Dumien
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Posts: 3,292
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Post by Dumien on Dec 20, 2014 19:53:52 GMT -5
So this is what the CoD forum has been up to recently.
Stay classy Hey, Guy.
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Post by hard1ine on Dec 20, 2014 22:40:16 GMT -5
Both sides of this argument have their fair share of strange opinions.
On one hand, there are people who genuinely think SBMM is causing 100% of the game's lag. Never mind that the last game Sledgehammer worked on, MW3, also had a large amount of connection issues, and once they left, Ghosts had much less complaints about lag. It's not a stretch to think that maybe Sledgehammer, a relatively new studio developing the biggest multiplayer title in the world, just hasn't been able to perfect their game's online experience.
The other side has people who think there's zero SBMM in the game. Their thought process basically boils down to "If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's not a duck until a Sledgehammer dev tweets that it is in fact a duck." Advanced Warfare was heavily influenced by Treyarch's design philosophy from Black Ops II, the other CoD that had people complaining about SBMM. Sledgehammer borrowed the Pick 10 system, scorestreaks, and gun-modifying perks as attachments ideas, why not Treyarch's skill based matchmaking setup?
I'm not taking either side. There's definitely more emphasis on skill during matchmaking than in other titles, but it's not why the game is lagging so badly. This game needs weapon balancing patches far more than matchmaking updates.
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Post by iw5000 on Dec 20, 2014 23:33:50 GMT -5
Both sides of this argument have their fair share of strange opinions. On one hand, there are people who genuinely think SBMM is causing 100% of the game's lag. Never mind that the last game Sledgehammer worked on, MW3, also had a large amount of connection issues, and once they left, Ghosts had much less complaints about lag. It's not a stretch to think that maybe Sledgehammer, a relatively new studio developing the biggest multiplayer title in the world, just hasn't been able to perfect their game's online experience. The other side has people who think there's zero SBMM in the game. Their thought process basically boils down to "If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's not a duck until a Sledgehammer dev tweets that it is in fact a duck." Advanced Warfare was heavily influenced by Treyarch's design philosophy from Black Ops II, the other CoD that had people complaining about SBMM. Sledgehammer borrowed the Pick 10 system, scorestreaks, and gun-modifying perks as attachments ideas, why not Treyarch's skill based matchmaking setup? I'm not taking either side. There's definitely more emphasis on skill during matchmaking than in other titles, but it's not why the game is lagging so badly. This game needs weapon balancing patches far more than matchmaking updates. Hardline..... who is saying there is no SBMM? Maybe i missed some posts, but that is NOT the correct view of many people. How many times does this need said? You are missing an entire side that has been presented. There are MANY people who feel that there is SBMM in the game, as we all heard David Vanderhaar say it a few years ago, when he confirmed that it has always been in the game since MW1 (which we intuitively knew from seeing lobbies reshuffled) and that Treyarch had tweaked SBMM in their own settings, giving it lowest priority on a four point scale. BUT.....(this is the key point you miss), we all also heard David Vanderhaar say that the SBMM is restricted to just some very far ends of the Bell Curve tails, and that most all players will never ever see themselves fall under it. And if someone did, it's not like it would affect things that much, only excluding some players at the far margins, and this doesn't even take into account group play. We all heard Vanderhaar say this stuff too. It's often forgotten. People only started complaining about SBMM during BO2...because David Vanderhaar inadvertently blurted out a comment that opened up a can of worms. We all saw how that went. It goes without saying, later developers have pretty much kept quiet on this topic, for fear of having to deal with whining. So there is a third viewpoint. It exists in the game as it always has, since MW1. But it's reach isn't quite what people want to make it out to be.
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Post by hard1ine on Dec 21, 2014 0:36:52 GMT -5
Hardline..... who is saying there is no SBMM? There's extremists on both sides, which I'm referring to just to point out how ridiculous SBMM discussions can get. Then there are moderate people that think removing SBMM will fix a majority of the lag (it won't) on one side, and people who claim SBMM is the same as other titles (it isn't) on the other. One other thing I don't get is why people don't just say "Sledgehammer should fix the lag" as opposed to "Sledgehammer should remove SBMM." It helps to fix the actual problem as opposed to mindlessly repeating a non-existant/very minor factor contributing to it. Also, nobody ever mentions the real issue with SBMM in this game, in that it doesn't work well with the Pick 13 system's inclusion of scorestreaks. If you're constantly playing against people of similar skill, it's much more difficult to go on streaks. This is more of an issue with Pick 13 (an Explosive Drone is not equal to Low Profile), but SBMM partly contributes to stale class setups, and I'm constantly making and encountering (inb4 small sample size) loadouts like this: Primary with Three Attachments Low Profile, Lightweight/Flak Jacket Any Perk 2 Blast Suppressor, Toughness Exo Overclock/Support UAV Why use a high streak that you're unlikely to get against equally skilled opponents when you can slap a Stock/Suppressor or a Perk on your class that benefits you the entire match?
