[bonestamp2]

Very well said, it's so frustrating.

One thing that has always bugged me, and that I've never seen discussed, is that when I play solo they'll pair me up with two other solo players and then match us up against a 3 player clan!

Even if we all have the same rank, they're not at all considering the advantage of 3 players who play well as a team, and in the clan case... probably practice and play together a lot. Especially at the lower ranks, but sometimes in the mid-high ranks, a well organized team can demolish a random group of slightly higher ranked players who haven't established a playbook.

At times when the servers are saturated with players, I think they should only match parties with other parties of the same size. For example, parties of two would only be matched against other parties of two and then each party would get solo player(s) to reach the team size of a given match. Parties of three would only play against other parties of three, etc. I understand there are times of low liquidity and such matchmaking would be impossible, and that's fine... I'd rather play than not, but when liquidity is high then I'd rather wait an extra 15-30 seconds for teams and parties to be more balanced.

What do you think about party size aware match making?

[JohnMakin]

> What do you think about party size aware match making?

I'm heavily in favor of what you said, and yea, back in the day when psyonix owned it there was a mode called "solo standard" which was 3v3 but you couldn't join with a team. It was awesome, people who did well in that mode tended to be extremely good teammates - you kinda had to to succeed. As a result it was usually much less toxic. Epic killed that mode almost immediately and it made me super upset.

[bonestamp2]

Ah, that's too bad Epic killed it. Epic keeps temporarily removing snow day and that hurts too.

[JohnMakin]

Yea I have a whole rant about this too - it probably costs them very little to keep these mods alive. I don't know their backend at all, or their engines - maybe some minor engineering effort they deemed wasn't worth it per patch so they axed it. At least that's what they claim by saying it was removed for lack of popularity. Which is a little gas-lighty because they can completely control the flow of traffic into these modes via incentives. Personally, every mode they've removed except solo standard I haven't cared about much, but I always laugh when they do it because it cannot possibly cost them that much to maintain. Just terrible management and it suggests they have a tiny skeleton team with little bandwidth or deep knowledge of how to maintain it. They don't really introduce any updates except cosmetics, and almost never server code. And everyone's happy with that - the community's deepest fear from the outset was that they'd mess with server code or the physics engines, which remain much the same as the day the game came out - which is a good thing.

The game is unique and important enough, for whatever reason, as an e-sport that I think it should be preserved in some form and I think to epic's credit so far they've mostly preserved what was there. These things however are quite frustrating.

[bonestamp2]

I completely agree. I almost forgot about Football too, that's one of the best game modes and it's only around for 1-2 weeks/year. I get that they're probably licensing the NFL brands for that time period, but they could still offer the game mode void of any NFL branding at other times of the year.