A few thoughts about premade

By Zbyh20 on June 20, 2009 8:27:49 PM from

Hello!

Last weeks i see like 75% premade custom games. People are obviously making some race for highest winning streaks.

Make it clear, normally it's not fun at all to play in random team against premade team, like 3 friends vs 3 random or 4 friends vs 4 random. Sometimes You can beat premade team, but thats really hard to achieve. So I started to think... is this game going to be fully premade ? At the start, I could play this game just for fun, from time to time, joining some first custom game on the list and have fun playing with all random teams without any disadvantages from one side (sometimes I was unlucky and got newbie in my team, sometimes other team was unlucky and that was fair).

Yea, I know playing with friends it's great thing, I'm not saying it's bad. But well, just look at some people. They can play only in premade team !! And to be honest, they just won't play against other friend team at all, they just like to kick random !! Why ? That's good question.

The stupidest thing around here is, when You are a host and You are losing, just quit and the game won't save at all !! Today I had a game, where host team was losing, so he quits game just before their citadel was destroyed. Result ? He got 110 games winning streak... still (just imagine, how many times he had to do this "trick" to achieve this proud result !!).

I can't understand why some people care so much about ranking ? Do they THINK people will say "he is good, he has 100% wins" ? And what about fun, If You crush Your rivals in 95% games, otherwise (if You fight against better team, premade or just lucky), You just quits to not count that game ? Is this still funny for You or You are playing just to get next win in ranking ? I can't say, never tried that, but it sounds hilarious.

I know no one like to lose, at least I don't , but when I see the game was close and we lost just by a magrin, it's fine for me, really. But I can't understand, how can people have fun from this constantly wins. These games are like with AI, just do Your job, same as always, other team has almost no chances anyway. Aren't that wins starting to be... automatic games ? You don't really play, You don't really need to think there. Just find out which players from opposite random team are the weasest and constantly attack and kill them, buy better gear from that "free" money and then You can do whatever You want to.

I'm saying that as a random player, who played this game just for fun, to stress out. Now, it's really no sense to play for players like me. I know clans would clear this situation a bit. At least You could easly see some players from same clan, before game start or even make clan vs clan battles. But there will still be some people, who just like to kick random assess hour by hour, day by day, week by week.

I think, there should be a possibility in lobby to check player history. Let's say last 10 battles, by showing only players names and result of battle from the person You are checking. Why ? Well I don't want to play random vs friend games, really. There is a line between losing on same terms and being smashed by a well organized friends, when You can just observe how Your random team is feeding them. I don't want that, it's not funny at all. That's why I think people playing premade games should be easly detectable from lobby menu. Just think about that - it's really no fun to realize You are losing almost all Your games, because You are playing (sometimes literally) alone vs 3 or 4 friends.

I think that's the main reason, why this game have no chances to stay popular longer than next couple months. Even the strongest person would give up after 2-3 weeks of constantly losing vs friend games. You just can't play this game alone now. You need to have few skilled friends in Your party, because You can be 75% sure, the other team will be premade. And if You really want to play "24/7" with friends, there are plenty of MMORPG's, which are made this purpose. Anyway, I think making premades detectable from lobby, would help alone players a bit.

+1 Karma | 42 Replies

Well, Germ, you are pretty on track there in that I have a friend that I got to try DG for a couple weeks over here, most everything in your list happened to him (expect you forgot to add "New player is spit-roasted by the gloating winning team in All-Chat, and Noob-bashed by his teammates"). Anyway, he did not get his own DG game, and instead got and plays DoWII now Now, they have stacked teams and bashing ect in DoWII too, but their ranking and friend system (not to mention a great "Rep" rating system) seems to smooth things out greatly over time (or so my friend has said).

I know if we stick with DG, it will have all the bells and whistles we need for good/fun online play (in time)>

I played a game recently that was clearly an abuse of the system, I'll refrain from using specifics as I only have my gut feeling to go off and not hard evidence. The players in the game commented that they were new players and were looking for equal skilled opponents and a non-stacked game. As anyone who has seen my online stats can attest, I'm not the best player in the world and so I thought these guys might be on my skill level and would give us all a fun, yet challenging, game.

About a minute and a half into the game it was fairly clear this was an organised team who knew the ins and outs of the game far more than myself. They played with LoS to lure myself and my team mate into 2v1 situations and used near perfectly timed stuns to kill us. As the game progressed, my team mate and I held our own and nearly made it to their citadel, however they were far more organised than we were and turned the tide fairly rapidly and we were just beaten down in the end. A few bad deaths due to my own mistakes sealed the deal about a minute before the end.

Now, a lesser man would've been infuriated. Although my personal Death count was, before the insane damage they outputted at our Citadel, fairly low it was frustrating because they outright lied. They deliberatly lured someone into their game by claiming to be lower skilled so that they could just stomp them. It's been a long time I've seen this kind of behaviour in practice, and frankly I find it disgusting. Not because I lost, but because they sought to remove all challenge from the game and just achieve a quick victory and lied to do so. Well, my excellent Team Mate and I made them work for it. I won't name names, I can't prove this is what was happening - however it was obvious to me, in the game, that this is what happened. I hope this behaviour doesn't become widespread because it will hurt the online aspect greatly for new players.

