On Warzone Scoring and Rewards

[Theology]

Want to save SWTOR pvp?

 

Put in 8 man queues.

[OpenSorce]

Right, so as soon as a WZ is a probable loss, leave. Got it. Thanks for the heads up.

[hypershadowcat]

That.. really doesn't answer the question at all, though.

 

I get that people are unhappy, but the old system wasn't that great either. It basically made everyone feel like a winner, because actually winning didn't mean jack aside from 1 daily quest.

 

And I still hear 0 suggestions for something that addresses both issues, making winning important, and still keeping a good reason for people to play their little hearts out for the entire match.

 

Maybe winners could get say 5-10 ranked comms? something small but usefull where the losing team would not be to far at a loss. Main point of the game should be to have fun not spend hours and hours to get the gear you need.

[Varicite]

 

In some respects I agree with you. It really depends on the specific "rewards" doled out. I think it is patently absurd to place the best players at an advantage over the worst players. Again, no one wants to see a paraplegic play 18 holes with Tiger Woods - except maybe a sadist.

 

PvP should be a competition - not class warfare. P

 

That said - legitimate victory and talent deserve recognition and reward! I don't think the reward should be of a character that places the better players at an additional advantage over weaker players, but a reward is called for: cooler looking gear, credit bonuses, valor spikes, unlocks for exclusive puchases that don't provide stat buffs, etc.

 

No one should want to see Michael Jordan get a 20-point headstart in a basketball game against a blind midget, but MJ deserves a recognition for his skill and achievements. On the other hand, if all Michael ever did was win games in which he had been given an advance advantage, then there would be no need to recognize him - he didn't accomplish anything.

 

When you shoot an unarmed man, you have not proven that you are stronger than he is. Similarly, when a player decked out in War Hero armor kills someone wearing recruit armor, he doesn't deserve anything. When someone wearing recruit armor beats someone wearing War Hero, however, that is a different story.

 

The bottom line: only in a level playing field does skill decide the contest. Don't be too quick to clamor for an edge in PvP or you will rob yourself of any real/meaningful victory. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be handing out trophies to the winners, though.

 

 

I think it should be noted, however, that no matter WHY any team loses, "gear" is always going to be cited as the reason.

 

It usually isn't the actual reason people lose, though. At least not entirely.

[CorellianWannabe]

This is the effect that "everyone deserves a trophy" events are having on society. Currently I get almost (almost) as many medals when I lose as when I win... I dont see a problem with the system atm. If your servers players are quitting perhaps the issue isnt how the game calculates rewards, but that your teammates are more concerned with being carried to victory than leading the way...

 

Tell you what-go tell professional athletes that they only get paid if they win-and since no one wins all the time they can effectively expect a salary cut. Tell them it's all about competition and not to expect to be carried to victory. See how far that gets you.

[Torcer]

WHY DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?

 

 

First of all, rest assured we are keeping a close watch on the results of our reward changes to Warzones in 1.2 and we will continue to pull constant metrics to make sure they are going in the right direction as players get used to the new rules.

 

.

 

(Emphasis added)

 

As I discussed in the (deleted) Redmax thread, BioWare’s over reliance on Metrics is the heart of their poor PvP design decisions. My thesis is that EVERY BW PvP design decision that makes no sense to the majority of the community is a direct result of BioWare implementing PvP designs based on TheoryCraft numbers and Metrics, to the exclusion of actual player experience. TheoryCraft based on interpretation of Metrics explains the implantation of poorly thought out PvP changes and DanielErickson’s responses consistently cite Metrics as the basis for BW fixes. Metrics should not be relied upon to “make sure they are going in the right direction,” actual players’ experience should.

 

How did Ilum happen? How did the 3 Medal WZ Reward Requirement happen? Why did BW claim a viable Tank role, when Shielding is ineffective vs. the damage types that smart players actually use? Etc. The reason why BioWare doesn’t adequately test PvP changes before pushing them to live is that player experience and how real people actually react while playing to design mechanics is essentially irrelevant to its number based PvP design philosophy. In support of this theory, I ask you to consider how BW consistently cites Metrics in its design explanations, and the lack of level 50 testing, and the non responsiveness to PTS feedback.

