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I'm sure many know this and could already be doing this (I know EonZerg and few others are doing it) but thought it might make sense to broadcast it.
Get a VPN if you're tired of long queue times (or if you just want to get crushed by Koreans). It seems this is most prevalent at 2100++ MMR. Not all VPNs are created equally. I am currently using a paid service and it works well (check URL at bottom for a full, comprehensive list of rated services). There are free ones out there, too, and if you find luck in using those, that's great. If you're looking into the free route, look into OpenVPN and find a config file for it.
I'm getting games vs. koreans in 20 seconds or less, and able to play on TR12-16; sometimes I've gotten TR20. It is a VPN server in Korea. Yes, I lose a lot more now, but it's worth it to practice against the current Korean meta + not wait 1000 seconds. My hope is that using a VPN is a short-term "bandaid fix" and my fingers are crossed that Blizzard fixes the underlying queue issue. They recently released a patch that allegedly tries to pair you with larger regional areas after 180 seconds ... does not work well.
Small tip: If you use a VPN and then also set your region to Asia in the blizzard app before you launch SC, that seems to help for some reason.
There's tons of other VPN services out there. Do your research. It also depends on your region.
For instance, I am on the East coast of the USA. I'm further from Korea than someone in California ... yet, I am still able to do this. Someone in California will have slightly better success due to closer geographic placement to Korea. I would imagine folks in Europe would have good success too as I've seen from others. Also, keep in mind, a VPN does NOT fix inherent bandwidth issues you may already have, etc. This is why I said do your research, I'd rather not waste time explaining the technicalities of networking here.
Full transparency -- It's NOT perfect. Sometimes it will disconnect, sometimes it won't be 20 second queue, etc. But for the most part, I can say, it's quite good for me (... could easily be horrible for someone else based on their location, bandwidth, routing, etc).
You could also get creative and maybe try a server in Japan or China, too. I'm sure that would pair you against koreans quickly.
Here's a doc I used for some research: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1L72gHJ5bTq0Djljz0P-NCAaURrXwsR1MsLpVmAt3bwg/export?format=xlsx
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well the vpn im using with dewalt and some others is not just made to match with koreans but to reduce the latency and play tr16 tr20 games,so even if blizzard team change the mm again to match koreans i will keep using it.like i did in the past on 1.16 fish server.
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Sweet, will try it out after work!
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any vpn will reduce your waiting time, but for increased TR you'll have to get a vpn with private data routs,like f.e wtfast (if i'm not mistaken).
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Can someone tell me which vpn service used specifically ? Caused I tried several(paid ones) and they did reduce queue time but lags really bad in game
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vpn is a godsgift for foreign competitive BW
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You also need to take into account your download/upload. If you already have a bad connection getting a VPN isn't going to fix it.
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SC:R now only $9.99 a month so you can actually play ladder.
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On March 30 2018 03:47 SCC-Faust wrote:
SC:R now only $9.99 a month so you can actually play ladder.
Delete that before blizz sees it.
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Kinda ridiculous since Matchmaking should be doing this for us in first place, instead of being forced to use vpn...
I am USW floating arou 1700-1800 MMR and que times are getting longer and longer, and meeting same people 3-4 times in row is very common occurrence. I no longer get koreans from Korea at all... just korean americans in california if i meet any koreans.
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On March 30 2018 05:59 jinjin5000 wrote:
Kinda ridiculous since Matchmaking should be doing this for us in first place, instead of being forced to use vpn...
I am USW floating arou 1700-1800 MMR and que times are getting longer and longer, and meeting same people 3-4 times in row is very common occurrence. I no longer get koreans from Korea at all... just korean americans in california if i meet any koreans.
Yeah, Matchmaking should match people across continents. Great idea. Especially in a p2p game
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Shit, what kind of VPN should we be using? Link!
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On March 30 2018 06:19 10dla wrote:Show nested quote +On March 30 2018 05:59 jinjin5000 wrote:
Kinda ridiculous since Matchmaking should be doing this for us in first place, instead of being forced to use vpn...
I am USW floating arou 1700-1800 MMR and que times are getting longer and longer, and meeting same people 3-4 times in row is very common occurrence. I no longer get koreans from Korea at all... just korean americans in california if i meet any koreans. Yeah, Matchmaking should match people across continents. Great idea. Especially in a p2p game
people getting very limited region based matchmaking, for example, USW isn't getting any koreans despite having fine latency to korea. This leads to very limited playerpool and often playing same people 4-5 times in row and meeting same people over and over again.
European people having to wait 3500sec+ per match due to being in unusual area: north europeans can't even match against people in germany.
Region is too limited right now and its not aggressive enough.
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honestly,im starting to believe they are not working in the game anymore,there is just no way you let MM die like that for more than 1 month,there are a lot of complains in the forums,do you think they checked the koget thread about list of features ? who knows,i guess if someone like Artosis Tasteless or even Nathanias asked them we could get an answer,
do you have lack of information about games,stats etc in game ? check starlogg, community project,do you need match vs koreans ? well get vpn,do you need to have a decent replays folder with nicknames races etc ? well use Crispydrone app.
etc etc,who knows maybe the community and talented people will be motivated enough to bring us what we had in the past ?
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On March 30 2018 07:13 [sc1f]eonzerg wrote:
maybe the community and talented people will be motivated enough to bring us what we had in the past ?
It's looking that way
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On March 30 2018 07:13 [sc1f]eonzerg wrote:
honestly,im starting to believe they are not working in the game anymore,there is just no way you let MM die like that for more than 1 month,there are a lot of complains in the forums,do you think they checked the koget thread about list of features ? who knows,i guess if someone like Artosis Tasteless or even Nathanias asked them we could get an answer,
do you have lack of information about games,stats etc in game ? check starlogg, community project,do you need match vs koreans ? well get vpn,do you need to have a decent replays folder with nicknames races etc ? well use Crispydrone app.
etc etc,who knows maybe the community and talented people will be motivated enough to bring us what we had in the past ?
Think they are going maintenance mode already. There hasn't been any budget/shift from matchmaking changes, just tweaks from existing one they have tried out 2 months ago, and obviously not working out at all for foreign community.
3 months ago, MMR range was way too wide. Now, its the regional restrictions are way too small.
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On March 30 2018 07:22 jinjin5000 wrote:Show nested quote +On March 30 2018 07:13 [sc1f]eonzerg wrote:
honestly,im starting to believe they are not working in the game anymore,there is just no way you let MM die like that for more than 1 month,there are a lot of complains in the forums,do you think they checked the koget thread about list of features ? who knows,i guess if someone like Artosis Tasteless or even Nathanias asked them we could get an answer,
do you have lack of information about games,stats etc in game ? check starlogg, community project,do you need match vs koreans ? well get vpn,do you need to have a decent replays folder with nicknames races etc ? well use Crispydrone app.
etc etc,who knows maybe the community and talented people will be motivated enough to bring us what we had in the past ? Think they are going maintenance mode already. There hasn't been any budget/shift from matchmaking changes, just tweaks from existing one they have tried out 2 months ago, and obviously not working out at all for foreign community. 3 months ago, MMR range was way too wide. Now, its the regional restrictions are way too small.
Yup. And it's sad we have to resort to something like VPN in order to have a good experience.
But, it's one of the better options we have now (in some weird and twisted way). I'd agree that if Blizzard doesn't address this in the next 1-2 months, MMR/ladder will probably really die in the foreign scene, if it's not already. VPN is just a short-term fix, really.
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On March 30 2018 07:13 [sc1f]eonzerg wrote:
honestly,im starting to believe they are not working in the game anymore,there is just no way you let MM die like that for more than 1 month,there are a lot of complains in the forums,do you think they checked the koget thread about list of features ? who knows,i guess if someone like Artosis Tasteless or even Nathanias asked them we could get an answer,
do you have lack of information about games,stats etc in game ? check starlogg, community project,do you need match vs koreans ? well get vpn,do you need to have a decent replays folder with nicknames races etc ? well use Crispydrone app.
etc etc,who knows maybe the community and talented people will be motivated enough to bring us what we had in the past ?
I feel the same, they arent working in the game anymore...
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They are working on it im sure, just not for foreigners. Financially we dont matter. We got conned.
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On March 30 2018 07:13 [sc1f]eonzerg wrote:
honestly,im starting to believe they are not working in the game anymore,there is just no way you let MM die like that for more than 1 month,there are a lot of complains in the forums,do you think they checked the koget thread about list of features ? who knows,i guess if someone like Artosis Tasteless or even Nathanias asked them we could get an answer,
do you have lack of information about games,stats etc in game ? check starlogg, community project,do you need match vs koreans ? well get vpn,do you need to have a decent replays folder with nicknames races etc ? well use Crispydrone app.
etc etc,who knows maybe the community and talented people will be motivated enough to bring us what we had in the past ?
I am trying to be more careful with my criticism because I was really happy with the video logs Grant Davies was doing and how he kept us up to date on what they were working on & what their priorities were. And on top of that, he actively posted in the forums briefly to address some misconceptions we had. I'm still frustrated over missing features and how matchmaking was going, but in my opinion, the fact that the dev team decided to do that for us meant a lot to me and I'm sure most people in the Brood War community appreciated it too.
Unfortunately things got dark. Last dev update was posted 3+ months ago here and I'm not aware of any other updates or messages from the dev team since then. I'm really crossing my fingers for the sc20 event to hear some sort of info.
Also, it is possible what iNcontroL said in the Twitch Rivals thread is somewhat true. I've actually been wracking my brain around after he made the post and figured it must be at the very least be valid in some form. I think it warrants at least some discussion if we're going to talk about possibilities of why we feel left out of the loop. If this is true, I want Blizzard to tell us what we should be doing differently, and list examples of actions that are preventing them from providing tournaments/events/updates to us. We are left to our own volition and we have our own circuit of foreign-hosted events that are funded very large in part from fans of the game and the amount of negativity in these events exist just like any other game, and I'd argue even less. I watch almost every foreign event I can, participate on the forums, participate in Twitch chat, and read the battle.net forums, and I still can't figure out what sort of mistake we're making that is so vile and out of line that it is preventing the same company who made the game for this audience to reconsider any continuation of supporting the scene.
On March 19 2018 15:27 iNcontroL
I can convincingly tell you I am having the hardest time getting Blizzard motivated to do anything for SC:R and a huge part of that is the community is toxic and negative about everything. You want to think I am making that up? Why? What do I get out of making that up? What precedent is there for that? Have I been known to make shit up and talk about it publicly?
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i guess is very easy to answer him, they are making events not for the BW TL community or atleast the 4 posters we have but a global scene.So when they are making events they shouldnt take 4 posters feedback in consideration.the people complaining wants to see something different,so i think is hard to please them,i will just go with the 10k 5k etc viewers and keep doing the same,it works for them.
Honestly why blizzard will care about some posters complaining the old BW legends and sc2 personalities are going to SC:R events ? just look at this like the youtube likes dislikes , 10000 likes and 10 dislikes,and is not a secret most of the times the threads are exploding just cuz drama is fun,u will never find them posting on calm threads with events like STPL or haveatyou or that filthy etc etc,but if there is drama everyone is in.
But i think is important blizzard heard us about the feedback we have for the game,cuz we are the people that wanna keep playing this game and want it to last forever ?
