How come you don't play ladder?

I can't play very much ladder because there are no opponents. Ban Blodir for not searching ladder.

Lack of people playing

Less than 2 minute game-ending strategies such as intie transport rush, first bomber, etc

Learning build orders for every map is too time-consuming

Other games are more fun than being stressed out all the time like in FAF

Getting map gen in any form is awful because the maps are 90% of the time quite poor in quality and redundancy

I don't play ladder because I can't just randomly queue or I will never get a game. I literally need to pm people to schedule ladder matches like they are dates just so I can get a game and it's just too much effort.

A lot of relevant thoughts from this thread still persist:

https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13006

@archsimkat said in How come you don't play ladder?:

I don't play ladder because I can't just randomly queue or I will never get a game. I literally need to pm people to schedule ladder matches like they are dates just so I can get a game and it's just too much effort.

Java client killed ladder since it's impossible to know when you can get a game. There needs to be an indicator like the python client had. https://forum.faforever.com/topic/5585/matchmaker-notification-indicator

I stopped playing ladder because it wasn’t fun for me.
The main reason for this is most games I played seemed to just about who can build the most t1 tank spam. The lack of variety at the ranks Id play at (c.800 when I stopped) meant I could find more variety in a game of astro craters, while teamgames are also usually less stressful since you typically only have a couple if parts of a map and units to focus on rather than needing to try and manage everything yourself. Being freed up from some of the micromanagement allows for more fun for me, since Im more able to be rewarded or punished for strategic decisions I make.

@morax Will give it time to extrapolate the data from that post as well. Thanks.

Still looking into more recent causes if they still persist.

It's no fun. I prefer to have other people to play around and piss off enemies by influencing "other" lanes instead of mine.

long waiting times to get an opponent
inability to watch replay while searching ladder
Both of these combined means that i can't make ladder streams unless i play some other game while wait for ladder.

@thewheelie He could be your opponent!

way more stressful and attention demanding, micro heavy in beginning with all the manual reclaiming and raiding/reacting to, and having to memorize and flawlessly execute build orders for all the maps or lose before it even started

teamgames provide stability for game to get played to its fuller potential unless you are a pro that can do all of this solo while having fun doing it, it kind of seems you need to have "minimum mastery over the game" to be able to enjoy 1v1, and it seems pretty high

or maybe I'm just bad at the game, that's more likely it

My current experience is I'm a 800~900 rated on the global ladder(600+ games) and around 500-600 on 4v4 TMM(<20 games).

Personal de-motivators for playing matchmaker (4v4 is my go-to) is:

• relatively long queue times (biggest factor)
• while the 'expanding map pool per rank' idea is great, I think the maps chosen for lower-ranks aren't great
• the ambiguity of it being a "ranked" or "casual" lobby is in a sense off putting (I see it as ranked, and am personally a casual player, so another negative for me)

What I see might be an issue for other, in particular new players:

• in general, the matchmaker in-client looks very bad UI/UX-side (lack of flow/direction)
• presence of the rating system (that is, it being visible) might be even more off putting to those who are straight-casuals, and aren't looking for strict gameplay

For me, it is because I hate little maps that are too intense since minute 1.
I prefer bigger maps, don't want to be rushed in min 3 and lost my hydro and basically the game

4v4 tmm is faster than lobbysim, has decent mirror balance, and nice variety of maps to suit different players. All my FAF friends play tmm rather than making lobbies now and its pretty fun.

I dont play much 1v1 because its kinda intimidating, i feel the early game is quite BO dependant and sweaty and i'm just not very good at that.

I don't play 2v2 at all because I got really overrated when it came out and played a bunch of matches in a row where it was me and 3 other top tourney players in the same game, whoever got me on their team just lost brutally and i felt real bad for them.