Matchmaking. E. D is not multiplayer game!

[bassman]

"I want to play with my friends but in open play" ? so... you were expecting a massive shard-server system a'la eve online? I'm pretty sure we'd need to give FD a couple of million pounds a year to make that even remotely feasible

If FD couldnt implement the feature properly within the budget they had to work with then they should not have advertised it as a feature. The OP cant be blamed for expecting an advertised feature to actually be fully working, its not down to him to examine FD's financial position an asses the viability of promised features.

 

[BigAT]

"I want to play with my friends but in open play" ? so... you were expecting a massive shard-server system a'la eve online? I'm pretty sure we'd need to give FD a couple of million pounds a year to make that even remotely feasible you CAN play with your pals in the group mode, claiming you can't is just wrong. I get that you want to play with everyone, and your friends on the same instance all the time, but that isn't possible atm. you can however play with friends as others have pointed out

edit: And wings ARE coming soon(tm), so your dream-way of playing will happen

I can confirm that playing with multiple friends does not work in private group either after testing this for many hours last night. The system worked better in gamma but it has become worse again.
Whether this is to do with player numbers or not I have no idea.
3 of us have tried all loading the game at the very same time and re-logged many times.
We tried sending text messages to each other (yes we have voice comms) and if we're able to message 1 person, we cannot to another.
Sometimes 1 person can message both people, though the ability to message each other has little bearing on us being able to see any of us in game, open or private.

This a part of the game that should be working, how can it work sometimes and not others, yet the response is, go in private or wait for wings.
Private doesn't work and how can wings work if you cannot see each other to form "wings"


I believe a large amount of people playing this game want to and are under the same belief that they can play together with friends, be it in open or private.
Wings is a feature to simply enrich co-op play, not be the fix in order to see each other.

 

[Dash]

From my experience last night - matchmaking isn't working how a lot of us are expecting. I spent over an hour trying to meet up with a friend, with lots of jumping in and out of instances to try and get us to match up. We completely failed to get it to work, but we were both seeing other people in our instances. We went to another system to no avail.

We finally were matched at a Nav Beacon, but upon leaving we were split up again and never saw each other again, despite being sat in the same place outside relatively quiet stations (only a few commanders).

Whilst we're in a group together we aren't playing privately - as that would be a bit dull (for us). My expectation is that the match-making process will always put friends in the same instance - if for some reason it cannot (e.g. that instance is already full of friends, the latency is just way too high, or it simply won't connect) that that information needs to be fed back to the player.

"Cannot join instance with X due to high latency" (move country, get closer friends)
"Cannot join instance with X due to capacity" (ask X to jump out and go into a new instance)

Etcetera.

The match-making server also needs to do it's level best to keep a track of people moving between instances. As we can't "slave" out drives yet, jumping has a good chance of splitting players up in reasonably active space.

 

[beelbeebub]

Played for about 2 hours last night with a friend, open play. Saw each other consistently and solidly (his SC "blob" did jig around a fair bit but otherwise ok).
.
Voice comms were rubbish (used steam).
.
Only issue was when he dropped to a USS and whilst I was cruising towards the wake to drop into the instance (which worked pretty flawlessly) I was interdicted. By the time I broke the interdiction the wake was gone and when he jumped back to SC we were in different instances (but I could see another player, so I surmise that I got placed into a SC instance with the other player who didn't have a good connection to my friend so he couldn't join our instance). However when we both jumped to a new system we were instanced together again.
.

The MP aspect of ED is not fantastic for everyone. Some people are seeing lots of other CMDRs others none. However it is working and FD can build out from this. The servers held up to launch traffic with hardly a blip for the majority (again some had issues) which is a good sign. Almost certainly FD will continue to patch the MP aspect to improve it and with wings arriving next year the MP aspect should strengthen again.
.

Would it have been nice if all this had been in at launch, yes, but look at it this way, there was a choice between keeping it all under wraps and providing all the functions at "launch" next year, or adding the functions between now and then whilst we play. FD, for a number of reasons, chose to let us play whilst they continue working.

