Cross District Matchmaking.. GTA Style loading?? I hope not!

[NotZombieBiscuit 3146]

45 minutes ago, MattScott said:

The new design will allow players to join any district they want to play in, and then match with any other player in that same district.
We can phase the matched players to a new district server with the best response time, and the game wont have to reload any art for the district.
This does mean that cars and pedestrians and other interactive props will change during the transition, but I feel like that is a small price to pay.
 

How will District chat be affected by this? One of the biggest parts of APB is the community and district chat is a huge part of that. I would not want to see that portion of the game fragmented due to how it works with phasing (Phasing was one of the biggest killers for WoW's sense of community). Would chat then be MAP wide across all phasing or just the INSTANCE that you are in? If it is just that instance it is quite obvious the issues that would come along with that and the heavy hit it would cause to seamless community. Edited July 27, 2018 by NotZombieBiscuit

[MattScott 15242]

This is a great question. Yes. I think we will need a new Map-wide channel.

[illgot 379]

On 7/23/2018 at 8:09 AM, Seedy said:

On 7/23/2018 at 7:45 AM, trismatic said:

This would make the game much better and more fair. Dynamically moving teams to match the threats better, and eventually the district would have similarly skilled teams. Was this mentioned somewhere? I've been suggesting and hoping this for ages and I think it was discussed years ago too. Technically it doesn't have to "load" you if done correctly like in The Division. It changes the "server" on-the-fly without you noticing in any other way than enemies/players disappearing and appearing.

if it was done on the fly then i see no issue. As long as it was seamless. 

I'm not sure how it can be seemless.  I mean, you are driving around, about to ram your friend, then suddenly you guys load to what, the same location you were at in a different district?  I doubt this would be case because then NPC/PC vehicles or NPCs/PCs may also be in the same location causing countless bugs.

More than likely you just load to the spawn screen as if you just died in a mission.  Now you are in the middle of a mission sans vehicle and at a disadvantage because you are being dropped with what ever load out you had on and have to steal a vehicle or run to the car spawner.

[DustyMittens 0]

8 minutes ago, illgot said:

I'm not sure how it can be seemless.  I mean, you are driving around, about to ram your friend, then suddenly you guys load to what, the same location you were at in a different district?  I doubt this would be case because then NPC/PC vehicles or NPCs/PCs may also be in the same location causing countless bugs.

More than likely you just load to the spawn screen as if you just died in a mission.  Now you are in the middle of a mission sans vehicle and at a disadvantage because you are being dropped with what ever load out you had on and have to steal a vehicle or run to the car spawner.

Apparently you've never been driving around in North Financial, and catch a truck spawning inside of a stopped car. It doesn't cause much just a car that goes 100 miles an hour spamming crashing sounds. Now me being a explorer decided to get into the vehicle that was going wild. It was glorious for the first few seconds it let me...then it shot underneath the map, and exploded. I died in the void with nothing to show for it, except a message of You shouldn't be here flashed across my screen, and sent me to the pick a spawn map. Glorious in my opinion. I do not feel it was a terrible bug.

[Alekero 6]

Anyway it wont be smooth and unnoticeably in APB so it has to be polished and tested much. Or we gonna get another bunch of bugs with flying cars, falling through textures etc. 

[speee 90]

2 hours ago, MattScott said:

Hi all,

Yes. We can't do cross district matching till Unreal 3.5 is released. The current version of the game can't support phasing.

The new design will allow players to join any district they want to play in, and then match with any other player in that same district.
We can phase the matched players to a new district server with the best response time, and the game wont have to reload any art for the district.
This does mean that cars and pedestrians and other interactive props will change during the transition, but I feel like that is a small price to pay.

Aside from the player matching benefits, it also means you can join any district while you wait.
No sitting at the district listing and competing with every other player to get the last spot on the single desirable district with the full population.

Thanks,
Matt

I really like this idea. I would imagine it would make matchmaking and threat/elo rating easier to work on as well. Edited July 27, 2018 by speee

[Clandestine 390]

41 minutes ago, DustyMittens said:

52 minutes ago, illgot said:

I'm not sure how it can be seemless.  I mean, you are driving around, about to ram your friend, then suddenly you guys load to what, the same location you were at in a different district?  I doubt this would be case because then NPC/PC vehicles or NPCs/PCs may also be in the same location causing countless bugs.

