Temporary Matchmaking Test

[Sinofsociety]

I wonder if some better UI / information would help?
Currently it's a bit of a mystery where the queue it up to and what roles are needed.

World of Warcraft in the LFR system has;

[tank] [Healer] [DPS] [DPS] [DPS]

As a UI frame, showing what roles are prospected, so it keeps you informed.

If the match maker has a scenario as target to the current players in the queue, and then displayed it ;

[Tanks] ?/?
[Heal] ?/?
[DPS] ?/?

There is the question of what does it fix - My view it'd be people relogging to fill those more difficult to fill roles.

Now, on a separate approach, I've often thought games with elements that need players to come together should have a hot spot event, so, every 2 hours, have 1 hour of increased rewards, so in every 3 hours, 1 hour is of increased benefit to be in the SC queue. So instead of SC just being running all the time, there is incentive to choose SC over other content during that time frame.

Another example of this from Warcraft is timewalking. People might not want to dungeon run all the time, but for one week of the month, there is incentive to run dungeons.

[georgehabadasher]

People don't play for objectives because they don't matter. You can lose every scenario and get 5-10x the renown of the winners by farming kills. You see premades let their opponents get objectives all the time just to lure them out to be slaughtered and not surrender.

If you want objectives to matter you need to reduce kill renown and increase objective/win renown significantly.

I partially disagree.
I do agree on the fact that playing for objectives should also provide renown (similar to how orvr BOs/Keeps do) and be competitive renown-wise to kills in scenario.

Where I do disagree, though, is that scenario objectives do not matter even now.

People, even good players I know, keep reverberating the saying that "The only thing that matters in scenarios is kills".
And, certainly, that is true if you look at renown gains. But Renown isn't your character's progression bottleneck; it's crests.

The average characters requires around 17.000 crests for their main spec BIS and potentially that much again for the BIS off-spec.
Do you think people care about Renown? Playing everyday for a couple hours will see you hit rr70+ in a couple weeks if done efficiently. You don't need scenarios for that, rvr gains are better. Especially since people just stop queueing against you if the stomps go for too long. I also know at least 3 people who have gotten bored of some of their characters which they played during 2x or 3x renown events because they ended up with less than 4k crests when they hit rr78. Granted, the above arguement is empirical but it should gice you an idea about why renown isn't what people (should) care about.

Now here again people might claim that "Kills still are all that matter in scs", but let me show you how that is not necessarily true:

Imagine if you decide to completely throw a scenario just to farm kills and your team indeed manages to farm them non-stop. What's a reasonable amount of kills you'd expect at the end of the match? 60 kills make sense to me as an upper bound.

Now let's assume that your 6man takes the entirety of the crests dropped and it does not get split with the rest of the parties, if any (which I'm pretty sure is not the case since crests might be getting shared in scenarios like they do by default in warbands nowdays).

60 kills for an average of 1 war crest per kill (very high estimate considering that if you do 60 kills in e.g. 6 minutes then the enemies will be worth nothing after their 2nd death or so, but let's again assume that).

If everything goes as described, what has your 6man achieved under those ideal circumstances?
Basically 60 crests split in 6 for an average gain of 10 crests from kills. Let's be generous and add 2 more crests from the points your kills got you, for an average gain of 12 war crests per person.

What did the loser recieve from winning the scenario? 10 war crests each, across all parties too (if more than 6).

Now, who is the big winner? You might still say the people who farmed them, but the reality is that on average the "losers" came out of the scenario with better rewards and possibly with better payouts than the winning team if we are actually being realistic.

Let me repeat myself. Winning the scenario (with any means necessary) should on average net you better rewards than whoever has the most kills. "Should" as in what is happening currently, not "should" as in that is how it should be (that is up to the devs to decide, although I also think it "should" be that way).

Where the theory falls apart is that the current scenario matchmaking system and certain scenarios' design do not let the losing team win by points if their enemies decide to camp their warcamp. Essentially, due to the lack of comeback mechanics and complete imbalance of roles, gear and skill level across teams, it is quite often that meat-wave tactics (i.e. running away from your spawn to try and backcap while the enemy team is staring at the rest of your team waiting for them to get down) are not possible. That is in my eyes a design flaw and one that people use to break the current scenario system.

By breaking it, I mean that they are intentionally queing in those specific maps so that they can ensure that if they win by kills they will also win by points, or more specifically by their opponents surrendering after being unable to even exit their spawn safely. Not only that, but it a particularly malignant behavior (if you'd allow me the term) since the aim is to spam sc queue for hours in a row whenever a "good" map is part of the weekend scenario event since, unlike weekdays, they are guarranteed to keep getting matches and people to stomp.
Malignant, because while it is the most efficient method to gain crests (15+ crests per 6 minutes or so) it is a method that preys on the community itself and has been eating away at all our new players for the past 5+ years. Adding barriers to spawns and removing guards from them has only made the situation worse.

To reiterate once again: for a good part of the scenarios, playing just for kills is inefficient as a way to progress your character. Playing for objectives and using kills as a way to secure objectives is the most efficient way to gain war crests from scenarios currently.
For the rest of the scenario maps, I would argue that they would need proper restructuring so as to allow the losing team to win by points if their enemies are not engaging with the objectives properly and are just hunting after kills. They are scenarios after all, not orvr in fancy locations.

If the devs will lean towards that direction (and perhaps also buff renown gain from playing the objectives) or if they will decide to turn regular scenarios into a different flavor of Ranked remains to be seen.

