"Finite Lives" Ruins 4v4 Deathmatch Every Time

CameraBeardThePirate · March 23

Oblivion_Protocol wrote: »

Your argument is that the finite lives format doesn’t work because people quit as soon as you person loses all of their lives. But infinite lives wouldn’t change that because people quit when the enemy team is ahead in every other mode anyway. As soon as it’s obvious that the match is going to be a stomp, people stop trying and hope to get it over with as soon as possible.

Finite lives is a "lose more" mechanic. It only serves to snowball matches and that is inherently unfun.

Oblivion_Protocol · March 24

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Finite lives is a "lose more" mechanic. It only serves to snowball matches and that is inherently unfun.

The thing is if your team is getting absolutely steamrolled within three lives, you aren’t going to suddenly have a eureka moment and turn it all around on the fourth, fifth, or sixth life. The unfun issues plaguing BGs boil down to unbalanced PvP mechanics, a lack of training wheels, and non-existent MMR. Giving people more chances to get their faces pushed in against someone who’s actively farming them isn’t to help much.

ketsparrowhawk · March 25

Oblivion_Protocol wrote: »

CameraBeardThePirate wrote: »

Finite lives is a "lose more" mechanic. It only serves to snowball matches and that is inherently unfun.

The thing is if your team is getting absolutely steamrolled within three lives, you aren’t going to suddenly have a eureka moment and turn it all around on the fourth, fifth, or sixth life. The unfun issues plaguing BGs boil down to unbalanced PvP mechanics, a lack of training wheels, and non-existent MMR. Giving people more chances to get their faces pushed in against someone who’s actively farming them isn’t to help much.

I've had lots of 4v4 Deathmatches that were actually pretty decent fights until someone lost all their lives.. then it was completely hopeless after that, ruining what was otherwise a fairly enjoyable fight even if one team was a bit stronger than the other. The mechanic doesn't even accomplish its goal of ending the games quickly because most of the time there is AT LEAST one player that refuses to jump from spawn and forces everyone to wait out the timer out of spite. And if you happen to be the player who has run out of lives, it's super unfun to just sit and wait until the match ends. It sucks for everyone involved. Even the winning team only gets to enjoy a hollow victory.. who is gonna feel good about winning an unfair fight??

MMR and matchmaking are problems that are not likely to be solved in the near future. Removing the "finite lives" feature can easily be done with a single patch and would make 4v4 Deathmatch a bit more enjoyable for everyone. By all means I would love better matchmaking too as a longer-term goal.

xylena · March 27

4v4 randoms without strict MMR will never be functional, end of story.

Oblivion_Protocol · March 29

ketsparrowhawk wrote: »

I've had lots of 4v4 Deathmatches that were actually pretty decent fights until someone lost all their lives.. then it was completely hopeless after that, ruining what was otherwise a fairly enjoyable fight even if one team was a bit stronger than the other. The mechanic doesn't even accomplish its goal of ending the games quickly because most of the time there is AT LEAST one player that refuses to jump from spawn and forces everyone to wait out the timer out of spite. And if you happen to be the player who has run out of lives, it's super unfun to just sit and wait until the match ends. It sucks for everyone involved. Even the winning team only gets to enjoy a hollow victory.. who is gonna feel good about winning an unfair fight??

If I go through 100 BG matches, 95 of them will be a stomp in one direction or another. Five will be decent fights. It’s nice that you can remember the fights that were so good, you and your team didn’t care about losing. But what about all the other times? And how can you guarantee that the person getting stomped out of all their lives wouldn’t just quit out of frustration anyway? Yes, it sucks losing all your lives and being stuck on that screen. But it’s not much better cosplaying Don Quixote and tilting at windmills over and over, knowing that you’re contributing nothing.

In non-Deathmatch modes, I can personally attest to killing the same player at least a dozen times or more on many occasions. And I can say that it didn't feel good winning that unfair fight.

ketsparrowhawk wrote: »

MMR and matchmaking are problems that are not likely to be solved in the near future. Removing the "finite lives" feature can easily be done with a single patch and would make 4v4 Deathmatch a bit more enjoyable for everyone. By all means I would love better matchmaking too as a longer-term goal.

I fully believe that a decent MMR can be implemented with a single patch, too. It’s not like they have to reinvent the wheel, here. Just copy what other games do.

ketsparrowhawk · March 29

Oblivion_Protocol wrote: »

ketsparrowhawk wrote: »

I've had lots of 4v4 Deathmatches that were actually pretty decent fights until someone lost all their lives.. then it was completely hopeless after that, ruining what was otherwise a fairly enjoyable fight even if one team was a bit stronger than the other. The mechanic doesn't even accomplish its goal of ending the games quickly because most of the time there is AT LEAST one player that refuses to jump from spawn and forces everyone to wait out the timer out of spite. And if you happen to be the player who has run out of lives, it's super unfun to just sit and wait until the match ends. It sucks for everyone involved. Even the winning team only gets to enjoy a hollow victory.. who is gonna feel good about winning an unfair fight??

