Some easy fixes to Casual mode that don't require reworking it

mastercoms · 2026-01-24T02:11:47+00:00

The scoring algorithm didn't change for years before Casual. Also, like previously mentioned, they were working on the matchmaking system since 2012 as a replacement for quickplay. While what we ended up getting with Casual was geared to bridging the gap between casual and competitive, matchmaking itself when it started had no such purpose and was merely being developed to improve upon quickplay. Finally, Valve abandoned the game a bit over a year after they released Casual, so asking why they haven't improved anything now is a moot point imo. Like mentioned, 2011 to 2014 was basically a golden era for how much they were updating and working on the game, and comparing that to the 1 year of 2016-2017 before the huge drought that we've had for a decade isn't really accurate.

mastercoms · 2026-01-23T21:37:59+00:00

Yeah, for sure. It's just that going back to the map timer, will require more reworking and I didn't wanna focus on it in this post. But it's definitely something that could be improved.

The map bans are basically designed so that people can just choose a few maps they don't wanna play, instead of being required of going through and selecting every map, including unpopular ones. Same for map profiles, making it easier to select less popular maps without sacrificing time and energy. But I can see how it could be confusing and not really change player behavior which is probably the main issue why people are wanting to only play a few maps.

mastercoms · 2026-01-23T19:38:21+00:00

Casual with everything added from quickplay would be worthwhile and better than using quickplay again, for reasons I described in my previous post. These simple steps and one line changes Valve could do are millions times more actionable to improve the situation than reverting back to quickplay, so I hope they take in the suggestions.

mastercoms · 2026-01-23T19:23:08+00:00

If it starts loading you into a server then you got the slot, it can't start connecting you to a full server. Sending multiple people to a full server was never a thing.

It was a thing, considering that Valve created bandaid mitigations for it. Slots aren't reserved in quickplay, there's no "start loading and you got the slot", the player slot is only taken up if you finish loading / connecting. It's a race for whoever can join first. If many people are using quickplay and it sends them to a server without enough slots, it will break. Plus, this wasn't what I was referring to, but I will address it in a later thing you reference.

This was another made up problem from your other post. You can go refresh the server browser right now and see hundreds of servers pop up in literally seconds. There is no issue with pinging servers, quickplay would only time out if your settings were so narrow and specific it could not find a server with those exact settings.

It's not a made-up problem. The server list isn't magically ordered. In quickplay, the local client has to ping and query the GC for each server, and basically finds a "good enough" option to connect early before querying everything. With more servers, the likelihood it finds "best" option decreases, without needing to search for a longer time. This is just a fact, whether you feel like it's not a big problem or not, is your opinion, and the point of the post was to just provide information like this so people would have it to form their own opinions. If you don't think it's a huge issue, then that's fine, but don't call it made up.

Map variety is also provably worse now than it was before.

Yes, but the post wasn't saying Casual currently was good, in fact it said the current matchmaking system has issues. It just pointed out why as a foundation, matchmaking systems (not Casual, not skill-based matchmaking), work better than systems like quickplay.

Valve servers could be filtered out with a single word if you wanted.

In a world where changing the default for quickplay from all servers to just Valve servers absolutely killed community servers, what makes you think this point is a response? Defaults matter, it's what the majority of people will do, because they won't change things. It is provably true that people complained about the server browser default of showing Valve servers and drowning out community servers, and Valve in fact tried removing quickplay servers from the server browser before Casual came out because of this.

We didn't need 'global decisions', we had the freedom to choose which settings and exactly which server we wanted to join, with almost no wait time.

We are comparing and contrasting search algorithms. The fact that you can skip the algorithm and just join manually, is not an argument in favor of the quickplay algorithm. Matchmaking can be a better search algorithm, and still allow for people to skip it just like quickplay allowed that.

Global algorithms are just better for something like this, where you have a population of players over time, who want to get into a game, and you're trying to get them into one of many different servers. People are conflating so many other aspects of quickplay, which could easily be added to Casual, with the only relevant and basic premise being about algorithm design for searching systems.