So, the conclusion. Premades aren't bad, when you WANT TO play with it. If I had 2 or 3 skilled friends, I would like to play premades to LEARN from other teams new tactics and their behaviour. But when i'm in random party and playing against premade, I wont learn anything at all !! Well, maybe one thing I can learn is... I can't cooperate with random party well. Sure, some chat dialogs are possible, but premades knows each other. They have tactics they are using every game. It's impossible to use your tactics in random party, because other players don't know you and your game style.

It's simple solution to this. Stardock should let for us to in-game check other people last games to easly see which games are premades and which aren't. If I see who some player played with in his last 10 games, I would see this particular game is premade.

It should be very easy to show. My idea is...

1) Add new history button in game lobby:

2) After click, you will get last 10 games list (based by ranking website), something like this:

So if you see some red colour in that list, you know those players played together before, and are in same team in lobby right now. From green colour you know, 2 players played together last game, and they both are in lobby right now, but opposite side. List should show at least last 5 games, and could be also in HTML format (build in game), so it would be much easier to implement. It really shouldn't be that hard to make, because you already have all data in your database. Its all about format and show them in game in right way.

So, if you have this kind of info, you can easly check player history in a second, and from the red colour know, which teams are premade. Simple and effective. This will let you choose, would you like to play premade or not. And thats what i want to know before game starts !!

Its a really hard question. You can say, that premade teams are unfair and they should put 'premade' somewhere in the game title, but lets face it.. those games will just not fill in any reasonable time.

I believe most people do this not for stat whoring (its not that much of a win/loss ratio issue, more like a games played issue), but simply because they would like to play with their friends.

An unfortunate sideeffect really, that playing with friends possibly even on ventrillo gives you a rather big advantage over random teams. This edge could be significantly reduced by having in-game voice chat, as that would give people speaking a common language the ability to coordinate in a similarly effective manner ad-hoc, without the need to join voice comm servers before each game.

We will see how the improvements in todays patch will change this, but personally i dont think much will change until the game gets voice chat added to it.

I don't think voice chat would help here much. First of all, it will be just margin of player, who would use this (mic "problems"). Beside, for most people, english isn't main language (eg. for me), and the truth is... I never literally spoke english. Maybe few years ago, when I had english in school i said couple sentences to my teacher, but since then, I'm writing, not speaking. So it would be huge problem for me, same as for most of people (you have to remember, it's international game). Beside, as we said earlier, premade is all about tactics. If bunch of random players playing versus premade, they will ALWAYS have disadvantage, because they don't know each other and they don't play each other game by game, to get to perfection. So vioce chat won't help much if you don't know people you playing with.

Like I said many times before, it's NOTHING WRONG with premades !! I just want to have a choise to play premade or not. It's not so hard for GPG/StarDock to implement in-game player history, especially based on HTML (GPG makes modified exe file with new lobby feature, SD makes players history page, which loads in this special ingame window).

It's really not funny when you are losing 90% games, where you can do nothing about, because other premade team just like to kick random assess. For people, who are saying how equal chances are with random team i have one thought. Try to play few games in random team vs good premade teams (there are a lot of them right now), and then after 5-10 losses in a row, tell me the game was funny for you. Sure you can win random vs premade, but you have to be VERY lucky to get great random teammates and not too good premade team. It's like maybe 1/10 to 1/20 games chance.

This whole post and those supporting it boils down to you not wanting to be TOO challenged. You have, in your head, some weird and incorrect idea that you should only lose a certain amount and under certain circumstances. This is ridiculous. You either win or you lose. Put the blame on yourself.

But, ironically, the premades are doing the same. They won't notify the randoms they want to stomp because they too don't want to be too challenged.

Quoting InfiniteVengeance,

reply 6

But, ironically, the premades are doing the same. They won't notify the randoms they want to stomp because they too don't want to be too challenged.

Actually I'd say its probably a mix of not wanting to be challenged and not wanting to sit around waiting. Telling pubs that you are premade scares them away (rightfully so). There just aren't that many premade teams who are actively looking for other premade games (partially frustrated by the lack of premade teams identifying themselves, seems like it might be a chicken and egg tipping point type of thing).

Okay... I have a few thoughts on this myself. I play games with two friends, we play 3 on 3s together in Custom... I guess that makes us a "premade", and whenever anyone figures out that we are a "premade", they instantly leave. We are CASUAL gamers, and we often lose our games, but people seem to think that "premade" means we are gonna smear them across the floor. So we don't tell anyone because we just want to play the game instead of having everyone leave. It's pretty retarded.

Quoting germ0nik,

reply 25

As stated above in various different fashions, the problem with premades is that voice chat and coordination from playing together in the past will give you a very good chance of smashing any random put together team, and in particular, any new players. This is extremely demoralising for anyone, and will make the game bland fast.