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I mean, faust, from a newcomers perspective to bw scene, criticism to scr seems 100% valid though.
If you are doing remastered product, you should be expecting modern gaming standards with the same old gameplay with some enhancement here and there, like graphics and hotkeys. However, scr has failed to deliver modern netcode standards to an old game.
I started BW when remastered was announced, and joined shieldbattery, a 3rd party BW app that used their own netcode, and went into remastered expecting that kind of gameplay. Smooth gameplay vs people within reasonable distance of you. Modern netcode standards in old game.
It is in no way upgrade from fan made services from latency/gaming perspective. Yes, visuals got better, but so many features are missing, including clan system, replay functions, categorization, ect.
Combine that with actual scr launch that was universally underwhelming with extreme lag problems, custom game problem, bugs, ect
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So we bullied a corporation into incompetence? Ok...
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I agree with you all. I don't necessarily take iNcontroL's quote at face value, but I believe it to be true in some form.
I'm mostly just saying there definitely is a problem somewhere regarding how Blizzard views the SC:R community, and I believe it would be in everyone's best interest to understand the problem better. I do not personally think they are withholding events because of what a few people said. Despite that, it would be extremely elucidating if someone could expand on what iNcontroL meant in his quote specifically because the last thread it was mentioned in was closed due to a lot of pointless arguments, and I just thought to myself that this is a huge claim to make and most people glossed over it.
And if we are going to talk about lack of Blizzard updates and events, I think that is the first place we should look. It isn't Blizzard themselves saying it, but it is a respected member of the community who has direct contact with Blizzard and it is by far more constructive to reflect on that than have this topic go to 12 pages with everyone getting progressively angrier and pointing fingers every which way.
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On March 30 2018 10:16 SCC-Faust wrote:
I agree with you all. I don't necessarily take iNcontroL's quote at face value, but I believe it to be true in some form.
I'm mostly just saying there definitely is a problem somewhere regarding how Blizzard views the SC:R community, and I believe it would be in everyone's best interest to understand the problem better. I do not personally think they are withholding events because of what a few people said. Despite that, it would be extremely elucidating if someone could expand on what iNcontroL meant in his quote specifically because the last thread it was mentioned in was closed due to a lot of pointless arguments, and I just thought to myself that this is a huge claim to make and most people glossed over it.
And if we are going to talk about lack of Blizzard updates and events, I think that is the first place we should look. It isn't Blizzard themselves saying it, but it is a respected member of the community who has direct contact with Blizzard and it is by far more constructive to reflect on that than have this topic go to 12 pages with everyone getting progressively angrier and pointing fingers every which way.
I think your right Faust. It isn't like a few salty threads directly = withrdrawl of support for the community. But It certianly can't help when Blizzard looks and sees a continuous trend of un-productive negativity. I think its something people need to think about. However I dont think that our hope for blizzzard to help scr is totally over. Yes, its been dark for a few months, but its quite possible something big will be announced during the SC20 anniversary.
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I don't think this has to do as much with Blizzard, but with content creators.E.g. FilthyRake and BaseTrade tried to get tournaments going with a lot of negative responses in the forum threads/ twitch chat. If you check out the threads, I'm pretty sure the aggressive/negative posters outweight the positive/welcoming ones. Combined with BW's low popularity and viewership in the foreign scene, it's pretty easy to see why a content creator/ tournament organizer would think twice before commiting resources to foreign BW. I would like to hear Schamtoo's opinion on this, I remember he faced similar problems when he started.
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You make a good point Faust and for events I can see where Incontrol is coming from but this is not (and should not) be linked to the actual state of the game, on the technical side of things. The latency and various other problems that kogeT detailed are all very legit problems, regardless of the supposed toxicity of the scene (and isnt that being a bit childish? Do you really think the LoL scene, for example, is the friendliest place in the world?).
A lot of people were VERY patient with SCR, including myself, but now this patience is wearing thin. If the game were on Steam you can bet the number of returns would have been massive. Empty PR is not going to fix it, and at this point I would rather hear Blizzard say "ok it s harder than we thought, we dont have the ressources for that team, sorry'' and move on and let the community find its way back together than making empty/dubious promises with super vague deadlines.
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On March 30 2018 22:15 WGT-Baal wrote:
You make a good point Faust and for events I can see where Incontrol is coming from but this is not (and should not) be linked to the actual state of the game, on the technical side of things. The latency and various other problems that kogeT detailed are all very legit problems, regardless of the supposed toxicity of the scene (and isnt that being a bit childish? Do you really think the LoL scene, for example, is the friendliest place in the world?).
A lot of people were VERY patient with SCR, including myself, but now this patience is wearing thin. If the game were on Steam you can bet the number of returns would have been massive. Empty PR is not going to fix it, and at this point I would rather hear Blizzard say "ok it s harder than we thought, we dont have the ressources for that team, sorry'' and move on and let the community find its way back together than making empty/dubious promises with super vague deadlines.
Mmm, that'd be so nice... Blizzard handing it over to the community... Thanks for the hard work, but since you guys at Blizz obvuously don't have the resources to actually finish this game and deliver the stuff that you promised to deliver a year ago...
It's time for the community to take over. Did I hear it correctly that Iccup is working on getting remastered to work?
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We're getting to the point where this is not all the algorithm's fault.
Originally it was, along with a bundle of other issues, but eventually we'll have to step back and say "Whoah, the algorithm doesn't suck, there is just no one playing anymore". Why people aren't playing anymore, well, I bet everyone can make wild guesses as to why that is the case. I was looking at server numbers compared to 2016 Fish days and even when SC:R first launched in the first few months. I know I brought this up like 3 months after release and Grant Davies did say according to their statistics, the player base was increasing, which I have no doubt was true. But that is by far no longer the case.
I'm at the point where I don't even feel like looking/posting on Teamliquid because of these threads and the state of the game. And you have people who come in and look at this from an outside perspective and think we're whiny entitled brats when Blizzard threw the first stone and it is just one blow after another. Yeah we're pissed, and yeah I bet Blizz isn't happy with our feedback or demeanor, but holy shit never have I played a game by an AAA company where I have to fucking pay for a VPN to find matches. And the audacity of personalities to come in and tell us how to act is actually beyond all parody. A Remastered release managed to actually DECREASE the playerbase within a year, killed the ability to find matches appropriately with no ladder alternative, and we're still waiting for the first season of ladder to start almost a year after it came out. In any bigger gaming community this wouldn't even be close to acceptable.
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The only recent blue post i have seen on the blizzard forum was in reply to a question asking when 2/2 matchmaking will be available.Reply was sometime in 2018 so more likely Q3/Q4 by which time there will clearly not be population to support it.
The recent addition of TR24 options and 90%+ of custom games on korea being on TR24 means nobody outside korea can realistically play custom 1/2/3/ums there, even with a vpn.
I like the new graphics but i would play on the old graphics, it doesn't make a difference to me.The addition of widescreen is the biggest plus in remastered for me.If someone could get widescreen mode in iccup or sb i would prefer playing on there, with old graphics if needed.
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Well, they did say earlier, one of their software engineers posted ... saying another MM tweak is on its way.
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The last time I played ladder I hit shamtoo 3 times in a row and then quit. Will probably give ladder another go when I get my pc fixed, but that was kind of frustrating.
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If a gaming company is unable to separate player negativity from constructive criticism, then there is something wrong with the process within the company.
Every public endeavor (gaming, political, news, etc) will encounter negativity. Does negativity halt all process? No, probably because the people or organizations facing negative comments understand that it comes with the territory (or in some cases, just lie through it). Blizzard is fully capable of handling negative reviews.
Someplace in their HQ building, there is a process diagram for SCR. Odds are it has schedules, release dates, project plans, daily meetings, dealings, progress updates, and more. This is how large professional IT companies work. It isn't like they wake up one day and are like, oh, gee, maybe I should work on some latency today! Tra la la la! Let me get my coffee first! No, they know what they're doing, while those out here waste their time talking about how they know this and that and the next thing and because Blizzard doesn't employ actual sorcerers, they're useless and hate the community. Everything you hear that gets posted is SPECULATION, as in, something made up because whomever decides to voice their opinion seems to have it in their head that they know what's going on behind those HQ walls.
What do we know?
Well, Blizzard there's this statement:
Sigaty, who says the pressure of succeeding StarCraft was “always looming” in his mind as he produced its sequel, won’t commit to making StarCraft III, but he will confirm that the franchise has a future beyond Remastered matches.
“We definitely will revisit this world again,” Sigaty says, adding that he sees StarCraft as critical to the “core of Blizzard’s DNA.”
So, go ahead. That's a quote. Speculate as much as you want about it. :D
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On March 31 2018 13:48 mLtySC wrote:
The last time I played ladder I hit shamtoo 3 times in a row and then quit. Will probably give ladder another go when I get my pc fixed, but that was kind of frustrating.
yea, schamtoo is a big bully
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7 Posts
We're still here, and we're always listening. I acknowledge that it's an ongoing cause of angst that we're not posting/communicating as actively as we'd like to, and you'd like us to. This is because - unlike many other teams at Blizzard - the dev team are communicating directly. There are good reasons why other teams don't work like us in this respect, and I'm sure we cause endless stress for our PR/community teams in working this way 
The upside is that we get a direct line, and I believe we're quite candid (as much as we reasonably can be). The downside is that posting takes time - and that steals time away from development. So it's a balancing act - we can't just bash out a rapid fire answer on a forum because misplaced words can be interpreted in ways we never intended, so we need to spend a little more time with our responses. The more time spent typing in a forum is less time spent typing code. Hence why I'm posting this outside core hours.
I believe we have great coverage of reading feedback on the Blizzard forums, and I'd say pretty good coverage of TL. I understand that us not responding to every point and every thread may make people think we haven't read it. Chances are we have. Chances are it's been immediately discussed and/or put into a tracking list for further investigation and possibly action.
On the video dev updates, I agree it's been a little longer than it should be. We've actually been working on the next one recently, so it's coming soon(TM).
On 1v1 MM, it's been an ongoing battle to find an algorithm and a balance that works globally for SCR. We've always strongly believed that a global MM is essential for SCR to survive globally. Our initial algorithm was returning too many high latency matches. We solved that with a major change, but I agree that we over corrected. Since then we've rolled out 2 further tweaks (one yesterday) to bring us back towards a happy medium. I am convinced that the algorithm we're now using is the right direction, and - unlike our previous algorithm - it can get us to a good place for everyone. But, being honest, that's still going to take some more time and experimentation.
On numbers & concurrency, we do have some headaches. Namely, that most of our population is in Korea (no surprises), and that overall it's still (and has always been) a relatively low population compared to more recent games. It's also compounded by Korea having incredible internal connectivity, and by comparison, most of the rest of the world does not. So Koreans get to MM for the most part now in an experience not dissimilar from playing on LAN. Understandably the rest of the world wants this too. And providing as close as we can to that is of course the challenge. But, I really don't think we're facing any new problems in this area from launch (other than perhaps the bar is now higher given the optimizations we've made to the network subsystem vs 1.16 - which has allowed TR20 and TR24 over the internet and without 6112 port forwarding any more). I guess what I'm saying is, in my view, MM in the foreigner scene is as solvable via the algorithm as it has ever been.
