Temporary Matchmaking Test

[Endari]

So gersy and others have already brought up my primary concern about the blacklist so I'll mention my other little problem with the incentive bonus. Extra RR is not a real bonus and in no way would get me to swap toons, throw in extra crests and I will at least think about it.

[Natherul]

...
People say it won't work because queue times will be too long, but that's BS. There are normally 200+ players online per side. Clearly, there are enough players, but most are literally forced into RvR, either into lag fests or carrying crates because of the sorry state of scenarios. I know people who specifically refuse to play sc because of the cancer. And when the system doesn't work, the correct way is to move forward, try new things, not revert to the old system that demonstrably did not work for a decade. It festered long enough, so I'm very thankful that you guys are trying.
...

I just wanted to chime in that 200+ players and people not doing SCs might not be the system but people might not want to. Just because they are online does not mean they would want to run SCs just like not everyone might want to do dungeons or RvR.

[georgehabadasher]

Great to see scenarios getting some love! Really enthusiastic about most of these changes!

Some obvious questions arise...
1) What is the purpose of starting a scenario two minutes early and making people wait up to two minutes until it fills? Why not just wait for the requisite number of people to enter the queue and start everyone at the same time?

2) Is the ready check solving a significant problem? Leaders queueing with afk players hasn't been a significant problem that I've encountered personally, or heard others mention as a problem.

3) Regarding weekend warfronts, has the dev team considered doing something similar the RvR weekly? In the RvR weekly, players can play any zone and earn progress towards completing the event. It would be nice if players could play any scenario to progress the weekend warfront event.

1) Because we have the Random Scenario pool, it can create sceanarios which we have different minimum and maximum player caps. So we have a minimum amount of player needed for the matchmaker to create a new instance (say for example 6 per side) in which a random scenario is made. Some scenarios will have a recommended player minimum of 12 per side. So the scenario would launch with 6 people on each realm in the queue then, backfill the players to fill up the other slots now. The matchmaker now is a lot better at backfilling, so we can rely on starting a match early and then filling up. Matches can also start earlier now, if the recommended amount of players the start time jumps to 30 seconds. At the moment (live) it is fixed at 60 seconds.

2) We will review this based on feedback.

3) It has been something that has been considered but we do not plan to adjust things at this time.

Really appreciate the response. It's great to have the dev team interacting with the community with such frequency again!

1) That seems like a lot of moving parts (and coding complications possibly creating bugs) for not much payoff. Wouldn't it be simpler for the matchmaker to wait until the requisite number of players are in the queue, then launch the scenario for all of them at the same time?

Currently during NA/OCE times, it's extremely common for solos and small groups to constantly enter scenarios that have already started, especially scenarios which require more than 12 players. It's frustrating as a player because it often feels like the scenarios are decided before you can even enter the fray and make an impact.

Another unrelated topic:
Currently, most scenario instances are started by a full party of six (premade) players--which has been noted as not very friendly to pugs. For example, in extreme cases, DPS players often spend up to an hour in queue during off hours, even though there are scenarios starting.
1) How does the new system start new scenario instances?
2) Are there any plans to prioritize scenario pops for players based on duration waiting in queue?

[Jajcek12]

50% Renown is greate motivator to log needed class and be crutial change in outcome of scenario. Renown point bonus assume that scenario will be won to take profit from bonus- i would consider aditional reward for loging needed class when scenario is lost.
First reward is better gaming expierience - from better class setup, but what if scenario is lost- did only better expierience is enaugh to satisfy class change??

[sven85z]

Really looking forward to these changes to sc system.

[MaxHayman]

Great to see scenarios getting some love! Really enthusiastic about most of these changes!

Some obvious questions arise...
1) What is the purpose of starting a scenario two minutes early and making people wait up to two minutes until it fills? Why not just wait for the requisite number of people to enter the queue and start everyone at the same time?

