Almost 4 months ago I managed to score 17 times in a single 50v50 bridges game, at the time something like that was a massive achievement and in the game I managed to do it in there was a decent amount of players, I don't have the exact number I as joined that game about 3 or 4 minutes into the game if I recall correctly.
Well, today, as you can see on the screenshot, I managed to "beat" that record by scoring 19 (it could have been 20 if my teammate didn't feel like ruining the moment), but the lobby I did it in was one with very few people in it. The game started with 8 players as the gamemode before that was a deathmatch.
For those who don't play enough giga blockwars to know what that means: it means everyone quit during the previous game, either because they were on the team that was worse than the other and as a result was getting spawn camped, or because they quit before the game started because deathmatch is a bugged gamemode as of the time I am writing this (there is a bug regarding the armor trims and another one regarding the way playertags are displayed making it impossible to tell your teammates apart from your opponents, the username bug specifically also exists outside of deathmatch but due to armor trims it doesn't matter that much).
Normally you'd expect the lobby to fill up. But That's not how giga blockwars operates, the player count instead kept slowly dropping during the game, to the point where by the time the game ended there were only 4 people left, me, 2 random teammates of mine and 1 red team player.
What I am trying to say is: giga blockwars lobbies are dead. Despite the gamemode apparently having at least 100+ players at almost all times you'll almost never even get a lobby with even as little as 40
For context: the maximum size of a lobby is 100, even if we split it evenly across the 3 regions in which cubecraft has any servers that should still equal to 33.
note that I am aware that, given the amount of players per region that's not realistic, but I am not gonna try to get data necessary to calculate a more realistic number for the sake of a post like this
I have no idea about the exact details of the infrastructure behind all of that, but the way in which its this hard to find a lobby with even as little as a double digit number of players and the way witnessing players join a lobby has genuinely become a rarity both lead me to believe there may simply too many open lobbies of that minigame per region.
Would it be possible to reduce the amount of lobbies per region? I'd seriously much rather be in a situation where there is only like 1 per region, with everyone who is trying to join having to wait until someone quits if it happens to be full than a situation where I can find a game quickly but have to play on a 50v50 map with a total player count that is equal or lower than that of the average 5v5s game.
And while I am at it, I think that's something that pretty much all "mega" or "giga" gamemodes on the server could use. They almost never reach the full player count, leading to the games in them being generally worse experiences than what they are intended to be.
I also think its considering a reduction of the amount of players per giga blockwars lobby altogether.
Reducing the gamemode to, for example, a 30v30 format, would not only allow to have more than one active lobby per region (up to two if a region has enough players to fill at least one full lobby, maybe even up to 3 for one of the regions during its peak activity times) but it'd also generally fit the map design and size more given that on most maps the full 50v50 experience tended to be very hard to enjoy.
Well, today, as you can see on the screenshot, I managed to "beat" that record by scoring 19 (it could have been 20 if my teammate didn't feel like ruining the moment), but the lobby I did it in was one with very few people in it. The game started with 8 players as the gamemode before that was a deathmatch.
For those who don't play enough giga blockwars to know what that means: it means everyone quit during the previous game, either because they were on the team that was worse than the other and as a result was getting spawn camped, or because they quit before the game started because deathmatch is a bugged gamemode as of the time I am writing this (there is a bug regarding the armor trims and another one regarding the way playertags are displayed making it impossible to tell your teammates apart from your opponents, the username bug specifically also exists outside of deathmatch but due to armor trims it doesn't matter that much).
Normally you'd expect the lobby to fill up. But That's not how giga blockwars operates, the player count instead kept slowly dropping during the game, to the point where by the time the game ended there were only 4 people left, me, 2 random teammates of mine and 1 red team player.
What I am trying to say is: giga blockwars lobbies are dead. Despite the gamemode apparently having at least 100+ players at almost all times you'll almost never even get a lobby with even as little as 40
For context: the maximum size of a lobby is 100, even if we split it evenly across the 3 regions in which cubecraft has any servers that should still equal to 33.
note that I am aware that, given the amount of players per region that's not realistic, but I am not gonna try to get data necessary to calculate a more realistic number for the sake of a post like this
I have no idea about the exact details of the infrastructure behind all of that, but the way in which its this hard to find a lobby with even as little as a double digit number of players and the way witnessing players join a lobby has genuinely become a rarity both lead me to believe there may simply too many open lobbies of that minigame per region.
Would it be possible to reduce the amount of lobbies per region? I'd seriously much rather be in a situation where there is only like 1 per region, with everyone who is trying to join having to wait until someone quits if it happens to be full than a situation where I can find a game quickly but have to play on a 50v50 map with a total player count that is equal or lower than that of the average 5v5s game.
And while I am at it, I think that's something that pretty much all "mega" or "giga" gamemodes on the server could use. They almost never reach the full player count, leading to the games in them being generally worse experiences than what they are intended to be.
I also think its considering a reduction of the amount of players per giga blockwars lobby altogether.
Reducing the gamemode to, for example, a 30v30 format, would not only allow to have more than one active lobby per region (up to two if a region has enough players to fill at least one full lobby, maybe even up to 3 for one of the regions during its peak activity times) but it'd also generally fit the map design and size more given that on most maps the full 50v50 experience tended to be very hard to enjoy.