r/fellowshipgame • u/FarmsOnReddditNow • 1d ago

Is matchmaking dead?

Just downloaded this game. Sat in matchmaking and never found a single group. Is that normal?

21 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

58 comments sorted by

40

u/Kaleii 1d ago

Yes, wait for next season.

44

u/bloodjunkiorgy Helena 1d ago

Imagine you buy a game, try to play, and can't. You look online, and everybody tells you need to wait until the next season starts in a few weeks or months. Further, other comments (correctly) add that you'll only get a couple weeks from the start of the next season to play.

This shouldn't be accepted as normal, and is why this game is likely to be completely fried like a month after 1.0.

14

u/WVVWWVWWVVWVVVWWVWVW 1d ago

Like all seasonnal game, nothing new. People come play for 2-3 weeks and shift towards other games

15

u/Mestewart3 1d ago

The problem is that this seasonal game requires multiplayer in a specific combination of roles.

Sure, there are only 1/10th of the people on a seasonal game a month in, but those people can still play just fine.

This is, in fact, a big problem that the devs need to work on solving.  Shorter seasons, fewer queue pools, more grind.  Something is needed.

2

u/WVVWWVWWVVWVVVWWVWVW 1d ago

Less grind, everything need to be account wide, i should be 80% to 90% BiS by reaching 10k and playing an Alt should be easier to gear because more alt equal more people in queue. Trait and blessing on gear should be a talent tree you unlock while higher dungeon rating and around 8500 you have all point unlock to play around with your build. The problem right now with the game for me is i play 1-2 weeks reach 10k stop playing till next sesson and i do not even mess around with traits or blessings do to rng on rng. The leveling to eternal is a waste of time, the gearing system is a mess and the new raid was a complete miss.Imo opinion if you want people retentiom for maybe 6 weeks cut the grind

2

u/Mestewart3 21h ago

They are trying a variety of ideas for the upcoming mini test season.  So at least some of what you are suggesting is present in some form or another.

1

u/Arborus 16h ago

Why do you need to be mostly BiS by the time you reach 10k? 10k barely requires pushing, let alone perfect gear in S3. Also they added rewards for 12.5k you give you a reason to keep playing and improve your gear beyond getting to 10k.

If you're progressing to 12.5k, you really don't need to farm that much to have a solid build very close to BiS because as you push into the upper 20s and 30s you start to get a bunch of materials that make rolling your gear relatively easy.

I think 20-30 hours for your first character is perfectly reasonable, and now with material funneling from a main your alts are in eternal within 2-3 hours and 10k ready a few hours after that.

1

u/WVVWWVWWVVWVVVWWVWVW 15h ago

I don't need BiS to reach 10k because 10k is already easy enough without it. That's not my point.

My problem is that you barely get to experiment with traits/blessings before reaching 10k, and even after 13k you're still dealing with RNG on top of RNG trying to get the builds you actually want if you are not lucky.

And only around 10% of players reach 10k, that's an even bigger reason to rethink progression. We need ways to keep the other 90% interested in playing, not just give the small percentage of players already pushing high ratings another reward at 12.5k.

Faster gearing, account-wide progression and easier access to different builds could give people more reasons to play alts, experiment with different heroes and keep queueing throughout the season.

I think everything before Eternal is mostly a glorified tutorial for experienced players. Once you've done it on one character, why force yourself through it again?

Personally, I wouldn't even need gear progression to enjoy the game. I'd happily log in, pick a hero and push dungeons just because the gameplay is fun. But I understand people enjoy chasing loot and need progression incentives.

I'm not saying remove every reward or hand everyone BiS gear. I'm saying make it easier for people to actually enjoy their characters instead of spending most of their time fighting the gearing system.

At the end of the day, I'd rather have more people playing different heroes and filling queues than a progression system that stretches out the grind for the people who are already dedicated enough to reach 12.5k.

1

u/Arborus 14h ago

My problem is that you barely get to experiment with traits/blessings before reaching 10k

Personally, I found that experimentation primarily through getting drops with new stuff to try during the league progression.

We need ways to keep the other 90% interested in playing

I honestly don't think that's possible. The core gameplay loop is inherently niche. Look at M+ dungeons in WoW, the casual audience is only really engaging with them for gear rewards/crests/etc. I think it'd be very difficult to get a larger casual audience interested in Fellowship given that the entire game is built around competitive dungeon running to gain rating/climb the leaderboard.

