New party system does not improve public matches.

What does it add? 

Well kind of nothing, unless you add people to your party.

So if you are playing public matches, nothing will change.

- People will afk..
- You will vote to kick.
- And people will not vote.

Nice..

Will I need to make the title of my game; "Join party, don't afk or I will waste my own time leaving the map" ?

I am on AP reset 70(soon), and it feels bad wasting 3-4 minutes per map because people are afk. 

And I can do nothing about it.

The new system, will not help at all.

Not to mention the lack of mana in 4 player games, people hog mana, upgrade lanes to max that don't need a single upgrade.

And I have to DPS 3 lanes since all the players have upgraded the wrong lanes, are AFK and just sit there and press G.

When I host a map, it should make me party leader, any player that joins should be in MY PARTY..

Make the lobby system like DD1, it aint rocket science Trendo.

@PandynatorDD quote:

What does it add? 

Well kind of nothing, unless you add people to your party.

So if you are playing public matches, nothing will change.

- People will afk..
- You will vote to kick.
- And people will not vote.

Nice..

Will I need to make the title of my game; "Join party, don't afk or I will waste my own time leaving the map" ?

I am on AP reset 70(soon), and it feels bad wasting 3-4 minutes per map because people are afk. 

And I can do nothing about it.

The new system, will not help at all.

Not to mention the lack of mana in 4 player games, people hog mana, upgrade lanes to max that don't need a single upgrade.

And I have to DPS 3 lanes since all the players have upgraded the wrong lanes, are AFK and just sit there and press G.

When I host a map, it should make me party leader, any player that joins should be in MY PARTY..

+1

Waaaaait wait wait.  So if someone makes a game, and is joined by pugs, the creator doesn't have any authority?  They only have authority over the people that have joined their party?

If I'm understanding this correctly, then this changes essentially nothing about the game, and I agree completely is a worthless addition to the game.  It does almost literally nothing to address the problems that people experience with pugs trolling/afking.  Trendy, please reconsider your stance on this.

@PandynatorDD quote:

So if you are playing public matches, nothing will change.

- People will afk..
- You will vote to kick.
- And people will not vote.

Nice..

Will I need to make the title of my game; "Join party, don't afk or I will waste my own time leaving the map" ?

Thank you for pointing this out. It seems as if I have not paid enough attention to the dev stream because I have missed this detail.

Actually I took it for granted that the first to start a (public) game always is the 'leader', even without a party. Maybe I just thought so because it just made sense. Or would have made sense.

Now, after they have announced the party leader stuff to the public, we have a chance this will be changed too, so that playing public games makes sense again.

@PandynatorDD quote:

Not to mention the lack of mana in 4 player games, people hog mana, upgrade lanes to max that don't need a single upgrade.

And I have to DPS 3 lanes since all the players have upgraded the wrong lanes, are AFK and just sit there and press G.

You should be thankfull that your peeps upgrade towers at least ... in my games people find very attractive to upgrade Trees. 

If this all true, then ya, my days of carrying randoms is over. If you host the map, u should b in control period. If they don't like how u run your map then they can leave and start their own map. Afk'ers, people who max out trees and leave the bees at tier 1, people who don't drop mana or upgrade anything... I should be able to kick. Party or no party. Screw the voting system.

TE are protecting the numerous baby players. Baby players are weak and dependent. They have a short attention span and are always looking to get carried. 

Are TE afraid they will go play something else, after they are kicked from the "nth" game for being a nuisance?



I keep seeing this "your ideas don't benefit me so they are worthless attitude" on these forums. Trendy is trying to make the game better for everyone, if you don't like playing with other people because they are too slow then play solo, advanced multiplayer is good for the community and good for bringing new players in which we need.

From even the days of NM4, I was never comfortable with kicking, so if anyone messes up (at least in my game), I'd just go through with it. I only kick on certain rare circumstances like if told them to leave and they don't, well they ask for it, for example.

If I'm at somebody else's game, normally I'll comply but also at certain occasions, I don't, as sometimes peeps kick for reasons that aren't even a big deal.

But hey, that's just my views.

PandynatorDD, i'm going to cook you some fried bambo for bringing this topic up

Yep yep! To be honest, I'm just glad that parties stuff ain't buggy anymore. The extra features are pretty much a nice bonus.

And as I did say, I was never comfortable with kicking so...well said there!

And have a great weekend too, Lawlta :)

Well I guess the extra exp & loot has to come at some price.  And that price is dealing with ******bag AFKers and people who upgrade trees.

I'm disappointed with this decision, but I understand (and disagree with) your reasoning.

Meh.  It is what it is.  Have a great weekend yourself =)

In not taking any particular side, but....

