Racketeer Online FG matchfinder thread!

[ZenErik]

I mean, I can hop on PSN any time and get beat up by a stranger for an hour.

Yea. That's usually how it goes whenever I try a fighter online.

[cha cha]

for me personally, it's just not that easy to commit. I like that you're doing it. I like knowing that if I can make, it's there. But just life means that I'm in bed by 10 EST during the week. So if I happen to be free during that time, and happen to own the game during that time, then I can hop on. If not, then I can't.

As it happened, you started this during the holiday season, which meant my time was even more limited.

My only real complaint from the one night I did get to come would echo dsheinem's from that same night - I showed up, and played for an hour or more, yet I was basically watching some guy who none of us knew beating the heck out of everyone else. It wasn't exactly exciting for me to watch. Like dsh had said, even if I was just watching two RB members that I did know, that would at least be more interesting than watching a stranger dominate. I mean, I can hop on PSN any time and get beat up by a stranger for an hour.

The streaming thing makes no difference to me. I don't watch the stream personally. I'd just come to play.

SF4 rules, but I'd be willing to play any game that was cheap and had an active group of guys willing to play as well.

Ok from noise's post I get:

-Didn't like some random guy beating down everyone for an hour: That was a first night mess up, when inexplicably I posted up ONLY here with the PSN id, and got a friend request from that random guy 'Mr400m' that very day (never played any games yet, so he couldn't have found me randomly), I did not know everyone on RB enough to determine he was not one of you, had no idea. So all that time I figured he was someone you guys all knew, and after that night he never showed again anyways and I did better to enforce soft limits to wins and what not.
There is still the problem of the SF4 lobby backing bass ackwards. There is no ways to text chat in lobby, so I can't express rules to everyone who doesn't read this thread. PSN is ridiculously slow to bring up messaging and mass message all lobby participants, so it's hard to communicate to begin with. I can't enforce a win limit in their lobby system either, a feature that EVERY other game seems to have but this one.
None of this answers how this guy randomly FR'd my newly created PSN account made expressly for RB fight nights, on the exact night I asked people to start adding me to their list. But it happened that one time, and never since.

I have stressed ever since then, that we impose a 5 win limit for a small lobby (4 or less ppl) and a 3 win limit for larger lobbies. It was worked great since...

As far as my locals go, I was going to have them register here at one point but at the time registration was closed. If they posted here, would this make a difference? I invite them to this night so you have the diversity of playing more than just me from the host account. But if that constitutes 'watching strangers is no fun', then I can stop having dudes come out.

As far as the stream goes, I know watching it isn't exactly appealing at this point, but it serves more functions than just watching randoms online spam each other to death... If you just load up the chat and kill the video, this is a quick an easy way for everyone involved to communicate. That way if you want:
- to request we switch games
- comment on your last match
- talk shit
- demand a rematch
- to just let everyone know you are peacing out or will be back etc.
- or just chat with random people watching your matches

That is all possible with twitch's chat function. It shouldn't kill your internet to load up the chat client and not the video stream, while playing.

I hope stuff like that can be taken into consideration for the future.

@ Noise in particular- if we started an hour or so earlier (like 730pm est), would this work better for you and any other guys here that you speak to?

Did I miss anything else?

[noiseredux]

@ Noise in particular- if we started an hour or so earlier (like 730pm est), would this work better for you and any other guys here that you speak to?

honestly, it's too random to say it would change much. I generally get home around 6:30. Eat dinner, clean up. So depending what's going on that night yeah I *could* be ready as early as 7:30, but if I have to stop for gas on the way home, or run any errands after work, or have bills to pay or other chores to do after dinner... well I think you see what I mean.

My gaming time is generally the block of around 7:30 to 10 during the weeknights, but it's not a guaranteed open time. I just play it by ear.

[EvilRyu2099]

I'm just curious, when you have that schedule, why did you schedule fight nights on weekdays and not weekends?

[noiseredux]

I'm just curious, when you have that schedule, why did you schedule fight nights on weekdays and not weekends?

me? Because weekends are even less reliable. Usually I'm doing stuff with my wife on weekends, so there's plenty of Friday/Saturdays where I don't play a game at all.