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Post by hard1ine on Dec 21, 2014 0:46:43 GMT -5
To them, people buying into/making up their own BS to rationalize a problem just serves to show that a problem does, in fact, exist. Exactly. People didn't make a huge deal about SBMM in Ghosts because for the most part, the game had solid connectivity. There's definitely lag issues in Advanced Warfare, and many people are upset about it, but removing SBMM won't magically make them go away.
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Will
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Post by Will on Dec 21, 2014 0:52:39 GMT -5
put "Lowered the impact of skill in the matchmaking search function" in patch notes or whatever just to appease the crowd. They could just say this without actually changing anything and the placebo effect would be strong enough to shut up a large chunk of the crowd. >> "Oh yeah the connection is much better now, lag all gone. See? I TOLD YOU SBMM was the problem!"
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Post by iw5000 on Dec 21, 2014 7:43:02 GMT -5
I think its more along the lines of the people in the first group thinking thats what the people in the second group are saying. I haven't really seen more than one or two people outright deny SBMM entirely (and even then its rather shakey), but it seems a lot of people whoa re primarily blaming sbmm for lag are talking as though its the only other alternative. I am lost here. Who would blame SBMM for lag? How? Is the thought process that the game coding is searching so hard for people of identical skill, that it is stretching itself to thin, and sticking people with other across the globe? Hence, more distance, more lag? That's absurd. David Vanderhaar is fully on the record stating that ping/geographical region are well ahead of any other criteria when starting up matchmaking. SledgeHammer, even on their worst day with their dumbest ideas, aren't going to flip that around.
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Post by iw5000 on Dec 21, 2014 16:25:13 GMT -5
Is the thought process that the game coding is searching so hard for people of identical skill, that it is stretching itself to thin, and sticking people with other across the globe? Hence, more distance, more lag? Yeah pretty much. That makes no sense.
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Post by bucket415 on Dec 22, 2014 18:58:38 GMT -5
I had a 4+ rage ratio. Thats minutes of enjoyable gameplay to rage filled game play. You take an 1887 or SPAS to lvl 30?
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Post by ChloeB42 (Alexcalibur42) on Dec 22, 2014 20:35:05 GMT -5
I had a 4+ rage ratio. Thats minutes of enjoyable gameplay to rage filled game play. You take an 1887 or SPAS to lvl 30? Thrice. Wasn't so much aggravating as it was disappointing until you got damage. 1887 was my baby though, loved that gun.
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Post by confuzzled on Dec 25, 2014 22:45:13 GMT -5
Change thread title to "Confirmed Virgin-Mode"....
Unless you are nine years old who is going to play a game for seven minutes, then kill themselves for seven minutes then play for seven minutes then kill themselves....ad infinitude ad nauseum.
Go outside and get some fresh air.
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Post by bucket415 on Dec 26, 2014 10:36:30 GMT -5
I hear that you can buy accounts that have 0 kills and 50,000,000 deaths. The perception is real.
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Will
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Post by Will on Dec 26, 2014 10:48:32 GMT -5
I hear that you can buy accounts that have 0 kills and 50,000,000 deaths. The perception is real. It's funny because in past CODs they would punish people who used modded lobbies by giving them grossly negative stats. Oh, the short term memories. I can hear it already: but SBMM is a new mechanic....my noodly appendage is squirming.