 

DanielErickson’s response IS evidence that BW will react to feedback, but it’s reactive rather than proactive. In other words, BioWare will only reexamine its design theory as implemented once there’s been a Community meltdown, and even then it relies on math, over countless thousands of hours of actual player experience.

 

Here’s the problem with this numbers based design philosophy – A Game is not a Math Problem, it’s not a spreadsheet, it’s a Game and it’s meant to be fun. If your game is not fun, it’s not much of a game, and even if your game is perfectly balanced on paper, it’s not really. Numbers can serve as the basis for a design, but there is no objectively numerically perfect PvP design. The human element will ALWAYS frustrate your design, and players will act in ways you never imagined based on an incentive structure you never intended because you were focused on numerically balancing some other issue. THAT’S WHY THOROUGH TESTING BY ACTUAL PLAYERS IS SO IMPORTANT.

 

As good as it is that BioWare is removing the 3 Medal requirements, DanielErickson’s reliance on Metrics in his response demonstrates that BW’s PvP team still doesn’t understand why these PvP design disasters continue to happen. If common sense would not have predicted that the 3 Medal Reward Requirement would create an incentive structure encouraging people to leave losing WZs and camp nodes rather than play to win, then adequate testing would have. Examining Metrics would not necessarily have revealed this player behavior; players would need to bring it to your attention, and you’d need to listen. BW needs to test its PvP design decisions, it needs to implement level 50 Copy to PTS, have enough PvP testers from all player types (Premades, PuGs, Solo, etc), implement one PvP change at a time since multiple changes at the same time may interact with each other in unforeseen ways, and it needs to listen to constructive feedback from reliable testers. BioWare’s failure to adequately test it’s numbers driven PvP design decisions explains nearly every poor design decision, and so long as BW continues to rely on numbers over actual player testing, PvP design disasters will continue to occur.

 

So now you understand why this keeps happening.

 

Granted, this is only a theory, I could be wrong, but if any of you have any other ideas about how these nearly incomprehensibly poor decisions like Ilum, the lower TTK post 1.2, and the 4 Medal Reward decisions keep happening, I’d love to hear them.

Edited April 16, 2012 by Torcer

[hypershadowcat]

Tell you what-go tell professional athletes that they only get paid if they win-and since no one wins all the time they can effectively expect a salary cut. Tell them it's all about competition and not to expect to be carried to victory. See how far that gets you.

 

lolz, so true

[Varicite]

Maybe winners could get say 5-10 ranked comms? something small but usefull where the losing team would not be to far at a loss. Main point of the game should be to have fun not spend hours and hours to get the gear you need.

 

Doesn't that put us in the exact same situation we are now?

 

People will complain that winners get to gear up faster because of the ranked comms, and there's no reason to stay to lose because you won't get ranked comms, and blabla regular warzone comms are too slow, etc.

 

I could understand making the spread not so severe (100 win / 60 loss instead of 100 win / 40 loss) or something, but no matter what you do, if you reward the winners, losers will complain.

 

At least in this day and age they will, lol.

[Drexz]

IMO one of the top things needed, with regards to rewards, is to improve them for people who defend a single objective for an extended period of time. Sitting at snow for 10 minutes or one of the outlying locations in novare for the entire match, will net you about 4 or 5 medals if there has not been any fighting. You are just sitting there and watching for incoming. So in essence you are getting penalized for doing a very important job on the team. It's no wonder everyone runs for mid.

 

How about an exponential gain on medals if you are defending a single location, so that at the end of the match you have the opportunity to exit with around the same number of medals as someone who keeps jumping around and getting a ton of fighting related medals.

 

For example

- Match starts, you cap a turret and stay there to defend

- You start gaining defending points and after first 3 you get a medal

- Then after next 2 you get a medal

- Another medal after another 2

- After this you get a medal for each time you gain defending points

- However, if any time within this cycle you leave the defense area for more then 30 seconds, it resets. Or if the defense area comes under attack and you gain one or more medals from fighting, it also resets this cycle. Dying resets it as well.

[bryanhyland]

if you are always loosing in pvp and never get any thing out if it for trying your hardest then what is the point

i hear guild wars 2 and diablo 3 are going to be free to play wander how many will people will leave star wars the old republic over the pvp still being messed up

[Twin]

How do you propose BW promotes healthy competition instead of creating a system that only gives incentives for participation?