We really are doing everything we can to make MM a great experience for everyone. Obviously we've talked to other Blizzard teams about their experiences, but taking that further, last week I visited GDC and sat down with the head of the matchmaking team at Activision to canvas their ideas and harvest their many years of experience. I was buoyed by the meeting as it really seemed like we were doing a lot of things right. It was also evident that we are facing some unique problems with SCR - we want low latency, skill relevant matches without having substantial player concurrency where most of our players are in one region with incredible connectivity, and we want to get games in a reasonable time frame. In saying that, I'm also aware that different players have different views on what's most important, and so maybe there's a world where we offer a preference button in the MM on whether you want to optimize on search time, skill, latency, or a "balanced" option.
It's certainly not ideal that folks are having to use VPNs to confuse or circumvent the MM algorithm. TR/latency prediction is super difficult, even more so globally. We've been investigating how we can improve the latency/TR prediction we use to configure the MM algorithm on a per-client basis. After last week's meeting, we're also going to get access to a vast database of latency data from the Activision MM crew plus their research on latency calculation which may also help us improve those areas of the algorithm.
TLDR the MM is still a major priority for us, as it has been since launch. Please keep the feedback coming, and rest assured we are reading it and working on it.
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On April 01 2018 06:49 GrantTheAnt wrote:We're still here, and we're always listening. I acknowledge that it's an ongoing cause of angst that we're not posting/communicating as actively as we'd like to, and you'd like us to. This is because - unlike many other teams at Blizzard - the dev team are communicating directly. There are good reasons why other teams don't work like us in this respect, and I'm sure we cause endless stress for our PR/community teams in working this way The upside is that we get a direct line, and I believe we're quite candid (as much as we reasonably can be). The downside is that posting takes time - and that steals time away from development. So it's a balancing act - we can't just bash out a rapid fire answer on a forum because misplaced words can be interpreted in ways we never intended, so we need to spend a little more time with our responses. The more time spent typing in a forum is less time spent typing code. Hence why I'm posting this outside core hours. I believe we have great coverage of reading feedback on the Blizzard forums, and I'd say pretty good coverage of TL. I understand that us not responding to every point and every thread may make people think we haven't read it. Chances are we have. Chances are it's been immediately discussed and/or put into a tracking list for further investigation and possibly action. On the video dev updates, I agree it's been a little longer than it should be. We've actually been working on the next one recently, so it's coming soon(TM). On 1v1 MM, it's been an ongoing battle to find an algorithm and a balance that works globally for SCR. We've always strongly believed that a global MM is essential for SCR to survive globally. Our initial algorithm was returning too many high latency matches. We solved that with a major change, but I agree that we over corrected. Since then we've rolled out 2 further tweaks (one yesterday) to bring us back towards a happy medium. I am convinced that the algorithm we're now using is the right direction, and - unlike our previous algorithm - it can get us to a good place for everyone. But, being honest, that's still going to take some more time and experimentation. On numbers & concurrency, we do have some headaches. Namely, that most of our population is in Korea (no surprises), and that overall it's still (and has always been) a relatively low population compared to more recent games. It's also compounded by Korea having incredible internal connectivity, and by comparison, most of the rest of the world does not. So Koreans get to MM for the most part now in an experience not dissimilar from playing on LAN. Understandably the rest of the world wants this too. And providing as close as we can to that is of course the challenge. But, I really don't think we're facing any new problems in this area from launch (other than perhaps the bar is now higher given the optimizations we've made to the network subsystem vs 1.16 - which has allowed TR20 and TR24 over the internet and without 6112 port forwarding any more). I guess what I'm saying is, in my view, MM in the foreigner scene is as solvable via the algorithm as it has ever been. We really are doing everything we can to make MM a great experience for everyone. Obviously we've talked to other Blizzard teams about their experiences, but taking that further, last week I visited GDC and sat down with the head of the matchmaking team at Activision to canvas their ideas and harvest their many years of experience. I was buoyed by the meeting as it really seemed like we were doing a lot of things right. It was also evident that we are facing some unique problems with SCR - we want low latency, skill relevant matches without having substantial player concurrency where most of our players are in one region with incredible connectivity, and we want to get games in a reasonable time frame. In saying that, I'm also aware that different players have different views on what's most important, and so maybe there's a world where we offer a preference button in the MM on whether you want to optimize on search time, skill, latency, or a "balanced" option. It's certainly not ideal that folks are having to use VPNs to confuse or circumvent the MM algorithm. TR/latency prediction is super difficult, even more so globally. We've been investigating how we can improve the latency/TR prediction we use to configure the MM algorithm on a per-client basis. After last week's meeting, we're also going to get access to a vast database of latency data from the Activision MM crew plus their research on latency calculation which may also help us improve those areas of the algorithm. TLDR the MM is still a major priority for us, as it has been since launch. Please keep the feedback coming, and rest assured we are reading it and working on it.
Probably the longest or biggest 'Blue Post' I've seen, or post by a Blizzard employee on TL or on the Battle.net forums period, Thank you for this statement, it is really great to have you guys at Blizzard working so hard to get this game we love to the level playing field we all want.
Thank you for your hard work, determination, and transparency here with this post!
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mm works wonders now(im in U.S. WEST) THANK YOU BLIZZARD GRANT
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On April 01 2018 06:49 GrantTheAnt wrote:We're still here, and we're always listening. I acknowledge that it's an ongoing cause of angst that we're not posting/communicating as actively as we'd like to, and you'd like us to. This is because - unlike many other teams at Blizzard - the dev team are communicating directly. There are good reasons why other teams don't work like us in this respect, and I'm sure we cause endless stress for our PR/community teams in working this way The upside is that we get a direct line, and I believe we're quite candid (as much as we reasonably can be). The downside is that posting takes time - and that steals time away from development. So it's a balancing act - we can't just bash out a rapid fire answer on a forum because misplaced words can be interpreted in ways we never intended, so we need to spend a little more time with our responses. The more time spent typing in a forum is less time spent typing code. Hence why I'm posting this outside core hours. I believe we have great coverage of reading feedback on the Blizzard forums, and I'd say pretty good coverage of TL. I understand that us not responding to every point and every thread may make people think we haven't read it. Chances are we have. Chances are it's been immediately discussed and/or put into a tracking list for further investigation and possibly action. On the video dev updates, I agree it's been a little longer than it should be. We've actually been working on the next one recently, so it's coming soon(TM). On 1v1 MM, it's been an ongoing battle to find an algorithm and a balance that works globally for SCR. We've always strongly believed that a global MM is essential for SCR to survive globally. Our initial algorithm was returning too many high latency matches. We solved that with a major change, but I agree that we over corrected. Since then we've rolled out 2 further tweaks (one yesterday) to bring us back towards a happy medium. I am convinced that the algorithm we're now using is the right direction, and - unlike our previous algorithm - it can get us to a good place for everyone. But, being honest, that's still going to take some more time and experimentation. On numbers & concurrency, we do have some headaches. Namely, that most of our population is in Korea (no surprises), and that overall it's still (and has always been) a relatively low population compared to more recent games. It's also compounded by Korea having incredible internal connectivity, and by comparison, most of the rest of the world does not. So Koreans get to MM for the most part now in an experience not dissimilar from playing on LAN. Understandably the rest of the world wants this too. And providing as close as we can to that is of course the challenge. But, I really don't think we're facing any new problems in this area from launch (other than perhaps the bar is now higher given the optimizations we've made to the network subsystem vs 1.16 - which has allowed TR20 and TR24 over the internet and without 6112 port forwarding any more). I guess what I'm saying is, in my view, MM in the foreigner scene is as solvable via the algorithm as it has ever been. We really are doing everything we can to make MM a great experience for everyone. Obviously we've talked to other Blizzard teams about their experiences, but taking that further, last week I visited GDC and sat down with the head of the matchmaking team at Activision to canvas their ideas and harvest their many years of experience. I was buoyed by the meeting as it really seemed like we were doing a lot of things right. It was also evident that we are facing some unique problems with SCR - we want low latency, skill relevant matches without having substantial player concurrency where most of our players are in one region with incredible connectivity, and we want to get games in a reasonable time frame. In saying that, I'm also aware that different players have different views on what's most important, and so maybe there's a world where we offer a preference button in the MM on whether you want to optimize on search time, skill, latency, or a "balanced" option. It's certainly not ideal that folks are having to use VPNs to confuse or circumvent the MM algorithm. TR/latency prediction is super difficult, even more so globally. We've been investigating how we can improve the latency/TR prediction we use to configure the MM algorithm on a per-client basis. After last week's meeting, we're also going to get access to a vast database of latency data from the Activision MM crew plus their research on latency calculation which may also help us improve those areas of the algorithm. TLDR the MM is still a major priority for us, as it has been since launch. Please keep the feedback coming, and rest assured we are reading it and working on it.
Mr. Grant from Blizzard:
This is great.
Even just seeing that someone from Blizzard directly is responding to a post -- I have to be honest, as someone who is extremely cynical ... I am happy to see a post from you.
Would you mind commenting on the new MM tweak you guys made yesterday (e.g. what exactly is the change/happy medium) that you addressed in your post? I'm sure there will definitely be more feedback on top of what I've stated below.
FEEDBACK: After testing a few games -- which is not a good sample size -- it seems marginally better. And still getting queued up against foreigners who are -100/-200 pts below with 200+ second queue times (better than 1000 seconds). I think the "Aggression" of MM searches needs to be widened so we can match vs Koreans. There are many foreigners who can get TR12 or TR14 against koreans and play happily. That is the real happy medium that needs to happen. If you're a foreigner who can't get that sort of latency against koreans, then the MM won't pair you because you'll never hit a good TR while it searches for a match. But those of us who have pretty good ping to KR should not be punished.
As a last note, if you're up to date on "Fish server" which was a very popular korean server during the 1.16 days, the BEST latency on that server was our current TR14 (the koreans called it #L2 + low lat hack ... just to give some background in case you're not familiar). So introducing concepts of TR16++ are just icing on the cake. We need to simply aim for TR12; even TR14 was still something that was introduced in the latter part of 1.16 before SCR came out. Food for thought. For reference, I'm a 2300+ MMR player, and there's folks in these threads posting higher than myself who can chime in on behalf of the more competitive foreigner community as well. Thanks for your acknowledgement and we hope to assist or answer any other questions you may have.
-SuGo
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It's crazy that the head dev does this for the community. Thank you for always trying to communicate with us. Sc:r is in good hands. Have faith folks.
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Such an exciting response!!
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@BlizzardDevs: Are you guys looking into enabling race picking for the ladder/enlarging the map pool at all? Maybe increasing the pool, while increasing the veto proportionately would be a good balance between those who want more variety/those who want only very balanced modern maps.
