Actual problems with the new PvP mode: ELO, attrition, tedium, missed opportunities.

Biggest problem I'm finding is that Guardians can't be matched with other Guardians. So we're forced to switch to Reaper and get matched instantly. This kinda ruins the fun and immersion for me because I can't really pick the side I actually like. Feels like match making would be way faster if Factions could match with themselves.

edit: also, how am I meant to grind to level 1000 if I can get like 1 fight as a Guardian a night. It just doesn't work. I get the lore reasoning, but a game needs to function as a game first.

@toxie-will-kill If only Athena had a subgroup that could be reskined as a threat but still on the same side... a Dark Athena.. or Adventurer even... A Dark Adventurer... no no no that could never exist, we would need a reaper equivalent... like how skeleton ships served the Warsmith.

We should really be able to queue against our own faction and be restyled as Dark Adventurers and Skeletons of the Warsmiths.

We have no insight on how the ELO system actually works

Could also be, How often a player fires a cannon and how often it hits a target and does damage or destroys part of the ship. Or kills a pirate.

The tendency for kegs to spawn in the Barrels of Plenty in the mutual invasion spots is way too high.

Let me guess...you not looking and crashing into them, thus taking more damage by environment and not player. :P

I don't see the necessity of locking the option to fight bigger ships behind streaks. I understand it may be this way to prevent new players from accidentally triggering it, but it's just kind of silly.

I think like they said, once you got yourself on the list as Top dog as a Solo Sloop or even Duo, you can take on other size ships. Which is for the best. No solo sloop wasn to "accidentally" fight a Galleon. (unless they are alliance)

Players should have a way to skip the invasion cooldown timer, so that they can opt-in for PvP immediately without having to dive (if for example they are stacking loot or flags).

I have yet to really witness a cooldown myself. Once my fight ends as a win, I make a bee line for the nearby outpost and still get invaded blocks away. Wind or no wind.

Losing battles and having to resupply is extremely time consuming and tedious.

Sigh...This still open Adventure. It the same during the "Old days" Where you stack resources, win or lose. Your still gonna have to resupply anyways or risk losing. Take your time, plan for a battle. Dont jump into a shark pool.

Beginning battles with both ships nosing at each other full speed is terrible. It feels especially bad in solos where you need to choose between helm and cannon as you are immediately forced into a broadside.

How else you want to do this? Some ships could be at an island with there nose pointed at sea. Some could have there broadside to a Fort? From the front is best direction as 99% of people park there ships like this, and if your sailing, it gives you moments to get read.
As a solo, you always have to decide...what is more important? Heck you dont even need to touch the helm, take a cannon and shoot!!

rewarding whoever can out-patience the other person first.

Bring it on. When I play, I have all the time in the world. Not my fault if some other player has a bed time :P xD

Part of me thinks the ELO behind the scenes is not working properly.

1-2 minute queue time is almost never accurate.

10+ minute queue time feels less.

I don't think it is matching people correctly.

My idea is how other games with ELO do it. Essentially, you sit for a maximum amount of time before your "pool" of players expands. So this goes both ways. Players with less skill will eventually get matched with better players and vice versa.

My argument is to keep the queue going back to back if a player desires. Not try to make it a perfect match.

This is assuming that already players are having long wait times because they win too many matches. I don't think this is the actual case so I'm hoping they are going to work out the kinks so people get more matches.

Me getting 4 matches in 2 hours is ridiculous. Most of our matches last 5-10 minutes. We have various levels where our average is around 30 in Athena allegiance.

Agreed. Also have to add a lot of bugs like no working canons or firearms, long respawn times from fairy of the damned (what can cause a loss easily) plus spawning spot of your ship. Sometimes enemy ships just spawned behind me or I simply spawned in their broadsite, having no chance of fighting back (Galleon vs Galleon).
I was very hyped for the update but nah.. after a couple of days all I am is disappointed.

@burnbacon it's purely based on wins and losses. Rare said this in the season 8 deep dive

@mouse-n-keybord said in Actual problems with the new PvP mode: ELO, attrition, tedium, missed opportunities.:

@xzodeak I've lost over 150+ solo brig matches and one team tonight said they had over 100 wins and 3 losses. Not sure if they were telling the truth. But everyone else I've asked about their W/L and they said they were just starting basically. Everyone on their crew was saying they had 5-10 wins and a few losses.

