betiko wrote:How about joining games instead of endlessly creating them? Or inviting people to join your games? Or advertising them in callouts? I don t get it.
Which game should I join? There are 6255 games waiting for players right now, and freemiums can only join up to 4. What if I choose one that doesn't fill for months? Better for me to try to find a game that is almost full before joining it, so I have a chance of playing soon instead of doing nothing. But how can I do that? There's no "sort by player's needed", and who wants to browse through 63 pages of games to find one that is almost full and has settings I'm interested in playing.
Premiums can join as many as they want, but if they join more than they want to actually play at one time, then they'll get overloaded. Better for them to wait until a game is almost full before joining, so that they can play soon, and don't get swamped with too many active games.
So it's like a giant game of chicken - all of these games sit idle that could be filled, but the system discourages joining games. This is where unlimited wait-lists could help.
Freemiums aren't the ones endlessly creating games, but I can kind of understand why people do it. Suppose you want to play on a particular map where you care about some of the settings, but not about others. You don't know what other people will want to play, so it makes some sense to create a bunch of slightly different games and see which ones get filled. But this just adds to the problem, because there's no way for people to indicate which games they would be willing to play. This is where a game matchmaker could help.
Not everyone has a large group of friends here, or wants to play with the same people over and over. Not everyone goes to the forums, and even so, how is creating a game not a callout for people to join? These things are available, but they apparently aren't popular enough options to solve the problem. These are the problems that my suggestions should fix.