Saturday Fights NA experience was not very good

[Burb]

The matches and queue population were pretty miserable tonight. I started with solo queuing, got some fairly new/less experienced players, vs a full 3 stack of the top players in the game. This.. wasn’t really fun and even if I was looking for some additional learning experience, this was not that at all.

After a few un-fun matches like that, where I was only matched against the same team repeatedly, decided to take a break for the night. Shortly after, found a few folks that wanted to party up and even that was still hugely imbalanced, often with my team being the team of overwhelming experience. Recognizing this, my group did try to help when matched against what was likely less experienced players by giving them a bit more room/time to engage in fights, letting them get the resurrections off, and even having some members sit down so as not to 3v1 the last member other team.

Historically, Saturday was -always- the worst to try to get people to play on as well as trying to find reasonable balance for match making, even during the private tests and community run test night.

I know with respect to population, that is very very much a work in progress and I know there will be future efforts to draw in player populations, when the time is right.. so I’m not concerned about that. This feedback is just that.. feedback that the night with respect to matchmaking was a pretty bad experience but it was likely rooted in the incredibly low population turnout. Prior FNF nights were much, much better on the whole, with regard to player turnout. Maybe it’s not worth being concerned about at this time, and that’s also fine if I shouldn’t be.. but surely people experiencing the game for the first or first few times here.. are going to have that “I was just run over, kthxbye” churn experience, right?

Anyway, feedback!

tldr: Saturday Fight Night was lightyears less enjoyable for me as the Friday nights have been, and I know it’s a population problem, but wanted to do my due-dilligence of providing you feedback just the same.

Thanks!

Edit: I know, it’s not a hugely popular platform to reach gamers on, but at the same time.. it’s been like 2 weeks now since anything with regard to Arkheron was posted on Bluesky. It might be good to advertise the Friday/Saturday stuff there, even if it’s just a small trickle of people showing up from that.

As a specific case and point: I started playing the game because you did post on Bluesky. If you hadn’t, I might not have joined..

[Bex]

@Burb

I know with respect to population, that is very very much a work in progress and I know there will be future efforts to draw in player populations, when the time is right.. so I’m not concerned about that. This feedback is just that.. feedback that the night with respect to matchmaking was a pretty bad experience but it was likely rooted in the incredibly low population turnout. Prior FNF nights were much, much better on the whole, with regard to player turnout. Maybe it’s not worth being concerned about at this time, and that’s also fine if I shouldn’t be.. but surely people experiencing the game for the first or first few times here.. are going to have that “I was just run over, kthxbye” churn experience, right?

Thanks so much for taking the time to share your thoughts about this. It wasn’t reflective of the ideal experience. It’ll take some time to build up more awareness about Saturday nights to help fill the queues and create more matchmaking buffers. We’ll work on the awareness part and are hoping to see some new faces soon. More updates on that to come.

[pants5555]

Thanks for the feedback, Burb! +1 one to what Bex mentioned. I’m really hoping that as we start inviting in new folks and people get used to Saturdays, things will liven up. A lot of the data we have right now shows that new players tend to hop in on the weekend days. That said, we’re always down to pivot if we’re not seeing traction and Saturdays keep feeling rough for everyone.

[RINA]

@Burb

Maybe it’s not worth being concerned about at this time, and that’s also fine if I shouldn’t be.. but surely people experiencing the game for the first or first few times here.. are going to have that “I was just run over, kthxbye” churn experience, right?

It is worth being concerned about, games are made for the player to have fun. So when new players have under 60 minutes worth of patience; trying out a new game where they stand no chance in their games due to matchmaking, it is not fun.

If there’s no feeling of “It’s possible” or “hey I’m good at this game” they will just leave, forever. Gone. Babahyee!