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On April 01 2018 07:52 ProtossGG wrote:Show nested quote +On April 01 2018 06:49 GrantTheAnt wrote:We're still here, and we're always listening. I acknowledge that it's an ongoing cause of angst that we're not posting/communicating as actively as we'd like to, and you'd like us to. This is because - unlike many other teams at Blizzard - the dev team are communicating directly. There are good reasons why other teams don't work like us in this respect, and I'm sure we cause endless stress for our PR/community teams in working this way The upside is that we get a direct line, and I believe we're quite candid (as much as we reasonably can be). The downside is that posting takes time - and that steals time away from development. So it's a balancing act - we can't just bash out a rapid fire answer on a forum because misplaced words can be interpreted in ways we never intended, so we need to spend a little more time with our responses. The more time spent typing in a forum is less time spent typing code. Hence why I'm posting this outside core hours. I believe we have great coverage of reading feedback on the Blizzard forums, and I'd say pretty good coverage of TL. I understand that us not responding to every point and every thread may make people think we haven't read it. Chances are we have. Chances are it's been immediately discussed and/or put into a tracking list for further investigation and possibly action. On the video dev updates, I agree it's been a little longer than it should be. We've actually been working on the next one recently, so it's coming soon(TM). On 1v1 MM, it's been an ongoing battle to find an algorithm and a balance that works globally for SCR. We've always strongly believed that a global MM is essential for SCR to survive globally. Our initial algorithm was returning too many high latency matches. We solved that with a major change, but I agree that we over corrected. Since then we've rolled out 2 further tweaks (one yesterday) to bring us back towards a happy medium. I am convinced that the algorithm we're now using is the right direction, and - unlike our previous algorithm - it can get us to a good place for everyone. But, being honest, that's still going to take some more time and experimentation. On numbers & concurrency, we do have some headaches. Namely, that most of our population is in Korea (no surprises), and that overall it's still (and has always been) a relatively low population compared to more recent games. It's also compounded by Korea having incredible internal connectivity, and by comparison, most of the rest of the world does not. So Koreans get to MM for the most part now in an experience not dissimilar from playing on LAN. Understandably the rest of the world wants this too. And providing as close as we can to that is of course the challenge. But, I really don't think we're facing any new problems in this area from launch (other than perhaps the bar is now higher given the optimizations we've made to the network subsystem vs 1.16 - which has allowed TR20 and TR24 over the internet and without 6112 port forwarding any more). I guess what I'm saying is, in my view, MM in the foreigner scene is as solvable via the algorithm as it has ever been. We really are doing everything we can to make MM a great experience for everyone. Obviously we've talked to other Blizzard teams about their experiences, but taking that further, last week I visited GDC and sat down with the head of the matchmaking team at Activision to canvas their ideas and harvest their many years of experience. I was buoyed by the meeting as it really seemed like we were doing a lot of things right. It was also evident that we are facing some unique problems with SCR - we want low latency, skill relevant matches without having substantial player concurrency where most of our players are in one region with incredible connectivity, and we want to get games in a reasonable time frame. In saying that, I'm also aware that different players have different views on what's most important, and so maybe there's a world where we offer a preference button in the MM on whether you want to optimize on search time, skill, latency, or a "balanced" option. It's certainly not ideal that folks are having to use VPNs to confuse or circumvent the MM algorithm. TR/latency prediction is super difficult, even more so globally. We've been investigating how we can improve the latency/TR prediction we use to configure the MM algorithm on a per-client basis. After last week's meeting, we're also going to get access to a vast database of latency data from the Activision MM crew plus their research on latency calculation which may also help us improve those areas of the algorithm. TLDR the MM is still a major priority for us, as it has been since launch. Please keep the feedback coming, and rest assured we are reading it and working on it.
Mr. Grant from Blizzard:This is great. Even just seeing that someone from Blizzard directly is responding to a post -- I have to be honest, as someone who is extremely cynical ... I am happy to see a post from you. Would you mind commenting on the new MM tweak you guys made yesterday (e.g. what exactly is the change/happy medium) that you addressed in your post? I'm sure there will definitely be more feedback on top of what I've stated below. FEEDBACK: After testing a few games -- which is not a good sample size -- it seems marginally better. And still getting queued up against foreigners who are -100/-200 pts below with 200+ second queue times (better than 1000 seconds). I think the "Aggression" of MM searches needs to be widened so we can match vs Koreans. There are many foreigners who can get TR12 or TR14 against koreans and play happily. That is the real happy medium that needs to happen. If you're a foreigner who can't get that sort of latency against koreans, then the MM won't pair you because you'll never hit a good TR while it searches for a match. But those of us who have pretty good ping to KR should not be punished. As a last note, if you're up to date on "Fish server" which was a very popular korean server during the 1.16 days, the BEST latency on that server was our current TR14 (the koreans called it #L2 + low lat hack ... just to give some background in case you're not familiar). So introducing concepts of TR16++ are just icing on the cake. We need to simply aim for TR12; even TR14 was still something that was introduced in the latter part of 1.16 before SCR came out. Food for thought. For reference, I'm a 2300+ MMR player, and there's folks in these threads posting higher than myself who can chime in on behalf of the more competitive foreigner community as well. Thanks for your acknowledgement and we hope to assist or answer any other questions you may have. -SuGo
Hey Grant, this is the best possible feedback you can get. We both played fish server for many years and we are very knowledgeable on what constitutes a good LAN and manageable gameplay for koreans. I also tried the match making system today after the fix and I still was getting matched up vs same player again and again. It was indeed a bit dissapointing to play the same player again and again and see the queue time go up to over 100 seconds. As of right now, I think a lot of foreigners will continue using VPN to play the best possible ladder. I hope sugo's idea of "happy medium" is seriously considered. Thank you
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EDIT: Ramblings because I missed the fact that there was a second page and am catching up now, so can be ignored:
+ Show Spoiler +On March 30 2018 09:38 SCC-Faust wrote:
Also, it is possible what iNcontroL said in the Twitch Rivals thread is somewhat true. I've actually been wracking my brain around after he made the post and figured it must be at the very least be valid in some form. I think it warrants at least some discussion if we're going to talk about possibilities of why we feel left out of the loop. If this is true, I want Blizzard to tell us what we should be doing differently, and list examples of actions that are preventing them from providing tournaments/events/updates to us. We are left to our own volition and we have our own circuit of foreign-hosted events that are funded very large in part from fans of the game and the amount of negativity in these events exist just like any other game, and I'd argue even less. I watch almost every foreign event I can, participate on the forums, participate in Twitch chat, and read the battle.net forums, and I still can't figure out what sort of mistake we're making that is so vile and out of line that it is preventing the same company who made the game for this audience to reconsider any continuation of supporting the scene.
Here's my theory. We are old, hardened elitists. Many of us have stopped buying their Shiny New Games because we like this old one and don't like the path in which Blizzard and maybe the rest of the industry is going with some of our favorite genres. We are irrelevant in the market. Our standards are high, and frankly outdated given how casual gaming is where the money is. Thus, it would take a lot of effort for Blizzard to satisfy us with anything, and we don't generate enough of a profit margin for them to consider it worth their time. Even if you take all of the StarCraft: Remastered players, anyone who is at ICCup D level or higher is already in the top 25% of active players, skill-wise, I'm guessing. The rest are satisfied with the service they get, playing golemz, bald snipez, TurCanHydraTamponDef, and whatever the fuck else in lobbies. So let's summarize what Blizzard's choices are: 1) Cater to a vocal minority on a 3rd party website and their ("elitist") standards, which takes a lot of effort and shortcomings are not appreciated (because we're "toxic"). 2) Fuck that shit, farm money from ASL and any other nails that decide to stick out too far. Run cross-promotional events to try to get as many BW players to buy SC2/OW as possible, and for the SC2 people to give RM a shot as well because they made it shinier now, see! I think if I was a financial analyst or whoever makes those types of decisions, I know what I'd pick.
EDIT 2:
On April 01 2018 07:52 ProtossGG wrote:
As a last note, if you're up to date on "Fish server" which was a very popular korean server during the 1.16 days, the BEST latency on that server was our current TR14 (the koreans called it #L2 + low lat hack ... just to give some background in case you're not familiar). So introducing concepts of TR16++ are just icing on the cake. We need to simply aim for TR12; even TR14 was still something that was introduced in the latter part of 1.16 before SCR came out. Food for thought. For reference, I'm a 2300+ MMR player, and there's folks in these threads posting higher than myself who can chime in on behalf of the more competitive foreigner community as well. Thanks for your acknowledgement and we hope to assist or answer any other questions you may have.
I think part of the problem is that Koreans, who have tasted the wonders of TR24, will be hella pissed if they are now having to alternate between TR24 and TR12. TR24 may have been a Pandora's box.
Also, does this mean that Incontrol was indeed stretching the truth, at least? I guess the dev's post didn't really prove or disprove it...
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On April 01 2018 17:02 Jealous wrote:EDIT: Ramblings because I missed the fact that there was a second page and am catching up now, so can be ignored: + Show Spoiler +On March 30 2018 09:38 SCC-Faust wrote:
Also, it is possible what iNcontroL said in the Twitch Rivals thread is somewhat true. I've actually been wracking my brain around after he made the post and figured it must be at the very least be valid in some form. I think it warrants at least some discussion if we're going to talk about possibilities of why we feel left out of the loop. If this is true, I want Blizzard to tell us what we should be doing differently, and list examples of actions that are preventing them from providing tournaments/events/updates to us. We are left to our own volition and we have our own circuit of foreign-hosted events that are funded very large in part from fans of the game and the amount of negativity in these events exist just like any other game, and I'd argue even less. I watch almost every foreign event I can, participate on the forums, participate in Twitch chat, and read the battle.net forums, and I still can't figure out what sort of mistake we're making that is so vile and out of line that it is preventing the same company who made the game for this audience to reconsider any continuation of supporting the scene.
Here's my theory. We are old, hardened elitists. Many of us have stopped buying their Shiny New Games because we like this old one and don't like the path in which Blizzard and maybe the rest of the industry is going with some of our favorite genres. We are irrelevant in the market. Our standards are high, and frankly outdated given how casual gaming is where the money is. Thus, it would take a lot of effort for Blizzard to satisfy us with anything, and we don't generate enough of a profit margin for them to consider it worth their time. Even if you take all of the StarCraft: Remastered players, anyone who is at ICCup D level or higher is already in the top 25% of active players, skill-wise, I'm guessing. The rest are satisfied with the service they get, playing golemz, bald snipez, TurCanHydraTamponDef, and whatever the fuck else in lobbies. So let's summarize what Blizzard's choices are: 1) Cater to a vocal minority on a 3rd party website and their ("elitist") standards, which takes a lot of effort and shortcomings are not appreciated (because we're "toxic"). 2) Fuck that shit, farm money from ASL and any other nails that decide to stick out too far. Run cross-promotional events to try to get as many BW players to buy SC2/OW as possible, and for the SC2 people to give RM a shot as well because they made it shinier now, see! I think if I was a financial analyst or whoever makes those types of decisions, I know what I'd pick. EDIT 2: Show nested quote +On April 01 2018 07:52 ProtossGG wrote:
As a last note, if you're up to date on "Fish server" which was a very popular korean server during the 1.16 days, the BEST latency on that server was our current TR14 (the koreans called it #L2 + low lat hack ... just to give some background in case you're not familiar). So introducing concepts of TR16++ are just icing on the cake. We need to simply aim for TR12; even TR14 was still something that was introduced in the latter part of 1.16 before SCR came out. Food for thought. For reference, I'm a 2300+ MMR player, and there's folks in these threads posting higher than myself who can chime in on behalf of the more competitive foreigner community as well. Thanks for your acknowledgement and we hope to assist or answer any other questions you may have. I think part of the problem is that Koreans, who have tasted the wonders of TR24, will be hella pissed if they are now having to alternate between TR24 and TR12. TR24 may have been a Pandora's box. Also, does this mean that Incontrol was indeed stretching the truth, at least? I guess the dev's post didn't really prove or disprove it...
