So having played a bit more since last time.

This mode has some potential to be interesting but the complete lack of matchmaking and the very lacking help for the losing side (esp skaven) renders it all down to nothing but a very frustrating mess.

The last round i played was happily a 4v4, but.

  1. Other side was all 35´s
  2. They all struck extremely close to eachother with extremely fast reactions to anyone going down
  3. Even their skaven rounds had simultaneous horde releases.
  4. They cleared all ambient enemies in sight in a matter of 10 seconds wherever they went.

And

  1. My side has 1 other 35
  2. Two 20’s or lower
  3. The other 35 was a Dwarf ranger whose primary strategy was to get distracted by any random target as far back as possible, even if it was a enemy special player running around a rock, and he´d stay there and get piled on. Utter refusal to communicate.

It got so bad the enemy team, two of them, suggested we kick the guy because he was ruining the match just that much but at that point with him having downed 3 times the run was just over anyway.

  1. The extreme skill disparity between the 20´s on my side vs 35s on the other result in them just getting killed over and over being permanently dead as skaven. They had no sense of timing or what to pick for when. Even when i got a troll and luckily knocked 2 people over a cliff and downed one before dying they could not manage to do anything meaningful…struggling to find respawn positions or jump shooting (and missing) as a gunrat.
  2. That left the enemy team very much comfortable feeling no pressure, because lacking skaven NPC spawns and passive refill of horde summing was nowhere near close to enough. I think i got two hordes off over two runs.
  3. Fire-rat is incredibly useless against a coordinated team. Poke your nose out and there´s a bullet/javelin there. Cant deal any meaningful damage because fire doesnt disturb aim and most ranged weapons seem to disrupt the fire-shooting. And with several shooters on the other side even gunrat feels really bad.

Only way to deal with such a team is hordes + disablers but…what if no hordes? Which is the case for this mode? It just feels awful

Urgently needed stuff :

  1. Much better passive horde refill
  2. Stronger or at least significantly more numerous hordes
  3. Skaven specials just do not work well outside hordes, but to summon hordes you need to deal damage, which you cant without hordes, which wont come if perma-dead. Or just if enemy team has good shooters.
  4. Tagging somehow got changed last patch and its really bad, revert please dear heavens.
  5. Premade teams cant be allowed to play against randoms, i dont care about implementation difficulty. Its beyond incredibly unfair for the opposing side. Especially with the in practice non-existent safeguards/Balancing mechanics for a losing side.
  6. System to deal with people leaving, people get (often reasonably) frustrated after a bad round, host quits and then the match just cancels and everyone left loses out too.
3 Likes

I want to highlight similar problems, but for me playing was considerably worse as heroes.

First: what’s the point of having dedicated servers if you don’t implement an automatic rejoin like in DT. I had finally found a good team for once and I got disconnected, just to find myself in another losing side as soon as i prompted qp again.

Selecting QP is putting you at a serious disadvantage, as you are basically filling slots against pre-made teams. Very often i started a 2v4 match.

Second: there need to be consequences for disbanding, otherwise, as many have reported, after a single loosing round many players just quit, worsening the chances for those that start the next round with bots (or nothing, if on the pactsworn side): either implement a surrender option or, preferably, some punishment for leaving.

2 Likes

Ah this i forgot in the heat of the moment, good call. And the point about QP tossing you in as replacement for quitters in bad runs against premades too.

Yeah it’s not only that, but even if you are “lucky” enough to be there from the start of the map, a premade of four is gonna start a QP and those 4 slots have to be filled, and that’s why I fear solo QP is such an unbalanced experience.

I think nothing short of an internal ranking system is going to fix things, but have we got enough players queuing? I doubt it.
It would still be worth a shot though: what I have in mind is the game matching you against players with a similar win/loss rate in VS

1 Like

Yeah there are teams which have combined 20-25k hours, you definitely want matchmaking and not releasing them onto new players.

2 Likes

It does seem intentional at times.
Yesterday I was playing with a friend and we got matched with 2 higher rank players (which I think might have been another duo), while the other team consisted of 3 lvl 9 players and a level 30 guy. As soon as the game started they wrote in the chat “nice, another perfectly balanced match”. I felt their pain.

2 Likes

Over a month since official versus launch and still no matchmaking.


This type of lobbies where I am paired with new players (not even new to versus, new to the whole game) against experienced player (sometimes premade squad) is 95% of my time with this mode.

Combine it with game going on sale on new mode launch, no matchmaking, “everyone welcome” from the start sounds like classic cash grab - and it is disgustingly bad.

No one is having fun, not new players, not the veterans. I guess it is time for a negative steam review to warn others from buying the game, lured with the news of exciting new game mode.

4 Likes

This is why I suggested a restart round/match vote, just like in L4D2

2 Likes

This is the only real change I would think about tbh, solves mosts issues, makes sense

4 Likes

I think that only way to fix Versus is to make our own player made ranking system and play custom games.

They could go about matching players based on their win rate.

Versus could be level gated or something. Finish the campaign on veteran and level a character up to 35 to be able to play, or reach enough power to play on legend.

I absolutely agree with the problem posed. It is complicated by the fact that you need to please both level 35 teams and other groups, since playing a random set of players against a seasoned level 35 team means entertaining them, and losing without a chance.
I would like to offer the following idea for consideration by the developers (if they read this message, of course) - to build matchmaking depending on the teams.

If you go to play, say, two people, then you can get into matches with a full set of randoms, or with two/three teammates on the other team, if three, then into matches where the enemy team has from two to four teammates, and if four - then into matches where there are also 4 teammates or, at worst, three teammates.

Of course, in this system, the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bprivate lobbies needs to be reworked - remove it from the “Quick Play” system in principle. Regarding the modes and maps in “Quick Games” - they can be given to the present players for voting (as it was implemented in Battlefield) or randomized.

Of course, this can slow down the search for matches, but in the end there are quite a lot of teams of four players in this game, so they will find each other in any case, and the other categories will also find players due to the relatively wide selection boundaries.

I am not a developer and therefore I understand that, as they say in my country, “Drinking is not doing sports. Here you need health”, therefore I realize that my idea may be unrealizable or unsuccessful, but in any case I want to hope that the developers will solve this problem itself, since it has really become a problem. And considering that “Versus” continues to develop, I think that instead of “hoping” we need to “wait”.