32-player TAW is not good for Zero-K

There is a lot here. I like AveragePlan's first post on player preferences the most. And SmokeDragon wrote the only post with some data in it.

quote: I'm not against trying the 11v11 limit. But the "large rooms kills small rooms" attitude is wrong and confused no matter how many times its expressed.

I agree, and I thought I covered this in rule #1 of trying smaller room sizes. Large rooms are a preference, there are players that much prefer them, and they are not objectively wrong. I get that the rooms being smaller for the moment is emboldening for the anti-large room cause, but arguing that people are wrong to like large rooms is just adding noise.

Something more subtle than "large rooms kill small rooms" seems to be true though. Experience says that a 32-player room "kills" the possibility of a second large room, when there are somewhere around 40-50 players looking to play. If those players were split in half and somehow completely unaware of each other (ie they exist in completely separate ZK communities), then they would each get to play a 25 player game. This is still a pretty large game, and there would be 50 people playing, rather than just 32.

We know that at least 40 people want to play a large team game at peak times. So the experiment is, if those 40 people fit snugly into two rooms, will they actually go out and populate two rooms? Or is the absolute maximum number of people who can play teams Zero-K going to just drop from 32 to 22? Because if the maximum just drops, then we know that any growth ZK might have had is being squandered by an apparently hard cap on how many people can play at a time.

There is surely some sort of marketing move that could push us past the awkward 40-50 peak player point, to the point that we naturally support two, or even more, large rooms. But I don't see anyone doing that. If you have a suggestion for some sort of marketing that you, personally, are going to put the work into, make a thread or post on Discord. Otherwise, we grow slowly over time, but slow growth doesn't seem to be able to breach the one-room threshold.

The new limit is 22 because 11v11 is still a pretty large game. It's relative to some degree. Do we have people clamouring for 20v20, refusing to play unless it becomes the new norm? No, because the standard has been 32 for ages. There are posts about what people love about the large games, which is all fine, but I have trouble with the implicit "...and these things are not present in 11v11, because that game size is way to small" at the end. 16v16 is somewhat arbitrary, that's the limit because it used be 8v8, then someone doubled it because the tech became available. It could have been 12v12, and then large game lovers would be defending 24-player rooms.

The benefits of supporting more than one large teams room are hard to ignore. It is selfish and shortsighted to do so. I see this a bit in the waiting list prioritisation change too. Great, you want to sit in a room and play for five hours. I like to do that sometimes too. But what about the people that popped in for a game or two, and can't find it because there is only one room, and that room is full? Guaranteeing a game for new arrivals seems like a good way to get new players.

And I know there are a bunch of solutions to the single room problem floating around. I'd ask people to give good thought to why they might not work, or consider actually trying to implement them. I'll try a lot of ideas that don't seem like they'll work, provided that whoever suggests them puts up some work behind to see it happen.

O.o

imho zerok-k is better..

[Spoiler]

If you're looking for a marketing move, look at BAR, don't cut limit in lobbies.
I really like lobpot, and i want to play 20v20
In BAR there are rooms with hundreds of players, and this does not prevent them from being online in other rooms

quote: If you're looking for a marketing move, look at BAR, don't cut limit in lobbies.

I just opened BAR and all their lobbies are capped at 8v8. And they have quite a few of them. I don't think I'm learning the lesson from looking at BAR that you wanted me to...

edit: QuietMute do you have something to say, or do you just not like it when the truth contradicts your narrative?

40v40 would just end up degenerating to rush x big unit, much like bantha rush was in the past or rush superweapon. Do we really need 80 players for this sort of gameplay? Why not 4x starting metal, 4 starting comms per player, 1/4 income rate, drop game size to 10v10, play on some 1v1 map and achieve roughly the same gameplay? This would allow 4 games to run in parallel, which would allow 4 people to control the "big game winning unit" that is rushed rather than 1 out of 80.

Rather than increasing player counts, ideally we should be focused on making the game more accessible to more players and doing more with less. We have a limited amount of players, and hard capping things to 32 concurrent players isn't going to help us grow in the long term. Having 4 extra players being able to play means we have increased the amount of players able to be playing MP in parallel by 12.5%. We shouldn't need 32 player games to have fun with Zero-K, and instead explore what is making those games fun and bringing that to smaller game sizes which would allow more people to play concurrently. More people able to play concurrently will mean more players will be able to enjoy ZK, which will mean we should grow.

