I loved the massive lobpots (32 players), please bring them back. This smaller room size is just stupid imo. One of the best parts of the lobpot was interaction between different players, and with smaller room sizes a lot less of that will happen. And yes the waitlist was not without problems, but if I couldn't get into a game sometimes I couldn't imagine having a stronger reaction than "shame, will be better the next time lol". The old system was much better than this crap and I would very much like if you reverted it. quote:
What I loved in zero-k was the monstrous battles. You banned that. |
Couldn't have said it better.
+7 / -0
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we did get 3 TAW pots at the same time on a Monday!!!
+7 / -0
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Just for the record, there are currently 3 TAW hosts of 22 players, 14 players and 6 players. That is in total 42 players playing. The 6 players are all beginners and they choose to start the game (so either they don't care or they like it like this).
+8 / -0
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If nothing else, this experiment might deconstruct one room culture somewhat so that people consistently start a second (or third!) room when the first is full, even if the change is reverted.
+4 / -0
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Yes it's true sometimes there can be 2 TAW running at the same time, but I think it's rare. What happens a lot is the lobby just dies because people get kicked out into the waiting room and stopped playing. I've seen TAW drop from 30 to 20 players in a minute, and other rooms don't have more players. Players simply stopped playing. Edit: as I was just typing the room dropped to 10 players. Lobbies die when there's a 22 player limit.
+1 / -0
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Here is some early data collection.  This is a stacked plot of the players in teams games over the past 13 days. The stacks reveal the room type breakdown as well as peak players across all rooms. The values are ingame players, not people waiting in the lobby. The bars are the maximum for each lobby over a 10 minute period, to bridge the gap between games. This makes the plot more readable. The dotted black line is the average spectators across all games, heavily smoothed for readability. The top contains information about each day. You'll probably have to open the full size image to read it. The main metric is playerminutes per day, which is the sum of the time ingame spent by all players. This uses game durations, so is unaffected by the 10-minute bucketing of the stacked plot. The top also shows how many games of at least four players were at least five minutes long. I also listed the average duration of these games, and a breakdown of game size. The room size and waiting list changes happened at the start of Friday the 11th. The waiting list only took on its final form late Saturday. Prior to that, the information was not sent to clients properly, which made it a bit confusing. No split has been used so far, but multiple rooms were still able to run. This is early data so we should be careful not to read too much into it. The strong Wednesday is particularly suspicious, since the new game size cap barely comes into play.  Here is every day of 2025, grouped by day of the week. The green dots are baseline, the red dots are the days since the new room size limit. The Wednesday stands out as the 3rd best Wednesday of the year, while the other days are fine. This is enough to say that the experiment is worth continuing, and it has at least not reduced the available games. It is very promising if the results so far hold up, but my gut says that some of the effect size has to be due to external factors. The weekend will say how reliable multi-rooming is, and may even see a test of !split this time. Here are some fairly speculative thoughts that draw a bit too much from limited data:
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It is unclear whether the the 22 player limit will promote "small" (<= 10 players) games. The breakdown of small games does not show a trend. This is fine, because promoting these games is not one of the main goals.
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It is also unclear whether the number of large games (>= 16 players) is affected. The 22 player limit seems to be producing more games overall, many of which are large.
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The games with the 22 player limit are shorter by 2-3 minutes on average. This is probably due to a lack of huge games.
 I can also scroll around the data from earlier in the year. A lot of it looks like this, with the above being an extreme example. People would pile into one host, play about 8 hours of games, then fall off a cliff. Is this due to a long match that finally tired everyone out? A map was picked that people would rather not play? This is probably where some anecdotes could augment the data. Sometimes the peak bounces back and there are another few hours of games, sometimes it doesn't. This seems to have improved a bit over the past few months. Spreading this peak out a bit, to more reliably shift into another six hours of games, seems important for building a the America timezone playerbase.
+12 / -0
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About arbitrary number of players limit : Why not to make the unit limit to be adaptative/"unlimited" instead, in a reasonable way to avoid lag ? This way there will be no more players queueing until the end of a battle because they were not able to play as consequence of some limit. I also agree with    malric in his post, even if it is a bit out of topic.
