viewtopic.php?f=15&t=15796
First of all I believe both pugs/casuals and premades are important to the game and they should both be catered for. Instead of fighting/whining at each other, we can come to a solution that fits both groups.
I’m a premade player myself, but I’ve also queued solo many times and even more on live. If I queue solo I expect to face a premade so now and then. That is the risk I know I’m taking for queuing solo. And I believe that is part of the game. It starts to get frustrating when 50%+ of the time you are facing premades with pugs. At some point like 80-90% of the scenarios was against a premade and that also frustrates me (and probably everyone else). From the premade perspective it is also frustrating to only be fighting pugs. I don’t mind having some easy fights while queueing, but it gets boring as quickly as it gets frustrating for pugs to fight premades.
Now I am against pug only scenarios because of two main reasons. First of all I like to keep the queue times down as much as possible. So far I am pretty satisfied with queue times in RoR and I like to keep it that way. Second I believe it’s part of the risk of queueing solo. While I totally respect people do not want to play in groups, the game is centered about group play in both PvE and PvP. I believe people should be encouraged to play in groups, but not forced. I am of the opinion that you take away all reason to form groups when you make pug only scenarios.
Having a premade only scenario as we have currently does help somewhat in this issue, but it is not the final solution. First of all it is a pure 6v6 scenario, only used by a handful of guilds as an arena. The queue times for Caledor Woods (CW) are generally very long if you don’t make an appointment with another guild. And if anything, it only increases queue times as it stands. As it is only a handful of guilds using it, I guess it doesn’t matter too much yet.
Another issue I see is people leaving pops because they know who they are facing. I don’t know the reason why the RoR-team made it so you can see who you are facing when the queue pops, but I think it would be better without it. Making a good matchmaking system when people just leave when they see hard opposition is never going to work. And that is exactly what I would like to see: a good match-making system. I’m not an expert in this, but I think there are definitely opportunities in making a good matchmaking system.
Danielle had some very good ideas that I believe should be possible also with a relatively small player base: “a thing that was introduced in HoN called ''matchmaking fidelity" where players were able to select longer queue times for better balanced matches” & “That system would completely shut down during low population, and conversely tighten up the fidelity (matchmaking criteria) as population increases to maintain acceptable queue times..”
Alternatively you could not have the option to queue for more balanced matches but have this automatically. Question remains what criteria there should be for the scenarios. Something else I was thinking off (again I’m not an expert in match making systems) is to build in a timer in the queuing system. For example only once every 5 minutes, the scenarios pop. The advantage of such system is that it there is a larger player base to make more balanced scenarios. It might increase queue times in prime time, but it would still be steady times and depending on the timer you don’t have to wait long at all. I guess the timer could even change accordingly to the current population.
Another point Danielle made was role queueing. I’m aware there is some kind of role balancing atm, but while it allows somewhat equal scenarios as in destruction versus order, it doesn’t guarantee balanced groups. This role queueing system could possible also show how many of which role are queued atm (or have been queued up the past X amount of time) to give players feedback on which roles the realm needs and possibly help a little bit in balancing scenarios out.
If you put all these above ideas together you should hopefully get a good matchmaking system with better balanced scenarios, both in terms of role setups and in terms of premades versus pugs. Completely separate to this matchmaking system you can have the 6v6 arena for those who want to these fights. It’s just easier to organize them through a queueing system and have boundaries formed by the scenario than to organize them in empty RvR zones where there still is a risk of people interfering and you can run endlessly far away.
