Hello Enlisted team, and thank you for enabling custom battles! I now have the option to choose whether my friendly icon disappears after a certain range I think this was a good workaround for the issues previously affecting “lone fighter” as a campaign mode.
One little hiccup that I’ve noticed… if you’re in a custom battle, and the battle ends, you have a chance to wait in the lobby for the next match. Usually, they cycle through a predetermined list of locations that the match creator can choose from, which is very cool as well. However, I’ve noticed that the matchmaker has a few criteria in order to proceed, and one of them is that the “Maximum difference in ready to battle players” can not exceed 5.
What this means in practice is that if you have people in the lobby who have entered, but not clicked “ready,” and there are 5 or more of them, the battle cannot proceed. However, it also applies to something else that it appears we haven’t thought of yet.
AFTER the match, players who are still reviewing their “Debriefing” score (kills, achievements, progress, etc.) - or just have to leave the computer for some reason and let the match end without changing anything - are also counted as part of this five. So in the match I’m currently in right now, we had a nice full lobby of people who were in what appeared to be a very vigorous, lively custom battle. The match ended. I joined after the match ended. I saw these people on both sides whose status showed three little lines. When I hovered over those lines, it showed me this indicator:
For those who can’t see the photo, it says “In Debriefing.” That means they’re still looking at the match results, as far as the computer is concerned. You can see how many people were in there waiting for the next match, ready to go. Now, it’s been whittled down to pretty much just me, and the people who are AFK.
SUGGESTION
Basically, my suggestion is just that those who have finished a match in custom battles, and are remaining on their score or “Debriefing” screen, have a time-limit before they are booted out for inactivity. I further suggest that these players be given a warning or notification, preferably with a sound component, that alerts them that they are required to become “ready” in status again, or else they will be taken out of the match. I would say about 30 seconds is long enough to review your score before being warned, and another 15 to 30 seconds before you are removed from the lobby.
One can always rejoin if they’re removed, afterall.
Even if it was as long as 2:00 in total, so people could use the restroom inbetween matches, I don’t think anyone would have a problem with that. I know that Enlisted also has other ways of detecing inactivity, such as lack of mouse movement etc, because that happens to me in battles sometimes - so perhaps those could be employed to detect this.
I really love custom battles but I have been stuck at this screen for over 10 minutes, out of sheer curiousity for whether those AFK players would come back, or leave.
… They’ve done neither.