Wouldn't it be a reasonable compromise to add an option when making a game that provides the host the ability to have 100% control [if they select said option] and that adds an icon in the game browser indicating that the option was selected [so that players joining will know if the host has 100% control over players or not]?   

From my perspective, a solution similar to that mentioned above would provide for people on both sides to be happy [since they all get what they want when they host their respective games] as well as help to reduce those potential toxic situations [since people will know if they can build or not before joining].

I'm wondering if the Steam itself can help deal with afk-players, for example, throw them on the blacklist? Has anyone tested this method?
As for me, at the moment this is a good alternative (if it works)...

Sorry for the click baity title, I knew it was a stretch. 

But well, from what I as a player and the current state of the game(very low chance to play with friends, due to being on different floors) the whole party system is not something I will interact with a whole lot. 

Maybe its different for others, and they are able to play with their friends  more easily. I think what Rusty suggests above would be great. 

A way to set the rules for a game you make. Make it not joinable via the quick play button and clear indicator of the rules the host has ticked off.

I agree that 100% kick option to the host could lead to more toxic behavior. But this could be addressed with some limits to it;

- 1 kick per map, but require you to play 3 maps to "charge" it.

- Make it only work up until X wave.

Theres plenty of things that can be done to tone down the potential for abuse. 

More important than the kick feature is a option for the host to control the G button. This would solve 90% of the issues I have when doing public resets. Make it have a 30s timer at end of map, if two other players G up, then you go to next map menu.

Next map menu; host controls it completely. 

I would also like an option to get all the mana in build phases, this should be a tickable option though.

The statement that most people use their mana may be factually correct, but in my games, it is far from it.

@PandynatorDD quote:

- Make it only work up until X wave.

In DD1, I was kicked many times when there was only one enemy left in a survival, even a few times when I helped building. So I ended up playing solo, like many serious players. So yeah, preventing the host to kick people in the last couple of waves might make things bearable.

@HolyBadman quote:

I'm wondering if the Steam itself can help deal with afk-players, for example, throw them on the blacklist? Has anyone tested this method?
As for me, at the moment this is a good alternative (if it works)...

A blacklist would also be fine by me.

And a more detailed description of the game (which towers to upgrade first, which not to upgrade, join next dungeon, don't AFK until the PDTs are 3 stars, etc) that the host can edit, save, and remind to all players with a shortcut might help too.

The party changes coming will be good for parties. Seems the confusion between parties and random public matches are causing people to get upset. These changes will help parties, mostly being groups of friends who play together. They won't really help random public matches, where people will inevitably not play the way you do or just flat out not care. 

Personally I think the multiplayer group changes should have been focused on random public matches first, as that is where it seems most of the multiplayer actually occurs. Your group of friends may not always be online, want to do the same thing at the time or like many people not have any friends that play this game. However those changes may be more involved than we think. And like Lawlta said, they're not done yet.

The extra loot is finally a step in the right direction, and I am happy with that. Am I happy with multiplayer as a whole? Nope. But they are asking us what we want. Not everything we want will become reality. And what they do change will not occur as fast as we want (many of us have wanted changes for 3+ years). 

I wont be able to change anyone's mind on this being good or bad, and I'm not trying to. But I've stuck with this game this long. I can wait to see what's to come.

Trendy need to give solo players a legendary chest like 2-4 player games.

Need to do games like DD1 did, if you hosted you had the power to kick, people learnt quickly you didn't feck about, if you did you had to go build your own lobby.

Vote kick never ever works and its pubs Trendy has to work on not parties.

@LAWLTA quote:

Hey All,

Just wanted to chime in real quick. There's a lot of hyperbolic statements that are made as facts, which they most definitely are not. If you want to have complete control over a game, look for parties in hubs or Discord, and you can have all the control you want.

Public games are not owned by anyone. You're not hosting it, and honestly, it can cause some very toxic interactions when one player has all the control over 3 others, far worse than what's been outlined here. We have been putting out massive surveys and have received thousands of responses. The total feedback we got is that:

• Defenders want to build towers in the majority of games.
• Very few want to only use active heroes when playing.
• A lot of Defenders give mana out quite a bit if they don't want to build.

While what has been pointed out here as negative experiences, on the entire scale, this is the minority of interactions. With our "Play Now" option we're introducing, giving host controls to players hopping in a game and getting kicked by the first person who got the session going would feel downright awful. Same with the majority of players who WANT to build towers, but get matchmade into a game where the first person to join decided they wanted to be the only builder for the whole map. We're opening up the ability to play with others and make it easier to get into the game and go. All of this said, even after this update releases we are working on:

• Additional features of making multiplayer games feel better. 
• Help reduce instances of toxic interactions.
• Make it easier to focus on the main point of the game:  having fun by destroying hordes of enemies. 