They need flush the system out more. Give us something as a gage cause to me it feels like I'm just fighting other max level PLs cause the system is so new and everyone is starting.

I think is okay as the system identifies everyone's rating and starts to match them.

The issue for my crew is "less than one minute" matchmaking is almost always not accurate and the times are almost always not accurate.

No matches happening at all.

I am hoping behind the scenes they are looking at how to make sure people get matches no matter what versus keeping someone in queue until the perfect match happens.

I've played with ELO in other games and they have an expanding rating. For example, if I am rated 100 then I should be looking for 90-110 people to play with. If after 5 minutes it expands 80 - 120, so on and so forth. This would allow people to eventually get into matches no matter what instead of whatever is currently occurring.

Before someone comes in here and says "switch sides" or "try a different setting." We play on PC, xbox, do both, various ship sizes, and even tried changing regions. We eventually just hit an infinite queue and that is ridiculous. That means the matchmaking is not working properly because there is no way something this fun would already be dead.

@toxie-will-kill said in Actual problems with the new PvP mode: ELO, attrition, tedium, missed opportunities.:

Biggest problem I'm finding is that Guardians can't be matched with other Guardians. So we're forced to switch to Reaper and get matched instantly. This kinda ruins the fun and immersion for me because I can't really pick the side I actually like. Feels like match making would be way faster if Factions could match with themselves.

edit: also, how am I meant to grind to level 1000 if I can get like 1 fight as a Guardian a night. It just doesn't work. I get the lore reasoning, but a game needs to function as a game first.

Why would faction ships sink each other? That goes against the lore and entire point of the system. The point is there are two factions. The factions are at war. Why would you as a guardian get reputation for sinking another guardian. That makes no sense.

@cptnpotbeard makes about as much sense as someone who wants to role play being loyal to Athena but is forced to switch to Reaper to actually play the game.

Anyone who's played a game with SBMM knows what the consequences of this will be.

First things first I need to cut in and say that anyone who's played a game with SBMM, and any intelligence plus decency, knows that those consequences are a good thing.
Adding sbmm was a good decision, Rare, and people at the tale of ends of the skill spectrum is in no way enough of a downside to cause questioning the decision.

And it's also non-inducive to streaks. That is true.
That doesn't mean you should remove or change sbmm, it means you should alter the rewards systems to account for the fact that streaks are not expected.

Crews should only be winning 50% of the time. Well that does leave streaks as being technically possible, it still means the highest amount of matches anyone is actually expected to win in a row, is 1. The most likely result of consecutive fights is W-L-W-L-W-L-W-L. People aren't going to get streak rewards. Not once we're past this first week where nobody is sorted out in the sbmm.
If anyone would like a comparison, I have been told that the newest Call of Duty's actually have some presence of real sbmm, thank bloody god; making them the best games in the entire franchise on that basis alone, but also meaning nobody ever gets the higher killstreaks anymore. Meaning the game needs changes, the killstreak system needs to be changed, to not have the expectation of people getting those streaks.

Additionally, as I'm sure has been said plenty of times already both in forum and Discord, intentionally losing to tank your own mmr to get easier streaks later is incentivized by the current reward systems.

@moogbeard пишет в Actual problems with the new PvP mode: ELO, attrition, tedium, missed opportunities.:

• Beginning battles with both ships nosing at each other full speed is terrible. It feels especially bad in solos where you need to choose between helm and cannon as you are immediately forced into a broadside.

bruh, u can raise the sails while u r underwater, and then it wont be full speed

@the-old-soul800 said in Actual problems with the new PvP mode: ELO, attrition, tedium, missed opportunities.:

Anyone who's played a game with SBMM knows what the consequences of this will be.

First things first I need to cut in and say that anyone who's played a game with SBMM, and any intelligence plus decency, knows that those consequences are a good thing.
Adding sbmm was a good decision, Rare, and people at the tale of ends of the skill spectrum is in no way enough of a downside to cause questioning the decision.

Intentional deranking, long queue times and smurfing are good things? How exactly?

As for the rest of your post I'm not sure I can take you seriously if you think Call of Duty's approach to SBMM is a good one, there are games where SBMM works properly and makes sense for the game and CoD is (very infamously) not one of them.