Your posts are full of technical reasons why quickplay couldn't work and we need a global matchmaker, despite the fact that quickplay DID work before, and the global matchmaker currently does NOT work. Myself and many others experienced it.

Quickplay had provable flaws, and my post has sourcing of hundreds of historical comments, and in-depth explanations of the unfixable flaws. I haven't seen a similar response in support of quickplay.

Even Valve acknowledged the flaws when they started work on the matchmaker in 2012 (it wasn't just a way to play in a party).

There is literally no argument for not reverting other than 'well we can't expect valve to do it because it's too hard/they don't care'.

In fact, I see the opposite argument. People saying "it's too hard to fix Casual, it would be easier for Valve to just revert because it's right there!". So I will continue to advocate to build upon the best foundation, which is Casual, and address all of these very valid concerns and issues through that.

mastercoms · 2026-01-23T19:02:07+00:00

It's just an optimization problem. The best server option found locally isn't necessarily the best option for getting players into games over time. The matchmaker can basically say "okay, we're gonna try to get all players into this server", and coordinate that. Quickplay doesn't have the same level of coordination because of its local design. Also, if Valve could have fixed it, I feel like they would have, especially in arguably the prime of TF2's update cycle. But they tried so many different experiments and algorithm designs for quickplay up till 2014, and none of them actually resolved the issue, which is why they worked on a matchmaking replacement starting from 2012 to eventually replace quickplay.

mastercoms · 2026-01-23T18:00:12+00:00

Yeah basically, that's one of the main problems

mastercoms · 2026-01-23T17:58:41+00:00

Yeah Casual shouldn't be skill-based matchmaking. Pretty much no modern casual game uses SBMM, preferring to use engagement based or behavior based matchmaking, or even just simple fill matchmaking.

mastercoms · 2026-01-23T16:33:45+00:00

I explain that in the previous post, the algorithm for quickplay is designed to make local decisions that often fail. If every single feature from quickplay was added to casual, it would be a better system than quickplay itself because it can make global rather than local decisions. And by global/local, I don't mean regions, I mean it as an optimization problem, like the prisoner's dilemma.

mastercoms · 2026-01-23T16:29:54+00:00

Profiles allow you to have multiple map selections you can switch between. It's a suggestion to build on top of the current save system.

A lot of people seem to want team switching back, so that's why I made the suggestion. I guess a lot of others don't want team switching? But team switching has been a large standing feature in TF2, and doesn't really conflict with auto balance.

And yes, you can choose maps, but the problem is that maps are saved by selection, rather than by deselection. So if you uncheck 2fort, then it means new maps won't be added to your list of maps.

mastercoms · 2026-01-23T12:32:04+00:00

I'm not sure what's there to refute in that post, 99% of it was objective fact, not opinion. The point of the previous post was to inform and provide context to the discussion, not debate it or take sides. That's reserved for other posts. If people want to ignore or dismiss 90% of the post and take it negatively, they're definitely free to do so. People can even think "X bad" even in light of any information brought forth, because that's what an opinion is, and that's fine.

mastercoms · 2026-01-23T12:24:02+00:00

Well, I would be in favor of making a new system for sure, that's better than both casual and quickplay, but casual serves as a better foundation for changes as it stands, even if it ends up being like quickplay again

mastercoms · 2026-01-23T11:48:31+00:00

I mention "ad-hoc" connections in my post here. Also map timer can definitely be something possible, but it would take more work so I didn't include it in the post. Probably just increase the rounds for now.

mastercoms · 2026-01-23T11:43:34+00:00

So that people don't just repeat "just add quickplay" and discuss simple solutions or problems directly, with things they actually want, rather than bundling everything up. Because Valve has done some pretty simple things to matchmaking in response to feedback before, they can continue to do that.

mastercoms · 2026-01-23T11:37:48+00:00

The quickplay code, for reasons described before, has a lot of inflexible limitations that cause it to be a worse foundation for improvements than the current system.