If I go through 100 BG matches, 95 of them will be a stomp in one direction or another. Five will be decent fights. It’s nice that you can remember the fights that were so good, you and your team didn’t care about losing. But what about all the other times? And how can you guarantee that the person getting stomped out of all their lives wouldn’t just quit out of frustration anyway? Yes, it sucks losing all your lives and being stuck on that screen. But it’s not much better cosplaying Don Quixote and tilting at windmills over and over, knowing that you’re contributing nothing.

In non-Deathmatch modes, I can personally attest to killing the same player at least a dozen times or more on many occasions. And I can say that it didn't feel good winning that unfair fight.

ketsparrowhawk wrote: »

MMR and matchmaking are problems that are not likely to be solved in the near future. Removing the "finite lives" feature can easily be done with a single patch and would make 4v4 Deathmatch a bit more enjoyable for everyone. By all means I would love better matchmaking too as a longer-term goal.

I fully believe that a decent MMR can be implemented with a single patch, too. It’s not like they have to reinvent the wheel, here. Just copy what other games do.

Belief doesn't make it true. And that's outside the scope of this thread. We're discussing the validity of the finite lives mechanic in 4v4 deathmatch. The game mode would be markedly improved without the mechanic. Ofc better matchmaking would be great. Perhaps we can discuss that in the many threads covering that topic.

xylena · March 29

ketsparrowhawk wrote: »

We're discussing the validity of the finite lives mechanic in 4v4 deathmatch.

The format itself isn't valid. Way too much variance and volatility. It doesn't matter what they do with the lives mechanic. It's fine when teams are evenly matched, but that is too rare.

If anything they need a mercy rule to stop wasting our time and clogging the queue forcing players to play out lopsided matches. The lives mechanic is a flawed version of this. If anything it should be polished to incorporate a mercy rule for unfortunately inevitable lopsided matches.

ketsparrowhawk · March 29

xylena wrote: »

ketsparrowhawk wrote: »

We're discussing the validity of the finite lives mechanic in 4v4 deathmatch.

The format itself isn't valid. Way too much variance and volatility. It doesn't matter what they do with the lives mechanic. It's fine when teams are evenly matched, but that is too rare.

If anything they need a mercy rule to stop wasting our time and clogging the queue forcing players to play out lopsided matches. The lives mechanic is a flawed version of this. If anything it should be polished to incorporate a mercy rule for unfortunately inevitable lopsided matches.

Imo it isn't fine even when teams are evenly matched. I'm repeating myself but I've had some fairly evenly-matched DM's that suddenly became majorly lopsided once someone died a third time. Sometimes the person who runs out of lives isn't getting steamrolled at all.. they're actually holding their own but they just died one too many times and now the match is ruined when we were having a good fight up to that point. It just makes an already-flawed game mode even more frustrating.

Bring back 3-team bg's

Necrotech_Master · March 29

i would agree that finite lives in the 4v4 DM is terrible

i personally dont really enjoy DM, but the 3 deaths and you done is just unfun, especially for someone who might not be good at pvp, those people who do die 3 times are forced to just spectate until the match is resolved, so they could be doing absolutely nothing for the 5-10 min of the match timer

lopsided matches are definitely their own issue, but i would agree unrelated to the topic of this thread

Oblivion_Protocol · 6:21AM

ketsparrowhawk wrote: »

Belief doesn't make it true. And that's outside the scope of this thread. We're discussing the validity of the finite lives mechanic in 4v4 deathmatch.

Well, unless you’re secretly a dev or can read their mind, belief is all either of us has when it comes to game system implementation. And the topic of BG MMR balance sits firmly within the scope of any discussion about changes to BGs, because it would solve the majority of the problems keeping new players out of BGs in the first place.

ketsparrowhawk wrote: »

The game mode would be markedly improved without the mechanic. Ofc better matchmaking would be great. Perhaps we can discuss that in the many threads covering that topic.

The game mode would be improved for the people who either already enjoy it or have super-optimized builds that let them be on the giving side of the stomping more often than the receiving side.

People who find BGs heavily unbalanced won’t care if they get a million lives if every single one of them is lost in a hopeless squash.

ketsparrowhawk · 2:29PM

This isn't a discussion about MMR. If the answer is always "make mmr better" then there's no point discussing anything. Matchmaking in video games is well known to be a difficult problem to solve.. not every game does it well. It's not as simple as copy/pasting what another game is doing. So to keep the discussion focused I'm going to steer us back to the finite-lives mechanic in 4v4 Deathmatch.

Deathmatch would be improved for the people who enjoy Deathmatch, you say? Sounds like a positive to me. 4v4 is the competitive mode btw you should be prepared to pvp.