Playability improvements this year? (Another Team Match Making thread)

General Discussion
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Are there going to be any patches to enhance playabilty of melee games this year?
If you’re not sure, try playing the game and thinking “what would make this game better”. The largest problem that I encounter when trying to play is the amount of time wasted trying to get appropriately skilled players in the same game. It’s really lame / not-fun to play games with disproportionate skill divides between players/teams.

Even just making more custom game filters, or start keeping a team ladder score (iccup) to allow for more competitive games to be organic would be a MASSIVE win. It’s like the team has written off this solution. The current set of priorities de-value the player’s time. To think that a perfect solution later trumps a good solution now is the wrong approach. Do something now that’s “ok” then do something better later.
Many of us have time constraints and would like to enjoy free time in a non-wasteful feeling way. This game in its current state often feels like a waste of time, as there’s no fun to be had without long periods of waiting around.
Our time has value. Do something to fix this problem. Stop de-prioritizing solutions that address this.

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The solutions have been said a few times in this thread, the sad thing is that Blizzard and the classic games team are not willing to read this feedback because lack of upper management support on the game, which i feel is a terrible error as this game will come back to life with Cloud services. The work needs to be done NOW not 6 years from now.

To solve the issued with Remastered:

  1. Implement AI technologies like BWAPI and improve native AI. Make it a payable package (like cartooned). This will allow people to play vs AI offline and get better, also there should be somehow of an “offline ladder” or “learning achievements” with this AI launch. You dont want to do it Blizzard?, leave it to the community to build, just make BWAPI work, and improve the native AI we will do the rest make an “AI council” of players that will work on this close to your dev team trough out all the whole process.

  1. Implement Team Match Making and allow players that own the free version to join (free players wont have ladder points), make TMM simple, just a custom game room that rotates, you can invite friends and a small “balance mmr” system with the possibility of chosing and vetoing maps etc, make all of this while we are also capeable of searching for 1v1 RANK games if this waiting period become longer than expected. Just do it.

  2. Implement a better “anti cheat & rules of conduct” system, just make all the players in a game upload the replay to a server, then compare those replays in an automated way.Who disconnected first?, did the game being played contained ally backstabbing?, did the person disconnecting was losing by a big margin?, did the game connection was unstable just when a player was losing but the whole rest of the game was just fine connection wise?. Just make a comprehensive serious system and start flagging accounts that go against common community guidelines.

  3. Fix the replays desync and observer desync problems once and for all.

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Nobody cares about BWAPI. This is a waste of time for this team to devote any resources to. If you’ve ever played chess vs an AI that wins every time it gets old pretty quick.
This game is fun because it involves humans, real people that can talk and think outside the box. Not robots that follow scripts or have canned responses. When the “Master AI” gets created, i guarantee you it will not be as fun to play vs as you’re envisioning. I predict it will be lame af after watching it for 10 minutes, like a perfect SCV rush or super gimmicky micro that is unbeatable. That’s how AI works, it only values the win condition.
Furthermore, just keep the list of wants to a minimum. They have 3-4 people, walls of requests will never be filled.
Every thread on this forum you’ve replied to multiple times. You need to find a job, or at least read a book or something.

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You are wrong AI will make this game better because it will be escalated and will provide extra value for the game. You are just not thinking about the future, this game will be on an “arcade-cloud” system at some point in the future.

One of the biggest problems with this game is that you can only play it vs humans as a matter of fact, you are just talking from the stand point of a minority of people that prefers playing vs humans. I can agree that some people like the “thrill” of winning a human, but at least 80% of the people would just like playing some good AI even before jumping into RANK.

Where do i get this data from?, games like Free Fire, Dota, PUBG mobile etc (which is the cloud service future for this game i dream off btw and i was pointing above), all those games show data that, let me show you the punctual facts this data shows:

  • Players when they lose two or three games they “need to feel” they are not wasting their time, so in this games (list mentioned above) they get players paired with bots or AI in matches, this has been proven successful making people stay in the game for longer periods of time.

  • Training in ANY GAME could have a very bad learning curve, the only comprehensive way of training today is vs humans, and right now 90% of the community already knows how to play the game and they are all wired to “win”. Playing vs AI allows player to “feel” how to get into middle game or late game, plus it allows players to just play enough time to “feel” they are improving and learning something. Right now in Free Fire for instance when you are “new” its very likely that you will get thrown into a game where 70% of the population are bots that will even understand that you have lag.