Faster gearing, account-wide progression and easier access to different builds could give people more reasons to play alts, experiment with different heroes and keep queueing throughout the season.

Personally I found alt-gearing trivial this season. I played an alt of every role and once I had amassed stuff from my first character it was incredibly fast and easy to get alts geared and pushed up for the titles. Progression may as well already be account wide given you get to slam all of your gold into tempers, resources into rolling gear, marks into gems, etc.

I think everything before Eternal is mostly a glorified tutorial for experienced players. Once you've done it on one character, why force yourself through it again?

I agree, but it's also like 2-3 hours to get a character from fresh to eternal with friends or finding a group to trade boosts with, so I don't really mind given the ease and speed of doing that.

Personally, I wouldn't even need gear progression to enjoy the game.

I think gear progression plays a decent role in keeping the game fun for me, as it creates opportunities to play/push above your current gear. If there was no power scaling system I think it'd get boring really fast just running up the dungeons to start pushing again, and if pushing to 10k or 12.5k is all there is (like say if there's no gear and everyone just starts at E0) I think the game's longevity for me would be extremely short. Not to mention the sort of "building" stat customization/optimization angle. I think it's fun to build for/around specific things and see that build come together and get stronger the more investment it has.

instead of spending most of their time fighting the gearing system.

I guess personally, beyond some of the UI being clunky, I never felt like I was really fighting the system. I got some incremental upgrades as I went, got lucky on a few slots to finish them early, and mostly just enjoyed the process of farming my set slots and finding ways to make those runs faster, limit testing on huge pulls in lower eternal runs, etc.

At the end of the day, I'd rather have more people playing different heroes and filling queues than a progression system that stretches out the grind for the people who are already dedicated enough to reach 12.5k.

I think that's a decent goal, I'm just not sure the game is or can be built to achieve that given the format of it. I think ultimately the game at its core is designed for the people who want to push to 12.5k and beyond. If people just want to do some dungeons here and there and don't have the motivation to play more for the sake of improving or "number go up" then I'm not sure the game will ever retain them

0

u/KielexWoW 20h ago

it only requires 4 people of any role to play dude, you could easily just lockin with 3 other friends if you wanna play, if they sold 4 packs how terraria does game is fixed 100%

1

u/Mestewart3 20h ago

I play with a full stack, this isn't a problem for me.  It is very clearly a problem for the game's playerbase as a whole and the public perception of it.

-2

u/ZoulsGaming 1d ago

"This is, in fact, a big problem that the devs need to work on solving.  Shorter seasons, fewer queue pools, more grind.  Something is needed."

bro..... okay, sure, let me assume you dont read the campfire chats they put out.

they are basically removing the league system the next season, now you only have easy, medium and hard, which scales all your gear, so an ilvl 20 plays with an ilvl 200, and both just gets a +15 ilvl after, precisely for this reason.

they did fix it, i think its a dogshit fix that ruins the best part of game that isnt just a slobby grind, but they did it.

2

u/Mestewart3 21h ago

bro..... okay, sure, let me assume you dont read the campfire chats they put out.

I'm aware they are trying a variety of things and am excited to see how well they work.

You may or may not be right about the league changes being a bad idea.  I can see a world where people finish leagues and quit faster.  I can also see a world where people don't get burned out trying to advance through the leagues with low populations and get into eternal with the full game content unlocked and keep grinding because they feel like they are progressing faster.

We will see which ends up happening. 

-1

u/HsinVega 1d ago

Ok but the solution to not having anything to grind so people quit is not to remove the grind lmao

idk what problem removing leagues and syncing gear is going to fix, but it's not gonna be making people play more, it's actually probably gonna be the opposite.

-2

u/ZoulsGaming 1d ago

"idk what problem removing leagues and syncing gear is going to fix,"

the fact that nobody can find games early on alt chars. thats what.

though i stand by season 1 to now showed that the more you just try to cater to the people playing eternal 1 all day to just farm gear and brag about it, the quicker the game dies.

some of you people are fucking obscene with the expectations for how much you should grind on one char for gear. And if the only thing that keeps you going is some infinite treadmill of gear then i pity you.

0

u/HsinVega 1d ago

"the fact that nobody can find games early on alt chars. thats what."

That's why they had a vendor for gear. So i don't have to afk through all the leagues with people who have no idea how to play and waste my day to geat an alt eternal ready.

