A suggestion to fix this game's main issue (matchmaking and players who desert being replaced by bots)

Suggestions
1

I like this game a lot, but its current matchmaking is not ideal. Players who disconnect being replaced with bot squads is something really bad, especially in a 10v10 setting where every member of your team counts a lot and losing even 1 of them can give you a significant disadvantage. Quite often you join a match, play well, but see your team is losing badly anyway, just to then realize that 4 of its members are bots. And when you have that many bots in your team (40%) the game is pretty much decided: your team will lose and there’s hardly anything you can do about it.

At times, a majority of matches played are decided not by the skill of the teams but by who has the most disconnected members. This is, I think, the biggest issue with the game right now (although it has improved since the game got more players). Now, auto-balancing teams and switching players between them doesn’t work in this game because there are different factions, which are grinded individually. I’m sure new additions and improvements to the matchmaking will be added by the developers in the future, but there are some things that could fix this issue more immediately.

My suggestion is: to allow new players to join in the middle of a battle and fill-in the slots of disconnected people. Currently this would never work because players (me included) wouldn’t like to start the battle with a significant disadvantage to the players who were already there and got lot of kills. So I have another suggestion: award free exp to players who join mid-battle, based on the time they joined the match (i.e 23 mins from the start, 15 mins from the start and so forth).

Now this again might sound dumb and obviously leading to exploits, but it could be regulated. ‘Replacement players’ could be awarded the experience only if i.e they kill at least 10 people. The experience wouldn’t be excessive too, I think about 75 exp for every 1 minute of battle they missed (thus, 10 mins would give 750 exp, and 20 mins, 1500, which is something reasonable and what an average player would get for that time), and people wouldn’t be allowed to join if the match had already passed 30 mins (at this point, you want the match to be decided, even if it is because of deserters).

Sure, it is unfair to award free experience, but this would make joining mid-battle attractive to the average player (and noobs). Think of it as an “emergency measure” to fix a huge current issue in the game that is player desertion and replacement by bots. The benefits to the game experience from doing that far outweight the negatives of awarding a few extra experience points to some players (who helped fix that huge issue), and it wouldn’t be a lot of experience anyway (75 per min, max of 2250 after 30 mins).

I’m sure this issue concerns the developers a lot too. So there goes a suggestion on a possible way to alleviate things.

5 Likes
2

Considering most of the players play like bots anyway, I guess this would be a good change to try.

1 Like
3

Make this only an option where only those who are willing to join a very late game would join the battle or else those who are unwilling will just instantly desert anyway.

4

There is no such thing as unfair exp rewards, instead there is an underwhelming exp rewards. I think that all of the problems in enlisted is intertwined; lack of player base results into people leaving hard matches for fear of getting steam rolled leading to players joining mid game and so on. I like your proposal, there must be compensation.

5

I have thought about this too. It could work as an option if the standard settings for new players be to allow them to join mid-battle. It might not be very honest, but it would fix a big problem and new players aren’t likely to notice it and have the same prejudice about joining mid-battle that experienced players have acquired.

Another thing that could work in a similar manner would be an option NOT to join matches where you have high ping (matchmaking would do a speed test on available matches before assigning the player to a match).