 

They want you to care about winning, and none of the suggestions I've read thus far even seem to take that into account.

 

People joining matches and "medal-farming" was a huge issue prior to 1.2 (still present in 1.2), because there was very little difference between winning or losing, and rewards were almost entirely based on how many medals you farmed.

 

That is still a problem that needs to be addressed, which was why the emphasis was put on winning/losing, instead of participation. It also coincides nicely w/ Rated WZs' emphasis on win/loss ratio.

 

My suggestion takes that into account..

 

Regarding Comms, Exp and Valor (And credits) - Imo these should be left static per game. Instead there should be separate rewards that only can be purchased by tokens gained from winning a WZ - But not anything that halts gear progression for bad/inexperienced/unlucky people.

 

Stuff like uniqe titles, uniqe moddable armor, SMALL boosts to base stats (Think datacron), emotes, uniqe companion mods, uniqe pets/mounts etc etc whatnot.

[Postalz]

My main issue with PvP at the moment is the amount of experience gained per battle. Solely leveling through PvP and have been playing since early access and I'm still not level cap.

 

The change from 3 medals to 1 is good. You should not punish honest players for a few bad apples. At the same time I do hope PvP can be a good way to earn credits.

 

Thank you for creating a game I enjoy

[johnkevin]

Will we ever see the set bonuses on the armor for battle master gear and the rakata gear line

[Zeus_]

I think the commendation need to be returned to normal before patch. The reasoning behind this is. The price has been increased on everything. The commendation that we were getting previous to patch will balance out since the prices have increased. 95% of my time is pvping up through leveling and at the rate I get commendations to getting quest rewards. Well lets just say I am better off straight questing than pvping to get the level 20 and 40 gear.

[islander]

Your a funny bunny. Go play COD if you think Aoeing people actually kills people. DFA is a smaller radius now, AND my full DPS gear DFA hits for approximately 500 a tick... thats *********** terrible, you must be playing some 11k health smuggler if your dying to aoe.

 

and why are you standing RIGHT at the door? melee should be picking of healers, tanks should be controlling and standing at the door, and ranged should be behind the pillars shooting at healers/melee.

 

Seriously. This. See thats the thing about PvP forums. They are usually filled with:

 

1) bad PvPers

2) good PvPers who troll them

 

They shouldn't be taking this feedback all too seriously, I mean listening to the 5% of customers who post here ruins games.

 

I'd go back to what they did in beta, and send out surveys every 4 hours asking questions and getting input from actual players who don't frequent forums.

[hypershadowcat]

Doesn't that put us in the exact same situation we are now?

 

People will complain that winners get to gear up faster because of the ranked comms, and there's no reason to stay to lose because you won't get ranked comms, and blabla regular warzone comms are too slow, etc.

 

I could understand making the spread not so severe (100 win / 60 loss instead of 100 win / 40 loss) or something, but no matter what you do, if you reward the winners, losers will complain.

 

At least in this day and age they will, lol.

The old system was working just fine. I can understand the the change in medals. But nerfing the rewards like that was just bone headed misstake.

Edited April 16, 2012 by hypershadowcat

[Polebreaker]

You state here that the WZ Shutdown Sequence is an "unfortunate bug where a feature of Ranked Warzones was incorrectly implemented globally." Yet, when you look at the 1.2 Patch notes, under the General Warzone section, the last two Bullet Points clearly state:

 

"Warzones will no longer shutdown early due to population imbalance.

Ranked Warzones have been temporarily disabled."

 

The Patch Notes would have us believe that you actually DID intend for this feature to go Live with 1.2, and be implemented Globally, not just in Ranked Warzones.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm more than happy that you're fixing some of these terrible changes, but I think a little more Transparency might be in order.

 

Thank you, I was going to point that out. Makes the whole thing seem either disingenuous, misleading, or incompetent.

[Obie_Wan]

No offense, but frankly BioWare's metric is worthless if they've been relying on them all along and still gave us mediocre results like this.

[CorellianWannabe]

Thank you, I was going to point that out. Makes the whole thing seem either disingenuous, misleading, or incompetent.

 

Can we vote for all three?

[DralenBrand]

I think it should be noted, however, that no matter WHY any team loses, "gear" is always going to be cited as the reason.

