CTF will return to Titanfall PC following player complaints
"It's obvious that lots of people were upset."
Titanfall developer Respawn is adding CTF back to the PC game's public playlist, following the outcry about it and Pilot Hunter mode being removed from all except Private Matches and the odd randomised Variety mode.
Respawn explained on its dev blog that less than one per cent of players were even trying to play CTF, which left those unfortunate souls sitting in lobbies for several minutes on end. Since this is a crappy experience, Respawn figured cutting it would filter players into more convenient modes. Players did not take kindly to this option being removed.
"It's obvious that lots of people were upset - far more than the player counts on the removed modes led us to believe," the developer said.
Respawn offered a very detailed account of how matchmaking works, but ultimately decided that to solve the problem of not enough people playing CTF it's going to widen searches after a set period of time to include neighboring continents. "This means you might end up in a game with a much higher ping than you're used to, but as players pointed out; playing is preferred to not playing at all," the developer said.
Additionally, Respawn is working on making the connection process more transparent, so you can see when people are trying to enter a lobby. "Lobbies will show 'Connecting...' on player slots when players are joining a match to avoid the misconception that your game may not fill up, causing you or other players to leave prematurely," the developer explained. "We know no one wants to play a 3v6 round."
Respawn is also working on fine-tuning its matchmaking process for balance, and will offer some tweaks to recalibrate teams at the last minute. "We're also adding a last resort measure to re-balance lobbies that have been constructed from disparate skill groups or couldn't be balanced in time by matchmaking. We're going to start rebalancing teams during the lobby countdown if they're lopsided. 6v4 matches will balance to 5v5, and we'll shuffle players so that teams have even skill."