More than likely you just load to the spawn screen as if you just died in a mission.  Now you are in the middle of a mission sans vehicle and at a disadvantage because you are being dropped with what ever load out you had on and have to steal a vehicle or run to the car spawner.

Apparently you've never been driving around in North Financial, and catch a truck spawning inside of a stopped car. It doesn't cause much just a car that goes 100 miles an hour spamming crashing sounds. Now me being a explorer decided to get into the vehicle that was going wild. It was glorious for the first few seconds it let me...then it shot underneath the map, and exploded. I died in the void with nothing to show for it, except a message of You shouldn't be here flashed across my screen, and sent me to the pick a spawn map. Glorious in my opinion. I do not feel it was a terrible bug.

We need things like that to stay or else APB won't be APB. I'm scared that wheelies might be gone in 3.5 

[Dopefish 248]

2 hours ago, MattScott said:

We can phase the matched players to a new district server with the best response time, and the game wont have to reload any art for the district.
This does mean that cars and pedestrians and other interactive props will change during the transition, but I feel like that is a small price to pay.

Cross-district matchmaking is one of the best upgrades this game can get. To avoid issues, you could "ghost" players during phasing until they're no longer colliding with anything in the new server. Hopefully this system will have a slight weight towards district population aswell, to retain the living world feel of APB. Anyhow, I'm glad to hear that you guys are aiming for a seamless transition 

[GhosT 1301]

2 hours ago, -Rachel- said:

2 hours ago, GhosT said:

Cross district matchmaking might improve matchmaking, but it is one idiotic solution.

No, it's the best possible solution. Matchmaking would then be server-wide and have a much larger pool of players to draw from. How, in any conceivable way, is it an idiotic solution?

Loading screens after almost every single mission.

If it's going to be seamless (which I highly doubt), you'll see tons of stuff disappearing and other stuff appearing, eventually glitching out because you just spawned inside of something that wasn't there before.
You'll also lose everyone that was in your team that you wouldn't mind playing with again, but aren't grouped with, and everyone else in the district - so if you're one of the people that actively uses the chat to talk to others, you'll be torn out of a discussion.

While mapwide matchmaking would be nice, it brings far too many problems with it.

[vsb 6171]

2 minutes ago, GhosT said:

Loading screens after almost every single mission.

If it's going to be seamless (which I highly doubt), you'll see tons of stuff disappearing and other stuff appearing, eventually glitching out because you just spawned inside of something that wasn't there before.
You'll also lose everyone that was in your team that you wouldn't mind playing with again, but aren't grouped with, and everyone else in the district - so if you're one of the people that actively uses the chat to talk to others, you'll be torn out of a discussion.

While mapwide matchmaking would be nice, it brings far too many problems with it.

mattscott literally just said it was going to be seamless? he’s also added that a district-wide chat is something that should be added, so chatting shouldn’t be an issue

as for the random pugs, i’d rather have far more balanced matches overall vs a team i can maybe solo with

[GhosT 1301]

14 minutes ago, BXNNXD said:

mattscott literally just said it was going to be seamless? he’s also added that a district-wide chat is something that should be added, so chatting shouldn’t be an issue

as for the random pugs, i’d rather have far more balanced matches overall vs a team i can maybe solo with

Which is just going to be full of spam, and the person you just had a district chat with will never know you left.

I just don't like the idea of it, it's hard to actually add such a thing to the game. Main problem being things like traffic that'll just change out of nowhere, and you spawning randomly into peoples cars, or bring your car with you that's left in some alleyway that suddenly blocks the line of sights during a shootout, or spawns inside of you which causes you to get stuck or glitch out.. all that. Edited July 27, 2018 by GhosT
typo

[-Rachel- 129]

3 hours ago, GhosT said:

Loading screens after almost every single mission.

If it's going to be seamless (which I highly doubt), you'll see tons of stuff disappearing and other stuff appearing, eventually glitching out because you just spawned inside of something that wasn't there before.
You'll also lose everyone that was in your team that you wouldn't mind playing with again, but aren't grouped with, and everyone else in the district - so if you're one of the people that actively uses the chat to talk to others, you'll be torn out of a discussion.

While mapwide matchmaking would be nice, it brings far too many problems with it.

