UPDATE: The battle servers for DUST 514 have been moved to “a more stable environment”. Players are reporting no battle drops and very little lag.
There is a problem with DUST. Well, there are many problems, but there is one problem in particular that is getting rather annoying: matchmaking. For the past two or three weeks now, whenever you queue up for a battle, wait five minutes, and get the “waiting for deployment” notification, nine times out of ten, the battle will drop. It will disappear. “Where did the battle go?” you ask. I don’t know where it went. Maybe Scotty the AI Matchmaker just decided, “Ehhh, nahh. They don’t need to play that battle. Public matches? Psh. Who needs them? Factional warfare? Let the EVE pilots handle that. Oooh. A Planetary Conquest battle? Ha! Those corps don’t need that district at all.” Whatever’s going on, it’s a problem. So much of a problem that players are referring to the drop as being “CCPeed on”. It’s not just one battle that this happens to either. It’s many, many matches in a row. As I type this, I’m trying to get into a pub with unfortunate results. Yesterday I hopped on, as is my everyday tradition, and I queued up for all four pub matches: Skirmish, Domination (which is the worst thing ever), Ambush, and Acquisition. Queued up for something like four or five hours. I played one, let me say that again; one, match. It was a full on proto-stompy ‘bush. It was awful. Worst part is, I didn’t even win. The problem isn’t just going on for me. In Episode 66 of Biomassed, other hosts and guests were having my same problem.
In this two, three-ish weeks that this has been going on, has CCP anybody said something about this? As far as I know, no. Nothing has been said. C’mon now, CCP. Somebody has to say something, right? I know CCP doesn’t come across as the greatest communicators in the world, but still. Something like this deserves a word. Even if it’s just, “Hey, we’re aware of this issue. We’re working on it”. I’d like something like that, and I’m sure others would too. Oh, a fix would be cool too. I understand the CCPs Rattati and Frame were on vacation at the time, but GM Archduke (shoutout to that guy, by the way.) was on both the forums and in-game holding down the fort. A quick email to somebody would have sufficed.
“What’s the point of all this?” you ask. My point is communication. Without it, this game’s as good as dead. For this game to last, in my opinion, we, the player base, need to hear from CCP regularly. “How do you do this?” you ask. Remember those newsletters that some of you signed up for? The ones that occasionally give you free crap? There’s your vehicle to move this information directly to the players. I would take a guess and assume that most everybody has their email linked to their cell phone. Put a monthly update in it and then hit the send button. Boom. As soon as that goes out, it’s in the pockets of most every player in the game. Nine times out of ten, they’ll pull out their phone, and check the email. Of course this also could go on the forums too, but a lot of people don’t check the forums regularly. We also elected this really great thing called the CPM earlier this week. Something like this is pretty much in their job description. The CPM are the mouthpiece for CCP. If CCP would utilize some of these things more often, I believe that some of these problems would be actively worked on and maybe fixed. Communication would be on the up, which would make a lot of people very, very happy.
The ball is in your court, CCP. It’s your move.