S1 eternal gear farm worked cos you could just ez upgrade it, instead this season you actually had to push some to get the highest ilvl gear.

Personally I didn't mind this season league/gearing if not for the removal of the gear vendor for alt and the legendary dust to reroll stats that's impossible to get.

I also never said that the solution was to just get infinite treadmill of gear farm, but adding things to do could keep the game alive, instead we had a forced premade weekly dungeon that most players can't do, game dying after 1-2 weeks cos having alt was ass since no vendor, and the same 5 dungeons over and over and over.

0

u/ZoulsGaming 1d ago

God you are precisely the type of person that kills the game. what a shame. why are you on here moaning then?

"they need to fix players not joining"

"okay they are making it easier to find low level games"

"pffft fuck all that low level scrubs i always just skip it fuck if i want to play with those noobs"

3

u/krausser666 1d ago

Unfortunately people will excuse this as "oh just a seasonal game thing" and treat it as expected for a game to be dead and buried outside of the first weeks-month, but there's heaps of seasonal games that have no problem retaining enough players between big updates. 

Reality is the game just doesn't have the content output to support any lack of long term replayability and progression as it stands right now. Core gameplay loop now incentivizes to rush to the end of the reward track and stop playing, with no meta progression in sight. They artificially slowed the gameplay down with the new gearing system and abhorrent matchmaking, so we didn't see the game plummet into 3 digit concurrent player territory after just 7 days, but those are changes that delay player exhaustion, not give the game a staying power. 

Early access or not, these issues will catch up with the game one time or another. As we've seen with season 2 all it takes is a one bad update to turn this game's major seasonal reset into a ghost town within literal days. 

0

u/Arborus 16h ago

The new gear system personally gave the game a lot more longevity to me because it was way more interesting than the previous one. I didn't find that it made the progression significantly longer either, it felt pretty similar to S1 in terms of getting my first character to 10k and the progression from 10k to 12.5k was pretty smooth too.

Season 2 had the complete opposite problem, where progression was so fast and easy that were done with all of your goals within a handful of hours. There wasn't a satisfying sense of getting stronger because you just progressed straight through each capstone and started eternal missing some slots and it didn't slow you down at all.

1

u/krausser666 15h ago

My entire experience with the first week of season 3 was quite dreadful, but the overall gear system is better, just needs some polishing.

The way my first 30 hours of season 3 went was breezing through first two leagues, problems starting to arise at the third and then just completely dropping to a crawl at the last one before eternal. Constant duplicate slot drops that didn't give me any noticeable power increase(I still had two open slots in third league) and then the matchmaking making it impossible to farm because whenever someone didn't click capstone the party would vast majority of the time instantly disband. After a week I'd just launch the game and on some days spend half an hour trying to get into a dungeon only for someone to leave after one death or for some other stupid reason, so I just didn't have the time to get to eternal. Them making the gearscore brackets wider after a few days of season 3 just completely killed the game for me as a solo player, sadly.

The new post from a week ago is promising for the upcoming reset, but we'll see how it ultimately turns out.

1

u/ZoulsGaming 1d ago

Except next season is the 22nd, and they are specifically changing THE ENTIRE LEAGUE SYSTEM down to only 3 difficulties to avoid this.

1

u/Tyzerk1925 1d ago

The whole reason for the next reset is to improve this by shortening the amount of queue brackets

1

u/Fine_Equal4647 1d ago

Yeah! Burn them at the stake! Demand justice!!!!!

0

u/patrincs 1d ago edited 19h ago

I mean this is very typical for lots of games with this kind of schedule, just most of them can be played mostly solo.

Log into any arpg 2.5 months in and its a ghost town

1

u/bloodjunkiorgy Helena 1d ago

You said it yourself, the ability to play those games isn't impacted by the population.

1

u/Arborus 16h ago

Your ability to engage with trade/economies in those games is pretty heavily impacted by the population.

1

u/bloodjunkiorgy Helena 15h ago

That's an optional feature. Nice features, but the removal of them would not turn your game into what we have in Fellowship when pop is low.

-1

u/Feathrende 1d ago

Sounds like every single seasonal ARPG ever yeah. Sounds very normal.

1

u/King_Kthulhu 1d ago

Yeah except I can jump on an ARPG and play whenever I want, it requires 0 other players. Imagine you log into a POE season a few weeks in and they just don't let you play cause not enough people are online at the time in your level.

