Pug Only Scenario

[Bozzax]

To those that say that everyone should start a 6 man. I have 5 people on my friends list from the old game. I dont play often and usually 1 will be on when I do. The days of playing 8 hours a night on comms having to plan ahead to sign upto guild events the week before ended for me when I left uni. I think that the majority are in the same position as me. This is an old game now and the playerbase aint mostly teenagers anymore. It will be more casual as that just how life makes it.

Telen definitely has a point here, I'm in a similar situation. Problem is that there's also a lot of people who can still sit on vent for 8 hours a night who would say that it's our problem we don't feel like doing the same.

So Telen that don't play often and you that spend an hour a day are the players War should be tilted for?

FYI our crew runs approx 3 hours 3 times weekly which isn't a shitload. We don't do it because we love farming pugs which by the way is impossible since we are rr capped and don't need emblems. We do it because we enjoy playing together.

What will you do when you need to start collaborating to do PQs, PVE dungeons or win city instances? Request PUG only city instances or easy mode PUG PVE dungeons?

SC and all other things in WAR is made easier if you do it with friends. Being in a guild even a casual one makes a lot of sense. Even the classes with clear archetypes give a clear indicator that this is a team oriented game.

Sure you can solo roam and have fun but that is just a nice bonus and honestly most fun aspects of this lovely game will be unavailable for you as they require team.

[Scrilian]

There are other games on the market that are not as time consuming as MMOs, are willing to give you alone freebies just because you log on and generate amassing gaming experience with a magic click of matchmaking button.

I'm yet to see any real evidence that such things are crucially needed to RoR without diluting the core group-based time&effort aspect of this game of by-gone age where MMOs were a thing and still in fact great by being no polluted with overly pug friendly notions that made quite a few great MMOs pointless.

[gungnir08]

Spoiler:

If you're implying that more than a few premades out there only really want to farm disorganized opponents, you're probably right. But there's a problem with implementing any solution that disproportionately impacts them.

Let's assume the worst, that there exist premades like this (again, probably true). If something occurs to isolate them from the pugs they want to farm, how might they respond? Suppose they want to try their hand at playing nice and going with the new system. They will probably lose, repeatedly, due in no small part to the low skill ceiling for succeeding at consistently beating pugs. They'll also probably not have thick enough skin to weather such losses and get better at the game since they've been raised on a strict diet of curbstomp and pug tears, which don't do wonders for learning humility.

Then they either quit, or game the system. If they quit, good riddance. If they decide to game the system, we're back where we started. One way they could game this system is to simply queue as solo players for the pug-only scenario, and organize after they get into one. This is a simple plan, and one which basically renders the work involved in preparing this new system pointless. As such, it doesn't seem prudent to commit time to addressing this problem.

Still, I'd love to see this game made more pug-friendly. It seems fair to claim that the majority of players are pugs, so helping them would be in the game's long-term best interests. I just don't think this is the best way to go about doing it.

Not only do I wholeheartedly agree with what you write (and also with what others have posted in this thread to similar effect), but also I have to tip my hat to your writing, which is both exquisitely exuberant and crystal-clear in its argumentation.

That being said, I think that implementations like PUG-only scs are arguably the most pressing need the game has right now, the reason being that balance in the battlefield, be it RvR or scs, is absolutely vital and certainly imho in a schedule of major changes should be prioritised over even class balance.

Why is that? The point of a game is to have fun. There maybe bugs, disconnects, zones not open yet. OK, this is Alpha, and you can still have LOTS of fun notwithstanding all those issues. But a 500/0 sc again and again and again and again...
That UTTERLY destroys the game for any player, even for those on the winning side (at least those who respect themselves)

And I, like so many other people playing a game, cannot and should not be forced to play inside a fixed group if we don't like to. We don't ask for a treatment of preference, we just want to have a small space within the game where we can have the chance to enjoy the only fun battles, which are the not grosdsly and automatically ultra imbalanced ones that are the most common now in scs. Just ONE sc in the entire game.

Hey, thanks for the compliment. I'm more of a mathematician than a writer, but it helps to have more than one arrow in the quiver, so to speak.

I agree with the point that crushing defeats motivate people to put the game down for either the short or the long term. There just isn't any fun in losing like that, and why play a game if not to have fun? The ironic thing is that those players whose reaction to this is simply to tell the losing pugs to group up and play as (yet another) premade are alienating and driving away the very opponents they wish to farm.

Even in the absence of premade-only queues, it'll end up that way if the pugs quit.

[CaseyJones]

Some people here don't get the idea. Now the range of their suggestions starts from stuff that has no connection to the topic like PQs and pve (which can be done with anyone you pick in a chat for just a couple of mins) to playing other MMOs if this one is too demanding. GG.

For multiple times I said that I purely enjoy jumping in a scen with random people. Right now it's not viable.

PUG community you're so eager to re-educate prolly represents the majority of players here and they don't even go to forums to discuss stuff.

[Tiggo]

Some people here don't get the idea. Now the range of their suggestions starts from stuff that has no connection to the topic like PQs and pve (which can be done with anyone you pick in a chat for just a couple of mins) to playing other MMOs if this one is too demanding. GG.

