Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - General Multiplayer Matchmaking and Ranked Games

Hey guys,

after i saw the Videos of Dragon Commander i had to order it instantly. Its just an amazing game. But after i finished the Singleplayer Kampagne, i am a little bit disappointed.

I was looking forward to do ranked games against People with the same skilllevel. I Thought there would be a matchmaking System where i can say i want to play a ranked game and the system automaticly searches for a Player to fight against. Instead there are abot 5 games...4 are full and the 5th game i am kicked out. I have to wait up to 30 minutes to play a game. And mostly no ranked games!

Am i doing something wrong or was the description of the videos i saw where it was told "u will be able to fight against Players with same Skillevel in ranked games" wrong?

I like the idea of ranked games very much and if u can only do ranked games like this without a working matchmaking system this is a hard fail for me and i would not have preordered the game and payed 40 Euro for it.

Pls help me and tell me if it is my fault and what to do...

Currently I'm getting 6 lobbies, 1 a ladder skirmish with a slot open and 1 a multiplayer campaign with 3 slots open.

Maybe most people are still focused on the single player campaign.

I see a few reasons for the small number of multiplayer lobbies:

One: I have read that people who ordered from GOG.COM do NOT have online multiplayer, only lan and larian is working to fix that. That way we will see alot more people.

two: this game was SEVERELY underadvertised. I feel I crossed this game by luck a year or two ago when I was looking up larian studios after playing Divinity 2, but other then that first teaser trailer I don't think I would have seen anything else about it unless I specifically looked for it until a month ago when ForceSC2strategy on youtube talked about it.

Three: closed minded viewers. Most of the videos I seen about dragon commander have comments like "As soon as I heard dragon with a jet pack, I stopped the video." or "mixing genre's never work." and several other responses. I think they need to give this game a chance. I find that this game is very well done with a lot of really impressive aspects and deserves a lot more attention. (Angryjoeshow is going to be releasing a video review later according to his twitter so that might help!

I've seen numerous valid reviews of the game, such as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dZzIsS89gE ...

But yeah, the fact that GOG does not have online match making for multiplayer is honestly daunting.

i on the other hand think that there was enough advertising. from pcgamemagazines,emails,youtube,twitch over kickstarter,pcgameonlinemagazines,gog,steam to known youtube channels,shoutcasters and various clans there was nowhere i didnt hear about it at least once. and i dont look out for new games at all. even in my clan forum there was a thread about it.
they got multiplayer previews,singleplayer,videos with views into the studio and so on. everything was perfect from that end.

and i furthermore think that the critical mass of people was there to get the multiplayer started big time. the game was balanced, gameplay was good, control was there, micro was good, there was a lot to get better at and the options to set up matches the way you want were also there. this definitely had the potential to start good and after that attract a lot more players even. this was also perfect.

two big failures however were made that destroyed it. and those were outside of the game itself.
first one was to split the MP community into 3 (!) parts by leaving the gog and larianvault users out to dry with no way to play MP (some people just dont want steam).
and the second one was introducing patches too fast that were not tested and made matters worse for a couple of people while not even getting a simultanious distribution.
while gog is on 1.0.18.0 (which is having crash bugs and sp hangups - meaning the last stable version is release 1.0.10.0), the vault version has its last stable version at 1.0.20.0 and steam is automatically on 1.0.27.0 like it or not until you roll back the changes manually.
meaning they effectively broke the Multiplayer community into 3+ pieces by two different mechanics of which only ONE piece has a multiplayer lobby that on top of it all exclusively shows only their third of the MP-players!


just an example here... we have 2 people left in our clan to hang on to dragon commander mp.
one on gog and one on larian and one had to litterally work for 5+ hours to even get the game to install (because of vault-version installation problems) and after the gog version was used to copy the missing files to the vault version we had to find a patch which would allow the two versions to even play together. btw it was discovered that you could use the vault patch 1.0.20.0 for the gog version without hangups. of course there is still the little problem that you need to set up your internet router before you can even use the connect-to-ip setting.

so it took about two evenings after work, a own running fileserver, access to the home router and enough knowledge to edit .bin files to even be able to play together with 2 people. and that without even having access to a lobby/browser afterwards... JUST because we bought the game at different vendors! one can imagine that people dont like to go thru that kind of trouble right after they found out that they got ripped off because they didnt buy from steam.
the fault is definitely NOT that there wasnt enough advertisement or customers.
this right here is why multiplayer is so dead that even steam version users (the only ones supplied with a lobby) come into the forum to rant about empty lists.

excuse yourselfs for false advertising and the faults made, build a singular lobby and create a workaround fast for gog/vault like a webpage that gives out the information of a steam client so that all can play together (this can be done within a week, the ui code is there), create one tested patch every once in a while that gets distributed simultaniously (of course it requires planing but it is doable) and maybe just maybe the customers that got fooled will come back when they get notified by the friends that waited till the final lobby+version because of the fast excuse and the workaround.
dont think this will be done though for a couple of reasons.
this is so sad. this was such a good game and such a huge chance.

Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Ok so i have to be lucky that i got the steam version of the game...didnt know that.

But in fact i am right...the lobby that only works for steam users is the only way to play mp...so if i look at it in a realistic way the ranked games can be faced in many ways and the ladder does not really count. Cause if i can only play ranked games in this lobby without matchmaking i can play 10 games a day versus my friends which are not as good as me or even let me win the games and i automaticly get on top of the ladder within a week. That�s not what i call a ranked game like it was told in the advertising of the game.


But beside this i can say that i have to agree to Alastar that i havent seen that much advertising. I myself saw it in a gaming magazine and on steam about a week ago. And are there so many users that bought the game on gog or larian? I mean steam is one of the strongest distributers of games...so if i say that there are 10.000 Users that bought the game on steam...and i can only find about 5 games with 4 players there are only 0,2% of all users playing multiplayer???????? The Singleplayer campagne is very nice i think...but i needed about 8 hours to finish it and i am not the fastest gamer!!!

I hope they work on these Problems fast cause i think that the game has great potential in multiplayer as most test videos told before and with a working matchmaking system it would be awesome to climb the ladder and become one of the best dragon commanders.



P.S.: Thanks Raze for the Info about the number of lobbys u get....so i can see that i am not the only one with such few games to join.

Or a direct connection.

....which still needs the same game version and port forwarding UDP 23232 (which I had to figure out with a protocol analyzer software)


You guys do realize this is like selling your game which I'll say is hypothetically Starcraft at full-price while not giving access to Battle.NET.

"You can play with your friends and over the internet via Hamachi, but you can't access the actual community and random hosting people, only people you actually know".
Larian screwed this one up really badly this time.

I have to agree to Zhuinden...even as a steam user the multiplayer experience is very disappointing. It takes much too long to find a working game, and if u have one the risk is high that someone crashes or leaves the game in the middle of the game. The ranks are useless cause if u leave a ranked game u dont get any reward or punishment, and if u want to level u just have to play with friends till u are number 1 in the list!

Without a working matchmaking system the mp part is useless and i regret spending fuckin 40 Euro in this game for a Singleplayer Kampagne i finished after 2 days. The game has so much potential and its vasted.

Maybe they can integrate a matchmaking system with a patch...i dont know...but for now the game is a huge disappointment to me.