That's what i fear the most tbh. Why even introduce TR 24? TR 16 was the absolute maximum koreans could play on UDP.... The rest of the population couldn't even access TR 14 without the help of Low lat launcher..
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you are all Lucky with queue times. I simply do not get games on any of my accounts 1000-1500 MMR. For me it's either TR 8 L 1 on korea through a vpn or nothing.
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On April 01 2018 17:02 Jealous wrote:EDIT: Ramblings because I missed the fact that there was a second page and am catching up now, so can be ignored: + Show Spoiler +On March 30 2018 09:38 SCC-Faust wrote:
Also, it is possible what iNcontroL said in the Twitch Rivals thread is somewhat true. I've actually been wracking my brain around after he made the post and figured it must be at the very least be valid in some form. I think it warrants at least some discussion if we're going to talk about possibilities of why we feel left out of the loop. If this is true, I want Blizzard to tell us what we should be doing differently, and list examples of actions that are preventing them from providing tournaments/events/updates to us. We are left to our own volition and we have our own circuit of foreign-hosted events that are funded very large in part from fans of the game and the amount of negativity in these events exist just like any other game, and I'd argue even less. I watch almost every foreign event I can, participate on the forums, participate in Twitch chat, and read the battle.net forums, and I still can't figure out what sort of mistake we're making that is so vile and out of line that it is preventing the same company who made the game for this audience to reconsider any continuation of supporting the scene.
Here's my theory. We are old, hardened elitists. Many of us have stopped buying their Shiny New Games because we like this old one and don't like the path in which Blizzard and maybe the rest of the industry is going with some of our favorite genres. We are irrelevant in the market. Our standards are high, and frankly outdated given how casual gaming is where the money is. Thus, it would take a lot of effort for Blizzard to satisfy us with anything, and we don't generate enough of a profit margin for them to consider it worth their time. Even if you take all of the StarCraft: Remastered players, anyone who is at ICCup D level or higher is already in the top 25% of active players, skill-wise, I'm guessing. The rest are satisfied with the service they get, playing golemz, bald snipez, TurCanHydraTamponDef, and whatever the fuck else in lobbies. So let's summarize what Blizzard's choices are: 1) Cater to a vocal minority on a 3rd party website and their ("elitist") standards, which takes a lot of effort and shortcomings are not appreciated (because we're "toxic"). 2) Fuck that shit, farm money from ASL and any other nails that decide to stick out too far. Run cross-promotional events to try to get as many BW players to buy SC2/OW as possible, and for the SC2 people to give RM a shot as well because they made it shinier now, see! I think if I was a financial analyst or whoever makes those types of decisions, I know what I'd pick. EDIT 2: Show nested quote +On April 01 2018 07:52 ProtossGG wrote:
As a last note, if you're up to date on "Fish server" which was a very popular korean server during the 1.16 days, the BEST latency on that server was our current TR14 (the koreans called it #L2 + low lat hack ... just to give some background in case you're not familiar). So introducing concepts of TR16++ are just icing on the cake. We need to simply aim for TR12; even TR14 was still something that was introduced in the latter part of 1.16 before SCR came out. Food for thought. For reference, I'm a 2300+ MMR player, and there's folks in these threads posting higher than myself who can chime in on behalf of the more competitive foreigner community as well. Thanks for your acknowledgement and we hope to assist or answer any other questions you may have. I think part of the problem is that Koreans, who have tasted the wonders of TR24, will be hella pissed if they are now having to alternate between TR24 and TR12. TR24 may have been a Pandora's box. Also, does this mean that Incontrol was indeed stretching the truth, at least? I guess the dev's post didn't really prove or disprove it...
Exactly -- TR16++ was some gourmet icing on a cake.
However, on the bright side ... all my VPN matches are basically TR12, a few have been TR14. And in these games, I've not heard a single peep from the Koreans. So, it begs to differ, would they really be pissed? Maybe at super high levels like 2800++... but at ~2300 level, it seems they don't ever say anything. And as we all know, the Koreans don't shy away from saying it's lagging during the start of games lol.
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im mostly playing tr16 tr20 with korean vpn,however the mm is stupid when it comes to avoid matching the same player,sometimes a player from japan or china gets match with me over and over and over,even when i change id with different mmr.im just alt q the games and we keep getting matched,is very annoying.eye i quit the games cuz the tr8 not cuz they re chineses or japaneses.
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On April 01 2018 22:58 ProtossGG wrote:Show nested quote +On April 01 2018 17:02 Jealous wrote:EDIT: Ramblings because I missed the fact that there was a second page and am catching up now, so can be ignored: + Show Spoiler +On March 30 2018 09:38 SCC-Faust wrote:
Also, it is possible what iNcontroL said in the Twitch Rivals thread is somewhat true. I've actually been wracking my brain around after he made the post and figured it must be at the very least be valid in some form. I think it warrants at least some discussion if we're going to talk about possibilities of why we feel left out of the loop. If this is true, I want Blizzard to tell us what we should be doing differently, and list examples of actions that are preventing them from providing tournaments/events/updates to us. We are left to our own volition and we have our own circuit of foreign-hosted events that are funded very large in part from fans of the game and the amount of negativity in these events exist just like any other game, and I'd argue even less. I watch almost every foreign event I can, participate on the forums, participate in Twitch chat, and read the battle.net forums, and I still can't figure out what sort of mistake we're making that is so vile and out of line that it is preventing the same company who made the game for this audience to reconsider any continuation of supporting the scene.
Here's my theory. We are old, hardened elitists. Many of us have stopped buying their Shiny New Games because we like this old one and don't like the path in which Blizzard and maybe the rest of the industry is going with some of our favorite genres. We are irrelevant in the market. Our standards are high, and frankly outdated given how casual gaming is where the money is. Thus, it would take a lot of effort for Blizzard to satisfy us with anything, and we don't generate enough of a profit margin for them to consider it worth their time. Even if you take all of the StarCraft: Remastered players, anyone who is at ICCup D level or higher is already in the top 25% of active players, skill-wise, I'm guessing. The rest are satisfied with the service they get, playing golemz, bald snipez, TurCanHydraTamponDef, and whatever the fuck else in lobbies. So let's summarize what Blizzard's choices are: 1) Cater to a vocal minority on a 3rd party website and their ("elitist") standards, which takes a lot of effort and shortcomings are not appreciated (because we're "toxic"). 2) Fuck that shit, farm money from ASL and any other nails that decide to stick out too far. Run cross-promotional events to try to get as many BW players to buy SC2/OW as possible, and for the SC2 people to give RM a shot as well because they made it shinier now, see! I think if I was a financial analyst or whoever makes those types of decisions, I know what I'd pick. EDIT 2: On April 01 2018 07:52 ProtossGG wrote:
As a last note, if you're up to date on "Fish server" which was a very popular korean server during the 1.16 days, the BEST latency on that server was our current TR14 (the koreans called it #L2 + low lat hack ... just to give some background in case you're not familiar). So introducing concepts of TR16++ are just icing on the cake. We need to simply aim for TR12; even TR14 was still something that was introduced in the latter part of 1.16 before SCR came out. Food for thought. For reference, I'm a 2300+ MMR player, and there's folks in these threads posting higher than myself who can chime in on behalf of the more competitive foreigner community as well. Thanks for your acknowledgement and we hope to assist or answer any other questions you may have. I think part of the problem is that Koreans, who have tasted the wonders of TR24, will be hella pissed if they are now having to alternate between TR24 and TR12. TR24 may have been a Pandora's box. Also, does this mean that Incontrol was indeed stretching the truth, at least? I guess the dev's post didn't really prove or disprove it... Exactly -- TR16++ was some gourmet icing on a cake. However, on the bright side ... all my VPN matches are basically TR12, a few have been TR14. And in these games, I've not heard a single peep from the Koreans. So, it begs to differ, would they really be pissed? Maybe at super high levels like 2800++... but at ~2300 level, it seems they don't ever say anything. And as we all know, the Koreans don't shy away from saying it's lagging during the start of games lol.
Maybe you got a lucky day, when I played vs Koreans via VPN around 2200-2300 the last 2-3 days with TR usually being 16 to 24 L 2, almost half of the people I played freaked out because it is not the maximum.
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On March 31 2018 13:48 mLtySC wrote:
The last time I played ladder I hit shamtoo 3 times in a row and then quit. Will probably give ladder another go when I get my pc fixed, but that was kind of frustrating.
lolol same here
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On April 02 2018 09:40 JiniHendrix wrote:Show nested quote +On March 31 2018 13:48 mLtySC wrote:
The last time I played ladder I hit shamtoo 3 times in a row and then quit. Will probably give ladder another go when I get my pc fixed, but that was kind of frustrating. lolol same here
I AM THE GATEKEEPER.
You gotta pay the troll toll to get to--
<3
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On April 01 2018 06:49 GrantTheAnt wrote:We're still here, and we're always listening. I acknowledge that it's an ongoing cause of angst that we're not posting/communicating as actively as we'd like to, and you'd like us to. This is because - unlike many other teams at Blizzard - the dev team are communicating directly. There are good reasons why other teams don't work like us in this respect, and I'm sure we cause endless stress for our PR/community teams in working this way The upside is that we get a direct line, and I believe we're quite candid (as much as we reasonably can be). The downside is that posting takes time - and that steals time away from development. So it's a balancing act - we can't just bash out a rapid fire answer on a forum because misplaced words can be interpreted in ways we never intended, so we need to spend a little more time with our responses. The more time spent typing in a forum is less time spent typing code. Hence why I'm posting this outside core hours. I believe we have great coverage of reading feedback on the Blizzard forums, and I'd say pretty good coverage of TL. I understand that us not responding to every point and every thread may make people think we haven't read it. Chances are we have. Chances are it's been immediately discussed and/or put into a tracking list for further investigation and possibly action. On the video dev updates, I agree it's been a little longer than it should be. We've actually been working on the next one recently, so it's coming soon(TM). On 1v1 MM, it's been an ongoing battle to find an algorithm and a balance that works globally for SCR. We've always strongly believed that a global MM is essential for SCR to survive globally. Our initial algorithm was returning too many high latency matches. We solved that with a major change, but I agree that we over corrected. Since then we've rolled out 2 further tweaks (one yesterday) to bring us back towards a happy medium. I am convinced that the algorithm we're now using is the right direction, and - unlike our previous algorithm - it can get us to a good place for everyone. But, being honest, that's still going to take some more time and experimentation. On numbers & concurrency, we do have some headaches. Namely, that most of our population is in Korea (no surprises), and that overall it's still (and has always been) a relatively low population compared to more recent games. It's also compounded by Korea having incredible internal connectivity, and by comparison, most of the rest of the world does not. So Koreans get to MM for the most part now in an experience not dissimilar from playing on LAN. Understandably the rest of the world wants this too. And providing as close as we can to that is of course the challenge. But, I really don't think we're facing any new problems in this area from launch (other than perhaps the bar is now higher given the optimizations we've made to the network subsystem vs 1.16 - which has allowed TR20 and TR24 over the internet and without 6112 port forwarding any more). I guess what I'm saying is, in my view, MM in the foreigner scene is as solvable via the algorithm as it has ever been. We really are doing everything we can to make MM a great experience for everyone. Obviously we've talked to other Blizzard teams about their experiences, but taking that further, last week I visited GDC and sat down with the head of the matchmaking team at Activision to canvas their ideas and harvest their many years of experience. I was buoyed by the meeting as it really seemed like we were doing a lot of things right. It was also evident that we are facing some unique problems with SCR - we want low latency, skill relevant matches without having substantial player concurrency where most of our players are in one region with incredible connectivity, and we want to get games in a reasonable time frame. In saying that, I'm also aware that different players have different views on what's most important, and so maybe there's a world where we offer a preference button in the MM on whether you want to optimize on search time, skill, latency, or a "balanced" option. It's certainly not ideal that folks are having to use VPNs to confuse or circumvent the MM algorithm. TR/latency prediction is super difficult, even more so globally. We've been investigating how we can improve the latency/TR prediction we use to configure the MM algorithm on a per-client basis. After last week's meeting, we're also going to get access to a vast database of latency data from the Activision MM crew plus their research on latency calculation which may also help us improve those areas of the algorithm. TLDR the MM is still a major priority for us, as it has been since launch. Please keep the feedback coming, and rest assured we are reading it and working on it.
thank you for your lengthy post and explanation, it was good!
