I'm certain of almost nothing on the matter but like you I was just thinking that I can't really imagine any obvious reason why that stuff would produce this behavior, although I can sort of imagine something goofy with cross faction like a slot on a team getting locked in as pub after a guy unqueues or some other such accident both systems have huge issues for the same reason (painfully high odds of there being a huge gap in ability b/ the handful of players on support roles in queue) but in his post he was specifically complaining that being higher rated can lead to getting skipped. like I said, this has always been a thing and it's always been a necessary nuisance. unless I'm misunderstanding what people are saying this is I guess sort of adjacent to but ultimately separate from the debate about which team the lower rated tank should be on, or whatever

if this is real it's an awful bug. one would assume it's probably related to the way cross faction works or the new team building does anyone who isn't a sperg poster just making things up as they write their posts know if it can happen with all dps games? or are support roles always present? it has always been like this it will pop after waiting long enough lopsided games are bad so the fact it works this way is actually good anyway

the infrequency of changes is arguably the most egregious thing about BWA's pvp development I get they're not great players themselves, they're understaffed, and inundated in terrible advice from their player base so I expect mistakes and over/under turned knobs. but they so rarely turn the knobs at all

in general for these boards I think best practice is to focus our attention on the most pressing issues, modulated by their feasibility (getting a less **** engine is pressing but never going to happen, for example) and while multiple nets are obnoxious I think they generally can be played around if you plan accordingly. I'm sensitive in both directions here, as playing around it may involve doing annoying things like sitting in stealth for a while before you do anything, or immediately moving to LOS when you do, and the like and one might argue you shouldn't have to do those things. I think I probably just disagree with that. if my previous post was coherent it should be clear that I am somewhat ambivalent on this topic but in general I side with the argument multiple nets might not be inherently broken, and that we should adjust more core issues and reevaluate. if mercs are meant to be a bursty glass cannon nerfing multiple nets might actually be overdoing it

im not sure there's much point putting my opinion this late into a thread that has derailed kinda hard but here goes my gut reaction is that net largely feels oppressive, in some contexts anyway, because it's coming from a ranged dps with rather stupid defensive mechanics and that nerfing net while some more pressing issues about the class exist would most definitely not be best practice at the same time, a phenomenon that surely exists in virtually any game where class balance or some equivalent thereof is a thing is the survival of broken or badly designed mechanics which hobble along because they belong to bad or middling classes, allowing them to fly under the radar. some aspects of net or multiple nets could fall under this umbrella, or at least they could have before 5.0. so while I personally wouldn't adjust net at this time I don't think the fact it went mostly uncomplained about previously is *necessarily* a knock down argument re: the trinity/4s epeen war I do think the deadness of group ranked is worth noting, especially when you take into account the age and state of this game (this is relevant because it strongly suggests the deadness problem is here to stay). however, I think the point about using trinity to balance is good, particularly because the trinity is hardly only relevant to group ranked - the SR queue is trying to create it when it can, and it matters in regs too. in addition to that, balancing for trinity and balancing for non trinity are not always inherently at odds. in my opinion, some of the best utilities are ones that are potentially powerful, but shift heavily in their usefulness based on whether or not you're getting trinity games. blood ward is a good example, I think. I always ran it when I was active in the game in SR but if I (bear with the thought experiment) knew I would be getting trinity SR games I would likely drop it. I'd most likely not run it in pressure 4s either. The stun immunity is no doubt disproportionately useful for hardswap 4s, so perhaps that "meta" is an exception, but whether or not that boost is useful enough to make it "worth it" is something I'm not qualified to say. But that possible wrinkle is beside my point. As it stands we have far too few clever utilities like this, and we'll probably have too few tacticals of the same. Anyway, tl;dr if it were up to me I'd adjust mercs to have more methods of being able to maintain dps/hps output while being focused and fewer ridiculous passive healing DCDs over nerfing net. But I think it's worth noting that sometimes dumb mechanics squeak by proper scrutiny, and that something like a net hinder debuff lasting a minute improving regs/SR while having almost zero impact on group ranked is not an inherently ridiculous possibility. I still think I probably wouldn't do it though