Here is what I worry about happening.

New player decides to start playing custom games.

New player gets roflstomped by premades 80% of those games.

New player decides to quit custom games and go to Pantheon/Skirmish.

New player finds Pantheon/Skirmish still lacking in functionality and offer mostly 2v2 only.

New player quits DG, and goes to play Halo 3, with its semi-functional ladder system.

Good post. Agree with the OP and this post. I've basically given up on custom games.

Ok if you want to play with your firends

Quoting RocketWidget,

reply 8

OK if you want to play with your friends why not play against them? With a few randoms on each team?

I think a randomise teams default option on custom games is essential because of this behaviour by a few groups of people spoiling the game for many others. One thing I noticed is alot of these premade team random stomp/rapers have a DOTA flavour about them. Is this a behaviour that is migrating from that game maybe?

Do U like pain ? Nope ? But there R alot of people that likes it. Same here. U think this is hilarious and some people think it's amazing.

Quoting Blitz64,

reply 6

I sometimes look up the host's name on the website http://pantheon.demigodthegame.com/.

then look at his gamelist, if he's playing with the same people, then it's premade and then I just quit.

Trouble is demigod often crashes when you alt tab. Then sometimes you can't log back in for about 20 mins. Which is a pain.

The short term answer is only host your custom games, never join an existing one. If it becomes apparent you have one of these bad teams in your game, end the game early so it doens't get saved and they don't get their stats padded. Of course if everyone does this there will be many half full games tjhat never start and many games will never finish.

I might have to start writing a list of these premade 'rape team' players and avoid them. Would be handy if there was a reputaion system in the game that would do this for me.

Even worse you normally don't even get a 'gg' out of these teams at the end of a game.

I had a fun experience tonight. I played against weeboi, rleo, and kfunguy. It became obvious towards the end of the game that they were a premade and my teammates had two kills between the two of them about 20 minutes in, versus 13 or so combined on the other team. I conceded, my partners did not, and the game drudged on. I called out the other team for beating up on randoms and they called me a nigger.

So... I'm all for finding a way to end the premade nonsense. The simplest solution seems like it's already going to be implemented though, and that's making stats/ranking visible next to your name.

It bothers me that I can't screen my own partners to make sure we stand a chance. It doesn't really matter to me that the players know each other, it matters to me that the teams are stacked. If I see three people with 70% win rates after 100 games on one team and two of my allies have 20% win rates or only a dozen games played, then I'm going to ask them to shuffle teams. I they don't, they can find someone else to play with. Getting games may be hard for premades but it's easy when you're solo, I can find greener pastures any time I know to look for them.

As for this guy, if he and his buddies really do have average win rates, then I won't hesistate to play them with newer partners. I'll gladly fight casual premades because again, it's not about them knowing each other, it's about having a fun game.

For anyone who says I should challenge myself, I say that the premades should challenge themselves for a change. I don't see why it's a one-way street.

i like to play in premade cause i lost so many times cause of damn noobs in my team. even if i write PRO in the game´s title or ADVANCED, they will join for sure. people with 11 games played and 3 wins for example.

i dont want to loose cause of others playing shit and dont even listen to what i tell them in chat.

i tell them in chat not to fight alone vs 3, not to buy priests as soon as possible and not to get a kill no matter what.

i just hate it if they dont listen at all and i am going down cause of them.

well, i play with randoms too, but i am always going to check their stats first. but even this cant tell if they are good or not in some cases.

it would partially solve the problem if there would be some kind of statistics INGAME to let everyone see how good the others are.

sure, i could check the pantheon page, but on the one hand its damn slow and on the other hand i would have to play in windowed mode, cause the game crashes with alt+tab most of the time.

The most fun games to me are pre-made vs pre-made. My friends and I always try to join a half full hosted game in hopes of getting this setup.

If you don't want any chance to play against premades then play skirmish or pantheon. I think most people understand that this is just part of custom matches.

I'm in a clan and play on a premade team more often than not, and usually the reason for us not telling our opponents that we are premade is because they'll leave. When we get 6 people online though we usually are just content to do 3v3's by ourselves for a while untill someone's logs off. We do 2v2's sometimes too but those just feel small.

It would be pretty epic if there was an official built in pre-made team skirmish bracket kinda like halo or dawn of war. Even if it just tracks each person's individual level rather than tracking the whole clan/team...either would be cool. You premade haters would see a lot less of us in custom and I think everyone would be happier.

put premade team skirmish in 1.2?? or is it already planned to be included?

At this point it's becoming harder and harder for me to get anywhere... The games I join are either obviously premades, or playing with shitty settings. For example, a Regulus who was hosting said he played with high strength towers, low strength creeps, high gold and fast creeps because it was "more fun" and said that it didn't give him any advantage over other DGs... riiiiiiight. It's just getting annoying when I have to choose between playing a game against people who will crush me or playing a game with shitty settings.

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A few thoughts about premade