2) Is the ready check solving a significant problem? Leaders queueing with afk players hasn't been a significant problem that I've encountered personally, or heard others mention as a problem.

3) Regarding weekend warfronts, has the dev team considered doing something similar the RvR weekly? In the RvR weekly, players can play any zone and earn progress towards completing the event. It would be nice if players could play any scenario to progress the weekend warfront event.

1) Because we have the Random Scenario pool, it can create sceanarios which we have different minimum and maximum player caps. So we have a minimum amount of player needed for the matchmaker to create a new instance (say for example 6 per side) in which a random scenario is made. Some scenarios will have a recommended player minimum of 12 per side. So the scenario would launch with 6 people on each realm in the queue then, backfill the players to fill up the other slots now. The matchmaker now is a lot better at backfilling, so we can rely on starting a match early and then filling up. Matches can also start earlier now, if the recommended amount of players the start time jumps to 30 seconds. At the moment (live) it is fixed at 60 seconds.

2) We will review this based on feedback.

3) It has been something that has been considered but we do not plan to adjust things at this time.

Really appreciate the response. It's great to have the dev team interacting with the community with such frequency again!

1) That seems like a lot of moving parts (and coding complications possibly creating bugs) for not much payoff. Wouldn't it be simpler for the matchmaker to wait until the requisite number of players are in the queue, then launch the scenario for all of them at the same time?

Currently during NA/OCE times, it's extremely common for solos and small groups to constantly enter scenarios that have already started, especially scenarios which require more than 12 players. It's frustrating as a player because it often feels like the scenarios are decided before you can even enter the fray and make an impact.

Another unrelated topic:
Currently, most scenario instances are started by a full party of six (premade) players--which has been noted as not very friendly to pugs. For example, in extreme cases, DPS players often spend up to an hour in queue during off hours, even though there are scenarios starting.
1) How does the new system start new scenario instances?
2) Are there any plans to prioritize scenario pops for players based on duration waiting in queue?

The issue would still occur if people don't accept the pop, etc. I am also hoping more people will use the "Give me a minute" feature which will force pull them in after a minute. If we wait always for the desired number of players for a queue we would only ever have small scenarios such as Ironclad (this is just an example) pop as they have a smaller minimum players. The system works quite well from our internal testing. We want to ensure as many people as possible are there at the start and right now, matches can start unbalanced as people have up to 2 minutes to delay them joining.

To your second point. The backfill system is a lot better than the current one we have in the game. It runs the same matchmaking rules as the method which makes new matches.

1) Once a certain amount of matchmaking tickets can be put together in a compatible way which will form a match over the threshold of minimum players required it will create a new instance. I can answer more specifically if that was not the intent of the question but it was quite vague.

2) Tickets are sorted by length of time in the queue, so they will always be tried first. Some of the rules are relaxed depending on how long the ticket has been in the queue.

So gersy and others have already brought up my primary concern about the blacklist so I'll mention my other little problem with the incentive bonus. Extra RR is not a real bonus and in no way would get me to swap toons, throw in extra crests and I will at least think about it.

Theres no reason this can't change in the future if it needs to. We could even make it more dynamic if we needed too.

[Bozzax]

24v24 organised scenarios

12v12, 6v6 scs that correspond directly to the campaign active maps? (reikwald > sc factory, Nordland …, marshes of madness > Mountain temple

12v12 racial scenarios? Dwarf v Orc with racial maps as above

Use the IP it will pull new players

[Alubert]

Will the new UI scenario replace the functionality of the queque add-on?
If so, that would be great.

[guessgap]

i love scenarios, so thank you for this long awaited change!
it sounds really promising, some very good ideas.
might even bring back some old players, e.g. i recruited 3-4 friends to this game and all of them loved scenarios 1-40, but left after realizing that most t4 scenarios were one-sided and rarely close matches.

[Sulorie]

sounds promising, I hope it works well. one question, are there still barriers at sc spawn points, which punish the weaker side?