Return of Reckoning

Premise: Sc's should be balanced, 50% win rate should be the golden standard no matter if pug or premade.

Goal: Reach 50% win/loss rate for everyone, even for premades facing pugs.

To maintain balance: Surrender or leaving sc before ends should not be rewarded.


As we all know premades are not made equal.
They come in all flavors from 6 pugs grouping up without coms, poor gear, and bad assist, to full guild premade, with BiS gear, with coms and close to perfect assist with 2/2/2 setup.

Players are not equal, some players are much stronger than others. Even the strongest premades sometimes bring a bad player as filler.

Gear, renown, and player skill all influence how a sc will go, and most scenarios are lost before they even begin because of this. But a fresh level 40 can ruin a sc for everyone else if opposition is fully geared, or sometimes playing a less than optimal class or spec.


My idea for getting true 50% winrate, while avoiding meta gaming as much as possible is as follows.

Each player is given a numerical value, each win increases your value, each loss reduces it. But different from ranked, every player starts with the value 10, every win increases your value by 1, every loss reduces it by 1 with a minimum score of 1.

Your value as a player joining a sc is based on your number of sc win/losses after the mechanic got implemented.

Each sc is forced to be near to point balanced, but rather than forcing only players as strong as your group like ranked tries to do, you just need to meet the raw numbers.

So a strong 6 man with a 5 sc lead is worth 15 points each, 90 points total, while a badly geared fresh level 40 with 5 losses in a row is worth 5 points.

Theoretically that 6 man could potentially now face 18 fresh level 40 chars with 5 losses each. For a funny but rather unbalanced game.

But since the premise is to always have a 50% win/lose rate, the average score of players should always move towards 10 per player. So 9 players to face a premade of 6 in this case.

Now the premade is strong, and they handily win the sc, 9 players down, they all lose 1 point. The premade is now worth 96 points +1 each, and if the sc should pop with same players again, the premade would face 9 players for a total of 81 points, and another 15 points worth of players could still be added. 1 Strong player or 2-3 weak players. The premade is slowly moving towards where win/loss will keep flipping for them.


So this is my idea for dealing with the imbalances in scenarios, everybody will get to experience both wins and losses, no premade can ever play without facing losses, and no pug can play an evening without a single win. And with a 50% win rate as the goal the weekly sc task of 10 plays and 5 wins is within reach even for a pug player.


Now there is a glaring issue with this method, kills give crests, wins give maximum 10. If you forget about winning and just hunt kills you can play the system to artificially lower your score while harvesting rewards.

Well there is a simple counter to this 100% of all crests dropped from kills are added as a share to the sc win reward, but still scaling with the current reward system, so even the loser gets a % of the crests.

You want the big rewards, you have to win, you getting farmed, well at least you get a chunk of the medals farmed off you when the sc ends.

And there is a completely new level of bragging rights for the truly strong premades, how high can you manage to get your score and how many players can you manage to face until your win/lose rate hits 50% and your score stops climbing.

Also as the last point, surrendering is not counted as a loss or win for either side, points stay the same. No gaming the system to artificially lower your score.

There are ways to fine tune this idea further, especially on the rewards side, like multiplying drop rates by player score, a premade losing will often deny the enemy kills which limits rewards for pug players, that the premade will harvest from the pugs freely when they are winning.

But there are counters to this, forced respawn, 1-2 teleport points from spawn into zone, and automatically ejected from spawn into sc after 30 seconds etc. So you can regroup, but you can't stay safe, you have to fight.

I'm not sure something this nuanced could be balanced.

The real answer is just that premade vs pug should never happen. Ranked is a separate gamemode for hardcore premades, they can go do that and queue as a 6 man. If you queue as less than a 6 man, you should not have to fight premades.

You can't fully balance it, you can only balance for win rate, everyone gets to win on average 50% of the time over time.

The battles themselves if they are balanced or not will be up to chance and player skill much like today. You can only make the numbers rise until the premade falls over. Is a 3 man, 4 man or 5 man a hardcore premade? Is it just 6 man that is a premade?

This would allow any size group to have a fighting chance, and after a few sc's start balancing out their scores no matter how many strong or weak players they have.

