(Make sure to read this monster text block before replying, thank you )Having spent nearly $200 on this game and investing a far more valuable amount of my time (350 hours) I can say with certainty that I am not new to this game. I recently took a break from this game shortly after the Human Resources Kickstarter was launched, hoping to come back to a very polished, bug free, complete product, with an actual tutorial. This has, unfortunately, not happened. The game, while significantly more polished (I like this), has about the same amount of bugs (mod-free), and a down-graded tutorial (a "player guide? seriously?!). The "player guide" explains mostly self explanatory things, and players will figure these things out on their own after about 3 or 4 games playing in sandbox or versus the ai. No surprise, the balance is not the same, which would be okay if not for the fact that I see that it is still being constantly, nonstop "tweaked." I don't feel as if these "ranks" are little more than bolsters to one's pride, because they do not separate the skill level of individuals.(Is this not what they are for?) If a new player were to try and earn a "rank", he would encounter skilled individuals who should be in a higher rank, than people of his own skill level. Now, with my experience, I do enjoy challenges, and it pleases me that there are still many competitive players on this game, but I'm sure new people do not enjoy getting steamrolled despite being in a low rank where they would undoubtedly expect to be evenly matched with other new people. The learning curve is so steep you might as well just send a set of mountain climbing gear with the physical copies that people buy. I would like to say that I did not start playing again with a pre-conceived notion that "Uber is a bad company," or "Uber can't make games." I love this game, and I will keep playing because I see that Uber has made changes. I for one love the unit cannon, it really spices up gameplay. I enjoy the vanilla matchmaking, but this game still feels like beta. Uber, if you ever make another big game project like this, don't be afraid of beta, because this game really should still be there.
You can't be matched with someone of higher skill level than you be a use that means someone is matched with someone of a lower skill level. (Rank wise I mean)
I understand this, and I don't mind "climbing the ranks." Did I say I wanted to be matched with a higher rank despite being in a lower one? I said the opposite, that people of equal skill should be matched together.
note: Reason you're matched up against more skilled players is because very few people actually play ranked, nothing you can do about that.
Yeah the way the matchmaker works is the more time you wait, the wider the search becomes. Also whilst you are unranked it will put you against anyone to help establish your skill. Only after your first 5 games does it attempt to match you.
Not a lot of people play ranked, so thats why you might get matched with someone way higher than you are
The polish on the game was thicker pre-save update. That broke a lot of things, but is agreed that it is a very needed feature. They are busy fixing save-game introduced bugs, as well as tweaking singleplayer to be better. TL;DR: You picked an unlucky point in time to jump back in expecting "bug-free". Thanks for your honesty though, I like your post. I would tell you it will get better, but knowing you get that a lot and waited a long time, I can just say it got better once already and simply broke with saves.
Bug-free should be a given after release. Sorry to be blunt here. The point of my post is to express my feelings towards the game after I took a break during late fall and winter, if you needed to know perfectdark.
you say don´t be afraid of beta ... but i say you have no idea about a companies resources ... it is always a thing of what someone should do vs what someone is realy capable of to do ....
That's almost certainly wrong. The only difference between your first five games and every game thereafter is that it doesn't tell you where you rank for the first five. I expect that behind the scenes it's identical regardless of the number of games.
The reason not much has changed is that the Save/Load feature is being worked on for months now. They really should have implemented it from the beginning since this feature requires many rewrites of original good working code. And because of those required rewrites, things get broken again and other cool features get delayed. But I bet once the entire save/load feature is implemented, that the game improvement rate will increase and that new cool features will come soon They are already working on asteroids and a galactic war revamp in the background and who knows what comes next
to calculate a position you need some data. So your first game could be against anyone, and I doubt your skill is established reliably even after 5. The system they use includes an 'uncertainty factor' (which increases with inactivity). They higher this is the more random the matches. This also has the side effect of allowing players to move more. Want to climb the ladder? Keep off it and practice in custom games, then come back and your high uncertainty score will give you a shot at people above you allowing you (in theory) to increase your skill rating and move up (assumin ofc you win ).
I think Quitch has at least a tiny point here: From the information theoretical point of view the most information about your "true" skill is gained when a match has a 50:50 chance (This is where the entropy of this decision is at maximum). So when you need to judge a person within 5 games, you will always try to fit the player to a game where there is a 50:50 win ratio, even if your information about the actual skill level isn't reliable. As a result of this the first game is against the average of all skill levels, since you have no information about the actual player. On the other side, this is just guessing