 

[flyingrasta]

Thats exactly it. The game is really good but matchmaking&missions are a huge part of the whole package, so the sooner they get it working the better.

 

[Homungus Piet]

They dont listen to the community !!!

HUGE PART WINGS AND MATCHMAKING

why you dont do it WHY

my whole community stopped playing cause of the missing feature . that makes me sad

 

[Auran]

They dont listen to the community !!!

HUGE PART WINGS AND MATCHMAKING

why you dont do it WHY

my whole community stopped playing cause of the missing feature . that makes me sad

I think you've spent a bit too long in space, commander. Please sit down before you harm yourself.

---

I'm not a backer and this is my first post, so I understand if my lack of reputation prevents any impact in the points I'm about to make. If it's worth anything (which it likely wont, understandably), E reached it's goal long before I even heard about it I must say that, when I bought the game within a day of launch, I have been playing constantly - and for days (I think... what day is it?) I couldn't see *anyone*. I was constantly checking my D̶R̶A̶D̶I̶S̶ sensors for a hallowed hollow blip. Maybe I missed a couple, but I never saw them.

When I came on today, I saw there was a 1.03 update. Updated and logged in... before I even left my system, I saw *five* other players, two of which I spoke to. I've seen at least 1 person in every second system I've gone to now (I don't know if that's normal but I *think* I'm in a relatively remote area... can't remember where, ~70LY away from Sol destination). Am I lucky, or has the latest update helped any of you guys? For your reference (re: geoblocking / ISP issues), my home connection is a el-cheapo ADSL2+ connection in Australia - though I've never had any major issues with them.

My main point though, we all know this game was pushed to meet the release deadline. It wasn't "rushed", but things were unfortunately dropped (for a later update) so other things could be buffed out. That happened, accept it. Would you rather have had the release date pushed back, and deal with all the beta limitations and issues (whatever they were, I have no idea) always with the fear of game-breaking bugs? Or would you have rather they cut something else instead of the Wings/Groups feature? Or how about they just do what Egosoft did with X3 and released a half finished, buggy product that brought the most powerful systems to a crawl, and took a year to get to a stable state for the majority of players?

I for one, prefer a cut-down game with superior polish along with the promise of future additions, rather than a delayed release or a more feature-complete "release" that's unstable.

But that's just me, opinions are opinions and they're fine to have. Abusing/harassing/throwing tantrum to the developers is not so fine.

Personally, I think the entire Navigation/Sensor elements are in far more need of work than multiplayer. Route planning is tedious and painful for so many reasons, especially over long distances. We need more shortcut keys - like a "Target: Resume Route" keybind would greatly help, having to manually scroll the nav list to find the system I was going to every time I check out an unknown signal gets a little frustrating frustrating. Unless I've missed something that helps this process..? Ah but I digress.

All this rage/depression is why Kickstarter projects are not always a good thing, IMO. It's too easy to develop a sense of entitlement.

P.S. Err, also it's nice to meet you all?

 

[Bantha]

Single Player or MMO?

I'm not sure what this game is...
Having backed it early, but not with a preposterous amount of money, I've been playing since Gamma.
I really struggle to meet my friend in Open Play (which is where we want to play). Countless hours on the phone with each other: "I'm at the same place as you now, but you're not there"... "I can't see you"... Closing the game, restarting together "On 3-2-1, start"... "Nope, still not together"...
We haven't tried following each other's wakes yet, but we have to be together in the first place to try that anyway, plus, really, it shouldn't be that difficult to meet up should it?
We've only met a couple of times, and soon split up when we hit frameshift...

This isn't a multiplayer game, certainly not in it's current format. It's a single player game where you might bump into other single players at random.

I think a lot of people are disappointed with this. Certainly, when me and my friend played Elite on the speccy 30 years ago, we dreamed of a multiplayer version. Visions of us flying, trading and fighting together across the galaxy. We thought Elite Dangerous would be just this, everything we've been waiting for. It isn't.