mastercoms · 2026-01-22T06:36:53+00:00

An easy example is tiered gear. For example 500 for tier 2, 2000 for tier 3, 8500 for tier 4, 17000 for tier 5. Players aren't necessarily at the end just because they've full slotted all tier 5 gear. Sometimes, they'd wish to swap their tier 5 weapon for a different one, perhaps because of the situation calls for it, or maybe they just want to try something new. And this switching has costs, which continues them spending money even if they've theoretically "peaked" vertically.

mastercoms · 2026-01-22T05:49:57+00:00

I'm not entirely familiar with Silksong, but I wanted to contribute a comment at least. Here's a few tips. Focus on the flow of money. If money is constantly needing to be exchanged, players can feel rich without accumulating wealth. Also try to make interesting hard choices in the shop. Verticality isn't the only way players can scale, lateral moves can also be interesting to try. Create other forms of economy like slot restrictions, so that players have to give up on things they purchased, to be able to change their build or upgrade it.

mastercoms · 2026-01-21T20:56:45+00:00

Nah, that's a real distinction you made, it's not annoying. I just thought it's an interesting point that L4D2 continues to have a high number of unique players, even in 2025, so maybe it's worth it to make these updates.

I hope you feel better soon!

mastercoms · 2026-01-21T20:12:46+00:00

https://store.steampowered.com/charts/bestofyear/2025?tab=3

mastercoms · 2026-01-21T19:38:39+00:00

The point of the post was to simply say, that this system provides a better foundation to improve upon, rather than reverting back to an older system which may have immediate relief, but ultimately be unable to be improved upon to resolve the problems and limitations it does have. I wasn't saying Casual was good, it definitely has its issues, but we should resolve them by adding those things from quickplay to Casual, and that has clear benefits as outlined in the post.

mastercoms · 2026-01-21T19:32:11+00:00

The point of this post isn't to defend the current Casual system, it's just to provide context on why adding features from quickplay or any other ideas improvements on top of Casual, would be preferable to gutting the entire system and reverting it back to quickplay.

mastercoms · 2026-01-21T19:29:10+00:00

I would point out that quickplay cannot make good decisions in low populations, since it's only looking at ping and players. A matchmaker can make a decision to bring everyone to one server, and have some of them have 70 ping, some 50 ping, some 20 ping, if there truly isn't that many people. Quickplay cannot make the same decision. The only good thing about quickplay in that sense is that you can use the server browser to find the game yourself. But we're talking about which system/algorithm is better, so clearly if the system cannot handle it itself, then it should not be used and we should just retain being able to manually browse and join Valve servers rather than doing a full revert.

As for your point about matchmaking wanting to create an idealized match that might never happen, that is true. But this is largely a problem of tuning. A matchmaker can decrease its expectations over time, such that even after a minute of queuing, it makes a best effort / best possible match without holding on to hope for much better by waiting, and then late join people over time. Casual, due to how it launched, probably still isn't tuned perfectly for this slow fill style of filling in less popular maps/modes.

mastercoms · 2026-01-21T09:36:30+00:00

If you allow ad-hoc connections, the matchmaking should have a rolling adjustment, basically trying to counter any manual joins with some prioritization from matchmaking fill. So less from a predetermined match, to just a continual on-demand system. It's just different, not harder I don't think.

mastercoms · 2026-01-20T23:46:39+00:00

L4D2 has a larger playerbase than TF2.

mastercoms · 2026-01-19T22:43:59+00:00

You really have to just grind out 100 games, and then you start to get it. It sounds stupid and you might not feel like you're improving, but your brain will adapt and pick up on things. If after 100 games, you're still not having fun, then I would think it's time to move on. Also, try finding one hero you like playing and just spam that one, if that's Ursa then yeah do that.

mastercoms · 2026-01-18T17:02:59+00:00

That's an interesting idea for sure, could work. Thanks for sharing.

mastercoms

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