Xbox Live Multiplayer Quickgame

[driven2sin]

I am glad enough people are playing that you can usually get a match on xbox live in a few minutes, but i noticed that anytime i try "quick match" no games are available but when i create a game and wait a few minutes opponents always show up.

What's going on? Are those players clicking on Quick Match or are they creating games too?

-D2S

[Niki]

I'm glad people are playing it multiplayer.

Quick match searches for games that meet specific requirements, in order to try and provide a fair match. In particular it tries to find games where the max level is set to something close to your current hero (or your highest level hero. I cant remember which).

Custom games allow you to specify the requirements and thus may return a list of games even when quick match says that there is none. Of course then you may find yourself up against a hero of a much higher level than you.

You can only join games when your hero is in the required level range. This has some effects on quick match games. With only one hero you are limiting quick match searches to the exact level range your hero falls into, as you aren't eligible for lower ranges and quick match tries to find games around your heroes level.
If you want more search results try creating more heroes of different levels.

Try creating a level 1 hero and doing a custom search for games where the max level is 50. This will show a list of all waiting hosts and their max level setting.
This should give a decent indication of how many games are out there and what level ranges are popular.

If you want to totally pwn everyone you can maximize your search results and competitiveness by creating a hero for each level range and playing them till they are at the top of their chosen level range. Different classes and strategies will excel for different level ranges.


Some things to remember:
When hosting the max level limits heroes to that level and lower.
When searching the max level limits results to games where the max level is that setting or lower.
If you don't have a hero that falls into the level requirements for a game then the game wont show up in searches.And remember if you cant find an opponent then invite your friends to a game! The more people that play the more opponents there will be and the easier it will be to find a game.

[Farscry]

When an opponent quits a game in ranked multiplayer matches on Live before it completes, should the game be ending in a "draw" rather than a victory for the player who stays?

I had an opponent last night who was down to one more attack and they'd lose, while I had a green mana shield up and roughly 20hp. They left the match rather than finishing their turn to allow me to finish the game, and the game ended in a draw rather than awarding me a hard-won victory.

If this is the intended design, I won't be bothering with playing random opponents anymore. It really kills the enjoyment when the design encourages quitters rather than encouraging solid competition.

[Eggo]

When an opponent quits a game in ranked multiplayer matches on Live before it completes, should the game be ending in a "draw" rather than a victory for the player who stays?

I had an opponent last night who was down to one more attack and they'd lose, while I had a green mana shield up and roughly 20hp. They left the match rather than finishing their turn to allow me to finish the game, and the game ended in a draw rather than awarding me a hard-won victory.

If this is the intended design, I won't be bothering with playing random opponents anymore. It really kills the enjoyment when the design encourages quitters rather than encouraging solid competition.

In 30+ online matches, I've had one person quit before losing. I left poor feedback (for quitting early) and put them on the non-preferred players list. If enough people do this, I assume something happens to the person, or they get blacklisted to the point nobody wants to play with them any more. I don't think any of this encourages people to quit.

[Niki]

The reason the players don't get a win when the opponent leaves is due to a bug that QA wanted "fixed" that required this behavior. The bug was basically to do with "incorrect result" on victory screen (but not on leaderboards) in some corner cases.

the next few paragraphs are background info on why it is the way it is. skip them if you don't care. The very last paragraph is where we stand currently.

During development we did have disconnects count as a loss in ranked games. The places that QA complained about were the following:
Its possible that both players can still talk to live even though they lose the connection to each other. In this case both machines would think its a win. live will determine who is the actual winner based on how "trustworthy" each player is (eg if you use say a firewall to do this a lot live will detect it.) However we cant detect the actual winner until too late for display.

Its also possible that you lose the connection to live (and your opponent) but the system doesnt know until far too late. The process of submitting stats occurs in the background in the xbox libraries, and completes/fails after the results screen is shown.
In this case the machine that lost the connection will say victory because we cant tell we've lost the connection to live until later when the live connection itself times out (which is likely well after we close the victory screen).
Both these situations can occur due to someone trying to cheat or can occur legitimately.

Then end result is that in order to always display the correct message we need both systems to get the same result when the game is ended prematurely.
For a player that quits early they get no personal benefit from quiting early. Its still recorded as a game played and not won so their leaderboard entry is still worse off.
If they pull the cable then live detects this and trusts them less in future when submitted results in games vary from player to player (which shouldn't happen unless they are trying to cheat).
And the final penalty is that people submit negative feedback for a player. This alters how that player is matched to games.

The only downside is that the player that should have won doesnt get their victory recorded. But thats a big downside if you are the player that should have won.

We are considering altering the behavior back to the original behavior. We aren't happy with the behavior as it is now either.
IMHO the incorrect message display is such a rare corner case that its a non issue. The current behavior allows losers to deprive their opponent of their victory, which isn't good. While the live service gives you tools to penalize bad sports it would be better if you didn't have to.

[driven2sin]

thanks for the great response. I had to give neg feedback to about 5 people so far since my combos can really get going and people just quit

i hope you do fix it, it is tough to watch a great victory go wasted. Atleast my 1st turn kill vs a level 50 went through (i am currently lvl 37) the handicapping pushed my red mana to 76 cap (from 50), and a breath fire ate his last 72 life after combos took out his other 80 life