+0 / -0
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Just to add a voice to the 32p rooms, I play(ed) exclusively the 16v16 room. I like the chaos of unorganized non-competitive games, the long lasting stalemates and either figuring out, how to overcome the other team or just prevailing and outlasting the other side. Any other type, 1v1, 4v4, matchmaking etc have no appeal to me. 11v11 as it currently stands is on the border of being... boring, for the lack of better word, or maybe "tolerable". Not much room for failure, since 1 player missing a beat has a different outcome in those smaller games, than in the bigger ones. This might include being new and not knowing everything, not having played the campaign, experimenting with new strats, being sub-optimal with the given factory. Those people were chewed out in the big games, I don't see them having any easier time in the small ones. Or maybe the room was not the issue, but the community. Anyway, sad the 32 is gone, but, you know, oh well. The other change, the lottery I don't really care about, as soon as it kicks me out, I'll be done for the day.
+5 / -0
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So people that were already in the "playing" list in an overcrowded room can get randomly sent to the "wanting-to-play" queue after each battle? If so I strongly disagree with that.
+1 / -0
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No, not randomly. If you join a lobby and didn't play a match, you get into the playing list priorized. If it's full, someone that already just played has a lower priority will go to the queue. This reduces waiting time and incentives going to other lobbies. So it's not random, but not the easiest to understand. I really like this change.
+1 / -0
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I fear, madez, that this system, which although fairly elegant and intended to support maximum player engagement, will have the negative effect of having people who stick to a single size of game being limited to not playing multiple of them, and thus having them play neither the bigger or smaller lobbies.
+1 / -0
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It's still terrible. Imagine being tilted after an annoying defeat and being eager to try again, but instead you get cycled out. The mechanic makes people in queue be more likely to get a spot in an overcrowded room after the battle, but that's dumb incentive : they should be incentivized to leave and join the other room instead!
+2 / -0
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Edit: Some was based on speculation, more details here: https://zero-k.info/Forum/Post/271799#271799But to get moved to the waiting list there must not be anybody in the player list with more matches so far. It's unlikely that 21 other played also just one so you get booted after just one match. If you binged a couple of matches, it's fair to let someone else have a go, right? At least for me it feels pretty healthy for me to get a mandated pause. So far it didn't happen though, always when I wanted to play, I had a place.
+0 / -0
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still bad. Imagine you had a free afternoon and got to the room early, maybe even seeded it, so got to play more games than most before the room filled past the cap. Then your persistence gets rewarded by getting yeeted out! A thing that could be done after some time is a set of polls to figure out where the community stands on each of the various changes that were tested.
+3 / -0
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If you are a player with the persistence to seed a room for multiple matches, you probably also have the patience to wait one out, go eat something, etc. I mean I get you, but it's probably reasonable to see if this comes up actually or not.
+0 / -0
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The issue of random kicking arise from question: who will play next game? Current implementation (as observed) is [people who didn't play previous game] + [random players from previous game] in this order. This way you will always will get in next match. If you came to play late you will get in next game If you have been spec'ed but game didn't start yet, you will get in the game If you don't like the map, you can spec, and be sure you can play next game after this In my opinion, there is much more benefits, then negative moments from current implementation. And of course there is a room for improvement. Someone already suggested to count played games and kick person with most consecutive games. This way situation that you will be kicked after just one game will be more rare. And after all even cap at 22 we still have just one "big" room. So you can't go to "another" room. It just doesn't exist. So it's like rollercoaster, got a ride, get back to the queue.
+1 / -0
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The UI could help to stop make it seem random. If people understand it better, they might like it more.
+1 / -0
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Such a system would need more feedback, like at least a message when you get specced "you were playing 5 games in a row, and you played most games from the players in the game, so you were specced to let in someone that did not play, next game you will join for sure, based on the same system". I would not like it when I would play and be specced, but I would like it when I would be in the waiting list. Even if I would not like it, I feel overall is fairer, at the extreme I would not want that if there are N+1 players than max, the +1 player is left out just because he joined some minutes after...
+1 / -0
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