Fix ranked sc

[Omegus]

The pops are horrible, and it seems less and less people playing it.
Fix it, don't let it die pls
the frustration is real.

It's almost as if 6v6 team deathmatch was a super-niche gameplay mode. I want ranked scenarios where it's the usual "proper" scenarios where I just get grouped with people of similar skill level and face those of a similar skill level. Screw TDM.

[dalen]

Anyone care to offer anything on top of 'fix it'? Suggestions, believe it or not, do get read & reviewed.

I think current matchmaking system is main issue, as its too strict.
Playing one match per hour and spending like 45-50m waiting for another match including all those aborted games is way too much.

To clarify a bit about the strictness of the match maker, it currently allows a maximum 325 MMR difference in a match. But that still means it can match the current top MMR player on scoreboard (1822 MMR) with someone that is playing their first match (1500 MMR).

Any less strict than that is essentially no match making at all. And in our experience that has usually resulted in the loosing side to stop queueing.

[thedonkeykong332]

Anyone care to offer anything on top of 'fix it'? Suggestions, believe it or not, do get read & reviewed.

I think current matchmaking system is main issue, as its too strict.
Playing one match per hour and spending like 45-50m waiting for another match including all those aborted games is way too much.

To clarify a bit about the strictness of the match maker, it currently allows a maximum 325 MMR difference in a match. But that still means it can match the current top MMR player on scoreboard (1822 MMR) with someone that is playing their first match (1500 MMR).

Any less strict than that is essentially no match making at all. And in our experience that has usually resulted in the loosing side to stop queueing.

But you are not even playing the game now, right now 28 people searching 0 games, you wait long @SS time and get paired in a 5v6 match and long wait again. There is no 6v6 scene here for such strictness..

[dalen]

I think current matchmaking system is main issue, as its too strict.
Playing one match per hour and spending like 45-50m waiting for another match including all those aborted games is way too much.

To clarify a bit about the strictness of the match maker, it currently allows a maximum 325 MMR difference in a match. But that still means it can match the current top MMR player on scoreboard (1822 MMR) with someone that is playing their first match (1500 MMR).

Any less strict than that is essentially no match making at all. And in our experience that has usually resulted in the loosing side to stop queueing.

But you are not even playing the game now, right now 28 people searching 0 games, you wait long @SS time and get paired in a 5v6 match and long wait again. There is no 6v6 scene here for such strictness..

if there's not even two healers on each side it doesn't matter if there's 200 DPS in the queue, it still can't make a 2-2-2 game out of it.

But we have tried doing no match making. It made people slowly stop queueing on the currently loosing side until we had around 25 DPS in queue on destro side and 1 in queue on order side.

[kmark101]

Before any brainstorming ideas, I actually have the question towards the devs: why the games don't pop, what is the reason?

I mean when 40-50ppl in que and no game is starting, what is the issue:
- order has only rdps while destro mdps in the que? or vica versa?
- too many engineers in que?
- the actual MMR difference is more than 325 for 12 players at any given time?
- bug?
- anything else?

On my knight (1805 MMR), I can't get a pop since Thursday, while being in que for like 12 hours total... something is not right with that.

[Greywolfamakir]

Matchmaking system is working fine, the real issue is the amount of ppl in queue. How to fix it? I have a couple of ideas.

1) Re-evaluate price on gear. If gear from Ranked SCs is gonna take longer than Sov pieces, no real Incentives to queue Ranked SCs. Im not telling that gear from Ranked SCs should be free, or easy, but if Sovereign takes less time than Ranked SCs, there is no point.

2) Add really good Weapons/Jewels , even the best weapons/jewels. If you add something "top" like Weapons or jewels, ppl will queue for Rankeds SCs, and it wouldn't be an issue since a lot of "top" gear is locked behind some kind of content (PVE, big scale PVP, etc...)

[sogeou]

People need to understand a super small amount of people want to do this. 6v6 is not a thing, it is never going to be big or pop or anything like that. Not sure if they removed the solo and did group only and made it a free for all, but then losers would stop unless losing got more / equal rewards. That could stop the whole rich get richer which is why destro alwys wins city and mostly always out gears order.