this would be an ineffective fix for a misdiagnosed "problem" unless you plan for them to also hide health this won't even work as people will just go back to doing what we did for years - using health as an approximation of item rating instead of reading the exact item rating as we can now also, gear rating is very unimportant to survival because of bolster. it seems to me it's mostly important insofar as it sort of functions as a stand in for an attitude of either not caring enough to be geared before queuing SR, or being too inactive in the game to get it. and these things generally correlate with ability and practice, which generally correlate with how easy you are to kill. and it only stands in for those things in this manner until you've played some games and other people in the queue get to know you and how well you play, at which point those direct observations of how good you are completely replace assumptions made based on your gear who is focused in SR is primarily decided by 2 things: class/class matchups and prior knowledge of the skill of the enemy players (if you happen to know, and you often do) gear comes well after that, and unless their gear is clearly TOTALLY ****ed up (suggesting they are new and you should tunnel them because they are new), mostly functions as a tie breaker. it's not a primary method of picking who to focus pts and juggs get tunneled because they are squishier and can't really escape and also can split your damage with guard if you focus one of their teammates instead. unless there's a difference in skill people are aware of they will go for a PT in 258s over a merc running bolster just about every time

there is 1 person above 2K in solos and 0 in group ok i tried

after the changes they made and how smushed ELO is now at 1250 you're only 100 elo from being silver again, that's literally 1 good session of play. ELO is not so accurate that 100 ELO is meaningful. 100 elo is margin of error - this is even true in very lively games. being silver and 100 elo from silver are far more similar than they are different, there's not as much of a problem here as you think there is. silver, or near silver, on dps jugg is respectable they should absolutely undo whatever made ELO so smushed now though you have misunderstood me casuals are a problem because the game is dead so it can't reliably group like-minded/like-skilled together for their own games, not because there's anything wrong with being a casual or bad player. if there were a forum for casual pvpers they could rightly complain that they get matched with tryhards who chain stuns and nets and have all their abilities bound to an mmo mouse, it's lame for the casual players too I assure you. overwatch has a lot of very poor, very casual players but the player base is so large that the matchmaker can create matches filled exclusively by these players. so they can have their own fun matches amongst themselves. same goes for the grandmaster ELO players. if swtor also had thousands of players in queue at any given moment all the "global bait" players would get packed into games amongst themselves, average players playing against other average players, and so on up the line. everyone has much more competitive, winnable matches in this scenario - it's good for everyone the cheating issue in this game is quite bad but it gets a disproportionate amount of attention because it ruins the integrity of the top 3 titles, which people obviously care about, and it's kind of insulting to see known cheaters sitting at the top of the boards. but cheaters have no impact on the vast majority of SR games that happen and their impact on one's ability to get to t3/t2/t1 is therefore also very marginal (their impact on getting top 3 titles, however, can be extremely large though!). the low population impacts how fun a LOT of the SR games that happen are, for comparison.

you will have spikes and up and down while trending towards the elo you contribute at. if you fluctuate around 1300 all season long, you play at 1300 level and for every one of those games you're going to have one where you get an easy win. meanwhile your impact in the toss up games will determine where you settle in the same players climb a lot every season because they're good and ELO reflects that thankfully bioware doesn't listen to the people who come on this board and say this

he's playing word games because he's wrong with respect to the actual spirit of the debate

unwinnable games and throwers are part of every solo queue elo ladder out there, swtor just has it worse than most games due to low population and a...highly casual player base the only solution to bad players is to either stop them from playing at all (not happening, nor should it happen) or get enough people in the queue such that there are enough matches to split low, middling, and higher elo players into their own games most of the time. this is also not happening. the bad players are spread about randomly so you'll climb if you keep playing and pull your weight

the smart way to evaluate anything is by comparing it to past versions or expected versions that might replace it when gone the game under keith has made vastly better decisions and perhaps more importantly it's trying to do good things ben would never have bothered with your minor complaints just show that you have expectations that will never be met keith is good

