Noobs and the Dota effect

"Matchmaking" (really just delineating) players by level would be preferable, isn't that how other DOTA-style games do it? I know League of Legends does.

I can be level 30 and team up with bunch of pre-10 guys and will end up facing around level 12 guys

This is the primary reason I stopped forfeiting the support class in favor of people who picked it first! I don't trust anyone to keep those turrets up to date properly... Naturally, with a position on defense/mid field... success is highly dependant on the rest of the team. But I think, that a team with two supports can indeed do well!

...Then there are times, when I pick support... and two others do. A good time to leave the server... <.<

Dunno why you call it the DotA effect since this happens in EVERY game that requires some kind of team work. It happened in TF2, it happened in bloody Medal of Honor Allied Assault back in 2002, it happened in everything with a team based multiplayer ever made really.

Leading out a charge only to find yourself alone 9 out of 10 times is absurdly frustrating. When I look at the scoreboard and I double my entire team's kills and money, when I'm constantly being ganged by 3 or 4 players because my team is nowhere to be found, it makes me a sad panda. When I'm playing Sniper and I'm the most offensive member, I'm the one pushing the charge... Or when there's two of us holding it out against the entire enemy team for several minutes without so much as a team mate showing up to back it up, when there are 2 people in a team of six actually trying to control important map areas, it gets annoying.

And off course, the classic: 4 people charge with you. 4 enemies charge at you. You kill 2 or 3 enemies, only to find that your entire team is either dead or fled... and you eventually die.

Sadly, not a lot you can do.

This has been suggested before, and I can totally agree. I like playing with my friends as much as the next guy, but I'll play on their team or against them, because I'm not trying to stack.

I don't really agree here. Simply because, how will newbies learn to play if they're only paired up with more newbies? When you wanna get better you play with good players, not with crappy ones.

I'm gonna stop you right here. I have yet to understand why people keep saying that assassins shouldn't kill players and instead should kill bots and turrets. The Assassin's role is similar to that of the sniper, precision striking. Eliminating valuable targets. She also happens to be very good at taking out bots and turrets, but she should, by no means, relegate taking out players to a secondary function, particularly due to how good she is at it. When I'm playing assassin I tend to do both, and I do quite well at it. I'll take out bots till I find a target, once I do I take them out. Then back to bots till I find a new target. Once I get juice I'll raid the enemy base and maul turrets (and one or two unlucky enemies I find if I get enough juice after destroying the turrets. Rinse and repeat.

@Salad Snake: Matchmaking is horrid and should never be default for anything. Let me pick my damn server.

Matchmaking is hard, if not impossible to do on publicly run servers.

What players go where?

Pretty safe to say that Uber will not be reneging on one it's advertising features for PC.

It's an indicator of how much time you spent playing the game, and how much time you had to learn. Now like in any other game some learn faster than others, so it's not the ultimate skill-meter (does that even exist anyway?), but it still means something. A level 0 have good chances of having no idea how to play the game, and a level 50+ has good chances of at least having understood the basics.

Sure some people played beta, some people played on 360, and their level can not reflect their experience. But it's really no biggie if they can have access for a few matchs to lowbie servers, and if it's an host choice there will still be servers without level restriction anyway.

So even if it's not perfect, in most cases a level range requirement option for servers could improve the gaming experience for everyone.

Wasn't manual team selection added as a feature in response to complaints of auto-balance creating gangs of vets that roflstomped newbs for round after round?

I much prefer it the way it is now, where I can at least counter-pick the stack.

Somehow, this reminds me of the economy. Many ideas on how they should fix it, but we all know there's no sure fire way to fix things to 100%.

Yeah like politicians having economy ideas without having studied economics, gamers have game ideas without having studied game design.

Looks familiar indeed!

:lol:

In Monday Night Combat your level equals your lifetime earnings in both Blitz and Crossfire. So I can technically level to 99+ only playing Blitz games. What happens now when I want to play Crossfire?

At least you'll be in a habit of killing bots, which is sorta useful for the team. Better than a team full of deathmatchers who let their whole base get flooded with bots.

Team can't get flooded with bots if the other team is being suppressed. In other words, deathmatching works, only if the team ACTUALLY KILLS THE OTHER TEAM!

I posted this idea in the wishlist forum but wouldn't getting rid of player levels on the team select screen pretty much solve stacking on pubs without making it hard for you to stick with a friend?

As for noob friendly servers, I can see the reason why but not really how it would really make a difference, new players are just gonna join whatever has the lowest ping. And more tutorials would just get ignored. Pretty much the most you can hope for is more protips on load screens that say something useful, like "ASSASSINS ARE ACTUALLY REALLY GOOD FOR PUSHING UP BOTS" and whatnot.

I also posted this idea, right below yours:

Why not remove player names and levels (basically everything)

The options on your screen should be this:
HOTSHOTS | ICEMEN

No names, No levels, No knowing if any player you got was bad/good. A completely random system, however you still get to pick which team you want to be on. Your friends would still be able to pick the same team as you, however, if all 12 of the players pick Icemen, then you won't likely get your wish.

Basically, it's a compromise.

Seems like it'd be more work to redesign the UI when they could just get rid of the levels box, but hey I'm not disagreeing with you either

/agree with this

I do not personally encourage team stacking, but I like to play with my friends as a team. I don't care to join team with noobs to even things up, but I prefer to have noobs who listen when advice is given. When people refuse to do anything but get slaughtered for twenty minutes then I'm less sympathetic about team stacking.

The biggest problem I see is when teams are overall balanced skill-wise and a pretty solid game is played, but then in the next game all of the mid-level players will stack with the top players from the previous game. Then the next game is just newbies getting punished for not quitting with maybe one guy trying to carry them, maybe not.

EDIT: Quote from the OP

We will probably see more tool tips like that as the game progresses. Developers who are close to their communities eventually begin to use tips from the game's community as official class 'tips and tricks'. IE TF2 and SC2

I think I can safely say that any university claiming to teach design is not going to have a realistic, helpful, or educational course.
You can't really teach someone how to design a great game.

Any university that can help you get into game development will be teaching Programming or 3D Modelling for games/film.