I don't know if this has been addressed in the past but....They seem a bit...game breaking...With teams as small as they are, this mechanic doesn't really fit within the ethos of having fun matches.
Maybe I just don't understand them.
I don't know if this has been addressed in the past but....They seem a bit...game breaking...With teams as small as they are, this mechanic doesn't really fit within the ethos of having fun matches.
Maybe I just don't understand them.
Parties won't be split by matchmaker, so if the two best players on the server are in a party, the team with those two players will almost always win. I'm not sure about this one, but the mmr of the party is determined by the mmr of the party leader; because i could get into 1300-1500 mmr games when i partied up with my brother, who started playing very recently.

Ridding the world of evil, one Berzerker at a time.
You are correct in that parties are broken. They just need to make it so parties can end up split onto separate teams; you'd still get to play with your buddies, but then you would also be able to shoot them in the face for even more fun.

Salvage: An Idea to Stop Leavers
Concur. Broken.
I'm all for the idea of parties, but what Hawken did wrong was ensuring parties are always on the same team. If they allowed the team balancer to break them up, parties of up to 12 players.
To be serious for a moment this is just a joke
I'm not sure about this one, but the mmr of the party is determined by the mmr of the party leader.
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fuzzy bunny you CZeroFive
Don't use them in this population base unless you want to ruin the other teams gameplay experience.
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fuzzy bunny you CZeroFive
Parties are great for guilds or for things like War Wednesday type of things or something. It adds comp play. BUT when used in PUB matches is a very bad idea. Especially when done on purpose for stomping and I've seen way too much of that. I've seen not just 2 ppl but 4 or 5 in a party. All high end players stomping snot out of new players. I equate it to High School kids going to kindergarten class and beating up little kids. What losers. While it may be a extreme example it portrays a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Now partying up with some friends and play together on the same server BUT NOT NECESSARILY on the SAME TEAM. That would be fine and fun. I've had 2 recently who actually said "I'm not here to make friends. I'm here for the HC and stats. I don't care whether you like me or not." Wow what nice people.
"Nov8tr" is pronounced "INNOVATOR"

Yes I'm really 64 yrs old. July 6, 1953
I've seen not just 2 ppl but 4 or 5 in a party.
It works the opposite way also when 3 new pilots team up thinking it will be better for them, they get crushed.
Something additional you you have to remember is that with the current population the number of people in queue that the matchmaker has to work with is abysmally low. Parties in their current implementation might work OK with a larger player base, but looking at the number of players in game vs in servers right now I see (222 online vs 141 in servers) 81 total players at the absolute maximum that could possibly be queued across all regions and gamemodes. If you have a party of 3 right now you make up almost 4% of the entire global queue by yourselves, and that number will be much higher when you break up into regions and game modes and shave off the players who are logged in but not queued or playing.
Typically if i encounter a party I just leave the server because one way or another balance is going to be screwed. Always frustrating when you see new players teamed up and have no idea what they are doing so their whole team keeps getting wiped because they've got at least two people who will always be together and never really contribute to the match because they are getting ran through the whole time.
Honestly I think parties should just be regulated to the party search function regardless of size and if you join the normal match making queue while grouped then you'll just be in same server together and not the same team.
Can't remember the last time I saw a match work out well that had a party in it.
Determining the MMR of the party is simply by averaging. I don't believe this has been changed since Reloaded took over.
Do you know how autobalance in servers with a party actually works if this is the case? In my experience, every party member effectively takes on the highest-MMR player's rating (or some arbitrarily high value) for balance purposes. I have no idea how many times I've been stacked with >2600 MMR players in a server that previously had fair teams for multiple matches in a row because a party of two or three new players ended up joining.
Fixed your post, cause using parties is one of the ways people abuse the system and stack teams. They don't care about their gameplay experience, they care about their stats and winning.
To be fair this is technically true, but it's a lot rarer than parties causing the other team to be stacked plus it's not really relevant to anyone in the discussion. No one >2500 MMR in NA stacks teams intentionally now as far as I know and tbh there isn't even a group of active pub players who associate with each other who could pull off inevitable massive stomps like Omni did when they infrequently partied up outside of organized play.
Rad and spacebar must have finally got all the capslock chat messages about them breaking matchmaking. I haven't seen them partied in a while and they were the biggest culprits of destroying balance.



Come on Crafty, you have been officially called out on your lies. Your online reputation is at stake here, this is just like an old school street race running for pink slips. Its run what you brung and hope its enough. Put up or shut the fuzzy bunny up.
Do you know how autobalance in servers with a party actually works if this is the case?
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fuzzy bunny you CZeroFive
Unfortunately this is one of those games where parties/groups sounds good in concept but in practicality it's not. Matchmaking has enough problems trying to balance the game with just random people. Gather a party together and matchmaking doesn't know what to do. If matchmaking splits the party up then I'm sure the party system wouldn't be so much of an issue. Of course this all wishful thinking.
On another note, how exactly is matchmaking going to balance a match where all the enemy mechs are 1 type of mech vs a random bunch on the other side? Has anybody ever put in any thought on maybe restricting the amount of mechs 1 side can use? It's always fun to see but how is matchmaking going to balance that exactly?
Hold on to the things you care about most, even if others see it as insignificant..If you can't be true to yourself, are you really living?





































Was this in a Deathmatch server (or bots)? Because the max party size in team modes is three people.
Allowing parties to be split up for balance would solve many of the problems they solve, BUT the issue with that solution is the norm set by many other games, where the function of a party IS to guarantee that everyone ends up on a team together. Before parties were added to Hawken there were many people complaining that there was no way to always play on the same team as their friends, and if they're changed so that parties are split up for balance those complaints are going to come back. People will be unhappy either way.
The issue, like Nov8tr said, is parties in pub games. Parties need their own queue, like the 6v6 queue we already have but with no size restriction. Obviously with our current population that's a problem, but I think that's a longer-term solution than changing how they function and switching one batch of complaints for a different one.
Yeah I know there is a 3 limit BUT I have seen groups of 4 and 5 on the same team over and over for as many as 5 matches. So I don't know how that worked. And I mean no insult to anyone but I see a lot of this when playing in EU servers. They talk about it being "our server". hmmmm
"Nov8tr" is pronounced "INNOVATOR"

Yes I'm really 64 yrs old. July 6, 1953
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