In an epic 2 hours yesterday S2 Games initiated the first series of Team Match Making testing. The moment the server message was announced thousands of players flooded the servers, creating and playing about 10 000 games in that short 2 hours.
In what was a shocking move by S2 by excluding Team Match Making's official release in the HoN 2.0 patch, quite a bit was explained yesterday. A major bug which caused major time wasting was definitely needed to be fixed. But aside from that and the constantly full European servers due to it being peak times, yesterday's testing was quite a success. Over at the forums, leavers were grieving en masse as their above 5% leave percentage is barring them from joining Match Making, which in a utilitarian sense is a good move by S2. Here are some feedback by players which Match Making worked for, pros and pubs alike.
ohai (17xx PSR player)
“
Everything worked well for me. I played two games. I did have the waiting for server bug two times but each time I waited one minute then logged out then logged back in. Both times after doing that I was almost immediately placed into a game and spent total(including wait 1 minute log out log back in time) less than three minutes looking for games. Had eu downvoted, USE and USW vote up. ”[ORPO] Kurpitsa (16xx PSR player)
“
I loved it, makes getting into games so much smoother and you get fancy rewards. Was worth the wait. Hopefully I get to play more in this weekend.”[AS] Kietharr (16xx PSR player)
“
Played 4 games as a team on Grim's Crossing. Queue was short, every time we got a match before the estimated wait time was up. No lag, no crashes. 2 wins, 2 losses so we were matched fairly well.”
[OK] Overpow (Competitive player, Online Kingdom)“
Matchmaking is the same as the public games. Practically, there is nothing new. Here and here you take a friend and literally outplay some newbs. The only factors distinguishing MM is the fact that before the game you do not know against whom you play, and of course the opportunity to acquire the desired coins. As for yesterday's test. First game I played on the USE but the server has proven to be very bad in comparison to 'normal' games. Often lags and spikes discouraged me to continue the game. The second game was on the European server, and I must admit it was good. The fact that you can search scrims way more faster is really great and probably it's the reason for which I will be playing MM.”So it seems that Team Match Making will be the ideal way to search for hopefully a good balanced game in the future. Hopefully with time from it's official launch Match Making Rating (MMR) will kick in with more accuracy and give pro players such as Overpow the ability to find a decent scrim instantly. Who knows, maybe in a few days all you gotta do to find a game is to click a button before it loads up!
After the testing Idejder from S2 Games made an announcement on the forums, briefing the results of the day's test.
[S2] Idejder“
So as everyone is probably aware Matchmaking is up and running and has been for roughly 2 hours. In that time it has spawned roughly 10,000 matches and served roughly 90,000 players in finding quick matches. The average wait times were below 30 seconds and overall a lot of people had fun.The downside is there is a significant bug, which is the evil "Waiting for server" bug that puts you in an infinite loop of staring at nothing. We do not yet have the data evaluated to tell how prevalent it is or how easy/hard it will be to fix. To get this data we need to take down Matchmaking and parse the huge amount of log files we have it creating.
That will happen soon.
Between now and 2:30 EST we will be turning off Matchmaking for the day. We will be working on how to fix the main issue that people have been getting and any other smaller issues. We will be looking at the match %, the balance of matches, and how quickly they happen all in favor of speeding up our algorithms.
Overall we are pleased, though. We worked through the night (30 hour workday woo!) and were able to deliver on our promise even if it was late.
We hope to bring it back online as soon as possible, but I would not expect it to be before tomorrow (Friday est).
We would like to thank those that queued over and over even though they kept getting the "Waiting for server" bug. You generated a ton of logs and we will use them to try to find and fix the problem. You helped more than you know.
To those who did find a game, we hope you had fun.”
Hopefully S2 speeds up the process of polishing the system and Team Match Making will be good to go very soon. So how was it for you? Share it in the comments section!