[Nekkma]

From the perspective of someone that have not done a single ranked game (but with another system probably wuold have) it feels like there need to be a positive start to get the "ball roling".

For an mmr system to work you need to draw in the masses, not just some competitive elite. I think you need to make some of the rewards easily achievable for casuals and those rewards also need to be desirable. Not saying it should be gear. Lets say the avarage player doing 20 game a season should have enough currency to buy 1 +24 quality talisman or perhaps 2 of the dungeon talis. Just look how many people quing for weekend warfronts for rather modest, but most importantly attainable, rewards. Rewards can be adjusted and requirements increased once a big enough playerbase is established.

Personally I decided not to bother with ranked (as I still need to gear from other sources on all my characters) when I read the 60 games in 6 weeks requirement. With hour long ques I will never be able to reach the minimum requirement of participation. This can of course become a negative spirale where players ignore ranked because of to long ques which leads to even longer ques. I will probably never be a player doing alot of solo ranked but with the reward sugegstion I listed above I would for sure do 20 games a season and who knows, I might end up liking it.

[blondgelockt]

Anyone care to offer anything on top of 'fix it'? Suggestions, believe it or not, do get read & reviewed.

Sure: Fix class and faction balance.

[nat3s]

A couple of suggestions:

- Improve balance so more "viable" classes feel they can queue.

Heal shamans would be mad to queue right now, they have slow casting heals and hots which take time to kick in... Doesn't work in a burst meta with glass cannon dps queuing.

Engi/magus are immobile and their dps drops to fluff damage if they need to move which is frequently required in a 6v6.

WL is just wrecking all. 6v6 is for your high burst classes (both burst healing and bust damage) either reduce burst all around or bring burst up on some of those that dont have it.

- Players want to feel special, I reckon a good proportion of people don't queue because they don't want to "embarrass" themselves with a low MMR (and that low MMR could simply be because they are playing an inefficient 6v6 class). If you're not going to balance around competitive 6v6 play then just remove MMR requirements from buying gear and do not display it anywhere, but still use it for matching.

- Fix the bugs. 6v6 frequently crashes when loading for me and I come back to a long quitter debuff. Stop the zoning in crashes, i suspect this is where all the draws are coming from.

- Stop GMs / Devs abusing the system. A high profile developer for RoR and White Lion enthusiast - don't want to name him as I don't want to get punished here - suffered from the above crash bug live on stream the other day and used an admin command to remove his quitter debuff. He extended it to 4 days and made it all very funny on stream before simply clearing it... He didn't really notice people weren't laughing, a lot of us were just shocked. I don't want to hate on the guy as he's done SO MUCH for this game and i HUGELY APPRECIATE it. Top guy. But this was an abuse of power to game the system ahead of other people who have to sit out such crash bugs. I stopped queuing then and there and haven't queued since. How can we trust he's playing fair?

- You can't force people to do content they don't enjoy, no matter the reward. If 6v6 content isn't something people enjoy, adding rewards to it to "force" people into it will only lead to people leaving. To solve this, provide other content avenues for obtaining the gear, maybe the final city dungeons which can only be run after winning a siege?

- Same point applies to sov btw, if people really thought about it I'd wager they hate cities, they are frustrating stomp fests. Look at live, they allowed you to earn invader/sov outside cities for a reason. You "force" people into too much content they don't enjoy and your pop will just whittle away to nothing. To fix this:

Allow rr80+ to earn invader in rvr lakes - This is a huge thing for me, i have rr80 chars with like 30 invader. Hugely frustrating and very difficult to get into forts with 2500 online when you play EU prime time only due to work (EU prime being perma stagnation).
Allow rr90+ to earn sov in rvr lakes - There are very few rr90 so it's not going to break the game + gives people more incentive to play beyond rr80.

People ENJOY rvr so allow us to use the content we ENJOY to earn our rewards. Stop gating **** off. Same applies to forcing rr80 to run gunbad and BB/BE to get to BS. It's just bad design.