For multiple times I said that I purely enjoy jumping in a scen with random people. Right now it's not viable.

which is just not true, dont make this up. I played solo whole day yesterday, with like 30 scs there were like 5 against a premade (mostly nikkys one which prbly even is only a guild group like 95% of the "premades" in this game) and i won 90% of the scs and even some against nikky.

this whole "oh the premades are so strong they demotivate "normal" player who can only play like 3h a day" is just pure nonsense.

and believe it or not: even in pure PUG scs one side will lose and often get stomped when they have no healer!

[Telen]

I dont think this utopia where everyone will play certain classes in certain roles in 2/2/2 pres is going to happen. Like I said the games old and we arent teenagers any more. All that guild politics and bragging that we used to think was so important looks different now. When I see pres stilling emoting at pugs they are spawncamping it just makes me think seriously you must be in your 20s now.

[Scrilian]

scen with random people
Right now it's not viable.

It never was and that's the whole point of it.

[Scrilian]

oh the premades are so strong they demotivate "normal" player who can only play like 3h a day

The ironic thing is that if people are willing to quit the game when faced with strong opponents - maybe it's not the game for them :^)

[gungnir08]

Alright, let's do this.

So Telen that don't play often and you that spend an hour a day are the players War should be tilted for?

FYI our crew runs approx 3 hours 3 times weekly which isn't a shitload. We don't do it because we love farming pugs which by the way is impossible since we are rr capped and don't need emblems. We do it because we enjoy playing together.

I'm not saying that your premade wants to farm pugs, but your reasoning is fallacious. It's completely possible that there are premades out there whose sole motivation for queuing is reaping schadenfreude from all the pugs whose days they ruined.

What will you do when you need to start collaborating to do PQs, PVE dungeons or win city instances? Request PUG only city instances or easy mode PUG PVE dungeons?

We're not talking about that now, but I'll play ball here.

PQs were revamped to allow for easy, medium, and hard difficulties for precisely this reason. Easy PQs were meant to be a thing for solo players to do if they didn't want to deal with the hassle of getting a group together.

PvE instances are group-only in every MMO that I can think of off the top of my head. Nobody is kidding themselves with that one.

City instances involve so many people that the contribution of one premade can be minimal. While they are akin to scenarios, I don't think the problem is as big of a deal there as it is with scenarios in general.

SC and all other things in WAR is made easier if you do it with friends. Being in a guild even a casual one makes a lot of sense. Even the classes with clear archetypes give a clear indicator that this is a team oriented game.

Easier isn't necessarily better. Some people want to queue alone and play with whatever the system gives them. I'm definitely one of those people, and as it is now, this playstyle is simply not viable.

Furthermore, if you want people to group into premades just to have a shot at winning, where will these incremental forced changes in playstyle cease? If everyone were to group into premades, then the next argument would be between premades running flavor of the month, meta compositions and those premades that play with either whatever is online, or whatever they want to play. If they want to win, would you say they should change the classes that they play?

Why should anyone have to fundamentally change the way they approach playing WAR if they want to have even a chance at occasional victory? I can appreciate asking players to learn obvious stuff, like how to kite, detaunt, etc, but if I want to play a healing AM as a pug, I find this desire to be incompatible with forcing myself to play a WP in a premade just because I want to win.

Sure you can solo roam and have fun but that is just a nice bonus and honestly most fun aspects of this lovely game will be unavailable for you as they require team.

Still only talking about scenarios.

As for me, other than doing Lost Vale until my bucket hat drops, scenarios are the only reason I play Warhammer.

[Ekundu01]

No matter how they change the system solo que vs solo que only maps or premade vs premade only maps there will always be a way to get around it if a team truely wants to fight unorganized groups.

This server doesn't have the population that live once did so that is a big part of the problem. If the only people queing on one side are a premade and the rest are in the lakes steam rolling in the zerg and the other side is getting rolled so they que up they will get matched with the premade. If you separate ques then it won't pop at all for either side.

Players who played on live know you can sync your que times if in some sort of voice com and still have a good chance to get into the same map if you only que for that one map together, this method was used on live to get more then 1 premade in the larger maps when trying to lock zones to get to the city. So if the solo que map only is put in place and a premade has no one to fight and still want to play as a group they could still end up in your solo only map by syncing ques and the chance that most of them will get in are fairly high.

There is one solution to make a pug vs pug map work most of the time but not sure if they are able to do it at this time and that would be to make factions not matter and make it a red vs blue situation and have the system pull from a pool of players and have it fill spots with destro or order. If i am not mistaken this was done towards the end of the life of the game on live when populations were low to keep que pops high no matter what side you played for.

With out the above changes if a pug vs pug map was put in you would see much higher que times or possibly no pops at all.

If everyone qued for SCs this wouldn't even be an issue but when you are waiting 10+ mins for a SC to pop on either side that means less then a WB is actively queing and if you keep fighting the same people then more then likely they are the ONLY ones queing on that side.

Not saying that having the solo que only map as an option is a bad idea but you have to look at the good as well as the bad that can come along with it. In the end if it causes more or equal frustration and doesn't improve any for the player base then the time they spent on changing something to not really improve anything could of been spent on making something else better in the game.

I have seen this issue in a few games as of late and have experienced the flaws first hand when games decide to just jump the gun and cause more problems and end up driving away more players.