[cha cha]

I'm just curious, when you have that schedule, why did you schedule fight nights on weekdays and not weekends?

me? Because weekends are even less reliable. Usually I'm doing stuff with my wife on weekends, so there's plenty of Friday/Saturdays where I don't play a game at all.

I dunno if that was also directed to me? But I am open to weekends, though my local FG meetup/tournaments happens on Saturdays, I also travel to tournaments often on weekend and lastly, I think a lot of people use weekends as their 'personal time' with families, shopping, friends and personal hobbies. I think it'd actually be harder to get people to sign up on weekends for this type of hyper-casuals.

[EvilRyu2099]

No it was directed at Noise..

[dsheinem]

cha cha as a frame of reference you should know than when we had something similar before it was pretty common for 3-6 people to show up at best, and most of them not every week. I think you're doing about as good a job as one can do, but your expectations might be a little high. I'd love if this did end up bigger/better than previous incarnations, but the fact is that this is a smallish community around retro gaming, so a big turnout for something on a recent system might not happen regularly.

Otherwise I don't see anything you need to worry about with how its run as the changes you instituted sound smart. I certainly don't think there's any animosity or anything like that, I think it is just that there isn't a lot of interest to drum up. I can't speak to the streaming stuff, as that just isn't something that appeals to me for any game of any kind with the exception of something like EVO.

All of that said, the other thing that you might consider is just having each night dedicated to one game instead of switching it up hour to hour. E.g. "Tonight from 7-10 we'll play TTT2, next week we'll play SF3 at the same time." I'm probably never gonna stick around for 3 hours, but if I know I can pop in any time in a given week's session and play a particular game, I think that would be sweet. But that's just me.

[cha cha]

No it was directed at Noise..

Ah my bad.

Any reasons in particular I haven't been able to get you to drop in on these game night yet?

[cha cha]

cha cha as a frame of reference you should know than when we had something similar before it was pretty common for 3-6 people to show up at best, and most of them not every week. I think you're doing about as good a job as one can do, but your expectations might be a little high. I'd love if this did end up bigger/better than previous incarnations, but the fact is that this is a smallish community around retro gaming, so a big turnout for something on a recent system might not happen regularly.

Otherwise I don't see anything you need to worry about with how its run as the changes you instituted sound smart. I certainly don't think there's any animosity or anything like that, I think it is just that there isn't a lot of interest to drum up. I can't speak to the streaming stuff, as that just isn't something that appeals to me for any game of any kind with the exception of something like EVO.

All of that said, the other thing that you might consider is just having each night dedicated to one game instead of switching it up hour to hour. E.g. "Tonight from 7-10 we'll play TTT2, next week we'll play SF3 at the same time." I'm probably never gonna stick around for 3 hours, but if I know I can pop in any time in a given week's session and play a particular game, I think that would be sweet. But that's just me.

Ah thanks Dsh, this is exactly the type of feedback I was looking for.

I have been kicking around the notion of just picking a game per night and sticking to it. But it is my fear that this will lead to a lot of 1-dude showing up and no other interest every other week or so, make the endeavor seemingly futile. However, yes, it is still on the table if I can figure out a good way to implement it; and just need to find better ways get a few more peeps interested.

I know it appears I am expecting too much, but I honestly only really expected 3-5 RB'ers a week. Ever since week 1, we have had exactly 2 people show up from RB each night, 1 of which usually leaving within an hour. Meaning it's just me and TSTR going on for the other 3-4 hrs until we can't play anymore.
I know this is a retro community, and I REALLY wanna implement more classic "retro" fighters in hopes of attracting more dudes from this place (so few have netplay on an even close to acceptable level). Hopefully as shit gets older (and cheaper) we can find that nice 3-5 fighters showing per night balance on a semi-regular basis.

I know this isn't exactly the largest community, but I notice a lot of dudes here like FGs, and current ones at that. I don't expect even close to all of them to show, especially on a weekly basis. I was just hoping for more than just 1 dude (TSTR) who is really interested and 5-6 dudes who are semi-interested, but not willing to really commit.

I remain hopeful that I can crack the code that make the time you sacrifice to join us worth it to you (or at least most of you).

I will keep posting new ideas any time I can, and again, thanks for the feedback guys. It helps me focus on what are important factors to getting each of you individually interested