I'm not sure we want to be part of a wing or a group either, we just want to play together. To be honest, if we started doing each other's head in, we might even have a fight. One time we did meet up outside a space station he shot me for a laugh, and was then instantly vaporized by the space station for his villainous activity - I have never seen anything so funny in all my life, especially as we were on the phone and all I heard was him shouting "NNOOOOO!!!!". Seriously, the tears were rolling down my face

But then we couldn't meet up again, gave up and both just went off in Open Play and we haven't seen each other since... we can't be bothered even trying now.

And there certainly weren't 32 players in either of our instances, so why did we not meet up? The "quota" wasn't full by any means. First and foremost, we're friends, and as such, that should be the first thing the instancing looks at. We should be paired automatically, even if that means giving us a new instance because there's only one space left in another. I'm no developer, but surely this can be written in? We want to meet other players, co-op, PvP, everything this brings with it, but first and foremost, we want to be together when we play. Is this too much to ask for?
I have a different friend across the Atlantic, and during development I managed to convince him to buy the game. I've actually told him not to now, because we won't meet up, and by all accounts, isn't geography a part of the matching process? If so, I'll never see him, so what's the point?

Rule Number 1: Friends should be paired together, first and foremost, above all else.

I do hope the developers take this on board and write this into the programme. It is such a terrific, beautiful game, but without multiplayer, this isn't enough. After 30 years, all they've really done is improve the graphics, and I'm sorry, but that's just not good enough...

 

[OriginalBadBoy]

After 30 years, all they've really done is improve the graphics, and I'm sorry, but that's just not good enough...

For you maybe ... Its good enough for me!

In all seriousness though, I suspect a lot of the matchmaking issues are to do with people's home set-up. It only takes one person in your session to not have their router configured correctly, or have one that doesn't support certain protocols properly, and the whole thing falls apart.

In the end there are groups of people who have very little trouble connecting to each other, and yet others seem to have major issues.

FD do need to work on the social side of things .. but lets get 2014 out of the way first shall we ...

 

[atlas974]

They dont listen to the community !!!

HUGE PART WINGS AND MATCHMAKING

why you dont do it WHY

my whole community stopped playing cause of the missing feature . that makes me sad

So
So much misinformation

 

[HappyMonday]

For you maybe ... Its good enough for me!

In all seriousness though, I suspect a lot of the matchmaking issues are to do with people's home set-up. It only takes one person in your session to not have their router configured correctly, or have one that doesn't support certain protocols properly, and the whole thing falls apart.

In the end there are groups of people who have very little trouble connecting to each other, and yet others seem to have major issues.

Good enough for me too...Stands to reason the system itself isn't fundamentally broken if it works for some people. Which is not to say it's acceptable for it not to work for most, if not all, in what's ostensibly a multiplayer game, nor a suggestion that Frontier aren't going to be worried about it.

Pure guesswork and no experience in the matter to draw on, but I suspect the trade for greater connectivity is the kind of laggy play I recall from Alpha phase particularly and that it's tuned to avoid that (and the inevitable "WHY YOU PEER TO PEER AT ALL FRONTIER!" outcry when what I gather are it's shortcomings are front and centre for people to see) at all costs, even over connecting friends.

Given that the game is clearly still largely unpolished,or unacceptably unfinished / released too early for money etc depending on your level of patience for all this, I think they'll end up having to tune it to 'connect anyway' as the multiplayer aspects are improved.

What I do expect we'll see is some guidance on setup / forwarding etc whilst we wait for all that...Indeed, there could well already be some I'm not aware of.

 

[Bantha]

Tried meeting my friend again, and now we're meeting up most of the time, instead of hardly ever.
I don't know what has changed, certainly nothing at our ends, but this is a real plus.
We're having such fun together, this is more like it!
Now, if they can just add joint missions, the ability to help each other if interdicted, joint bounties (not just last hit takes all), and so on, I think we're getting there...