  • Bots and AI help you practice things from a “save point”, that is you could “theoretically” grab a replay save a point and then just jump into the action seeing if you can do the same thing as a pro player for instance. The best example for this is practice mode in Tekken, in that game Practice mode has allowed the community to grow into levels that are just impossible by just playing vs humans… or going into arcades.

  • Another factor about AI is that you can play games without lag, there is a fact nobody talks about, but the whole Latin American community has lag issues and they are not capable of playing game where they can improve their micro or “feel” how a TR 24/LAN with -1% UDP lost package game feels, some of them are very talented, but as soon as they play someone that has better connection they miss the opportunity of winning just because they have no prior experience playing with this lag.

And now about you pointing out that “all AI only values win condition” that entirely depends, you could program AI and BOTS that help players to train and just feel that they are improving in small steps. I would even argue that this AI should be thrown into the RANK ladder, for more conservative and old thinkers like you there should also be an option to turn that off, and of course the ladder points obtained by winning an AI should have a different ladder entirely or a compensation of some sort into real MMR values.

BTW chesscom for instances uses bots all the time to let players “win”, is just something game developers have been admitting and talking about for the past 5 years or so. In the case of chesscom i invite you to watch the 2018 Video Game Conference about it on the GDC that year, a “chess game was mentioned” and a funny green logo shown as an internal joke.

About me having a job?, well i work all day, i am a well accomplished person thank you. You need to fight you lower tier manners.

To close with a positive attitude just tell you i understand where you are coming from, right now the bots and AI from SCAITT are very though and… well boring to play (not really i prefer playing vs them in 1,16 a million times really, and there is a lot of people like me), the point is that you can create an AI with certain constrains like “play like an 800-1200 MMR players”…

So the future for Starcraft Remastered whether you like it or not is AI/Machine Learning oriented, we are probably not going to see it for the next 5 to 6 years, but is a given fact. At some point in the future Starcraft Remastered wont be needed to be installed in your hardrive, and you will be capable of just joining a website or service and play them entirely in virtual machines docked in the Cloud, the latency will be perfected slowly as the CDN and Datacenter technology that offers this services gets better and better with time, is just a matter of time. In that future a WHOLE NEW generation of players will like to “Test Starcraft Remastered” before purchasing the complete package , or just trow some fun games… just like an arcade “50 cents for a game”, in that future AI is the way to go… if you cant see that i am sorry to tell you you are thinking like a 90s guy, and hey !! i am a 90s guy also.

The only thing i am trying to do in here is to make you understand, and anyone from the community that the sooner we start embracing the fact that AI is the future the better will be for all of us. And specially Blizzard needs to think in terms of future and start developing this AI tools for latter profit, i just argue that BWAPI is something that needs to be Officially attached to remastered as a paying service ASAP and let the community play with it the next years, it will make the future change to CLOUD much easier.

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Team match making much more important than playing bots -_-’

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Most definitively, but i am scared of TTM, it feels like Closing the gates on Remastered if you understand what i mean.

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I care about a new broodwar AI. Believe it or not, there are people who are not competitive and dont want to play against other people because the competition is insane. They want to sit back, relax and enjoy a challenging match with a proper AI. It will definitely be beneficial for the casual community in the long run. Also blizzard should ban barcode usernames.

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I totally agree.
I mean why is CO-OP in SC II so much fun and succesfull? It is playing versus a bot with different powerfull commanders against endgame threats. You may not win all the time but every win feels engaging

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@The100YOU - I think TMM would be opening the gates to SC:R, not closing them. There are hard custom (use-map settings) campaign maps if you don’t like the “competition” of playing online.

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What i mean is that TMM makes us believe the team is working on something at least you know?, like a “bounding contract” between us the community and the devs. What i am trying to say is that once they release TMM and fix some patches and so on… what is next for Starcraft Broodwar Remastered?, what are we going to “expect” from them?.

Feels like TMM is the doors to abandonware.

