently works for the region and it's not what players want we can change it. There's no benefit to us to be right on this just for the sake of being right.

We'll look into some of the feedback players have been providing here and I can see if I can also give you guys some more clarification on the matchmaking process or something else that will make it easier to understand how things are working right now.

durztwo

very long matchmaking queues

How is is it "very long matchmaking queues" exactly when you can have two players in Australia sitting side by side, they both start matchmaking for the same thing at the same time, and they will never be matched with each other no matter how long you wait?

It's just broken software. It might surface itself as "very long matchmaking queues", but it's still broken at the core.

We're not relying on player feedback only and we use data of how long players are waiting in queue. Regarding your two players sitting next to each other: Is the expectation that the game just starts with those two Australian players and the group gets potentially never filled?

Definitely interested in hearing more about that. Thanks for the input!

Hey. We understand there's some confusion around this and some players think matchmaking is broken. Due to very long matchmaking queues we decided to allow players from Oceania to be matched with other servers. We prioritize matching with the US West servers now to at least allow players to join with other agents that speak the same language while having relatively quick queues, but we understand that latency is an issue.

There's probably not an ideal solution for everybody. Some players would like to never match outside of their region because latency is the most important to them. Other agents would prefer to have quicker queues and don't care that much about latency. And then there's probably a bunch more options and opinions that players have. We know this is a tricky topic but we appreciate your feedback and we can make further changes to the matchmaking.

RiChessReadit

I’m no game dev so I can’t even begin to understand the level of troubleshooting that goes into making something work, but why are conditions or circumstances of the death/down even a problem? Is it not a binary state?

Can you go into more specifics as to why revive hive fails so often? On the surface it seems like it should be simple, that’s why it’s so frustrating on the player end.

I can't go into details as I'm not a developer either. What I know is that certain instances can make it happen that you don't get revived. The thing I'm personally failing at is to understand what is a simple solution and what is difficult. Without knowledge of the intricacies of software development, I often times think something will be an easy fix to then find out it's not, or expecting something to take a long time when it actually is a quick fix.

Once we're certain the Reviver works as it should, maybe having one of the devs talk about the fixing process would be an interesting topic.

Sloi

I know that’s not how they designed the hive, but why couldn’t they just make it a binary item when it’s used for solo play?

Do you have it available? Yes? Then it 100% revives the player.

Is it on cool down? Yes? Then you can’t use it and therefore it won’t revive you.

I don’t know why it can’t be that fucking simple. Can someone explain?

Because bugs! If we boil it down, it should work like you're saying. If you have it equipped and it's off cooldown it revives you.

We're fixing a couple more instances of the Reviver not working properly with Title Update 3. Feel free to test it on the PTS right now and let us know if you find more instances of it not working.

Reviving, it turns out, is pretty difficult to get bug free due to some circumstances of how you die, with which effects on you and what you're doing while you die. We'll get there eventually, but I can tell you the devs put some serious work into fixing the bugs we found so far and it's unfortunately not easy and every bug needs its own fix.

We'll add a hotkey to open the Social menu when downed with Title Update 3. While that doesn't allow you to access all of the menus, it's a first step. We'll look into adding further access in the future, but I can't promise anything for now.

Hey! Just wanted to let you know we'll have an article for the PTS going out today that will have Patch Notes. Caveat: The dev team is still working on the PTS, so the Patch Notes will not be complete and some changes that are in the notes might not have made it to the PTS yet.

It should give you a pretty good overview though! Thanks for testing.

ChrisGansler

Thanks for letting us know. Just to double check, you did download a patch, right?

And it's the same as before, after Easy Anti Cheat is done, the boot up is slow (long black screen) and then the loading before your agent shows up, as well as afterwards is very slow?

Just getting back to this (was waiting for my game to boot): We're aware that the fix seems to not have helped all players and we have a suspicion what's the cause of that. We'll put some more work into it.

