I've been playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 again recently, and it's similar to Hawken in a lot of respects. It's heavily team-based, discouraging "lone wolf" play, and its class system means that match outcomes often depend on team composition. Due to both of these factors, teamwork is key, and assuming no blatant stacking, the team with better coordination and teamwork tends to win. In fact, assuming similar amounts of teamwork on both sides, even moderate stacking in terms of skill level doesn't ruin matches. That said, let's talk about Hawken...
In my opinion, the matchmaker does pretty well when it decides teams at the beginning of the game. Given a group of 12 people, I find that it's good at evenly distributing skill on both sides. The problem is that this never happens.
- The vast majority of the time, using the matchmaker to start playing dumps you into an already in-progress match. Sometimes, this is ok: if you're lucky, you join a match that just started or become the 12th player in a somewhat far along but close match. But usually, it's frustrating. Suddenly being shown a 1500:3000 base health ratio indicates not only that you've been put on a team unable to hold its own, but also that you're doomed either to lose from a bad team or to carry this team to victory. Neither option is fun, because one provides a sense of futility and the other a sense of picking up slack from relatively useless allies.
- Entering one-sided matches like this isn't great, but ideally, you can stick around until the end and wait for matchmaker to scramble the teams so next match more evenly distributes competence. But ending a match takes a long time. Exactly why the ends of matches linger so long has been discussed at length already, but the fact is that this downtime is apparently long enough that many players find it more efficient to leave immediately and reenter the matchmaker queue than to just wait for a new match to start in the same lobby. And once a few people leave, the more likely MORE people are to leave because nobody wants to start next match with 6 people or fewer, especially since such underpopulated matches often stay underpopulated without ever getting new players to fill out the 12 slots. In Team Fortress 2, humiliation provides a fun epilogue while the server waits to start a new round, but in Hawken, players completely lose control for an extended duration during which they could be in another match accruing the resources necessary for upgrading equipment (since HC isn't earned in downtime).
- The relatively small size limits of each team exacerbate team size imbalances. In Team Fortress 2, even unfull servers often have about 8 players on each team. This means that an additional player provides his team with a 1/8 manpower advantage against the other team, and while not insignificant, it doesn't suddenly make the other team feel unfairly outnumbered. But in Hawken, the small team sizes mean that matches with 4v4 are common. When a 5th person joins, the bigger team suddenly has a whopping 25% more players than the other one, turning the tide of battle in a fashion that makes the smaller team feel annoyingly powerless against the increased pressure and reinforcements. And, once again, due to the matchmaker's tendency to leave matches with unbalanced player counts, these matches' teams often remain significantly skewed until the very end. Even if everyone waits for the next round to start (which is unlikely, as discussed above), the new match's waiting room still often lacks incoming players, leading to permanently skewed teams (and then the cascade of leaving players once they realize nobody is going to arrive to even out the teams).
- Shorten downtime and provide HC incentive for players to stay between rounds. The more people who stay until the next match, the better.
- Have matchmaker focus on managing fewer matches. Lots of low-population matches leads to no fun for everyone, so denser player distribution would fill/balance both in-progress and about-to-start games faster.
- Don't start objective-oriented matches without a larger minimum player count. Low-population deathmatches can work out as 3-way duels or pair-vs.-pair TDMs, but empty MA and Siege matches always suck because they feel like ghost towns (since players aren't supposed to be actively seeking/following enemies).
- Increase team size. I know, this one's a doozy, but even making the teams 8v8 could go a long way for making technically unbalanced team counts feel less overwhelming (as described above).
- Add functionality for vote-scramble and vote-kick. That way, if a match is clearly unbalanced, players (if the majority agrees) can choose to immediately rebalance the teams to provide a better experience for everyone (stomps are boring as winners and obnoxious as losers). Vote-kick is necessary due to those who are idle or verbally abusive and therefore hindering their team's effectiveness or everyone's enjoyment. Vote-scramble could/should provide small HC rewards to all players almost as if the match had run out of time just then so they don't feel like rebalancing the teams will cost them significant potential winnings.
- Provide an option for "join matches in progress." This option could allow more patient players to wait for new matches, and you could provide an HC bonus to still convince players to join and balance out currently running games.
- The server browser should be a little more detailed. In addition to player count, it should also show the vital match statistics of current team scores (3000:3000, for example), time remaining/elapsed, and friends currently in the server. This would also allow a "see friend's game info" option in the friends list so I could see player count and game mode before blindly jumping into a friend's match. Blindly/accidentally joining a friend's private duel? No thanks. Selecting a friend's 5v5 recently-started siege? Yes please!
Oh, and not being able to manually join a friend's match even if invited due to MMR is completely bogus.
Edited by Mykinius, April 19 2014 - 12:51 PM.

 

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