I am sure SC:RM has a nice future on the lines of what i said above, but i also feel that TMM is like an “invisible line” that has yet not been answered by Blizzard, something they MUST and HAVE to answer and address. After that i am worried it will only be silence.

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I guess after TMM there is nothing major to work on other than an AI. They could think about hosting games into in-house servers for better connectivity and make a test server where people can mess with the game’s balance unofficially and play test games. After all these are done, broodwar remaster is complete and would only need the typical maintenance.

What we should expect as a fandom after devs to-do-list has been complete? We could expect blizzard to make bigger tournaments with that money they allegedly spend for updates

However knowing how low Blizzard has fallen, all these above are a fantasy dream

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Interesting would be to make ladder avaiable for all free starcraft user, but with the restrain that they cant placed on the ladder. Just like the current system with 5 matches to be positioned, but endless. THis could be easy to implement and may put more players into the pool. A next step for this would be to make that they can only play against other placing people, in other words other free user and people that are playing their 5 matches to get placed. And the final step would be to make it that if a person of the premium version waits a certain time it gets matched with a free user if avaible so he/she gets matched …

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Ok i normally read your post and even i have a hard time understanding 100% of your ideas, but lets see.

What you are saying is that players with the free version (not the Remastered version) should be allowed to play RANK/Ladder but they should never be “placed” as in “get a proper RANK based on their MMR and level”, they would “stay in a certain LIMBO” never actually being inside the RANK algorithm but just playing positional matches (those first 5 matches to get your rank).

As a matter of fact i believe is a great idea !!, but hear me out, i think that the way this should be implemented is by creating “QUICK RANK ROOMS” and also “ACTUALLY GIVING THIS PLAYERS AN MMR THAT THEY WILL NEVER GET TO SEE”.

So expanding on your idea a free player would not see the RANK button (they would see not Ladder button to press) but when they press Custom they will see some rooms that are labeled as “QUICK MATCHING”, they click this they cant chat and the game starts no questions asked, they can see the race they are playing and the name of the person, the map, nothing else.

Internally this free players are playing vs people with the Remastered game that are either waiting to long or being positioned, so in reality there is indeed a “hidden ladder” for this free users, as if they win a “Quick Match” vs a positioning player that was 1900 in the prior season they they should get the MMR and Rank accordingly but they will never get to see it !!, for them is just a quick match, they CANNOT see the opponent MMR least their own, they just get a win on their ordinary ladder, they cant veto maps, they wont get portraits, nothing, for them is just a custom game done QUICK.

This way internally the RANK system could take this “free players” into the algorithm with a legit MMR attached to the account and race (not the server name), this could also boost sales because people would be interested to know what kind of points they really have instead of staying ignorant of that, they will have a new “incentive”.

So this players are really not experiencing the ladder, they should also help the algorithm overall experience and help the old complains of the type: “losing to many games in a row” or just players that are “struggling into achieving those last 40 points to become next Rank” etc.So in other words free players that play QUICK GAMES now also serve as a pool for the algorithm to boost players fairness and Quality of Experience. Also as you say, which i think is a great idea ,this players could be used to get positioning games quicker and just overall make the waiting time shorter for people playing RANK.

So i think is a good idea, i dont think it would get implemented because in the brain of the developers probably “opening RANK” to the free people is not a good idea, but i think it could boost and open new opportunities specially when TMM comes around the same system could be used to make waiting times shorter.

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Sorry about the post quality, i will try to better myself in the future.

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The only reason we ‘expect’ TMM is because they have mentioned it multiple times over again, amongst other things.

Co-op mode was never mentioned being tampered with so I don’t “expect” that from them.

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Then people would abuse this by not playing as a ranked player and bashing noobs - just like they are sometimes doing now by leaving and getting a lot of free loss’ on their acc.

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What do you mean by Co-op mode sir?

So you are saying that if they decide to give people using the Free version a “hidden ladder” someone would use that for “bashing noobs”? i dont understand, please elaborate.

Also yes, TMM was announced on release and i quite a disgrace that so many years after we dont have it, they could easily implement it just for custom games to test the grounds (Iccup-Fish system), i have no idea why they wont, probably just because they dont want to start a serious of other problems, hey ! they cant even change colors or change how the GUI renders without having the whole community crying like babies, complicated crowd Starcraft Remastered is.