mando net goes through shroud too it's just another of the bugged pub abilities, of which we have a few

max item rating bolster is good and makes pvp more competitive set bonuses, tacticals, and amplifiers add interesting wrinkles to gearing and playstyle - I love the idea in theory. please be careful about the magnitude of their impact though, as they could easily be overpowered. the ones you've posted so far don't seem overly impactful though - almost like an extra utility slot or so on the topic of tacticals please note that they could be very helpful for improving pvp balance without messing with dps/hps targets for PVE. some specs disproportionately suffer in pvp due to difficulties doing their rotations (e.g. lots of casting, needing to roll around a lot to not die (operative dps), and so on - issues take-and-dish damage classes like marauders and snipers don't have) and some are painful to play in solo ranked where you get a lot of games with no tank, or no healer, or neither. tacticals, along with utilities and set bonuses, provide an opportunity to address these challenges for some specs that are middling or poor. thanks! more gear from more places is also good in general most of the changes you guys talked about sound theoretically good I think. definitely better than 5.0, which I think you guys know made a lot of unpopular changes

do you not have class symbols turned on? class symbols are a god send I don't understand the concept of "taking the subjective" because I'm a native english speaker so all that stuff is completely transparent to my brain But I can say I've never seen nor heard "who is whom." I became curious if this is because the 2nd pronoun there is not an object, and therefore should be who and not whom, or if it's just one of those english things where the phrase became entrenched as "who is who." I found the following we use who as the subject and whom as the object. Isn't the second who in Who is Who an object? If you can ask that question, you have reached at least the intermediate level in the game of correctly choosing between who and whom. At this level, we must distinguish between action verbs and nonaction, or linking, verbs. The verb to be and all its forms, including is, are, was, were, will be, has been, and all the other forms for the 12 tenses, is a linking verb. It links a subject to one of three things: an adjective describing that subject, a phrase identifying the current location of that subject, or a noun or pronoun that refers to the same person or thing as the subject. That last situation pertains to the who is who situation. When a linking verb links a subject to a noun or pronoun, it is almost as if that sentence has two subjects. so apparently the 2nd pronoun is not an object, so it's who is who!

if squads of fury maras and sorc healers in regs annoy you, as they probably should, please come join us in solo ranked we need more players and unlike the unranked pvp warzone/battleground mode of every MMO we don't have an obnoxious arms race encouraging people to run in increasingly large squads of increasingly meta classes in voice comms into a queue that is mostly people not doing those things we've got the meta class arms race but at least teams are random and we've got support role parity! if you queue solo and want fair matches, play solo ranked!

if you would like to have your illusions that dps juggs are overpowered shattered, queue for solo ranked on one ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ if regs were actually a competitive game mode you'd notice that jugg dps are mediocre in that game mode too. but they're not competitive

something like that would be fine

these ones are very easy but the system would obviously have to have some sort of guard rail built in without it, you'd have obviously terrible situations where the matchmaker is trying to move the #1 or #2 highest rated dps onto the same team in order to avoid a class stack. #1 dps vs #2 dps is one of the most important factors in getting vaguely balanced matches and stacking them together for class balance would not be even REMOTELY worth it also any class stacks that are of neutral value will increase the average elo delta of matches with no counter benefit. do you know what the neutral class stacks are? the best I could do is guess this same issue could be addressed by better class balance...in addition to all the other things better class balance would address I don't think this is a fair criticism as ELO is literally designed to work better with more matches. If you want an accurate elo you need to play regularly, but really not THAT much. a few matches a day will be more than enough additionally if there's a skill approximating algorithm that doesn't need a decent number of games to work, or doesn't get messed up by throwers I haven't heard of it

class imbalances don't make the game non zero sum, synergies slightly do though

saying it's designed for chess isn't very fair - it's going to be fine for any zero sum game the class stack synergies you bring up do mess with how zero sum solo ranked is but it is VERY slight

