Playing for ratio ?

[Styx]

Hi people !

I noticed lately that it is becoming more and more difficult to start a game on FAF.
This is not due to any technical issue, it is due to the behavior of more and more people.

How many of you have hosted (or even joined) a game and saw people connecting and then disconnecting a few seconds later. Or even disconnecting after another person joined the game ?

There are so much people who are just looking at the ratio and just because they think their team is not going to win, they just prefer to leave until they find a game in which they are sure their team will be the winner.

My god !! Are you only playing for ratio ? Are you only looking for "easy games" ??

On my side I don't care about ratio, I can even be in the always loosing team : it's not a drama. Of course I like to be in the winning team, but what I am here for is playing.

So yes, I'm for "balanced" team (meaning we should not have all the pro players against the noob team). The problem is that a lot of people seem to be wanting to be in the "pro" team to be sure they're gonna win against the "noob" team.

So the message I want to say here is : please, don't only look for games where you're sure to win. It's not because you're not in the team which seems the strongest that the game won't be good. It's even sometimes really challenging and interesting. And I'm also pretty sure that most (or all) of you prefer spending more time playing in a game than waiting in the game lobby.

[Kryo]

i lost like 17 of my 20 last games. So Im not a winning team joiner

[Raging_Squirrel]

Don't care about all that crap.
I play only stacked games

[SpinDrah]

It doesn't take to many team games where your "Team mate" Is building walls around his four main mexes to learn NOT to play on a team with idiots in it!

[Brandon007]

Eh, if I ever play Online, and get Idiots for team mates, I just use them as Distractions, and/or nuke them to get them outta my way XD

[noobymcnoobcake]

Eh, if I ever play Online, and get Idiots for team mates, I just use them as Distractions, and/or nuke them to get them outta my way XD

1) how can you use them as destactions when they have no units and all the eney units are overunning your acu? any oponent with half a brain knows to leave them well alone and snipe you. Nuke them? realy? you gonna last that long and waste that much mass? your dead from the start and nothing you can do about it.

2) In a 2v2 that good player may have taken out an ACU and kept the other players untis at bay. But then you find enemy has autogive and when those gunships arive your teammate is to retarded to have any interceptors even though you said get some air right at the start. There we are GG. you kill ally wit TML and rebuild? you behind on mass and units by a long way. You leave him be? He gonna do nothing usefull and waste tons of mass teching that single factory he has to T3 while he has -400 power.

I think if you matched say zock or ubergeek up with a under 500 player two 1500 rating players would smash that team in minutes. All you need to do is snipe the good player any way you can and its GG.

Teams need to be balanced for it to be fun. 4 player game shoud have no more than 200 rating diference of teams rating and 8 player game should have no more than 400 diference of teams rating. That I think is balanced teams. But two medium players are much better than a good player and bad player. So if one team has some real bad players the other needs some as well.

[uberge3k]

I play for fun.

I do not find games fun when they involve teammates who do not communicate and make large mistakes. More specifically, any scenario where even if I were to play my position perfectly, the game's outcome is still inevitable.

I do not mind training new players who wish to learn; in fact, I find it enjoyable.

Most of the "noobs" that cause these problems in game do not wish to learn; they ignore your instructions and DC or suicide when they dislike the outcome they think is happening.

Playing what essentially amounts to a 2v1/3v3/4v1/etc is pointless should the other team know what they are doing.

Fortunately, it is relatively easy to determine who is "noob" and who is either simply underrated or willing and able to learn. Give everyone a fair chance.

Therefore, I primarily play with friends whenever possible. If possible, we "split" the new players between teams to create some semblance of balance. Alas, this is not always possible due to the fickle nature of players.


My thoughts on the matter are as such: even with the above in mind, team stacking, in the traditional sense is, IMO, rarely a problem. Creating "balance" discourages new players from learning how to play. I started out on the bottom rung of the ladder when I started playing with the "grownups". I was always in the team of "randoms" and was usually slaughtered. And I learned something new in every game, watching the replays and seeing exactly how the other team effortlessly demolished mine. And what happened? I slowly improved. When I then came to Remmy, LordVader, TAG_ROCK, and other greats of the game to ask for training and to teach me how to improve even further, they listened.

FA is a hard game. If repeatedly losing while learning the many intricacies of the game is not appealing, then, you probably shouldn't be joining a game entitled "TAG vs WORLD". If I host a game titled "be good", I assume that whomever has joined has read the title and understood that, yes, the other team will probably be comprised of above-average players, and that they are willing to step up to that. When in lobby, if you see the other team is made of strong players, you need to be ready to bring your A game and play your hardest, regardless of how hopeless you may think the situation is from the ratings.


TLDR:

Learning FA is hard. If you want to learn, seek out opportunities to test yourself further, be that through 1v1s or "stacked" games. Playing the game to avoid losing is, well, counterproductive to that goal. The majority of the problem stems from the 800 rated guy with 100 games who cries "BALANCE!!!" in the lobby.

If you're reading this, you probably aren't him, in which case there is not much you can do. All I can suggest is to find a good group of people to play with.

[Styx]

I agree with what you say uberge3k.

The main point of the discussion was here : why is it taking that much time to start a game ? and one of the reason I think is due to the ratio, but not only !

I started this post after having spent almost 1 hour trying to play (I was kinda angry because I had 1:30 hour left, and I wanted to play before leaving. Finally after 1 hour I gave up)
Within 1 hour I haven't been able to play because of people being afk, or not being "happy" of the teams/players that where about the start the game.

This is not happening everyday, but was is quite frequent is that you have often 15 minutes to wait before starting a game which has all its players. Some will leave, other will join, some are afk, and the remaining will complain about other players in their team, ...

Last time was really a bad experience, that's why i wrote this post (I felt like I had to say something about it :p ). But often I notice people hosting/joining games and then go afk ....
I don't remember having seen that much people doing that when I was playing GPGNet.