 

It usually isn't the actual reason people lose, though. At least not entirely.

 

 

Granted - many people lose b/c they suck. I can agree with you there. However, 2 points:

 

(1) If they suck that badly, then you shouldn't need an edge in gear to beat them; and

(2) Regardless, there are good players who lose because of the gear differential in that they have RL obligations and cannot invest the time required to get better gear, especially under this system with the crap/no rewards for losing.

 

You say it isn't the reason people USUALLY lose, and even then "at least not entirely," meaning that even you admit gear is or at least can be a contributing factor.

 

So, why can we not have rewards for winners that do not affect how level the field of play is? I cannot believe how many weenies we have here who are so senstive about losing any edge when you are absolutely right: many players who lose will lose, regardless.

 

So, if they will lose regardless, then why give the winner any edge? I for one do not mind losing on a level playing field. I do mind losing when the playing field is not equal, whether that contributes in whole or in part.

 

 

[Varicite]

My main issue with PvP at the moment is the amount of experience gained per battle. Solely leveling through PvP and have been playing since early access and I'm still not level cap.

 

The change from 3 medals to 1 is good. You should not punish honest players for a few bad apples. At the same time I do hope PvP can be a good way to earn credits.

 

Thank you for creating a game I enjoy

 

I'm curious how often you play.

 

I also level through PvP, and work full-time (at work right now actually).

 

I'm working on my 3rd 50 through just pvping nights and weekends, along w/ space dailies and class storyline.

[RealGoldlantern]

I don't understand the protest over the "gear disparity." In 1.2, they're practically throwing Battlemaster gear at you. You can get like 3 pieces a day. If you aren't in full Battlemaster gear on a new character in a week, you're doing it wrong. I play Republic, too, so I have the same low population problem that makes it hard to fill a warzone and I usually only do my 3 a day to get my daily done, but honestly, they've made it TOO easy now. The gear disparity before 1.2 was MUCH bigger, since you had to be valor 60 to have the best gear. Now they just hand it to people. Edited April 16, 2012 by RealGoldlantern

[DarthKirbyOOI]

A huge thank you to everyone who played this weekend and provided valuable feedback and analysis.

 

There's this cool system companies are using nowadays where developers add 'test servers' with upcoming patches so that gamers can preview the content and provide feedback in advance, and the developers take that feedback and make changes to the patch before it goes live.

 

You should look into it.

Edited April 16, 2012 by DarthKirbyOOI

[Sunflake]

Hey folks,

 

Some follow up news from observations of play and feedback over the weekend. In the next couple of days we will be deploying a small patch that will address the following issues:

 

• As discussed, minimum medals to gain rewards will go from 3 to 1 to better reward those who are backfilled.
  
• Warzones will once again be shutting down when population imbalance is detected. This was an unfortunate bug where a feature of Ranked Warzones (in full team play it is not desirable to let one team end the game prematurely by quitting out) was incorrectly implemented globally.
  
• Completion of Warzones will gain a large increase in the percentage of rewards it represents, so while scoring is still the primary driver, you will cease to see games that give no rewards if players have a minimum of 1 medal earned.
  
• We are extending the time we wait for a full team of eight to better make sure Warzones pop with complete teams.

 

A huge thank you to everyone who played this weekend and provided valuable feedback and analysis.

 

Just so you know....

 

The daily PvP quest to win 3 matches is, yet again, not always being updated by a win. This is the same bug that haunted us for weeks and weeks. I did a alderaan and won it and it did not updated the daily pvp like the same bug before.

 

Second... And i hate to say it.. Again the bug that sometimes (only in alderaan) you die... get back and stand at a turret and defense poitnts are not added. This is also a very old bug.

 

Just fyi

Edited April 16, 2012 by Sunflake

[Ultraviolence]

Why did we lose so much money for warzones? It's not like we were getting rich. After leveling to 50, buying the cheap speeders, not buying crap off the AH, valor rank 67, and few pieces till full BM I had accumulated a little over a million credits. It felt balanced.

 

You can check my account to verify, who in the hell are you polling to cut the credits from warzones?!

 

And you cut the credits at the same time you add content that requires credits, how lame is that. I paid 600k for a guild bank, and the only way to make that money back is to PVE. What a bunch of crap.