Here's some examples of how we can do more with less:
- If people do not enjoy expanding (which they have to do less of in a large team game), should we not just automate that?
- If people enjoy coordinating with teams, why can't we have a series of smaller game sizes where you can reinforce your "team"'s other concurrent matches?
- If people don't want games to end quickly because of raiders, why can't we have starting defenses?
- If it is just people liking the restrictive metal income, why can't we have a metal mult of like 1/2 and bring the game size down to 8v8?
- If it is goofing off and having low player responsibility, why can't we just agree to no-tryharding or produce scenarios in which a player can reasonably goof off? (Though if it is this, we'd have the issue that this would become stale over time, which would likely hurt retention). We could just.. agree that the game is a casual game and enjoy it as such.
- If people like to have large scale armies, why can't we center a game between two ais who spawn hordes of units over time that you must support? Players could contribute units to it and it would send waves at the enemy units while the players macro/micro.
- If it is the novelty of them, we should come up with events to introduce novelty.

What I think players need to focus on is what is discovering why they're having fun rather than arguing over an arbitrary number that is somehow producing games they enjoy. This way we can replicate conditions while still allowing more players to play. Having a singular host though where the bottleneck for more players playing is the maximum players though I don't think will be healthy long term for concurrent player counts as any new player we gain will immediately be welcomed by up to an hour or two wait time to try the game.

Banning the most used room is what is not good.
It didn't look there was a lot of people, this evening, honestly. I spec a few maps because I like this game, but didn't feel to join.
What I loved in zero-k was the monstrous battles. You banned that.

Personally I'm of the opinion that MM should be the main interface for the majority of players. I think the majority of custom games align with what's possible and more streamlined with a tuned MM experience. ATM, we have a culture of using custom rooms because that's where the players are, but to me (and correct me if I'm wrong) there are precious few advantages to this.

If MM could give me tuning options (e.g. an order of preference for team sizes, map preferences etc.) and was expanded to include larger teams (and players were using it instead of customs) I think we cut out all the needless voting, all the calls in chat to join room, all the failing to start the game, and all the politics of fighting each other for what room we "should" like.

I think customs should be a side option for wanting specific settings or organised play. I think the main offering should be MM facilitated play. I want to be able to set my preferences then spec some lobsters until a game that meets my preferences is ready. I think this would be good for the player experience, for player retention, for removing one roome culture, and for cooling down a lot of the inter-lobster conflict.

quote: But this forced 'solution' doesn't guarantee player growth

The old status did not lead to larger community over the years (or not percivably for players, maybe there were on average 1 more player online over 1 year). The new status was introduced as "an experiment" and (ignoring my opinion on it) I think it's more of a sign that nobody has a clue how to "get over" the local maxima that we arrived at. Maybe it is not even possible. Maybe final result will be worse. But everybody seems to want more players (the player that want large games to have larger games, the player that want smaller games to have more games).

From SnuggleBass
> Personally I'm of the opinion that MM should be the main interface for the majority of players.

Yes, 100% yes. The best situation would be competitive play as 1v1, teams, FFA, lobpot would all go through a matchmaker.

Except 1v1 they don't currently, and that is telling a lot. 1v1 is happening through the matchmaker because people understand that it is the right way to find matches. And it is successfully happening because just 2 people need to agree.

The other options don't happen through the matchmaker. The inertia to compete against the big public famous TAW lobby is too large. Except one time, through extreme hype, we actually managed to get a couple of small team games with the matchmaker. It was like a miracle.

I think that the UI needs to change to make a matchmaker for the other game modes the defacto interface, because the existing matchmaker is not used for years.

On giant BAR games:
I am pretty sure that the 50v50s are coordinated events that make for good streams and videos, rather than good games. That isn't to say that participating isn't fun. Lots of things are fun once. But the purpose is to be an event. We cannot use the existence of these huge games to say that this type of game is fun long term.

On using the matchmaker:
The matchmaker is inherently worse than a battle lobby in many ways.

• You can't see which map is going to be played.
• You can't see who is going to be in the game.
• It is hard to tell when the next game will be formed.
• It is hard to know whether you will make it into the next game.

The battle lobby lets everyone assess the next game, then decide whether to play it. This produces more buy-in so people follow through and actually play. I don't think the map voting and starting is a problem. It's really streamlined by this point, it's fine. Matchmaker has other advantages, but you don't end up with a good matchmaker by dismissing the advantages of the lobby.