Scenario Match Making

[dontcomplainx]

I dont think 6x12 is a good idea, only oldschool/Pro's will q as a group, casual premades will never have a chance against 12 players, this format only punish the pug's/casuals that want to start their own groups.

[Morf]

Spoiler:

There will never be a system that works

Actually there are several systems that would be better then the current one

If you make sc's 6 premade players v 12 pugs etc etc all you do is make premades run fotm setups because of the shame that would come losing to pugs, and if by chance the premade runs a fotm setup and the 12 pugs have a few good players who qued solo and they destroy the premade, that premade will no longer que.

Honestly I don't see the problem are you worried your premade get beaten and won't queue? The part that everybody needs to run FOTM is incorrect as well. Enigma proved this beyond a doubt by making whatever they played the FOTM and/or stomping the so called FOTM groups

Having 1 or 2 pug only sc's and 1 or 2 premade only sc's is fine, premades will struggle to get a single sc pop but seeing as they are more organised and generally more vocal its going to be easier for them to get a fight with others players simply by pm'ing someone on the othe side who also has the intent to do a 6v6 and organise it in the rvr area or sync sc ques.

Exactly how would it be better? We had it before you know when group queue wasn't implemented

I tend to agree, there may be better systems then what there is currently, not alot better but these systems will still suffer from the same issues ppl bring up at the moment, someone has to win and someone has to lose.

I am defo not worried about losing, im just telling you how it is, when a premade loses to players who would appear to be lesser players the premade then loses interest and sometimes rages and logs off, this is why you see so little premades roaming the rvr lake, because the shame of dying to lesser players is to much to take.

As for enigma they always ran the fotm setup when they could, which is why when witchbrew got nerfed you never saw that witch elf char again, they are players who make a group with the best synergy in mind with the soul purpose to win and only win and which is why you didnt see the 3/2/1 setup after getting rekt.

As for being better thats just my opinion, i mean generally ppl que all anyway, i just dont see the suggestion of having 6 v12 any better then having a few pug only and a few premade only, sure i could be wrong try it and see but my feeling is it wont improve anything.
Remember 90% of the players who que sc's are randoms and the off chance(this is from past experience) a premade sees another premade in an sc you pm 1 of the players and ask if they wana que for CW or meet somewhere in rvr.
Furthermore if premades want some 6v12 fights or whatnot go into rvr, you will find alot of fights where you are outnumbered, they may not always go your way but thats the nature of a pvp game.

[Morf]

Im not a premade player at all. In WAR I did some premade only from time to time when there was some some need for IB in alliance.

But making pug only and premade only queue would be bad idea. It would eventually lead to long wait times for premade scs because there would be no real motivation to do premade scs. I mean - it wouldnt be interesting for new players to actually start to play in premade.

But if there would be some additional unique rewards from premade scs... Some hard to get so you cannot "farm" it and you would actually have to give your best...

Like - "whatever" token
- you can gain it ONLY when you win in premade sc (doesnt matter if you lose 0-500 or 490-500, only winners would get it)
- you can spend token for some unique (though not OP) rewards : set jewels, pocket items, bundle of better talismans or pots (some % increase of stats compared to other items you can craft), mounts etc.

I think this way it might actually make the premades scs more interesting and give players chance to fight for something more than epeen and also motivate more players to actually grp up and try to work as premade

Premade players are stronger then your average player, giving them extra rewards on top of the fact they are better players is a bad idea, i dont see why premade players need to be rewarded, the reward and reason why they chose to do 6v6 such as caledor woods is because they enjoy it, sure the wait for a pop is long and some nights be non existent but that is how it is when you chose to partake in the minority scene.
Encouraging more players to group and take part is a good thing, although many players are worried if they do so they will get mocked or laughed at for not being good enough, a way casual/less skilled players can partake in organised group fights would be a great thing but pls dont reward already strong teams with items that are better then your average players items.

[peterthepan3]

Premade vs Premade scenarios = 6 emblems/7 emblems
Pug v Pug = 5 emblems

something small but an incentive nonetheless

[grumcajs]

Im not a premade player at all. In WAR I did some premade only from time to time when there was some some need for IB in alliance.

But making pug only and premade only queue would be bad idea. It would eventually lead to long wait times for premade scs because there would be no real motivation to do premade scs. I mean - it wouldnt be interesting for new players to actually start to play in premade.

But if there would be some additional unique rewards from premade scs... Some hard to get so you cannot "farm" it and you would actually have to give your best...