It would be seamless, do you not know what phasing is? It just moves you from one district to the other without having to reload the district.. so no loading screen. Some things might appear or disappear, but for the large part, it should be a quick, load-free transition. If you're worried about immersion, then sorry, because yes, some things might change as you phase, but it also gives you a better chance at a fair match and does so more quickly than without the technology, so it's a tradeoff, but on the win side for 99% of people.

[Killer Rabbit 71]

9 hours ago, GhosT said:

Which is just going to be full of spam, and the person you just had a district chat with will never know you left.

I just don't like the idea of it, it's hard to actually add such a thing to the game. Main problem being things like traffic that'll just change out of nowhere, and you spawning randomly into peoples cars, or bring your car with you that's left in some alleyway that suddenly blocks the line of sights during a shootout, or spawns inside of you which causes you to get stuck or glitch out.. all that.

Do you really think they'll just spawn your car inside someone elses? They're not idiots. I imagine you'll have some sort of noclip on for a few seconds as you phase in, to give you a chance to keep on driving seamlessly and get to a point where you won't glitch through anything.

[GhosT 1301]

29 minutes ago, Killer Rabbit said:

10 hours ago, GhosT said:

Which is just going to be full of spam, and the person you just had a district chat with will never know you left.

I just don't like the idea of it, it's hard to actually add such a thing to the game. Main problem being things like traffic that'll just change out of nowhere, and you spawning randomly into peoples cars, or bring your car with you that's left in some alleyway that suddenly blocks the line of sights during a shootout, or spawns inside of you which causes you to get stuck or glitch out.. all that.

Do you really think they'll just spawn your car inside someone elses? They're not idiots. I imagine you'll have some sort of noclip on for a few seconds as you phase in, to give you a chance to keep on driving seamlessly and get to a point where you won't glitch through anything.

Who knows, something like that might not even be possible in APB. LO has said so much stuff by now, but we pretty much haven't seen anything yet, so I don't know if it's going to work out as perfect as they say it will.

Just a little sceptical that's all.

[NotZombieBiscuit 3146]

I'd rather they despawn your vehicle and kick you back to the pick a contact spawn point to avoid any issues for both yourself and other players.

[trismatic 2]

On 7/27/2018 at 11:43 PM, illgot said:

I'm not sure how it can be seemless.  I mean, you are driving around, about to ram your friend, then suddenly you guys load to what, the same location you were at in a different district?  I doubt this would be case because then NPC/PC vehicles or NPCs/PCs may also be in the same location causing countless bugs.

More than likely you just load to the spawn screen as if you just died in a mission.  Now you are in the middle of a mission sans vehicle and at a disadvantage because you are being dropped with what ever load out you had on and have to steal a vehicle or run to the car spawner.

Well, sure, NPCs disappear and appear, of course. That is a very small price to pay for getting more equal matches, more opposition as in different teams, faster opposition since the pool is larger... Honestly, I can't see any valid arguments why this system isn't superior to the one we have. I could even bet that this system could attract more players into the game and personally I see it as the biggest game changer this game has ever had even planned, including the engine upgrade itself.

Also, issues like these can be easily worked out. Make the phasing players transparent for a while so no collision issues. District chat is rather pointless for many, mostly filled with garbage. Social is the district where you can socialize. Immersion is not taken out but made better since you actually match with equal players and the phasing procedure is quick and not happening every time a match begins. Even solo, you get more chances to play with equally skilled other solo players than put in a team with a random less skilled team. You could even make "friends" this way. Less frustration, more fun pew pewing. Edited July 29, 2018 by trismatic

[Nophromoo 6]

On 7/27/2018 at 3:56 PM, Seedy said:

On 7/27/2018 at 3:52 PM, BXNNXD said:

i can’t wait to district phase inside of a civilians car and explode

that said i think it’s a great solution to arguably one of apbs bigggest issues

im driving down the road.. la la la.. listening to the tunes.. next thing.. spawned in new /d . right on top of another car.. dead or thrown right the fuck up in the air like we used to exploit for youtube videos.. Hey we might even get back up the the PCs and stuff on the top of that roof! 

 

Possible final form of the phone booths? The mobile phone call.

[Salvick 248]

Sounds like the definitive solution to dethreating and unbalanced matchmaking, although I hope we still have the option to browse the full servers list and join any instance we want in order to arrange our meetings with other players, friends and clans.