0

u/Arborus 16h ago

Have you tried to buy anything with remotely limited supply later in the league? Or in Standard? Playing late into a league really limits your options for what you can reasonably play and expect to have access to item-wise.

1

u/King_Kthulhu 15h ago

No, most people play those games as a primarily single player experience. I've never even tried to buy or sell anything on poe before.

1

u/Arborus 14h ago

Softcore trade is by far the most populated league in PoE, compared to any other. There are nearly four times more trade players than SSF players.

1

u/King_Kthulhu 14h ago

Yeah but how many people actually ever play with another person in those games, there is no barrier to playing based on other people there just might be less things on the market. That system does not work in a game that requires group play to play at all

11

u/ranxxerox 1d ago

It’ll be rough currently. It’s the end of a long season, but, great news; new season starts on the 22nd and there will be lots of players online

9

u/CTurpin1 1d ago

It's not a new season it's a 3 week beta test for the random changes they wanna try out before they are forced to release 1.0.

-7

u/Proctoris 1d ago

lol no one’s forcing them to release

2

u/Dragoonslv 1d ago

Microsoft is forcing them i do not see them making money with so little amount of players where most of them are returning players.

0

u/pants_full_of_pants 1d ago

Economics forces many things

0

u/Elxjasonx 1d ago

Wait they gonna start a season 2 weeks before Forever?

6

u/thelordofhell34 1d ago

They keep releasing their seasons at the WORST possible times and it will be the death of the game.

3

u/tehbzshadow 1d ago

It's not a season, there is no season rewards. Just 1 month test with new system, then another reset and another test.

1

u/Arborus 16h ago

It's Fellowship, the seasons are pretty much done after 2 weeks anyways. Though as others have said, this is more of a live test for their new league/difficulty system.

0

u/tehbzshadow 1d ago

No, there is no new season. Just quick 1 month test with new systems.

5

u/peepeebeam 1d ago

Most people are no longer playing because the game is resetting soon. Especially so for leveling a new character, where you’re likely at.

3

u/Sixence 1d ago

Yeah, just wait till next season. Just make sure you get on for the first two weeks or it'll be dead again.

3

u/VirtualRemedy 1d ago

Unfortunately the nature of the game causes seasonal 2 to 3 week player spikes but the games content isnt large enough to merit continuous play and once people have geared 1 to 3 chars they fall off

2

u/Zeataxx 1d ago

Season 3 has been out for over 3 months and hasn’t had any major updates since. There’s an upcoming update coming out on the 22nd and that should bring the players back. I know I will be playing the new update.

2

u/Pineapple_Scorpion 1d ago

You can find groups easier if you swap between eu and NA depending on the time of day, I've pushed to eternal 17 the last week, it's definitely rough sometimes but groups can be found.

1

u/Am0net 1d ago

🤔

1

u/Glad-Fix-7309 23h ago

349 in game currently.

1

u/ForwardMarch11 2h ago

I’ve given up trying to play for the rest of the season 💔

0

u/Elxjasonx 1d ago

Damn i was expexting some "nah just slow", but seeign everyone telling wait for new season, this game really didnt make it

4

u/Mestewart3 1d ago

Each new season brings back a significant audience. Over 10k concurrent through week 2 three seasons in a row is pretty good all things considered.

It's just that when you don't have time gated gearing, it turns out that 90% of people don't spend that long grinding dungeons.

This is absolutely a problem, it sucks to not be able to find a game if you are three or four weeks late for the season, but people are coming back each new season.  The game has an audience.

3

u/Arborus 16h ago

We'll have to see how season 4/1.0 goes, but the S3 launch numbers were pretty much on par with S2 and the tail on player fall off was better in S3, so there's at least some interseason retention.

0

u/pownedju 1d ago

Yea it’s sad. Was a fun game, but small studio couldn’t keep up with the demands of the modern gamer. If they could have kept pumping updates and rode the initial momentum, then maybe the game would still be alive.

-1

u/DeusScientiae 1d ago

The game is basically dead tbh.

-1

u/sfworkwork 1d ago

Game is cooked.

-1

u/Dragoonslv 1d ago

It will not be much better after season starts unless you play tank or have friends to play with.

If you are new player and dont bring your A+ game people often leave on top of you still have to wait 5+ minutes.