I’m not sure how any of this made it past testing or which intern designed these live services features, but a few very simple changes would make people hate you a lot less:
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Correct the bug that causes someone having waited through the entire queue to be dropped in the offline tab. This is a lazy UI issue that is horrific for the user experience.
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When disconnected from a game, there should be a simple option to reconnect to the last game you were in. Far too often the memory leak or whatever that crashes the client after a couple of hours has left a game at a terrible time and with no reference to what game the player was in.
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When moving in and out of a game that is not disposed of, or attempting to join an invalid game due to password/name mismatch, should not be timed. It makes sense to possibly regulate the mass creation of games to support the system, however, attempting to join a game with invalid information should not place a load on the system enough that warrants a 30-second wait to correct the typo and try again.
3a. Stabilize the systems that cause failures joining password-protected games in general. -
Fix the issues with the lighting when at max settings. The client crashes often when too much lighting occurs even on 3080+ graphics cards, likely due to efficiency issues. This can be mitigated by lowering the settings, but as this is not a hardware limitation, it should be corrected with code optimization. At a minimum, artificially limit the setting until fixed to improve first impressions.
Obviously there are many other issues, but fixing these few things would greatly change the feel of the game from that of a beta or some community-backed student project to that of a professionally released game.