The big focus of these party changes is to SPECIFICALLY address community feedback on parties. If you think that this is the end-all-be-all of multiplayer interaction updates/changes, then you're dead wrong, and you'll probably just end up getting more frustrated over nothing. There's a lot more coming, it just takes time. The goal of this post is to point out the stuff we're adding in this update for parties is to make specifically the party experience better. The significantly greater majority of the games played in DD2 are multiplayer parties, which was a big motivator to improve that experience. Pointing out the things it doesn't do (public game control was not presented as a feature being added in this update) or us wasting our time, and stating that as factually bad, is both unfair to yourself and us.

Have a great weekend everyone! :)

I have to disagree with you here, Lawlta. Real feedback comes from playing the game, not from throwing a survey inside a forum and just laying back on the couch. Have in mind people who answered the surveys are people who "play hard", and most of the time solo the game. In-game, the experience is massively different!

I will break everything up:

• Defenders want to build towers in the majority of games.

Not true. In 3~4/5 games, you'll join a match where you'll have people dropping their mana to whoever joins. Same if you start a game and wait for 3 players. Everyone starts asking "who's building?" and dropping their mana. Things may change in onslaught, but onslaught isn't the entire game; there's more besides it, and many players will never touch it.

• Very few want to only use active heroes when playing.

Not true either. Besides what I said above, you just need to open the in-game match list and you'll see tons of rooms with people asking for builders in the name. While afking maps is what the majority of players aim for, it's much easier to use a dps hero (you can contribute a ton with CC abilities!) than a builder.

• A lot of Defenders give mana out quite a bit if they don't want to build.

Well, duh? There's the occasional *** who won't drop mana if they don't want to build, but why wouldn't you if there's someone willing to build?

Our feedback on parties is REALLY simple. We just want DD1's system. The host should have all the powers (choosing map, kicking people without vote, next map/to tavern...). If I start a game looking for builders and 3 gunwitches join and just afk expecting a builder to join (I've seen people do that while I went to the toilet before building), you want to be able to kick one of them or several (many people will just not vote or will be afk, so voting is just not possible). Hell, I'd even say nobody should be able to G unless the host does so! I hate building on the first wave, and have everyone press G when I'm at 200/800 DUs. And it happens. A lot.

While it's cool to get information from surveys, that's a terrible way to get information from your game. Have in mind every place you collect information will target different kind of players. An occasional player will probably never check these forums, and if they do, they probably can't be arsed or get immersed in the community enough to participate in surveys. You need to get different sources. Go play from scratch. Make an anonymous account and see how the progress for a new, casual player is. Try to play a C4 match fresh off of C3. See how many people leave your game only by seeing your iPWR, how iPWR 7000+ players join your game and drop mana expecting you to build, not helping, or even worse, how boring it gets when one of those players build a flame aura on each spawn to rush the map, not letting you try strategies and progress through the game "properly". Let us restrict maximum power to join as well as minimum.

@Nefhith quote:

snip

Exactly

@LAWLTA quote:

Anecdotal evidence, or even posts on the forums, don't account for the majority of how players play DD2. Surveys are a fantastic source on feedback en masse from a community, but it's not our only source of feedback, and is silly to think that it's what entirely sways any decision. We actively track how players interact with every level of the game, get feedback from our QA team, RQA team, and RPG testers, and much more.

You're still talking about a minority here. In your first post you said "We have been putting out massive surveys and have received thousands of responses". Considering in the last month of august the game barely went over 1000 players (1042 to be exact), I would like to know which version of dungeon defenders 2 the other several thousands of players are playing.

If you mean cumulative, you should have in mind the progress between the application of those changes. How many of those players said "oh boy, we would like a system that resets our entire progress in this loot farming game!"? What were the responses after you applied it? How many (most probably private) surveys did you run for the QA, RQA and RPG testers that included several changes that didn't come in one go, and instead got released progressively, possibly changing the outcome of those surveys after trying the changes made by those surveys? How wide was the scope of those surveys?

Anecdotal evidence and posts in the forums DO account for the majority of players just as well as those players in the QA/RQA/RPG testers do. If you're willing to open the development of the game to a minority of players instead of leaving it to the studio developing it, don't dismiss what is actually happening in the live game as an effect of the choices made by those players. You're dismissing the opinion of the end user, which is a massive mistake to make when it comes to these things, and I know about that, working as a web/software developer.

When you say something is "not true", you are basing it off of your personal experience, which if it has been negative, we apologize, but from everything we've gathered, it is not how the large majority of games usually go.