You wouldn't care if you were facing a hardcore 6 man, as you should always have a decent chance of having a fighting chance if you have numbers on your side. Same if you are in the premade, you are fighting a uphill battle number wise, and for each win you get closer to the point where you have to take a loss.

I play regularly 2 times a week with a premade, and I am the worst player in the premade, I die the most of anyone in my premade, but even then I can often count my deaths in a evening on one hand, this suggestion I have made here will completely wreck that, the better the premade does the harder the fights will get until you can't handle it and you lose. And once you reach your skill and gear ceiling, you should average about a 50% win/loss rate with this system. You will always be fighting enemies or numbers that challenge your limits as a player, both as a premade and as a pug player.
And if you lose, well then things become a smidge easier until you push yourself again. But there is no long term punishment for either winning or losing, just how many wins in a row you can manage to stack up before you fail.

There is not and will not be a balance between classes in this game. Thanks to the local "developers" who play the order. Order is stronger than destruction. If you want to win, play for a warrant.

Well with this method you don't care about class balance in sc's. Since weaker classes will fail earlier, their score will be generally lower, so your opponents will be a smidge weaker or you will have more support if fighting someone stronger.

Class balance is it's own issue, but won't have much impact for sc balance as long as the points don't care about your class just how many wins or losses you have, and hence your point value for how many players to face.

The game has equality of opportunity, not outcome.

I agree, there is a disparity between gear and classes, but that is moot.

Gear, and class choice should never be conflated with outcomes relative to skill and team work.

Perhaps, what ever the weekend event, that can be assigned the pug sc.

Lets see, there is one pug sc every week, all the rest is open for everyone. And every day you see unbalanced sc's going on repeat, with people being farmed on repeat. With massive gear and skill gaps crushing new players.

With balance based on win/loss ratio, that becomes unimportant in scs. And some semblance of balanced fights no matter what you are bringing to the sc. Low geared or renown becomes much less of an issue.

And if two premades are on, well then they have a good chance to fight each other. If they are equal in strength, they should preferably fight each other. While still keeping sc's open for everyone.

You or anyone else are not entitled a 50/50 win rate.

This sounds terrible. We don't have the playerbase for a proper MMr system, so just throw more and more pugs into the meat grinder until the pre-made loses?! How will that benefit anyone? More pugs get ate, and those forming groups get frustrated at the CONSTANT unbalanced matches, or simply revert to farming PUGs and ignoring SC mechanics.

This idea ignores that SCs have objectives and are not straight death matches. 12+v6 is a hard fight, add flags and you functionally cant win many SCs. This would encourage premades to go for kills and ignore objs so they get a "loss" even more than currently.

Also seems super easy to game. Form a strong 5man, then invite someone on a decent losing streak. Or just form a duo/trio so you have better odds getting "lesser" players on your side. If anyone thinks the Killboard has caused issues, this would be Hell. One would assume we'd have to reconfigure the Surrender option also, or else that'd be used to game the system.

You try to lessen this with the rewards but., that's already a thing! Many SCs don't reward each kill. It doesn't work currently. Why would it work under your system? People want kills. And many. Many of us have been BiS for years. WCs aren't a carrot.

As for the bragging rights, people want Kills. The wins are usually secondary. At least, that's 90% of the groups I've rolled with. Again, we have our loot, we want to kill.

Lastly, I don't understand the premise. Why 50%? I'd get having some catch up mechanic, like if you're at 20% Winrate or 90%, then we can go 12v9, maybe. Could the OP offer a bit more explanation on Why? You just state it as fact with no reasoning that 50% is the gold standard. Edit2: I get the reasoning for some system, just why 50%? It seems kinda arbitrary. Groups aren't equal, why would the outcome be?

Edit: also, how would this system manage SCs without healers/tanks? Or would you install a match maker again? We tried that before, our massive pop of solo DPS classes freaked out over the Q times.

Edit 3: I think you need more perspective on why people have losing streaks. If often isn't just premade vs pug. It's that one side has 1 healer, and 1 tank, and the other is 2/2/2, or 1 side assists and the other doesn't. We have already shown that the community doesn't want a proper match maker so, I don't see how any system will actually resolve the underlying problems.

A system that gives terrible players the same wins as good players?

Why would anyone try to improve then? Most will even stay near spawn and watch an anime instead of trying to win.

People trying to win should win more than people not trying to.