This seemed fast, although I’m sure for some of you it didn’t come fast enough. Respawn has taken back an earlier decision and is bringing back playlists, including the Capture The Flag playlist to Titanfall’s online modes.
As Respawn explained before, they decided to take CTF out because people were not really playing the mode, and consequently, matches were hard to find. It turns out there were less than 1 % of players using it, and yet, their decision to remove it was very, very unpopular.
Respawn took the time to explain, not just the decision to remove CTF, but how they went about online matchmaking in the game in general. The good news is that the Azure servers were put to good use building private servers for fans on the fly. People asking for server browsers should know that the tasks associated with running those programs are completely handled in the cloud.
The bad news is many of Respawn’s choices regarding how online play should work fell apart in practice. Among other things, they wanted the system to be set up for players to match up based on skill, but finding perfect matches with the same skill levels proved untenable. Things turned out this way, even when they accounted for allowing lopsided matches when those weren’t available. The system was also set up that it tied up players in low population regions from getting matches, and of course they couldn’t manually find them.
For now, Respawn is bringing back playlists, including Capture the Flag, and pledging to make more changes on the backend to improve searches.
However, they’re making more radical changes than that. They’re adding in rebalancing for teams, so that lopsided matches like 6 versus 4 are evened out to 5 versus 5. There’s a lot more, but as you can imagine, this above change alone can make or break Titanfall’s online experience. We’ll keep you up to date on how the fans react to this one, but for now, you can read Respawn’s arguments here.
TItanfall is available now on PC, Xbox 360, and Xbox One.