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Post by Marvel4 on Dec 26, 2014 20:06:18 GMT -5
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Post by bmac39 on Dec 26, 2014 20:09:16 GMT -5
^ That was from the asset dump. Directly from the game code. That's an actual error code you can get from the game. As seen here:
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pachiderm
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Post by pachiderm on Dec 26, 2014 20:21:56 GMT -5
For those of you who might begin screaming "OMG it's SBMM. IT'S TOTES IN THE GAME!" If the game skill-matched first, you would never get that error because it would have already eliminated any matches where the skill difference was too high. This is tantamount to proof that the game skill-matches while attempting to join. And because we aren't auto-kicked out of every other game, I would also say it's tantamount to proof that the game's skill-matching is not strict.
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Post by bucket415 on Dec 27, 2014 12:15:25 GMT -5
Isnt that just shopped? The wording sounds like something a 9th grader came up with.
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pachiderm
True Bro
Chewing some serious leaves
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Post by pachiderm on Dec 27, 2014 12:17:47 GMT -5
Isnt that just shopped? The wording sounds like something a 9th grader came up with.
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Post by Megaqwerty on Dec 27, 2014 16:03:39 GMT -5
It's a real message, but I agree that the diction is quite undeveloped. It was probably written quickly since Sledge thought it would be rare (which is true on consoles).
Every picture of it I've seen has been on PC and I suspect that it's only coming up there because of how small that player base is.
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Post by iw5000 on Dec 28, 2014 23:01:05 GMT -5
Never seen that. Ever.
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Pentaza
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Post by Pentaza on Dec 30, 2014 14:16:06 GMT -5
Did this error (or something similar) exist in previous CoD games?
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Pentaza
True Bro
Most kills, fewest deaths.
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Post by Pentaza on Dec 30, 2014 14:24:48 GMT -5
Interestingly, I somehow got into my first (and only real) noob lobby a day or two ago (playing TDM). I went on a 20-something streak without any difficulty and finished up something like 33-4. As soon as the game finished I discovered I was no longer in the lobby.
While I have no proof, I suspect I was kicked out by matchmaking. There was no error message. Just that when I exited the post-game items, stats, etc. menu I was back into select playlist menu, no longer in the lobby. I'm certain I didn't accidentally back out of the lobby... I was planning on sticking around in that lobby as long as possible!
I don't recall that ever happening in CoD before, although admittedly it may have happened and I may not have noticed.
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Post by iw5000 on Dec 30, 2014 15:11:28 GMT -5
Interestingly, I somehow got into my first (and only real) noob lobby a day or two ago (playing TDM). I went on a 20-something streak without any difficulty and finished up something like 33-4. As soon as the game finished I discovered I was no longer in the lobby. While I have no proof, I suspect I was kicked out by matchmaking. There was no error message. Just that when I exited the post-game items, stats, etc. menu I was back into select playlist menu, no longer in the lobby. I'm certain I didn't accidentally back out of the lobby... I was planning on sticking around in that lobby as long as possible! I don't recall that ever happening in CoD before, although admittedly it may have happened and I may not have noticed. There's a lot of weird stuff going on with this game. We've had people forced kicked from lobbies quite a many times, as well as kicked from our groups. Party/group coding in AW really sucks. We had one guy dropped at the start of a game four straight times at one point. Then difficulty reforming groups. And it has to be with the game itself, not on the XB1 side, as I never see this weird stuff happening with games like Destiny. Even dumb more stuff. For a game that was supposed to have Dedis, I saw three host migrations in just two hours on Sunday afternoon during a clan war.
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Post by Megaqwerty on Dec 30, 2014 16:58:37 GMT -5
I personally have never had more problems with matchmaking than in AW. Ghosts was bad at launch, but the patches in the first month resolved the issues.
Specifically, invited players have difficulties joining parties and parties can be randomly broken on attempting to find games and once games launch.
The fact that AW itself consistently crashes for at least someone in the party every night doesn't help either.
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Will
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Post by Will on Dec 30, 2014 18:28:29 GMT -5
Yeah the party system is terrible. I thought it was a problem with Xbox One (we had these problems in all games when the console launched - but seeing it happen to you on PS4 as well tells me it might be the game. "Can not connect to host - his game is private" is the biggest problem we keep running into.
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Post by ChloeB42 (Alexcalibur42) on Dec 30, 2014 18:36:51 GMT -5
I've actually had much less problem with that in AW then in Ghosts, BO2, MW3 and BO1. Those games made it neigh impossible to join people from my experience. AW has a few hiccups and I hate that the last few games (MW3, Ghosts and AW) don't have an option to change your privacy settings. BO1 and 2 at least allowed you to join a friend if they had an open party.
