Temporary Matchmaking Test

[saupreusse]

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

Afaik this patch only focuses on the matchmaker, but max did tease that they may address those other things in the not so far future.

[Alubert]

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

Afaik this patch only focuses on the matchmaker, but max did tease that they may address those other things in the not so far future.

Great news!

[Baaldr]

This looks awesome! gj!

[JohnnyWayne]

The matching based on a point system is what I also had suggested about 2 years back. Sounds awesome. Really interested how your calculation formula looks like. What aspects are considered.

Looking forward to seeing the the performance improvements. Does this utilize a bucket approach that kicks off SCs every x seconds?

It's not totally finalised right now and we will tweak it over time. The matchmaking system is based on Open Match.

Interesting. Did you notice that the stopped developing OM1 in 2022 and there is a OM2 around? Seems like they streamlined the matching workflow and moved away from the micro service approach. I kind of was expecting they'd have an algorithm for matching implemented, but from what I could gather, devs still have to do that themselves. Documentation seems somewhat lackluster.

[salazarn]

Interesting changes, the intent being to make balanced teams fight each other.

However I do not see it being successful.

The reason being that it is not fun for one 2/2/2 in RoR to fight another 2/2/2 in RoR in sc. Premaders avoid doing it in ranked and people will not enjoy it now.

The reason is that healers are overpowered crosshealing each other with party heals and hots and that with guard and taunt makes for dead games.

It is why tier 1 and mid tier people enjoy sc and then never play it again. They dont want to sit in a 20min sc and get 2 kills at the end of it.

[leftayparxoun]

Interesting changes, the intent being to make balanced teams fight each other.

However I do not see it being successful.

The reason being that it is not fun for one 2/2/2 in RoR to fight another 2/2/2 in RoR in sc. Premaders avoid doing it in ranked and people will not enjoy it now.

The reason is that healers are overpowered crosshealing each other with party heals and hots and that with guard and taunt makes for dead games.

It is why tier 1 and mid tier people enjoy sc and then never play it again. They dont want to sit in a 20min sc and get 2 kills at the end of it.

Keep in mind that most scenarios are 12v12 or larger so in most cases it should (theoretically) be 4 dps assisting on the same target. Of course, the target will also (theoretically) be healer by 4 healers instead of 2, but this situation allows for way bigger bursts of damage (as an hp%) that may catch the healers off-guard before they can keep them up.

Regardless, let's talk about the 6v6 situation.
Even if what you claim is true (which I personally doubt), we are quite fortunate that, unlike ranked, winning by kills is not the only way by which a team may win a Scenario. Playing the objectives is a valid alternative that is also the original intention of the gamemode, with kills basically being supplementary to achieve the above goal.

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.

Now you might say "How am I going to disengage/split safely to do objectives?".
Well, if it is actually true that equal 2-2-2 setups cannot land kills on each other, then you should have no problem sending a dps or a tank solo for that job.

[gisborne]

Please make the reward a fixed amount of renown rather than a %. I'm not going to want to queue up on my healer/tank into possibly losing scenarios to get an extra 50% of 500 renown.

[gisborne]

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.

[leftayparxoun]

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.

[FischiPiSti]

...
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.

And I believe a very big reason for that is the terrible experience of scs that you guys are trying to address, like I said. I do hope there's more to come because there's a lot of improvements that could be had...

Any plans for changing the respawn system? Right now, most players outside of a premade don't expect to be revived, so they hit respawn right away. But how waved spawns are set up, the timer can be just a few seconds, not giving healers a chance to even attempt to revive them. It distracts them, wastes their cast time and CD, and the player is out of the fight(most of the time for good). So healers just don't bother reviving. But worse, it splits the group basically permanently. Sure, it's up to the players to try and regroup, but even if they try, 99% of the time it's a snowball effect leading to each scs having just 1 group fight, and then 4 minute afk or ganking a couple of players trying to rejoin the fight while the other half is lying dead.
System proposal:
- If somebody dies, automatically start a countdown for respawn, 10(tentative) sec constant. Gives plenty of time to attempt to revive if a healer is nearby.
- If somebody doesn't want to be revived for whatever reason, clicking respawn, respawns them immediately, removing their body so healers don't get distracted and waste time
- Respawning flags the player. At the base, there is a barrier(or just use the teleport back to start position feature to make it easier) that prevents flagged players from leaving the base. The same global 30 sec waved spawn rules would still apply, meaning the player would have their flag removed at the next 30 sec cycle, allowing them to rejoin the fight.
Effects:
- The 10 sec constant respawn timer gives healers clear rules to be able to prepare accordingly, less ambiguity about when the body would disappear, wasting their time. On average, healers right now have 15 secs to revive someone, so 10 sec would technically be a nerf to that, but because the timer right now varies so much, it's unreliable to even attempt to revive. Again, a clear constant timer is just better.
- The change would effectively increase the downtime for those who don't click on respawn from 0-30 sec (15 average) to 10-40 sec (25 average). But if it helps to stabilize the group fight, I think it's beneficial for everybody.
- Being locked in the base gives spawning players time to prepare better, potion, respec, mount up, check map, chat, whatever. It beats lying on the ground up to 30 sec for sure.
- The same effective 30 sec wave rules still apply, meaning the team doing the killing still has the same upper hand; it is mostly a QoL change.