Why scenarios still suck

[anarchypark]

I play solo SC 99% times and don't expect heal, guard, rez. I'm totally on my own.
I like playing against impossible odds
It's challenging like hell mode after hero mode in some games.
after so many wins and loses u realise u can't win everytime.
so in losing games i'm trying to earn as many scores as i can, dragging 2dps on my back and finally touch down the object. It often ends up 1~200 more points in my team. It's better than 500-80. tanks are good for this solo play.

I see majority of ppl playing this as like FPS, kill, kill, kill, rp farm from kills.
It's dps perspective
nothing wrong with that, i just don't see the fun as a tank. I don't play my class to be the guard bot

There are strategic elements in this game thx to the objectives in SCs.
It's about maneuvering, predicting, decoying, blocking, intercepting.
Some ppl call it running around.
tank is ok to run solo. untill enemies focus on object. then u would have right to yell 'follow me!'
it's rare 6man focusing on SC object, they focus on killing. maybe that's why i don't have interest in 6man anymore.

[Marsares]

Scenario population and archetype balance are frustrating, but much ore frustrating is the solo mentality that most players exhibit.

Way too many lol DPS tanks that don't guard, lols DPS healers that don't heal and DPS that just charge in and somehow expect to survive and utterly to fail to assist on one another.

I am levelling a BG at the moment and it just seems to be that most scenarios I am the one of the few who guards, am the only one who actually guard switches and generally goes defensive in order to my job.

I constantly die from guard damage on healers, often without getting a single HoT from them, I have yet to receive a guard when I am under pressure. And to often I stand there in amazing when three DPS are banging on three different Enemy tanks.

It is frustrating, people just seem to play for scenario scores to feel good about their own abilities, rather than playing as a team. Not uncommon though,most MMOs are like this. When I am in T4 I plan to join a guild - any takers?

/rant over

[Sulorie]

Way too many lol DPS tanks that don't guard, lols DPS healers that don't heal and DPS that just charge in and somehow expect to survive and utterly to fail to assist on one another.
...

It is frustrating, people just seem to play for scenario scores to feel good about their own abilities...

The people you describe hardly play for sc scores as those teams usually lose the sc and score horrible.

[altharion1]

I cant see much ever being done to counter the archetype imbalance. I, personally, see this as the biggest issue in SCs.

I dont see much ever being done to change it because the Devs decided to add a quitter debuff to lock people into horribly imbalanced scenarios, rather than tackle the issues that are causing such a large proportion of SCs to simply not be fun because of archetypal imbalance.

[DokB]

I have to agree with the developers stance on archetype balance in scenario pops, but only because I get home from work during the dead hours of the server and there is barely anyone online queuing anyway. I'd rather at least get SC pops than have to wait even longer than I already do if they did enforce a stricter archetype balance for when a scenario decides to pop.

[Azarael]

You were all told in the beginning that there was a tradeoff between archetype balancing and freedom of group size. I told you that implementing solid archetype balancing for arbitrary group compositions and sizes would be beyond my ability. I can only think of a naïve implementation which would be brute force and would sacrifice other elements, such as the time integrity of the queue.

I offered 1/3/6 queuing with role checking as a compromise. The community rejected that. I believe I made it clear, at the time, that if the community chose to reject a limit on their queue freedom for the sake of archetype balancing, then it would be the community's problem. Predictably, they did so, and they can suffer the consequences of that choice.

The manager does what it is able to aid in archetype balance. Pure solo SCs are guaranteed to be balanced if no pops are rejected. Groups are sorted internally by composition first and by time second. Group-based SCs will prioritize solo fill players based on archetype balance. Beyond this, I see no means of further enforcing balance other than outright barring groups that are biased towards DPS or brute forcing by trying every possible composition and selecting the first that is reasonably balanced.

[7rere7]

I cant see much ever being done to counter the archetype imbalance. I, personally, see this as the biggest issue in SCs.

I dont see much ever being done to change it because the Devs decided to add a quitter debuff to lock people into horribly imbalanced scenarios, rather than tackle the issues that are causing such a large proportion of SCs to simply not be fun because of archetypal imbalance.

Doesn't the quitter debuff lock a player out instead ?
Theres not enough player population to have an archetype balance for SC's .

I noticed so far all those ranting on here about team play ,play an elf class.

[Hastykrasty]

I don't get the sense of this topic.
There are bad players, it's a fact, so what's the point? make a ranking system for pros only?
If you want perfect archetype balance ----> Longer queues times, then people will complain beause scs don't pop, and so nobody will queue.
If youremove the quitter debuff you can chose when to leave if you find a really imbalanced party ----> but people will abandon if they are loosing, so the winner side will always fight in empty scs, even if the party are balanced in archetypes, but not in skill (premades vs pugs for example).
People are like water. They follow the path with less resistence. Nobody will try to fight vs a better enemy (on the paper) if you remove the quitter debuff.