@guyrza said in Actual problems with the new PvP mode: ELO, attrition, tedium, missed opportunities.:

@moogbeard пишет в Actual problems with the new PvP mode: ELO, attrition, tedium, missed opportunities.:

• Beginning battles with both ships nosing at each other full speed is terrible. It feels especially bad in solos where you need to choose between helm and cannon as you are immediately forced into a broadside.

bruh, u can raise the sails while u r underwater, and then it wont be full speed

It actually resets to fully dropped once your ship surfaces.

@moogbeard
Old Call of Duty's were infamously bad specifically because they didn't use sbmm.
Then some were infamously bad because they claimed to use it, but didn't actually; they just did team balancing instead. Which is better than nothing, but worse than actual sbmm. And they did such a bad job at it that the games still felt like they had nothing.
The new CoDs, where I'm told they finally have real sbmm and people are getting the K/D ratios of 1.0 they should always have had in all the games, are the best CoDs on that basis alone.
Based on my experience so far with my recently acquired (reboot) Modern Warfare 1, they should actually be making the sbmm even stricter than it currently is.

Long queue times for end-of-skill-spectrum players IS a good thing.
Longer queues for better matches is superior to shorter queues for worse matches.
The long queue times everyone is getting sometimes, currently, is not because of mmr. The sbmm has only been out 4 days, nobody is sorted yet; everybody is in everybody's range still, as if there was no sbmm at all. The effects of the sbmm in SoT won't actually be seen for at least a minimum of two weeks, when a notable amount of people have finally started to be sorted out.

Intentional derankers and smurfs, dealing with them that is, are both upgrades from the direct bad matches from not having sbmm. Which means that yes, they are positive changes. They are negative, but less negative than the alternative, making the change to them positive. Going from a negative number to a smaller negative number is a positive difference.
They are also both detectable, and able to be reacted to: Rare can address the concern of their existence.
Moreover, intentional derankers actually is not a result of sbmm. Its a result of the streaks system. That's the part that needs changes.

@the-old-soul800

The sbmm has only been out 4 days, nobody is sorted yet; everybody is in everybody's range still, as if there was no sbmm at all. The effects of the sbmm in SoT won't actually be seen for at least a minimum of two weeks, when a notable amount of people have finally started to be sorted out.

Thats my concern as well. I know friends of mine who had their 10th streak match with an afk/kill me already-crew. That's in no way any kind of a matchmaking at all.

So what I think and what I see is that you get matched with random people all the time, the effort you put into is not rewarded in a fitting manner. You can either spend 2 hours fighting like a sweatlord for maybe 2 levels or you can spend them being afk, getting killed constantly, have no sweat at all and reach the same goal. This is not how matchmaking and ranking is supposed to work.

I experienced an issue when solo sloop matching… I have heard from other players that this has happened to them as well… I loaded in with the opposing solo slooper in front as usual, we engage in cannon fire moments after loading in and while those first canons are still being shot from the sloop… I’m boarded and killed… when I spawn back in, kill the player and look at the map there are two ships in the circle… this was not an organic ship entering the battle… this was an alliance or ships working together that planned to take advantage of the solo slooper match making system. what was supposed to be a solo sloop match with the possibility of an organic encounter of another ship entering the battle is now basically an execution for the incoming solo slooper. A lot of players are trying pvp for the first time or trying solo pvp for the first time. They go into it expecting a mostly fair fight, and this trick is not only demotivating for those players it is an exploit of the game mechanics in my opinion. I think any players in the area who are not match making at the time should be despawned from the area and any ships in the area when the battle initially begins should get a “get out or your ship will explode” message similar to when the match making ships go out of bounds. I’m not sure if that would even help since players would learn to wait just outside the area…
maybe when defending you could be spawned to a different area in the same server when a match is found… I’m not really sure how rare would solve this issue or if they even see it as an issue… Something like the above would still allow for organic encounters of other ships joining the fight but stop multiple ships from camping a spot waiting to stomp on a solo slooper who is expecting somewhat of a fair fight, not 2-3 ships against 1 solo sloop at the very beginning of the fight.

Toda vez que procuro partidas de PvP no ps5, não consigo encontrar partidas, são raras as vezes que encontro players para enfrentar, desta forma nunca pegarei a maldição do esqueleto. Precisava de ter outra forma de pegar a maldição do esqueleto. Estou desistindo do jogo, pois não consigo alcançar meus objetivos e outros amigos meus também passam pelo mesmo problema