I wonder why the dev team is currently now not thinking about the "obvious solution" as it seems with regards to matchmaking. You explained above, why low connectivity and small playerbase outisde of Korea make it very hard to optimise the MM algorithm so that it's working fine for foreigners. Which is especially true for high level players, let's say ~2200 MMR and above.
Do you think about reintroducing hosted ladder matches? Hosted ladder has been tried and worked well for this community for the last decade or so in different interations of private servers. Hosted ladder games also have significant advantages that i would like to point out here:
- first and foremost: hosted ladder games provide ladder games to the players that atm have to resort to VPN to find games. The human brain is much smarter in picking "the right opponent" then an algorithm can ever be. For instance  eOnzErG and a korean player of his skill might not get matched in the ladder because the algorithm doesn't recognize the proper parameters in latency, but both players can make a concious decision to play on TR 12 or even 10, if they so choose. You could code it so that the hosted game has a minimum TR that needs to be matched for the game to be possible and display it in the game name.
Another prerequisite, beside from the coding, would be to provide visible and significant ladder stats (MMR) in the game name or when joining. Atm ladder stats are not visible in the menu and game lobby.
- hosted ladder provides you the option to rematch vs a player of your choosing. Ofc such a feature needs to be limited, thus hard coding a maximum amount of games vs the same opponent would be necessary. Ideas how to limit rematches can be found here for instance ICCup ladder rules.
- hosted ladder allows players to train specific maps in the ladder environment. If, for instance, you are preparing for a tournament game on Destination, you might as well play more then your normal quota of games on that map in ladder. While your at it: hosted ladder games allow for a much bigger selection of established, well liked maps to choose from for ladder. Diversity is good as long as you can ensure ladder maps are competitive and balanced. For inspiration, i refer again to the ICCup mappack. (Only the 1v1 ladder folder)
There are also good reasons to be skeptical of hosted ladder games. I would like to adress some of these concerns!
- corrupted maps and or hacked maps might be used:
This can be avoided easily if protected maps are used for ladder. The community did this in the past with a tool called SCM Draft for it. Im sure you folks have better options at hand, so it should be a non-issue.
- people smurf on ladder and have a great time to demolish lower level players with mass BC in TvP.
True, smurfing and the frustration that comes along with it for lower level players have always been an issue. But that doesn't change fundamentally with Autmated MM as i would like to point out. People still make new accounts (partly also because they don't find ladder games on higher MMR) and the problem is the same. As a 1700 MMR player, i can testify to that 
- people will abuse ladder:
This one is a bit tricky. Yes people can in theory abuse the hosted ladder system to qualify for tournaments (ladder qualification phase, as in current BSL 4) by having friends throw games in order to push them up in the ladder. Past tournaments with bigger prize pools and ladder qualification had this problem. Thus it's important to limit the amount of games one user (not account) can play vs the other per day. You cannot fully avoid the problem without having staff people manually check profiles for suspicious entries. ICCup staff did that in the past in the wake of foreign tournaments with ladder qualification, but i think it's not feasible for you folks. But, given the current tournament circuit outside Korea and the small amount of tours that run ladder style qualification, i think the problem is negligible.
Thanks for reading Grant, as i'm sure you will! No explicit reply needed, you already explained to us how posting on the forums in length drains from your actual work. I hope you consider my idea though. I have been engaged for round about three years as a staff person for a private brood war server and have actively helped and discussed the structure and redesign of our internal ladder system in that time. I added that to give you some background on where im coming from in this discussion. Thx in advance again!
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On April 02 2018 22:32 Cele wrote:Show nested quote +On April 01 2018 06:49 GrantTheAnt wrote:We're still here, and we're always listening. I acknowledge that it's an ongoing cause of angst that we're not posting/communicating as actively as we'd like to, and you'd like us to. This is because - unlike many other teams at Blizzard - the dev team are communicating directly. There are good reasons why other teams don't work like us in this respect, and I'm sure we cause endless stress for our PR/community teams in working this way The upside is that we get a direct line, and I believe we're quite candid (as much as we reasonably can be). The downside is that posting takes time - and that steals time away from development. So it's a balancing act - we can't just bash out a rapid fire answer on a forum because misplaced words can be interpreted in ways we never intended, so we need to spend a little more time with our responses. The more time spent typing in a forum is less time spent typing code. Hence why I'm posting this outside core hours. I believe we have great coverage of reading feedback on the Blizzard forums, and I'd say pretty good coverage of TL. I understand that us not responding to every point and every thread may make people think we haven't read it. Chances are we have. Chances are it's been immediately discussed and/or put into a tracking list for further investigation and possibly action. On the video dev updates, I agree it's been a little longer than it should be. We've actually been working on the next one recently, so it's coming soon(TM). On 1v1 MM, it's been an ongoing battle to find an algorithm and a balance that works globally for SCR. We've always strongly believed that a global MM is essential for SCR to survive globally. Our initial algorithm was returning too many high latency matches. We solved that with a major change, but I agree that we over corrected. Since then we've rolled out 2 further tweaks (one yesterday) to bring us back towards a happy medium. I am convinced that the algorithm we're now using is the right direction, and - unlike our previous algorithm - it can get us to a good place for everyone. But, being honest, that's still going to take some more time and experimentation. On numbers & concurrency, we do have some headaches. Namely, that most of our population is in Korea (no surprises), and that overall it's still (and has always been) a relatively low population compared to more recent games. It's also compounded by Korea having incredible internal connectivity, and by comparison, most of the rest of the world does not. So Koreans get to MM for the most part now in an experience not dissimilar from playing on LAN. Understandably the rest of the world wants this too. And providing as close as we can to that is of course the challenge. But, I really don't think we're facing any new problems in this area from launch (other than perhaps the bar is now higher given the optimizations we've made to the network subsystem vs 1.16 - which has allowed TR20 and TR24 over the internet and without 6112 port forwarding any more). I guess what I'm saying is, in my view, MM in the foreigner scene is as solvable via the algorithm as it has ever been. We really are doing everything we can to make MM a great experience for everyone. Obviously we've talked to other Blizzard teams about their experiences, but taking that further, last week I visited GDC and sat down with the head of the matchmaking team at Activision to canvas their ideas and harvest their many years of experience. I was buoyed by the meeting as it really seemed like we were doing a lot of things right. It was also evident that we are facing some unique problems with SCR - we want low latency, skill relevant matches without having substantial player concurrency where most of our players are in one region with incredible connectivity, and we want to get games in a reasonable time frame. In saying that, I'm also aware that different players have different views on what's most important, and so maybe there's a world where we offer a preference button in the MM on whether you want to optimize on search time, skill, latency, or a "balanced" option. It's certainly not ideal that folks are having to use VPNs to confuse or circumvent the MM algorithm. TR/latency prediction is super difficult, even more so globally. We've been investigating how we can improve the latency/TR prediction we use to configure the MM algorithm on a per-client basis. After last week's meeting, we're also going to get access to a vast database of latency data from the Activision MM crew plus their research on latency calculation which may also help us improve those areas of the algorithm. TLDR the MM is still a major priority for us, as it has been since launch. Please keep the feedback coming, and rest assured we are reading it and working on it. thank you for your lengthy post and explanation, it was good! I wonder why the dev team is currently now not thinking about the "obvious solution" as it seems with regards to matchmaking. You explained above, why low connectivity and small playerbase outisde of Korea make it very hard to optimise the MM algorithm so that it's working fine for foreigners. Which is especially true for high level players, let's say ~2200 MMR and above. Do you think about reintroducing hosted ladder matches? Hosted ladder has been tried and worked well for this community for the last decade or so in different interations of private servers. Hosted ladder games also have significant advantages that i would like to point out here: - first and foremost: hosted ladder games provide ladder games to the players that atm have to resort to VPN to find games. The human brain is much smarter in picking "the right opponent" then an algorithm can ever be. For instance eOnzErG and a korean player of his skill might not get matched in the ladder because the algorithm doesn't recognize the proper parameters in latency, but both players can make a concious decision to play on TR 12 or even 10, if they so choose. You could code it so that the hosted game has a minimum TR that needs to be matched for the game to be possible and display it in the game name. Another prerequisite, beside from the coding, would be to provide visible and significant ladder stats (MMR) in the game name or when joining. Atm ladder stats are not visible in the menu and game lobby. - hosted ladder provides you the option to rematch vs a player of your choosing. Ofc such a feature needs to be limited, thus hard coding a maximum amount of games vs the same opponent would be necessary. Ideas how to limit rematches can be found here for instance ICCup ladder rules. - hosted ladder allows players to train specific maps in the ladder environment. If, for instance, you are preparing for a tournament game on Destination, you might as well play more then your normal quota of games on that map in ladder. While your at it: hosted ladder games allow for a much bigger selection of established, well liked maps to choose from for ladder. Diversity is good as long as you can ensure ladder maps are competitive and balanced. For inspiration, i refer again to the ICCup mappack. (Only the 1v1 ladder folder) There are also good reasons to be skeptical of hosted ladder games. I would like to adress some of these concerns! - corrupted maps and or hacked maps might be used: This can be avoided easily if protected maps are used for ladder. The community did this in the past with a tool called SCM Draft for it. Im sure you folks have better options at hand, so it should be a non-issue. - people smurf on ladder and have a great time to demolish lower level players with mass BC in TvP. True, smurfing and the frustration that comes along with it for lower level players have always been an issue. But that doesn't change fundamentally with Autmated MM as i would like to point out. People still make new accounts (partly also because they don't find ladder games on higher MMR) and the problem is the same. As a 1700 MMR player, i can testify to that - people will abuse ladder: This one is a bit tricky. Yes people can in theory abuse the hosted ladder system to qualify for tournaments (ladder qualification phase, as in current BSL 4) by having friends throw games in order to push them up in the ladder. Past tournaments with bigger prize pools and ladder qualification had this problem. Thus it's important to limit the amount of games one user (not account) can play vs the other per day. You cannot fully avoid the problem without having staff people manually check profiles for suspicious entries. ICCup staff did that in the past in the wake of foreign tournaments with ladder qualification, but i think it's not feasible for you folks. But, given the current tournament circuit outside Korea and the small amount of tours that run ladder style qualification, i think the problem is negligible. Thanks for reading Grant, as i'm sure you will! No explicit reply needed, you already explained to us how posting on the forums in length drains from your actual work. I hope you consider my idea though. I have been engaged for round about three years as a staff person for a private brood war server and have actively helped and discussed the structure and redesign of our internal ladder system in that time. I added that to give you some background on where im coming from in this discussion. Thx in advance again!
hosted ladder would destroy foreign scene further. Koreans will not go to game that has anything les than TR 20
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I haven't really had any problems with the global match making or latency. Its been great to see the network improvements. I think their is a vocal minority of people having issues. Which its definitely good to hear and adjust, but keep in mind most of the rest of us are just enjoying getting in games when we can, and watching ASL5. Really looking forwards to 2v2 MM and a glad to hear its in the works. I played a 2v2 game recently and it actually went really well no lag thanks to your networking improvements, even with a friend who hadn't portforwarded and was a known lagger in previous patches. Additionally, I think the F2P and remastered MM has brought a lot more activity to and resurrected the game. Ignore the haters and keep up the good work Grant.