When I say something is "not true" I'm basing it off of my hundreds of hours and even more hundreds of matches played in the game. I'm speaking from in-game experience talking with people in-game, in the tavern, during matches and from things other people told me. I filter stuff such as players saying they got kicked from a match because they were disrupting the game (causing kobolds to destroy towers or being ***s in general), I'm just presenting generalized evidence of what a regular user's experience is in the game. A survey won't tell you the result of a player who is looking for users to try and complete a match with only dps players. A survey won't tell you how many times someone got kicked off a game because they could only provide DPS after a difficulty change. Your RQA/RPG teams are not experiencing a neutral experience of the game, and are not a "regular" user who plays casually the game.

As an example, what would you do if juicebags/dreamanime (to say 2 of the most famous users around that come to mind) say the game would be better by halving a hero's health? If you implement the changes, would you dismiss the regular user's (in this case, the end user's) feedback saying this hero is getting one shot by a sneeze in his general direction? These changes got suggested by two players that are well above and beyond a regular user's level of skill, and could probably do with a no-hit gamemode, but you're applying their skill-based changes to users whose playtime is well below 5% of those two user's playtime.

I know your RPG team is exactly for that kind of players, but *how many users* are there in that group? Do you weigh their opinion as much as the rest of the test groups? If they're a group for that kind of people, I highly doubt they spend the time testing things such as ascension power (which is a massively time consuming task made for the most hardcore players), and if you do give them "shortcuts" to make it easier for them to test it, it means they're automatically disqualified as a valid opinion for those kind of things, since they're not bound by the same rules as a "regular user", which also means it defeats the purpose of the RPG testing group, which also leads to you having to rely on the most hardcore players who always ask for more of a challenge, which in turn also makes things harder to reach for the regular user.

I know that is the entire point of ascension power, and that changes are coming, but it's an example.

My experience in DD2 has been mixed, and I wouldn't -by far- say it's been a negative experience, but the game itself forces you to have a negative experience. Kicking afk players, players who are forced to DPS because they want to play with other people, but the difficulty scaling makes it impossible for them to build, people kicking DPS players because they're looking for a builder... There are lots of factors at play in here, and every change, every suggestion, and every post, coming be it from Marcos, from a discord comment, from a survey or even from a random user in the forum talking about "anecdotal evidence" should've been taken into account. You're a person. A survey has set answers with yes/no, a rating from 1 to 5, or a short explanation about "why", but you, and any other person with some criteria can pick between a post about "woah I found a matchmaking group that kicked me for no reason" or "end game exp rewards got lowered" and choose what to dismiss. What are the variables on the first one? Was the guy being a jerk and left it off? Or maybe there were other factors at play that got him kicked? A post like that is hard to judge, and you can only hope he found a better group, but what about the user getting less xp? (I know you've seen that thread, that's why I'm using it as an example :p) He's posting screenshots comparing pre and post patch xp gains. That also counts as anecdotal evidence and maybe there are other factors at play, but that thread in particular got some people reporting the same.

Same thing here. I may be talking from anecdotal evidence, but my "anecdotal evidence" comes from being in those forums for several years, playing the game regularly and reading several user's discussions, complaints, stories... Many users with similar experiences as me won't ever come here to post like I do, participate in surveys or anything, which means you should go *in* the game, and see for yourself. Theorycrafting from a bunch of data is one thing, but there's always practical evidence. When was the last time you made a fresh steam account, not related to your name or anything at all, booted vanilla DD2 and tried to play from scratch anonymously without any of your friends?

By the way: I know juicebags and dreamanime are really useful members of this community, the former releasing almost mandatory guides for any new player and the latter submitting a massive ammount of bug reports that make the game a really awesome, bug-free experience for the rest users, but their skill in-game is real.

We've even received a lot of feedback that suggestions made in this thread made public games in DD1 absolutely terrible experiences, leading to a lot of trolling and exploitation. We don't take that feedback as "well that negates that feedback", we accept it all and go from there.

That is fantastic, but I would like to point out you're kind of contradicting the rest of your post here. Might be a slip, but you literally started your post with you saying you dismiss user experiences in-game and posts on the forums from suggestions.

If you're talking from only this forum post, what makes this forum post more important than the rest? Is it because it comes from a defense council member? Is he more important than the rest of users? (no offense [[43706,users]], and sorry if I did!).

There's probably a good middle ground to be found, and for this thread, I'll repeat it again, we are not done with these systems. Getting mad that one system is getting improvements and assuming others are not going to get the same attention is going to lead to pointless frustration. Stuff takes time. We're not even close to done yet.

