The New World team discusses service improvements, matchmaking development and challenges, requests like cross-world Outpost Rush, and more on the way in Season 4.
The latest Forged in Aeternum features Kyle Richter, software development manager for the Azoth backend team, engineers Matthew Woo and Kenny Doyle, and QA engineer Quynn Carter. They discuss the latest in these service improvements what’s happening now, and what might be a bit further off.
A core feature in the entire discussion is matchmaking. The bones of the matchmaking feature in general are in place, with subsequent improvements, and more on the way. They want to offer more flexibility to be able to allow for a number of varied experiences. The overall positive response to matchmaking so far is one reason why the team is looking ahead to create further cross-world features.
In this talk, they take us back to the creation and challenges behind the initial implementation of cross-world Outpost Rush, and the data it provided that is fueling future development. After building the infrastructure and making sure the capabilities of OPR worked cross-server in a smoother design. Later, they improved the matchmaking system and used things like player attributes and group characteristics to inform matchmaking and provide a better, more fun team composition. The improved matchmaking speed is something the team acknowledges as a positive when it comes to OPR and why they are continuing to focus on providing these consistently requested features.
In previous developers talks, they posed questions to the community about what they want to see as cross-world experiences, and some of the popular suggestions were Expeditions and Arenas, which are now Season 4 targets.
This isn't the limit, though, because they're also discussing how the functionality can be used in even more ways.
With this in mind, the team is asking the community to name some pain points in finding groups, and what they’d like to see to improve them. These questions will surely be addressed in a future video.