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On April 05 2018 09:26 RomeD wrote:
I haven't really had any problems with the global match making or latency. Its been great to see the network improvements. I think their is a vocal minority of people having issues. Which its definitely good to hear and adjust, but keep in mind most of the rest of us are just enjoying getting in games when we can, and watching ASL5. Really looking forwards to 2v2 MM and a glad to hear its in the works. I played a 2v2 game recently and it actually went really well no lag thanks to your networking improvements, even with a friend who hadn't portforwarded and was a known lagger in previous patches. Additionally, I think the F2P and remastered MM has brought a lot more activity to and resurrected the game. Ignore the haters and keep up the good work Grant.
what are you talking about? This isn’t a minority issue. Everyone from even 1500 mmr is suffering from low population issue and is having to face same player again and again. You have no clue do you?
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On April 05 2018 10:20 Shinokuki wrote:Show nested quote +On April 05 2018 09:26 RomeD wrote:
I haven't really had any problems with the global match making or latency. Its been great to see the network improvements. I think their is a vocal minority of people having issues. Which its definitely good to hear and adjust, but keep in mind most of the rest of us are just enjoying getting in games when we can, and watching ASL5. Really looking forwards to 2v2 MM and a glad to hear its in the works. I played a 2v2 game recently and it actually went really well no lag thanks to your networking improvements, even with a friend who hadn't portforwarded and was a known lagger in previous patches. Additionally, I think the F2P and remastered MM has brought a lot more activity to and resurrected the game. Ignore the haters and keep up the good work Grant. what are you talking about? This isn’t a minority issue. Everyone from even 1500 mmr is suffering from low population issue and is having to face same player again and again. You have no clue do you?
EVERYONE. Do you have global statistics/surveys/facts on that one?
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Just chiming in here to say I think it's awesome that Grant and the team are able and willing to communicate directly like this, so thanks for that. No PR team blocking/filtering things is really quite incredible.
Not much to add besides that. I'm a fairly low rank player (1720 MMR) in Pacific Northwest and queue times are usually 1-3 minutes depending on time of day - quite tolerable. From my pov it's no worse than iCCUP ever was, plus I no longer have to put up with people insta-leaving because they don't like my rank or the map I hosted or who knows what else.
I'm surprised to read that VPN gets people better MM results than direct connection. That sounds like region is weighing too heavily in the decision, if tricking it into making a match reliably gets a better result than it predicted...
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On April 05 2018 11:05 10dla wrote:Show nested quote +On April 05 2018 10:20 Shinokuki wrote:On April 05 2018 09:26 RomeD wrote:
I haven't really had any problems with the global match making or latency. Its been great to see the network improvements. I think their is a vocal minority of people having issues. Which its definitely good to hear and adjust, but keep in mind most of the rest of us are just enjoying getting in games when we can, and watching ASL5. Really looking forwards to 2v2 MM and a glad to hear its in the works. I played a 2v2 game recently and it actually went really well no lag thanks to your networking improvements, even with a friend who hadn't portforwarded and was a known lagger in previous patches. Additionally, I think the F2P and remastered MM has brought a lot more activity to and resurrected the game. Ignore the haters and keep up the good work Grant. what are you talking about? This isn’t a minority issue. Everyone from even 1500 mmr is suffering from low population issue and is having to face same player again and again. You have no clue do you? EVERYONE. Do you have global statistics/surveys/facts on that one?
go to any sc rm forum and read my thread on extremely long queue time. you see people at even 1500 mmr having to wait long time. Also you guys are lower ranks you don’t even suffer the same issues we are facing. We are literally on verge of quitting. Foreign scene will only be left with ums and 150 mmr users
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On April 05 2018 13:26 Shinokuki wrote:Show nested quote +On April 05 2018 11:05 10dla wrote:On April 05 2018 10:20 Shinokuki wrote:On April 05 2018 09:26 RomeD wrote:
I haven't really had any problems with the global match making or latency. Its been great to see the network improvements. I think their is a vocal minority of people having issues. Which its definitely good to hear and adjust, but keep in mind most of the rest of us are just enjoying getting in games when we can, and watching ASL5. Really looking forwards to 2v2 MM and a glad to hear its in the works. I played a 2v2 game recently and it actually went really well no lag thanks to your networking improvements, even with a friend who hadn't portforwarded and was a known lagger in previous patches. Additionally, I think the F2P and remastered MM has brought a lot more activity to and resurrected the game. Ignore the haters and keep up the good work Grant. what are you talking about? This isn’t a minority issue. Everyone from even 1500 mmr is suffering from low population issue and is having to face same player again and again. You have no clue do you? EVERYONE. Do you have global statistics/surveys/facts on that one? go to any sc rm forum and read my thread on extremely long queue time. you see people at even 1500 mmr having to wait long time. Also you guys are lower ranks you don’t even suffer the same issues we are facing. We are literally on verge of quitting. Foreign scene will only be left with ums and 150 mmr users
I just searched a game with a new profile. Took me 60 seconds to get matched with a ~1580 TR20 USA guy . I live in
central europe. Seems fine to me
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Dont forget that around 1500 MMR is the spike for amount of players. On 2300+ you kinda in no-mans land bc you are somewhat at the pinnacle of the foreign ladder. So just based on MMR your potential player pool is maybe just 1/10. Thats where korean players have to kick in.
Plus different timezones make it harder anyway. Further, dont extrapolate from your experience to everyone else experience.
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On April 05 2018 15:58 MarcoJ wrote:
Dont forget that around 1500 MMR is the spike for amount of players. On 2300+ you kinda in no-mans land bc you are somewhat at the pinnacle of the foreign ladder. So just based on MMR your potential player pool is maybe just 1/10. Thats where korean players have to kick in.
Plus different timezones make it harder anyway. Further, dont extrapolate from your experience to everyone else experience.
Let me quote him: "you see people at even 1500 mmr having to wait long time". "extrapolate from your experience". Do i have some kind of different experience? How? And when you cant find games across the continents...well...
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On April 05 2018 16:08 10dla wrote:Show nested quote +On April 05 2018 15:58 MarcoJ wrote:
Dont forget that around 1500 MMR is the spike for amount of players. On 2300+ you kinda in no-mans land bc you are somewhat at the pinnacle of the foreign ladder. So just based on MMR your potential player pool is maybe just 1/10. Thats where korean players have to kick in.
Plus different timezones make it harder anyway. Further, dont extrapolate from your experience to everyone else experience. Let me quote him: "you see people at even 1500 mmr having to wait long time". "extrapolate from your experience". Do i have some kind of different experience? How? And when you cant find games across the continents...well...
Like i said take a good look at forums and my thread. Also the other guy mentioned he was 1530 and got 60 queue time. thats horrible. I used to get 20-30 sec at 2200+ months ago when we.m could play koreans
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20-30sec is very nice :O like iccup good time
"D+ D+ D+"
"go"
"prom/prom"
ALT+C prom tab prom select map enter instant join ALT+O gg^^
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On April 06 2018 03:03 ProMeTheus112 wrote:
20-30sec is very nice :O like iccup good time
"D+ D+ D+"
"go"
"prom/prom"
ALT+C prom tab prom select map enter instant join ALT+O gg^^
Yeah, those times were great. Especially when those games were definitly not full of smurfes. Just like on Shield Battery. When i was new on Shield Battery, prominent names in here didnt (did) join d- games
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i never really saw smurfing as a problem tbh, i don't do it, if someone did and i get to play vs a better player great that's what i was going for.. i guess for beginners it is more of a problem, makes it too hard to win and maybe even to learn to an extent lol although tbh all that beats you teaches you something
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I've been inactive the last few years (atleast as a player), so excuse me for asking a nooby question, but why in the world would you use a VPN for Starcraft? That just adds more latency to the game.
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On April 06 2018 04:35 L1ghtning wrote:
I've been inactive the last few years (atleast as a player), so excuse me for asking a nooby question, but why in the world would you use a VPN for Starcraft? That just adds more latency to the game.
To bypass long queue time.
It's in the thread title.
The match maker system has had some trouble causing unacceptable queue times for players.
But yeah, if this wasn't a core issue (which has caused me to stop playing starcraft for the last 4 weeks for example), then using a VPN would make no sense.
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On April 05 2018 15:47 10dla wrote:Show nested quote +On April 05 2018 13:26 Shinokuki wrote:On April 05 2018 11:05 10dla wrote:On April 05 2018 10:20 Shinokuki wrote:On April 05 2018 09:26 RomeD wrote:
I haven't really had any problems with the global match making or latency. Its been great to see the network improvements. I think their is a vocal minority of people having issues. Which its definitely good to hear and adjust, but keep in mind most of the rest of us are just enjoying getting in games when we can, and watching ASL5. Really looking forwards to 2v2 MM and a glad to hear its in the works. I played a 2v2 game recently and it actually went really well no lag thanks to your networking improvements, even with a friend who hadn't portforwarded and was a known lagger in previous patches. Additionally, I think the F2P and remastered MM has brought a lot more activity to and resurrected the game. Ignore the haters and keep up the good work Grant. what are you talking about? This isn’t a minority issue. Everyone from even 1500 mmr is suffering from low population issue and is having to face same player again and again. You have no clue do you? EVERYONE. Do you have global statistics/surveys/facts on that one? go to any sc rm forum and read my thread on extremely long queue time. you see people at even 1500 mmr having to wait long time. Also you guys are lower ranks you don’t even suffer the same issues we are facing. We are literally on verge of quitting. Foreign scene will only be left with ums and 150 mmr users I just searched a game with a new profile. Took me 60 seconds to get matched with a ~1580 TR20 USA guy . I live in central europe. Seems fine to me
Using your experience isn't helping the larger community.
If you're happy with it, that's fine. But simply acknowledge that for many others, it is a valid concern and issue. You posting these sort of comments could be read and deter blizzard from actually helping (not saying that will happen, but hey, it could, right?)
It's simply about perspective and getting everyone in the community to a "happy medium" -- obviously, things will never satisfy 100% of the community. But we're VERY far from even 70% satisfaction right now, if you ask me.
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What a shame. Kinda makes me wish that they never did Remastered in the first place. I kinda gave up on Ladder earlier this year and resorted to only playing Custom Games with my practice nerd. And I honestly don't feel like paying for a VPN just to be able to play 1 game properly.