At the moment I think the devs are doing a great job, personally I have an average around 50% win vs losses in t4 on pug scs. If you loose too much start thinking what can YOU do to improve, it's easy to address the fault to others.
But again, truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.

[Dragaz]

The biggest offender contributing to horrible scenarios is them starting unbalanced population wise. I think around half? of the scenarios I did there was usually a ~2 man advantage on one side. This is actually a gigantic advantage

This is no way near to be a "gigantic" advantage. A decent player is easily able to control at least 2-3 people by himself, especially on a tank.

unless those extra people happen to be MDPS (MDPS is actually just garbage in pug scenarios honestly wish they were barred from solo queing and required them to que up with a guard).

A mdps is always able to carry a pug game on his own. It's just not as easy as playing a rdps - Call it a learn to play issue.

An extra healer can mean 50% more healing

most of the pugs can't even outheal pet damage and will die to any kind of damage. cross heal is a loanword for most pugs. so i don't see these 50%.

The amount of people, especially pugs who don't think tactically about situations is staggering. So when you are on a team that say has 7 players at the begging of a nordenwatch. And the other team has 9/10 and your team without a care in the world just charges up to fort and tries to fight man to man but loses horribly because of man disadvantage... things immediately go south and the other team begins to snowball hard. In unorganized scenarios the 1st fight/wipe in the most important because from this point on the likelyhood of a regroup especially in multipoint scenarios is low and you start seeing people trickling in and essentially feeding.

Having a system in place that ensures scenarios do not start, or at least let you leave the spawn until the numbers are even, and doing so for late coming players on both sides would go a long ways to making scenarios much more enjoyable.

this has nothing to do with the system but again is a learn to play issue. same counts for the common classes (usually kotbs, ibs, mwps, chosen or any kind of orcs) who tend to solo cap.
what's next? are you going to make a proposal that scenarios like nordenwatch should have a straight route, simply to avoid getting outnumbered? how much more pug friendly should the game become in your opinion until you are able to enjoy PvP?

I know there is some kind of archetype balancer in place for scenario pops, but with all due respect to Az it's so bad it might as well not even exist. I know more stringent rules on allowing archetypes in will result in LONG que times for DPS classes, but honestly i'd rather have consistent good scenario pops than what we have now were a good chunk of scs are just steamrolls. And promoting people to at least que with a healer/tank friend will make scenarios better in general.

i think you voted and fought for the pug sc back then. a lot of people mentioned that this would go wrong because the game in general is based around groups. yet you and your compagnons ignored those posts and won the battle. now you are honestly complaining about the fact that the avarage solo player in general tends to play a dps over a support class? honestly that's comedy gold. it is even more fun that you would let the dps pugs down, suffering from long queue times rather than forming a group or starting to duo queue and adapt yourself?

Honestly though, I just needed to vent after all these awful scenarios were taking the 10 minute leaver buff was more palatable than staying in, or we are just steamrolling so hard i just put guard and follower on a dps and alt tab for 5 minutes. The amount of actual good fights in scenarios is pretty slim. I know a lot of it comes down to people doing stupid stuff, and while you can't help that there are some things I do believe could be put in that could make scenarios much better than they are now.

that's what happens if a already small competitive scene dies completely. back then you had multiple great scenarios with a lot of guilds queuing up. Now everyone who is able to gather 6 men will end up steamrolling pugs (or suffers from "unfair" sc compilations when solo queuing).

the key to fix this issue was always to promote group play and make group queue attractive. a solo player will rarely decide to play a class which can't kill on his own e.g. a healer/def tank. solo healing relies on pug skill + heal leeching got killed. tanking for pug dps is also very unattractive. the safe version is a rdps hence why the server is stuffed with engis, squigs, bws and sorcs. the reward for playing easymode (fotm) is way too high when it's compared to what people get for forming groups/playing support classes.

delet this.
And by "this", I mean your BG.

that's what people would suggest about BO too, when they did not know how to play it.

[Marsares]

Way too many lol DPS tanks that don't guard, lols DPS healers that don't heal and DPS that just charge in and somehow expect to survive and utterly to fail to assist on one another.
...

It is frustrating, people just seem to play for scenario scores to feel good about their own abilities...

The people you describe hardly play for sc scores as those teams usually lose the sc and score horrible.

Poor choice of words. I didn't imply the scenario score, but their individual heal/damage scores on the scenario board.

Many people don't seem to care if they win or lose, as long as they got a high individual score they think they contributed well. Which quite often is far from the truth.