With your 100 person example, you’d have 10 servers full of 10 people each, and nobody else would be able to join those games until those matches end. It would be like seeing all servers either completely full or completely empty in counterstrike.
So, what do you do with additional players (#101…#110)? Do you instantly put all ten of them in a new server? If you do that without considering their skill level, you cause unbalanced matches and people running to the forums to complain about it.
If you try to group players #101 through #110 by their skill, their skills level will probably not be the same for all 10 players. Let’s say you have a bell curve of 2 very good players, 6 decent players, and 2 newbies. If you separate them into those categories so that you can find other players of the same skill level to match them to, then they have to wait until more players join the matchmaking queue, or for the currently full games to finish. This results in the waiting that people are currently complaining about on the forums.
If you keep the existing teams together between matches, the players who were waiting might have to wait even longer. If you don’t keep existing teams together, then some of the people who were playing won’t get put into games right away and will have to start waiting again each time they finish a match.
In Battlefield, Counterstrike, TF2, etc., the server browser works because individual players can leave a match and a new player can fill in that spot. Games tend to be more than just 10 players, so being down one or two players on a team isn’t a dramatic disadvantage, and new people join pretty quickly. You tend to have almost-full servers most of the time, where a player can just jump right in.
Some of those games also have the ability to auto-balance teams if several players on the same team quit at once.
In Battleborn, you have in-match character levelling. Players who are lower level and fewer pieces of active gear have a dramatic disadvantage. In Counterstrike you have money to buy gear, but after a couple of quick rounds, things start to even back out because there’s a limit to the gear you can buy. In Battleborn, things don’t even out - when a player begins out-levelling you, their lead tends to compound itself because they can kill things faster and have more health than you. It only stops compounding when everyone reaches level 10 with all gear active. Usually, an unbalanced match will end before everyone gets to level 10.
Right now, the only way to join a match-in-progress in Battleborn is if you had disconnected earlier in that same match. Nobody else is currently allowed to take your spot.
If Battleborn was changed so that players could leave/join in the middle of a match, there are some questions to resolve:
- What if the person who left the match got disconnected due to internet issues and wants to come back? Reserve that spot for them if their disconnect was unexpected, and allow someone to join if they quit gracefully (i.e. using the menu)?
- What happens when one player of a pre-made group voluntarily quits a match, but wants to stay in the group for the next match?
- When someone new joins, do they get to pick a new character, or do they inherit the character of whoever left?
- Can someone leave and then immediately rejoin in order to pick a different character?
- If someone new joins, do they start at level 1, with a huge disadvantage against everyone in the game already, or should they start at the average level of the other players on their team (rounded down to prevent exploits)?