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Post by Megaqwerty on Dec 30, 2014 19:05:00 GMT -5
BO1 and 2 at least allowed you to join a friend if they had an open party. Ghosts let you do that, at least on PS4. AW will occasionally let me do this, but only rarely and for seemingly no reason.
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Post by iw5000 on Dec 31, 2014 9:49:56 GMT -5
Facts: 1. SBMM has always existed. 2. SBMM is only considered after connection optimization. Ergo, the game will attempt to pair up bad players with bad players but only if those players are the best possible connection. No. Your "facts" are simply not accurate. 4. Advanced Warfare brought back BO2-style SBMM, but on steroids. It's even stronger this time. It even factors in your BO2 and Ghosts stats, that's how serious it is about limiting players to tiny skill pools. To make matters worse, AW doesn't even give us the matchmaking preference options like BO2, because SHG is so da mn determined to match us up by skill. If you legitimately do not believe SBMM plays a huge role in public matchmaking, you are in denial. Flat-out denial. Several people, including Drift0r (an SBMM-defender), have exposed the game's public matchmaking algorithm code as hard proof. Drift0r made a video showing the SBMM code but Activision didn't like him showing game code and told him to take it down, so it's gone now ( see here). But since I can't link you to that video, I'll leave you this: ProofIf you still need more proof, go check out Drift0r's Twitter where he's posted evidence that if he didn't have US-only filter on his router, he would instantly get paired up with players from other continents. Even with the US-only filter enabled, he still got put into a pub where all of the players were completely spread across the US. West coast, mid-west, south, and east coast. Someone in Seattle playing with someone in Boston is NOT (!!!!!!!) an acceptable ping!!!! It's pretty hard to deny the influence of SBMM when I literally see the exact same fuc king players in every TDM lobby I get put in on PC. Every. Single. Fuc king. Day. I never had that problem in BO2 until late in its life cycle when the player count was extremely small. Maybe this has already been discussed, but how is the above proof? There's some code. And Drifter talking about how he has the code. Ok? So what. We know that code has been in CoD since MW1 (at a minimum). In fact, we even know there has been some code in the games to let people with only a few hours of playing, to only get lobbies against other new people (or was that a new person playlist?). Either way, it's on the record that various elements of SBMM have been used in CoD. Even something as simple as a TDM lobby of 12 people, will reshuffle the players in the lobby for a second game, under the pretence of rebalancing. What Driftor's code doesn't show, is the extent and/or reach of the SBMM. How big of a net is it casting? People keep using Treyarch's BO2 as some proof of SBMM, where it ramped up, etc... but the reality is, there was never any proof with it. David Vanderhaar admitted to it being there, in similar fashion to prior games, but ALSO was on the record in saying that it didn't capture many people in it's net. There were other factors ahead of it, and even IF it did kick in, the parameters were very loose, it captured few people. And what type of proof is anecdotal evidence seeing the same players in a lobby? That could easily be explained away by a low player population count. Especially in the above example, a PC. CoD is dead on the PC. Hell, it almost pretty dead on the XB1. If you go play on a non-popular game mode like CtF, it's common to see the same opponents when lobby searching, four or five straight searches. Is that SBMM? No. It's just the game can't find enough players. Until code can be found, showing how the parameters work, how big of a net it casts....there is no proof of anything.
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Will
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Post by Will on Dec 31, 2014 13:29:53 GMT -5
All that Drift0r showed was a list of variables that might be used for SBMM. And we all know game code is pumped to the brim with dead/unused variables.
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Pentaza
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Post by Pentaza on Dec 31, 2014 18:55:07 GMT -5
Until code can be found, showing how the parameters work, how big of a net it casts....there is no proof of anything. This the most frustrating part - the lack of any concrete information. When things are opaque, as they are in this case, it leads to lots of speculation and finger-pointing. When there have been a lot of matchmaking problems since release, that have (at least for me) been worse than what I have experienced with previous CoD games, SBMM - something which there is reasonable evidence has been changed since previous releases, at least to some extent, but which we don't have the facts about - is going to come up in debate as a possible cause of the problems. In lieu of the facts, opinions are going to vary on the extent to which SBMM may be causing connection problems. Something I don't recall seeing mentioned so far in this discussion is that the parameters could well be configured differently for dedicated servers (if and where they exist) versus listen servers.
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