Sorry for the delay and the inconvenience.

Thanks for letting us know. Just to double check, you did download a patch, right?

And it's the same as before, after Easy Anti Cheat is done, the boot up is slow (long black screen) and then the loading before your agent shows up, as well as afterwards is very slow?

Just want to chime in: This is obviously not working properly. We have found a first issue that might cause this and will work on fixing it as soon as we can.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Anundir

You are forcing PvE players into PvP content to prepare for PvE raids. You lost a LOT of players in TD1 because BiS dropped in DZ. Your company was praised for not making the same mistake in TD2. So much for that now...

Let's have this discussion when all content is out there and you know where to get your loot and how it'll look like. We totally understand that some players prefer their solo experience and others prefer not going into the DZ.

Nothing we're doing right now is set in stone and will never change. But, we also want to challenge our players to experience new things.

We'll definitely keep listening to you.

schoopderp

It's unclear why some balance changes were implemented if you don't want players to look at them. What's the reason behind only releasing some of the balance changes without implementing the whole picture at once?

Some changes were ready for implementation, other were still being worked on. That's why we will have phases on the PTS that focus on specific topics.

mrz3ro

Balance is not what we're looking at for the first phase right now.

Balance is what WE are looking at in this phase. You made a bunch of balance changes and you're telling us not to pay attention, but we've played other games and we know how this goes.

You can totally look at the balance changes made right now. But without the context of the other changes coming to the game, it'll like not be very fruitful.

ray_fucking_purchase

So now their forcing players to the DZ once again in order to get Max Gear Score. What the fuck?

Without spoiling too much. The raid is not in the Dark Zone.

gX-kiD

Balance is not what we're looking at for the first phase right now.

Then what exactly are you looking at? Should players on the PTS just give random feedback on "bugs" without any communicated changes or assigned test tasks? Because then you can also get rid of the PTS as it serves no purpose beyond what's possible with feedback on the live game already.

Yes, the first phase is literally bug hunting. If you find something that is broken, let us know!

Balance will be a discussion topic in one of the next phases and then you're more than welcome to provide us insight and feedback on what you feel about the changes present on the PTS.

Just to give you the full picture: Not all balance changes that are coming for TU3 are yet on the PTS.

cfox0835

Balance should be what you’re looking at for the first phase right now, though.

Without all changes to balance being present, we disagree with that statement.

RobinxR

So where is the so called changes to make players feel stronger if they nerf literally every single talent which made sense to run?

Hey, we already said this in our forum post: We currently only want you to look for bugs on the PTS. There are a bunch of balance changes that have not made it into today's PTS build.

Balance is not what we're looking at for the first phase right now.

I feel like this is a bit of communication error on our side. We do intent to balance PvE and PvP separately. That does not mean that one change in one mode will never effect the other mode.

But we do have tools that allow us to do more balancing that is different for PvE and PvP. We have not done any PvP balancing so far but if you're interested in what we might do in the future, I'd strongly advise to tune in to State of the Game in 35 minutes.

Kaaner

Love the ideas that the devs have except for the talent nerfs they are looking at.

I don’t think nerfing the popular talents and buffing the less popular talents is the way to go. Just buff the less popular ones without nerfing the ones people use the most. I understand it’s a live game and things are always changing but talents are extremely important and some talents will just always be better than others.

You can’t just keep nerfing and buffing talents because some aren’t used as much. The answer should be to buff the less popular talents and then evaluate where it’s at. Hopefully they don’t go crazy with the nerfs.

We'll talk about details in the future, I just want to add to this:

The overall thought right now is that some content is too difficult and some NPCs are too spongy. While we want to change (nerf/buff) talents, the overall experience should be that players get stronger.

We understand that some players would like to see only buffs to under performing, but there is concern of power creep and us endlessly buffing talents without actually changing which talents are always used. Please do keep providing feedback on this though, we're not saying things can't change.