After removing Capture the Flag and Pilot Hunter as regular multiplayer modes in the PC version of Titanfall, Respawn Entertainment has reinstated the former following criticisms from fans. It also provided an explanation as to why CTF was removed in the first place: less than 1 percent of players were actually playing the mode on PC. This resulted in a less than stellar matchmaking experience.
“With that few players attempting to connect, our matchmaking would just sit there, spinning forever, waiting to find a game to play. This is a bad experience for the user, and so we had to look at how we fix it. Our first step was removing playlists that were effectively broken. The second step is to continue refinement of our matchmaking. After that first step, though, it’s obvious that lots of people were upset — far more than the player counts on the removed modes led us to believe.”
The matchmaking in its current stage leads to “75% of games having less than a 30% score differential and 15% of games with less than a 5% differential (that’s a difference of a few pilots or squads of grunts in Attrition).”
“The problem though, is that even when tens of thousands of people are playing Titanfall at once, there may not be a lot of games forming at any one time, especially during non-peak hours. This means our absolute ‘perfect’ match is often hard to come by. This is where the hard part of matchmaking starts.
“Do you just continue looking for minutes, hoping to find the perfect match? What happens if that perfect match never opens up? What if there’s no one in Southeast Asia who is also in the 75th percentile skill that really wants to play Last Titan Standing right now?”
Regardless, Capture the Flag is back (for now). Respawn is also planning to introduce some new modes in the future and the Expedition DLC is already out, providing three new maps. Stay tuned for more details.