Attention Killers! Killer Instinct will be testing Ranked crossplay between Steam and Xbox/Windows players.
Ranked Crossplay Test
Starts: Friday, February 9, at 12 PM PST
Ends: Monday, February 12, at 8 AM PST
For the full blog breakdown, please read our news article.
This thread is here to collect your feedback on the experience. Once the test is over, please report back here with all your thoughts, feedback, and findings. Fight on!
Will this update also change voice chat in the Steam version, so that Steam players aren’t always on a hot mic?
This weekend will not be a patch or version change, it is a back-end adjustment for our initial test. Your reported issue however is on our list to investigate, thanks for reporting in!
Hello! I just wanted to give my feedback. I played a couple of hours of ranked today via steam to test the crossplay and it went very smooth for me. I had a couple of times where I was waiting a little longer than my normal queue time via xbox/windows but I am in bronze on steam so it may have just been trying to find me someone more my “skill level”. I also noticed it seemed to be trying to find someone to play against on steam first as I noticed it was giving me quite a few of those and then after the longer wait it was giving me mostly xbox/windows players. I only had one instance where it just failed all together but after trying again it connected as normal. I really hope this becomes a regular thing because this could be such a huge thing to help keep our little game alive that much longer. I really appreciate all the work you guys are putting in. I hope the rest of the test goes well!
My experience today was fine. I played 2-3 hours on Steam and didn’t have any issues finding matches. I had ranked down to Gold and find appropriate matches on my way up. Mostly Gold, a handful of Killers and Silvers. After getting promoted to Killer though, I fought a lot of the same opponents. I believe that’s normally an issue of KI ranked, but it seemed more intense than normal. Also, I really hope the mic issue in the Steam version is solved at some point.
That’s news actually. Would it be also possible to unify SL Online and Shadowlab, which will allow to finally experiment against much larger variety of (skillful) players, popular figures and top players as well.
Plus it would probably increase better selection rates for created shadows. Shadow Lords online on Steam is pretty much non-exist anyway. At the moment, ranked matches instantaneously finds opponents.
Played ranked on the Steam version for a few hours yesterday, everything ran smooth. No disconnects, no crashes.
I’d also just like to reiterate here how nice it would be to have a passcode system for unranked modes. Currently, due to the lack of direct invites cross platform, there’s a bit of guesswork and uncertainty involved in getting Steam and Xbox players to find each other on purpose. The option to set a 4 digit passcode on exhibition and lobbies would make that a lot simpler.
So far Steam ranked is interesting as I get a very different pool of players from Xbox ranked on PC but I also seem to be getting a lot of stutters against Xbox players, this started for me February 10 and 11 (the 9th I played for a bit but did not notice it at the time).
I still need to check on Xbox ranked client to see if it behaves the same way, but I’m still very happy and grateful for the devs to be working on this!
I or my opponents have frequent communication breakdowns. I was given a warning for winning too often due to disconnection and was put in quarantine.
The test seemed pretty flawless for me. There were two matches that weren’t great, but I’m assuming those were actual bad connections and not from crossplay.
I mean, crossplay is already in the game for casual matchmaking, so it makes sense…
Hi there, I played on my Xbox series x, I played about 25 matches between sat and Sunday , the connection went smoothly through all of the matches, finding matches took about 1 minute, and 2 minutes in a few of them, but overall was a good time
I played about a dozen hours over the weekend, all from the Steam side, and the only issues I had were ones that I’d normally experience when playing on Xbox Live (getting rematched with the same opponent over and over again being the main one).
Maybe this was just a case of luck or something, but something I did notice that was different from playing on Xbox Live is that after reaching Killer Rank I only got matched with other Killer Rank opponents. On Xbox Live, I’d frequently run into Silver or Bronze Rank players. I like this, to be clear. I have a friend that got frustrated when trying this game out. They would try to find appropriate matches and mostly find Killers. Not sure if that’s something real tho or just an effect of, presumably, an increased player base in this last weekend.
I paticipated in this after not really playing over the last 2 years. It was nice to be back on KI for a bit. Steam ranked was mostly smooth. I matched with both other steam players, and xbl players of all ranks qualifier-killer. My rank up match back to Killer however was against a qualifier. The handful of players after reaching killer did range in rank from qualifier to killer as well. Seems comparable or identical to my previous years of ranked gameplay on xbl/win10. Hope this stays at a feature. Hot mic on steam still needs fix. Also there was one instance the I got shadow ender instead of ultra. No vod of that, but I do have a screenshot
Note: screenshot was from exhibition crossplay
Here is the ranked session vod for any additional research
I did experience a disconnect at 1:27:47. It didnt seem like a rage quit to me, maybe more like a desync imo? The other shin player had hands on the screen, and on my end I got to ultra but maybe I got grabbed on his end so desync? Not sure.
Directly after the match above (at 1:29:30) is where I match up with the Qualifier for rank up, even though the prompt says “gold or higher”.
The guy I matched up with was afk as well for the first half of the match, so I gave him a lifebar lol.
Thanks for reading, and thanks for all the years of KI.
Runs great only issue is that I keep running to same people netcode cross play test was supreme victory hope update comes soon so I can get back to the game
I would like to inform that yesterday Evening I played around 3 hours and had no stutters on the microsoft client against Steam players, it could be just luck but I hope this helps a little bit with the implementations.
To add to the info all my games where via Ethernet and from Mexico, south of California, keep up the good work!
First of all congrats on making this huge step by trying to fix one of the main issues on this version of the game, hopefully we can see the full release and finally have everbody play this game with each other.
I played for almost two hour on steam, and pretty much was an amazing experience, I only had one match with funky connection playing against a Xbox/Windows player. For more information Im playing with Ethernet, with a 100Mbps speed. Ill put a link to that match (Min 59, 32 Sec):
URL: KI Steam Crossplay Test VOD
Besides that, the quality of the matches were pretty good playing with Xbox/Windows players. I went through silver playing againt almost every rank except Killer. Once I reach Gold Rank I played versus Silver/Gold/Killer. The wait time were max 45seconds on my session, I played on Saturday around 5:00pm-7:00pm
Steam player here, it felt great to see a populated Ranked pool after the few times I got there and only saw Killer players after a LOT of waiting at that. I could finally go up to Gold rank there =D
Besides the mic issues and going against the same player often times, I think a lesser problem I could talk about is some stutters against Xbox/W10 players that did not happen in Exhibition with this same platform IIRC, might as well be my connection since I play on Wi-Fi, but I still think it’s worth to mention even though it happened with some Xbox players and not all of them, it really felt smooth during this testing period.
Overall I had a great experience! Best of luck for the official update ^^
I will say that the pool of players I got into matches with during the time I had to play, from about noon to 6 PM Pacific on Sunday, was really tiny. I got matched with the same 3 Shago players a lot. It probably didn’t help that I was in qualifiers and bronze during that time, it’s been a while since I last played.