Like - "whatever" token
- you can gain it ONLY when you win in premade sc (doesnt matter if you lose 0-500 or 490-500, only winners would get it)
- you can spend token for some unique (though not OP) rewards : set jewels, pocket items, bundle of better talismans or pots (some % increase of stats compared to other items you can craft), mounts etc.

I think this way it might actually make the premades scs more interesting and give players chance to fight for something more than epeen and also motivate more players to actually grp up and try to work as premade

Premade players are stronger then your average player, giving them extra rewards on top of the fact they are better players is a bad idea, i dont see why premade players need to be rewarded, the reward and reason why they chose to do 6v6 such as caledor woods is because they enjoy it, sure the wait for a pop is long and some nights be non existent but that is how it is when you chose to partake in the minority scene.
Encouraging more players to group and take part is a good thing, although many players are worried if they do so they will get mocked or laughed at for not being good enough, a way casual/less skilled players can partake in organised group fights would be a great thing but pls dont reward already strong teams with items that are better then your average players items.

I wasnt talking about anything game breaking or OP.

And premade player doest have to be better than average player at all. It might look like it when they are in premade especially with players they know.

Premade grp is almost everytime better than average grp. This is true. But if more players would try that premade scs there is higher chance they wouldnt face premade all the time. And again - these changes I have proposed werent meant to be to increase premades pover but instead motivate players to try play in group rather than randomly joining solo scenarios. And some carrot is always required - what would be motivation for average players to participate in grp scenarios? To get better? To fight some challenging fight? Maybe. But I think chance to get something unique, even when they would have to fight hard to get it is still better than being mauled 3 times in row by premade and just say - **** off, lets just queue solo...

Also it was mentioned several times - when u do not participate in tough and hard fights, you wont improve. If players would fight against pugs, they wouldnt get any better to have a chance to beat other either full grps or even premades.

[zumos2]

Premade vs Premade scenarios = 6 emblems/7 emblems
Pug v Pug = 5 emblems

something small but an incentive nonetheless

Playing around with rewards might be a way to encourage players to form premades, but I do not think it will be very effective. It already provides much more rewards if you play scenarios with a premade than when you play alone, simply because you will win more scenarios. I highly doubt an increase in emblems for premades would help anything. Adding a unique reward only for premades is only acceptable to me if it would be purely cosmetic. Solo players should not be forced to not run with a premade, which is what you would do when you make for example a strong juwelry set which you can only get when winning scenarios with premades.

If any reward might help improve the current scenarios, I think it would be some kind of underdog reward. If pugs would face a premade, give the pugs extra rewards to encourage them to fight. There is most likely no point in only giving them extra rewards for winning, as this will like never happen. But for example double the amount of emblems you get per 100 points could encourage them to keep fighting for extra rewards. You could tweak these numbers a bit, giving only extra rewards for the first 200-300 points, to not get too crazy. But that could be open for discussion.

[peterthepan3]

i don't think there should be rewards for prem v prem. only cosmetic things/extra emblem (IF ANYTHING).

which is why you didnt see the 3/2/1 setup after getting rekt.

^ ain't really adding anything to this topic/necessary/relevant.

[adei]

Friendly reminder to keep things relevant to the topic

[grumcajs]

Spoiler:

Premade vs Premade scenarios = 6 emblems/7 emblems
Pug v Pug = 5 emblems

something small but an incentive nonetheless

Playing around with rewards might be a way to encourage players to form premades, but I do not think it will be very effective. It already provides much more rewards if you play scenarios with a premade than when you play alone, simply because you will win more scenarios. I highly doubt an increase in emblems for premades would help anything. Adding a unique reward only for premades is only acceptable to me if it would be purely cosmetic. Solo players should not be forced to not run with a premade, which is what you would do when you make for example a strong juwelry set which you can only get when winning scenarios with premades.

If any reward might help improve the current scenarios, I think it would be some kind of underdog reward. If pugs would face a premade, give the pugs extra rewards to encourage them to fight. There is most likely no point in only giving them extra rewards for winning, as this will like never happen. But for example double the amount of emblems you get per 100 points could encourage them to keep fighting for extra rewards. You could tweak these numbers a bit, giving only extra rewards for the first 200-300 points, to not get too crazy. But that could be open for discussion.