And how does a corporations "motivation" rely solely on their communities responses? Isn't the fact that your game created eSports motivation enough to deliver a quality product? What sort of standard do they have for themselves? Personally, I'd want my remaster to at least be as good as the original, and RM is not. To me, the communities toxicity seems like a lazy excuse. Just say that there is no money to be gained by bringing RM up to 1.16 and pass BW back to the community. But I guess that'd be bad PR for Blizzard.
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^ exactly i agree for me remastered is only a good thing if it improves on the original on top of making public servers ladder-enabled again. and it has not delivered, it is slow to start, slower interfaces, buggy, some loss of functionality, and then the ladder does not provide a practice environment on par with what we had before remastered either and so... i don't even want to launch it most of the time. just honest opinion :/ not for a lack of stating what I expected long ago, it's been a mess and then a status quo pretty much, just like I expected from the company.
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On April 06 2018 05:11 StylishVODs wrote:Show nested quote +On April 06 2018 04:35 L1ghtning wrote:
I've been inactive the last few years (atleast as a player), so excuse me for asking a nooby question, but why in the world would you use a VPN for Starcraft? That just adds more latency to the game. To bypass long queue time. It's in the thread title. The match maker system has had some trouble causing unacceptable queue times for players. But yeah, if this wasn't a core issue (which has caused me to stop playing starcraft for the last 4 weeks for example), then using a VPN would make no sense.
i used vpn to play vs koreans on fish 1.16 ,is was the only way to play low lat games vs them from Europe.in the begin of remastered i was using it aswell to play low latency games,so when the people keep complaining they meet koreans lagger on ladder,was not the case for me,and the vpn i used was also tested by SC2 progamers to play in KR server.so for me it is ideal,sadly it stoped working for a while but now is back,so for me right now is just like when remastered started.
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On April 08 2018 01:13 ProMeTheus112 wrote:
^ exactly i agree for me remastered is only a good thing if it improves on the original on top of making public servers ladder-enabled again. and it has not delivered, it is slow to start, slower interfaces, buggy, some loss of functionality, and then the ladder does not provide a practice environment on par with what we had before remastered either and so... i don't even want to launch it most of the time. just honest opinion :/ not for a lack of stating what I expected long ago, it's been a mess and then a status quo pretty much, just like I expected from the company.
Expected from the company? How is it possible that Warcraft 3 and Starcraft 2 have working matchmaking, but for some reason developing Remastered seems to be a problem. What factor holds them back? They keep on saying: "They have to keep everything the same because people want that". Is having to keep the same for a 20 year old game a good thing?
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not the same, as good or better!
what holds them back, I already said what I think, there is money to be made putting the old popular game on the launcher and advertising for games with loot boxes and such^^
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On April 08 2018 03:00 ProMeTheus112 wrote:
not the same, as good or better!
what holds them back, I already said what I think, there is money to be made putting the old popular game on the launcher and advertising for games with loot boxes and such^^
So Overwatch doesnt bring people to Blizzard, its the Starcraft 1 community that shovels in the customer. Just like Incontrol said:" People are just in Starcraft 1 for exposure and money!". This is so funny
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On April 07 2018 23:58 ProtossGG wrote:Show nested quote +On April 05 2018 15:47 10dla wrote:On April 05 2018 13:26 Shinokuki wrote:On April 05 2018 11:05 10dla wrote:On April 05 2018 10:20 Shinokuki wrote:On April 05 2018 09:26 RomeD wrote:
I haven't really had any problems with the global match making or latency. Its been great to see the network improvements. I think their is a vocal minority of people having issues. Which its definitely good to hear and adjust, but keep in mind most of the rest of us are just enjoying getting in games when we can, and watching ASL5. Really looking forwards to 2v2 MM and a glad to hear its in the works. I played a 2v2 game recently and it actually went really well no lag thanks to your networking improvements, even with a friend who hadn't portforwarded and was a known lagger in previous patches. Additionally, I think the F2P and remastered MM has brought a lot more activity to and resurrected the game. Ignore the haters and keep up the good work Grant. what are you talking about? This isn’t a minority issue. Everyone from even 1500 mmr is suffering from low population issue and is having to face same player again and again. You have no clue do you? EVERYONE. Do you have global statistics/surveys/facts on that one? go to any sc rm forum and read my thread on extremely long queue time. you see people at even 1500 mmr having to wait long time. Also you guys are lower ranks you don’t even suffer the same issues we are facing. We are literally on verge of quitting. Foreign scene will only be left with ums and 150 mmr users I just searched a game with a new profile. Took me 60 seconds to get matched with a ~1580 TR20 USA guy . I live in central europe. Seems fine to me Using your experience isn't helping the larger community. If you're happy with it, that's fine. But simply acknowledge that for many others, it is a valid concern and issue. You posting these sort of comments could be read and deter blizzard from actually helping (not saying that will happen, but hey, it could, right?) It's simply about perspective and getting everyone in the community to a "happy medium" -- obviously, things will never satisfy 100% of the community. But we're VERY far from even 70% satisfaction right now, if you ask me.
Silencing someone whose only point was that the stance you guys take should have a factual basis isn't going to help the community either. You are catastrophizing the MM situation by saying things like "Even at 1500 you get absurd wait times," or "we are not even close to 70% satisfaction," when according to starlog.gg you can clearly draw the line at where you think the "top foreigners can't find games" issue starts and judge based on that how many people are struggling. For reference, for 70% of satisfaction in terms of MM, I'd guesstimate that you'd only need to please everyone up to 1530. The further you get from that number, the number of people that are potentially dissatisfied with match-making (the ones located to the right of the cut) gets exponentially smaller. I would say that the amount of players above 1800 makes up less than 1% of the total playing population. Mind you, this is on a GLOBAL level.
So, as I mentioned in the other thread, the issue is probably not that Blizzard's algorithm is fucked up, it's that Blizzard can't spread a penny's worth of butter over a dollar's worth of toast. In other words, there are so few active 2000+ MMR players that matching them up consistently without issue is not a sustainable reality. The issue is that there are not enough good players who (still) play the game. There are not many up-and-coming players to replace the seats left behind by the competent veterans. That's the underlying issue.
EDIT: It should also be noted that every foreigner who uses a VPN makes it harder for those who don't to get games, further compounding the problem.
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you guys take should have a factual basis
I'd guesstimate that you'd only need to please everyone up to 1530.
The further you get from that number, the number of people that are potentially dissatisfied with match-making (the ones located to the right of the cut) gets exponentially smaller. I would say that the amount of players above 1800 makes up less than 1% of the total playing population.
So, as I mentioned in the other thread, the issue is probably not that Blizzard's algorithm is fucked up, it's that Blizzard can't spread a penny's worth of butter over a dollar's worth of toast.
Thanks for all of your facts, as usual always 100% the best source for information, knowledge, and basically anything you need from Jealous, your friendly BW forum Sooth-Sayer keyboard warrior.
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On April 09 2018 07:45 GGzerG wrote:Show nested quote +
The further you get from that number, the number of people that are potentially dissatisfied with match-making (the ones located to the right of the cut) gets exponentially smaller. I would say that the amount of players above 1800 makes up less than 1% of the total playing population.
Show nested quote +
So, as I mentioned in the other thread, the issue is probably not that Blizzard's algorithm is fucked up, it's that Blizzard can't spread a penny's worth of butter over a dollar's worth of toast.
Thanks for all of your facts, as usual always 100% the best source for information, knowledge, and basically anything you need from Jealous, your friendly BW forum Sooth-Sayer keyboard warrior.
After analyzing the data from starlog.gg more closely, I have come to realize that they used an incredibly stupid system for plotting their data points. They use 30 point intervals for 1200-1800, with each point not being just the people at that point rating, but all of the people that are roughly +/-15 points from that rating.
In other words, at 1470 they list 76,909 users, but what that actually means is that there are 76,909 users between the ratings of 1455 and 1484.
Meanwhile, in the 1800+ graph, they use increments of 10 points, which I believe do the same thing.
The more logical approach would be to have each specific rating point accounted for, or for the amount of users to be an area under the curve as their graph suggests. In other words, they should have either made it so that each point value from 1455 to 1484 had their own data point, with an average of about 2500 users at each point. Or, they should have made it so that the total amount of people in the graph between 1455-1484 was 76,909 people and scaled it accordingly.
So in essence, further investigation shows that while the graph is made to look like a Gaussian curve, it is actually two scatter plots with aggregate sums underneath each. As a result, this means that my guesstimates may have been a little inaccurate. Let's find out.
Going through the process of finding all of this out yielded the true data about the population of players 1200+ with a total of 5 games or more on ladder, as per starlog's limitations:
1. There are 462149 users in Global 1200+ with 5 or more ladder games played.
2. There are 429829 users between 1200 and 1800 MMR with 5 or more ladder games played.
3. This leaves 32320 users over 1800 MMR. This is roughly 6.99% of the player population with 5 or more ladder games played, which makes my guesstimate of users over MMR 1800 being only 1% of the population inaccurate, if we omit what I'll be discussing next.
4. 70% of 462149 is approximately 323504. The amount of players who are 1200 to 1530 MMR and have played 5 or more ladder games is 352518. This means that in order to have 70% of your players satisfied, you don't even need to satisfy everyone up until 1530 MMR, so my guesstimate was on point here if we omit what I'll be discussing next.
It should be noted that this omits all of the people who have less than 5 ladder games, which is imaginably a large number of people who either like or don't mind TR24. It should also be noted that this is imaginably all users in the past year, so many players may have gone inactive by this time and thrown a wrench into the statistics. It should also be noted that this omits all of the people on the tail end of the equation (looking at the CPL sign-up thread, it is clear that there are at least some below 1200 MMR users). Let's also not forget that the majority of active players are Koreans, who don't mind TR24 and actually like it a lot.
So, all of this is to say that the best data we have is still insufficient to make absolutely concrete claims about what % of people who are currently active are above 1800, or what is the minimum rating at which you will have achieved 70% satisfaction with TR24 implementation. However, this is all still much more than what you have contributed to the discourse with your snide comments and blind contrarianism, although I'm not surprised that one of the community's most derided individuals is behind them.
Think about it this way; if there were that many players outside of Korea above 1800 MMR playing, such that there would be adequate reason for Blizzard to bend to the demands of that demographic, you'd have no problem matching up with someone outside of Korea in your skill rating. The fact that you can't is testament to how few there are, and why that 1% figure may actually be more accurate than the data analysis from starlog may indicate.
In other words, Blizzard can't spread a penny's worth of butter over a dollar's worth of bread.
EDIT: I just realized that we can cut up the 6.99% of players above 1800 figure some more, as not all of those players are foreigners who struggle to find matches because they are not Korean. Korean server peak activity in recent times is ~20,000 concurrent users. Asia 4,000. West 1,300. Europe 700. East 350. Taking these numbers into consideration, we can estimate that by summing the respective peak times, with 20,000 Koreans out of 26,350 total, they make up 75.90% of active users in a single day. If we assume that all regions ladder equally (and because we know that switching your region to Korea or Asia gives no benefit to MM without VPN), then of that 6.99%, only about 1.68% of the total laddering population are non-Koreans above 1800 MMR. So again, my estimate seems to be quite on point. Thanks for the low-effort skepticism.
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EPT