Yes but he does have a point. Some of the wrinkles in class differences can produce synergies that create an advantage that is not reflected in ELO. Multiple nets against none, multiple predations against none, multiple skankers or offhealers against none, etc. The situation he gave is easy (and that's fine, it's just for the purposes of a thought experiment) because balancing classes in that scenario does not compete with also balancing the ELO between the teams. In the real world, however, these 2 things will often be at odds. You will be inevitably trading imbalances of one sort (various class stacks) for another - imbalanced "skill" (ELO). This is made worse by the fact that some class stacks are basically of neutral value, creating ELO imbalances trying to balance the class layout for absolutely no benefit. Or some class stacks are only valuable against certain enemy classes and so on. I'd argue that because class stacks will generally balance out in the end and that quantifying the ELO value of certain stacks is basically impossible that this is more of a *class balance* issue than a matchmaking one You're right that this matchup is not the best example of his point but his point is legitimate - class stacks of various sorts can create synergies not reflected in ELO. In fact, this one has 2: a bunch of nets on one team, versus a bunch of off guards on the other. But I'm mostly ignoring that because we're just fighting the hypothetical. The concept at hand is legit.

You can suggest ways to make matchmaking better but this is totally irrelevant to the question of whether or not the current matchmaking "works." Working in this context just means better than nothing, which is the cancer that we had before. One of the cool things about ELO, and the reason that every vaguely competitive ladder uses it, is that it encapsulates the things you've mentioned here into a number. You don't need to account for skill, class, and gear individually because ELO already does all that for you. A 1200 merc in 258s pulls approximately the same weight as a 1200 dps jugg in 230s. If they didn't, they wouldn't have ~1200 ELO. Couple things here. Unless bioware explains how the reg ELO/MMR works you simply cannot test it. Period. You're just guessing. I'm definitely not endorsing bioware not telling us how it works as that has been a constant source of annoyance but until they do the most we can do is complain. Secondly, see my previous blurb. If the system does in fact use some form of ELO those things you mentioned are taken into account because they are reflected by your ELO. If it uses win percentage the same would be true. ELO is better than win % though because it is more sensitive to more recent matches and less so to very old matches, which stats like win % are weighed down by. Same as before you can make all the recommendations to bioware you like about how it ought to work but that doesn't mean the current system doesn't work, or isn't better than what we had before. Please don't do this If you're inclined to claim that you're not doing this, check what you've titled this thread Exactly. This is why people going on the forums and pretending that they know the current matchmaking is not working or worse than no matchmaking is bad. Because they don't know this. This is separate from changes you'd like to see. Claiming that random allocation (aside from the role based stuff) is better than what we have now is functionally the same as claiming the current method is worse than nothing. As explained and as you yourself seem to understand you cannot possibly know this to be the case. In fact it's straight up unlikely because pulling this off would be actively difficult. Even fairly "bad" metrics like gear rating, matches played, or valor are almost certainly better than nothing at all - if only barely. I think you aren't grasping how difficult it would be to be worse than nothing at all.

damage reduction exists, many players do really really bad damage also "reduced damage taken" hacks aren't really a thing you cannot dodge attacks while hard stunned in swtor

Like I said in order for it to be worse the MM would have to be stacking better players together to such a large degree that it even outweighs the support roles balancing. The people cheerleading this ridiculous notion that MM should be turned off do not realize that bioware would practically have to *try* to create this state of affairs and that it is highly unlikely I don't mean this as an insult but people on this board constantly interpret individual or small numbers of matches completely incorrectly or draw absurdly large conclusions based on nearly-useless anecdotes. The person who made this thread is one of the worst offenders and they all feed off each other I'd bet the farm they are simply imagining things and every time they get a ****** warzone confirmation bias takes over it was added. they explained how the role balancing works but not how the hidden elo/mmr works. being cagey about details has always been their MO whatever the hidden elo is, it's probably something simple or standard. like a typical elo ladder where wins bump you up modulated by your team's average elo vs the opponents and vice versa. or win percentage. what other methods could they even use? please note that none of the conspiracy peddlers are even offering theories as to what elo method they might realistically use that could be producing the results they imagine they're getting. the fact this sort of thing doesn't even get discussed in this thread shows you the level of insight it's operating at