I was talking about situation where there would be some scenarios only for solo queue and some scenarios for grp queue only. so no premades have rewards by fighting vs players that solo queue for sc

And again - by unique I meant unique in terms A BIT stronger than what you can get via crafting or vendors (like few extra points on talis, few more AP/HP on potions and jewelry with some balanced set bonus - like tok ones but scaled for lvl 40, or some +2% crit or avoidance talis for weapons. Something unique that wouldnt make it "must have" but solid enough to encourage players to make a grp and play together to get these items). If you give players "only" cosmetic reward it pretty much remove the motivation for a lot of players.

and there shouldnt be any underdog at all. When I queue sc solo I expect it might lead to spawn camping with very little chance to do anything when the dice rolls us a horrible archetype setup. If there would be pug vs pug possibility there shouldnt be underdog at all.

[zumos2]

- It's a scenario queue, not a scenario pool - priority is given to those who queued first to preserve the important Queue Time element

If you would use my idea of letting queues pop every X amount of minutes (which you could make dependent on the current population), I guess you would call that a scenario pool (considering it treats players independently of their queue time). Is it not possible to make a scenario pool that also uses time queued as a variable? The advantage of a scenario pool is that it is easier to make more balanced scenario groups. What it does mean is that if there are too many people queueing for the DPS role, a DPS-player would have a longer queue time than the other roles. This could be partly sorted by giving players information of how many players of which role are queueing (or have queued in the past X amount of minutes). If you see there is an overload of DPS, you might want to relog to another role if you have the possibility to do so. Obviously the downside of making a scenario pool and adding another variable is that the matchmaking systems gets more complicated. Whether that is too complicated or not is not for me to decide. I’m just trying to see what options there are

- For both sides, try every unique combination (i.e. NOT permutation) of group sizes which add up to a number between 2 and the maximum player spots left in the scenario, using the first available groups in each sublist and prioritizing combinations with the highest individual value for size

This is the part which increases the chance that premades face off against each other rather than against pugs if I understand correctly. But if there are a lot of people queueing, the algorithm probably finds a way to have a scenario the moment a premade queues. And there are good chances that if there are a lot of solo players (or smaller groups) that 6-man premades don’t fight a lot against each other. Going back to the point of having a scenario pool. I guess it would be much easier to prioritize 6-man premades against other 6-man premades. What other options would there be to make it more likely that 6-mans fight off other 6-mans?

The scenario manager algorithm attempts to balance roles only when adding solo players. I'm planning to refine this a little for groups, both by using the composition of a group as a weight when adding to the queue (to ensure that for example a 3 DPS group is prioritized below a balanced group) and by ensuring that the composition which comes closest to resolving any existing role imbalance in a scenario is used for a given player count fill slot, rather than the composition which includes the highest number of players in an individual group.

I think both these changes would be good improvements to the match-making system. I do believe that 6 man groups should be ignored by those rules as 1) they don’t have to be punished for running anything else than the most balanced 2-2-2 setup and 2) as they form a full group, they cannot really balance the other group. The latter isn’t completely true, you can obviously throw some heals to the other group and maybe a 3 dps 6-man premade goes better with a second group which has relatively more tanks and healers, but I don’t believe it is significant enough to take into account.

A [6] is very likely to be balanced, whereas a [2, 2, 2] could easily be composed of 5 DPS and a healer who are trying to dodge the solo queue logic which is weighted against the large numbers of DPS.

This should be fixed when you add in the changes above right?

A point made by Danielle was to adept the match-making to the current server population, making it have more/higher match-making criteria when there are more players queueing and fewer/lower criteria when there are less players on the server. Is this something you could consider possible and/or advantageous? I guess it isn’t very hard to implement. Have several criteria lists (algorithms) and relate them to a certain population (maybe even per tier?).

Another issue I see is people leaving pops because they know who they are facing. I don’t know the reason why the RoR-team made it so you can see who you are facing when the queue pops, but I think it would be better without it. Making a good matchmaking system when people just leave when they see hard opposition is never going to work. And that is exactly what I would like to see: a good match-making system. I’m not an expert in this, but I think there are definitely opportunities in making a good matchmaking system.

This was debug text for my benefit that I never got around to removing. It appears if a scenario pops with at least one group having been matched. It can be removed if it is causing issues.

For me it makes no sense that you can see beforehand who you are facing and have the option to leave based on that. It goes against the principle of a scenario: you don’t know who you will be fighting. Yes there is a risk if you queue solo that you face a premade. There is also a good chance that you fight equals. Pugs will always choose the easiest way to get rewards if given the option. So they will just leave and requeue when they see the names of a known premade. If I queue solo I would do the same after I lost several fights against the same premade. I cannot blame them, yet it is frustrating to be in almost empty scenarios. Even more so for those who did join. I’m also afraid that even if we would have a perfect match-making system, some will still choose to leave if they see known premades.