Matchmaking and Multiplayer update to the community

Hello, Extinction Elites,

What a week! Since launching Second Extinction into Early Access we’ve been overwhelmed with all the positive response and feedback to our little Dino Murder Simulator. We couldn’t be happier with the love you have shown us. But we also wanted to address some of the feedback you’ve shared directly, and let you know about our plans for the coming weeks.

We have noticed a few of you raising some questions and issues around both matchmaking and forming a party in multiplayer. We wanted to let you know that you’ve been heard! On top of exploring potential bugs we wanted to clarify how things should work.

With matchmaking there are a few things to highlight. We are looking into why some of you are struggling to find matches but don’t have any firm leads as of yet. On launch day and on one other occasion Playfab did encounter some downtime and this would have blocked some of you from finding matches. Playfab is a piece of middleware that provides us online player accounts and matchmaking.

Our matchmaking takes a simple approach; everyone can be matched with anyone else but it’s sorted by location and by player level. We’re looking to experiment with removing player level entirely but will update you if and when this gets rolled out to live.

Below we describe the two ways in the Frontend to matchmake with players in Second Extinction;

Lobby screen: “Find Party” will try to search for any group of players that are currently also looking for a group.

• The player gets added to a party in deployment (that is looking for a random player)
• The player joins a party in the lobby screen (that was also looking for a party)

Deployment screen (after mission select). “Find Random Player” will open up your lobby for other players.

• Another player will join your party (that was looking for a party or also in deployment looking for a random player)
• You join another party also in deployment.
• (note that for each result you will not change mission type)

Finally, we want to let you know that we have a long-term goal of improving both the flow and the messaging to make it clearer what you can and should do in different circumstances to make Matchmaking easier overall.

Whilst talking about matchmaking we should also mention Hot Joining. We only allow this option for players who have been in a party and then for whatever reason left the game. Selecting the option “Re-join last session” will allow you to sync up with your party assuming the mission is still going. We have also improved a bug (see the hotfix, patch 0.1.0.1) with hot-fixing that was losing people all or most of their experience points and materials on rejoining a session, with the patch, this will be improved but is still not 100% correct and needs further work.

With regards to the occasions where you are not able to form a party of 3 we believe this is primarily down to network connectivity errors on the player side. Having said that we have one of our multiplayer engineers investigating right now if there is anything we can also do on the game side. As a peer-to-peer game, if you or one of your party has low bandwidth then that will cause odd behavior in the game (dumb or popping enemies) but also can block both the finding of matches or direct team joining.

We recommend players try inviting people one at a time, if it fails instantly you know it is the host or that person who is having connection issues. You can also try rotating the host amongst the players. We will be looking into what messaging we can add to help clarify what is happening at different stages.

We hope you find this write-up useful and appreciate the feedback. Keep it coming!

P.S: Rosy sends her regards. Her baby is running dry, and she’s gotta reload!

Cheers,

Prezzi. G