Of course you're not done with these systems, but that's not an excuse for how you're justifying how you dismiss "end-user" experience as a feedback. Once again:

Anecdotal evidence, or even posts on the forums, don't account for the majority of how players play DD2.

That is one of the worst things you can ever say, to be honest. I don't want to be rude, but after reading that the first thing that came to mind was that you had no idea about this topic. Of course it could've been a slip and I just misunderstood your expression (we're humans; we make mistakes).

A thing I have not realized yet: If I am a party leader, we are a party of 4 and in the middle of a combat wave - if I kick a player from the party, is he also kicked/banned from our game (or even our matchmaking) or is that player only removed from the party and stays on the same map we are currently playing?

Sorry if this have been clarified - I could not find the information.

@RustyCounterweight quote:

In not taking any particular side, but....

Wouldn't it be a reasonable compromise to add an option when making a game that provides the host the ability to have 100% control [if they select said option] and that adds an icon in the game browser indicating that the option was selected [so that players joining will know if the host has 100% control over players or not]?   

From what I have read, lawlta has stated that no players is actually hosting a public game and that's one of the reasons why they should not have those rights. Please correct my if I took this wrong.

From what I understand, no player at DD2 is hosting anything at all because the game is totally server sided. From that point of view, I see DD2 sessions/games/session browsers similar to a Teamspeak Server. Public chats but you can create your own rooms where you can kick people if they misbehave (or - to be fair - if you are an idiot, you can kick them for no reason).

I have been kicked at DD1 quite often for no reason and I tried to remember those players' names so I did not join them again at a later time. If there had been a black list/ignore list, this would have been a lot easier.

@PandynatorDD quote:

Maybe its different for others, and they are able to play with their friends  more easily. I think what Rusty suggests above would be great. 

A way to set the rules for a game you make. Make it not joinable via the quick play button and clear indicator of the rules the host has ticked off.

I agree that 100% kick option to the host could lead to more toxic behavior. But this could be addressed with some limits to it;

- 1 kick per map, but require you to play 3 maps to "charge" it.

- Make it only work up until X wave.

Theres plenty of things that can be done to tone down the potential for abuse. 

More important than the kick feature is a option for the host to control the G button. This would solve 90% of the issues I have when doing public resets. Make it have a 30s timer at end of map, if two other players G up, then you go to next map menu.

Next map menu; host controls it completely. 

I would also like an option to get all the mana in build phases, this should be a tickable option though.

The statement that most people use their mana may be factually correct, but in my games, it is far from it.

Hm... my friends just refuse to play DD2 anymore since they have played it ~2 years ago. I have some people in my steam friends playing list DD2 I really like (no real life friends), but they are so far ahead, I don't even ask. ^^

I think recharging kicks would make it even worse because you would think about 'what if someone worse joins' and stuff like that.

Yeah... the G-button. Heaven and hell. ^^ Actually I had never thought about this. It sounds nice somehow but I have played in games at DD1 where that one was afk ('upgrade and repair'-maps). I know we have an afk timer in DD2, but still. ^^°

@Ryzours quote:

A blacklist would also be fine by me.

One of my dreams. ^^

About what Nefhith has been writing: I haven't played for quite a long time. (because I like public matches but DD2 has taught me that public matches can be anything but fun) My responses on the surveys count as much as those from people who are playing on a daily basis. Actually I did not feel as if I could express what is inconvenient to me anyway because the possibilities to answer felt a bit 'narrow'. Maybe that's just my impression and TE just wanted to receive feedback for a specific thing without revealing too much... which would be quite understandable.

@Dreizehn quote:

About what Nefhith has been writing: I haven't played for quite a long time. My responses on the surveys count as much as those from people who are playing on a daily basis. Actually I did not feel as if I could express what is inconvenient to me anyway because the possibilities to answer felt a bit 'narrow'. Maybe that's just my impression and TE just wanted to receive feedback for a specific thing without revealing too much... which would be quite understandable.

Which adds to my point. Nothing against you, by far, but is it fair for players who play everyday to have their forum posts dismissed while a player who hasn't played for (months? you didn't specify, but I will assume so, correct me if I'm wrong!) a long time has more powr than them in the future of the game?

@Nefhith quote:

-snip-

Well said and i agree. I dont know about the data the devs are getting or how theyre evaluating it, but in my personal experience( and the majority of my friends in game)  Multiplayer atm isnt friendly to no one(not even to the new player and to the end game player), bc of that i just do MP with some close friends who are climbing for AP. Protean Update and the new MP incentives are really good imo(made me get back to the game), but we need some better public lobby management imo. Just my opinion anyway.