I don't understand you people at all. (Destiny)

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Monday, June 08, 2015, 22:37 (3501 days ago) @ Claude Errera

Join in Progress is always going to be joining you into a game where your team is either behind or ahead, that won't ever change and that's not a bad thing. I've certainly come from behind once I get more people filling out my team. What is bad is that there is apparently no basic check that tries to judge whether there is enough time left to join new players into a game.

I think that's actually the crux of the discussion here - I don't think ANYONE is arguing with you that being dropped into a game that's about to end is an IDEAL situation. (Most of us on my side of the issue are saying that the negatives involved with that situation are outweighed by the positives that an extra player can bring, overall.)

Well, except I've gotten two so far who started off by saying they disagreed with everything I said. :/ That's frustrating even considering my initial post had a pretty big flaw regarding the initial JiP cutoff. (I meant the half game cutoff as a starting point for discussion... except that's not what my post says. My bad. Don't post when you're angry kids!)

Coming up with the point of no return is HARD. I don't think I've ever seen a post that picks a time that's made me say "yeah, that works, across the board." You started with "after 5 minutes" - and then conceded that that might be too short. But what's NOT too short? 10 minutes? 7 minutes? A certain score range before the end? A score range with a max delta? Something even MORE complicated?

I don't think you can just pick "3 minutes" or "4 minutes 28 seconds" or whatever. What makes sense to me is some combination of looking at time remaining and the difference in score with a sanity check that never allows JiP if there isn't enough time to actually load the map. From there I'd look at historical data. What's the biggest score delta that was ever over come in two minutes? Three minutes? Four minutes? I'd work out some formula that says something like "at x time left a score difference of y points is too large to come back from" and disable JiP once a game has crossed that moving line. And maybe reenable it if the game crosses back! But that formula wouldn't be some guess, it'd be backed by actual data and then tweaked to allow some reasonable leeway. On top of that, surely there is some minimum amount of time that most players feel is long enough to make a contribution to the match instead of feeling like the match ends just when they're getting started. What is that amount of time? I don't know. My gut feeling says three-ish minutes based around how long it takes a Super to charge, but it could be much better pinned down with good discussion and play testing.

Lump all that together and you get a set of rules that try and match every player into a good game. Not every player is going to have a good game. Sometimes your team is terrible. Sometime you are terrible. Sometimes there's lag. Etc. Etc. But right now Destiny really does seem to just throw players into ANY game without even basic checks to see if that game will likely be satisfying.

Nobody's come up with an answer that really works yet - including Bungie. So they just say "join ANY game in progress where the rest of the parameters are a close match". Which works for me, but clearly not for you. ;)

I think I'm looking at it from a different angle. Like most, I think the system works pretty well. I'm not bringing up my example of not getting to play a match because it happens to me all the time. (I believe it's only happened once!) I'm bringing it up because I don't think it should happen at all. Then I'm trying to look a little further to see if there are other situations we can all agree upon where JiP doesn't make any sense. I just don't like looking at it from a "there's no solution yet so it's good enough as it." perspective. Should Bungie have done that with Destiny's color blind options? Or the way upgrading a weapon worked in The Dark Below? Sure, maybe improving JiP is something that would cost far too much in terms of server load or matchmaking times or development time. Or maybe it's something like fireteam chat that can be "easily" added and would work well... if only enough people make it an issue.

Either way, though, I'm okay with stiffer penalties for quitters - I've ALWAYS been an advocate for the "wait 5 minutes before being allowed back" plan, going back to Reach days. It's never been implemented, but I think it mostly works. If you quit because something came up (phone call, door bell, kid puking, whatever), those 5 minutes won't bug you at all. If you quit because the game bumped you, it'll probably take SOME time to get back online and ready to play - so the remaining penalty won't be a HUGE hardship (though I will grant that it will be annoying, since you ALREADY got screwed by a server error - the only mitigating circumstance is that most of these happen because YOUR connection isn't perfect, and the server can't keep up, so a short timeout is probably a good idea ;) ). If you quit because that last guy who killed you made you rage - you NEED the 5 minutes. :) But clearly Bungie has never seen it this way, because they've never implemented this. ::shrug::

Agreed.