This is fundamentally correct. Put more succinctly, nobody tries to do the objectives because, in the vast majority of scenarios, it is trivial for the stomping side to decide to win, even if they are ignoring the objectives until they're down 400-50. That's because in the majority of the scenarios, there is only one objective open at any time, or at most two.

For example, take the most recent weekend warfront scenario: Gromril Crossing. The fights congregate around a single point. There is no option to 'play the objectives' if your team can't outfight the opposing team. After losing the first engagement, many players simply respawn and re-engage. This leads to a kind of chain reaction in which one side has won the first engagement and is picking off the remaining stragglers just as the respawning players re-engage. The winners of the initial engagement still have morales, still have pre-hots, and more importantly, have a numerical advantage because they're now only facing the recently respawned players. This pattern repeats until you get to the warcamp. Because this is so common, many players give up after losing the first engagement and AFK randomly around the map, further compounding the advantage to the winning team.

If you look at scenario results from the Old Dwarf Road weekend warfront, you see completely different outcomes. The outcomes were much closer, both in kills and by scenario score. This is because the player mentality is subconsciously different in this kind of scenario. Players losing the first engagement tend to try to avoid the fight they just lost and go back cap. Because all three objectives are open at all times, if one side chases kills, it can facilitate this backcapping behavior because the objectives are clear. If the stronger team splits up, the weaker side can still win smaller fights if they have more players in the area. This leads to a more engaging and dynamic combat environment and is a basic tenet of game design. RoR is the only game I am aware of that so severely limits the usefulness/availability of objectives.

[M0rw47h]

...and how we are supposed to finish event quest for event SCs?

[normanis]

i like idea also que to pve

[Sinofsociety]

Message on joining the scenario from server;

Scenario join.
You are not receiving a bonus incentive for this scenario.
You are no longer marked as a scenario quitter.

I joined when the UI for the scenario match maker indicated a tank and healer bonus of 50% reknown.

Reviewing my combat log, at the end of the scenario my reknown gain was -
84
96
96
=
276
(excluding kills reknown, but that was 25 for a kill / death blow.)
I'm unsure if that has the bonus applied or not.

Hope this helps!

[wonshot]

Feedback after 1-2 hours of queueing during the test:

Solo queue scenarios could maybe be slightly better without the Reservation feature, this prevents tanks and healers to swap party to where they are needed or want to go.

The first fight is very often a strong determinator of how the outcome of the scenario will go, for solo queue there are no premades joining later and helping turn an uphill battle so if solo queue scenarios could not begin before all assigned players with a pop are inside it could maybe make the scenarios better for everyone? Joining later as a backfiller coming into a scenario where your team is behind and some might even have given up, is not fun. Neither is it if you team loses the first fight due to someone pressed Give me a minut and is reserving a spot preventing a tank swapping group, or making you outnumbered for the first clash.

But I like ALOT of the systems and archtype bonuses, the new layout and matchmaking so far. Just outnumbered and reserved seem to be an issue with first impressions

[sven85z]

Felt alot better to me as a solo player q up.

[Cenerae]

So far I can't tell the difference in the mid tier queues. Destro getting both more melee and more healers while Order getting too many ranged dps and not enough of anything else. Solo queueing is still as coinflippy as ever for me, but I suppose it can't account for people who can't/won't perform their basic role functions properly/at all.

[kleinbuchstabe]

First Impression:

The New SC Interface looks realy nice and user friendly

First I qued solo and had very fast pops (as Tank).
Then I joined a 6man, and we had no pops at all. Avarage time was +-1min, but we waited more than 6min without a pop.
Therefore, all groupmembers decided to que solo then, and everyone had instant pops again, but splited up in different SCs.

Thats a little bit weird, cause it feels now that solo quers are prioritized (or group ques are disadvantaged) generaly in the SC que.
I really hope that this is not working as intended, cause SC is a group based content imo. Playing 6man SC with guildies is one of the reasons i play this game since decades, dont want to loose that to a solo-que prioritizing system, wich leads to 6man groups spliting up to get a pop, like it happend today. This would be a very bad direction...

Another feedback is about the bonus
I qued as tank, wich promised me 50% RR bonus. When I joined the SCs, i was one of 4 tanks (good matchmaking), and the system said:
"You are not receiving a bonus incentive for this scenario."
This happend every time, so i never got the promised bonus, and is asked myself why?
Maybe beause there are 4 tanks in the SC, so everything is fine?
But isnt the reason, that there 4 tanks in this SC, the promise of a bonus?
I think when there is a bonus promised during que, you should get this bonus, otherwise you feel a little bit cheated.

[OceanSoul]

Granted, a big number of players do not like to play for objectives but in my opinion this is mainly due to the complete degradation of scenario matchmaking up to the point where they are just seen as pugfarms nowdays. Should this status change (and especially if non-kill rewards in scenarios get buffed), then I expect people will start playing more tactically.

People don't play for objectives because they don't matter. You can lose every scenario and get 5-10x the renown of the winners by farming kills. You see premades let their opponents get objectives all the time just to lure them out to be slaughtered and not surrender.

If you want objectives to matter you need to reduce kill renown and increase objective/win renown significantly.

People don't play for objectives because for the most part its boring. Killing is fun and standing on the flag doing nothing is not fun. The more objectives gameplay decoupled from actual pvp gameplay the less people care about them. People rarely forget to pick up the thing in Maw of Madness or Mourkain Temple, because its simple and you can keep doing fun part - fighting - while also doing objectives.

It has nothing to do with efficiency or the proper way of progressing. I mean it does, but not as much as whether the thing is fun to do or not.