Premades Are Destroying The Queue Again As Per Usual

[winpersec]

Did 3 WZ and 4 Arena Weeklies, noticed like zero premades who made a change. There were probably one or two, but they were the same garbage as the average solo queue player, so that changed nothing. DM server, played in prime time.

Edited April 3, 2023 by winpersec

[krackcommando]

On 4/3/2023 at 11:48 AM, hunKAIn said:

Of course, people started to use /stuck as they don't want to waste even a second on such games. So, I am wondering how bad it gets as sometimes you can see this behavior even if you might have some chance. Yet, I admit that sometimes it is a relief that I don't have to spend like 10 mins on games, where I might get 0-1 medals.

there's debate about this, particularly in rated matches, but /stuck is not some evil thing in arenas. I'll never /stuck the first round even if I know everyone on the other team and know exactly how it goes and regardless of how undergeared my team is. the 2nd round, it just depends how I'm feeling. of course, I regularly /stuck any round when the round is decided and continuing to fight just prolongs the round/match. the possible extra medals are meaningless to me. I'll get the cheevo on any toon I play.

the problem with /stucking is that "knowing you're drastically overmatched" is subjective, and I run into a chunk of players who will /stuck a round even if the other team is only slightly better.

iunno. I don't think /stucking matters. you should be able to do it each round. if you're willing to /stuck (regardless the reason), then you're not gonna try. and since you don't wanna leave and eat the deserter debuff...it just means the match will be that much longer for the rest of your teammates to sit through. not sure who this rule is serving. arenas today aren't serious business. that's clear from the matchmaking on down.

[AwesomeTacoCat]

FWIW, premades are literally running rampant on SS, it’s basically constant pugs vs premades in prime time these days. So not sure what servers others playing on atm but it’s pretty nuts here atm. 

[steveerkcanjerk]

On 3/30/2023 at 12:45 PM, krackcommando said:

where do you see your win rate for the new season? my stuff didn't reset that i can tell.

This is for the new season i did not play my scoundrel in the last one. Played about 55 matches for warzone and 120 for arena. 

Warzone: 55 games played, 37 games won. 
Arena: 120 games played, 91 games won.

[krackcommando]

1 hour ago, AwesomeTacoCat said:

FWIW, premades are literally running rampant on SS, it’s basically constant pugs vs premades in prime time these days. So not sure what servers others playing on atm but it’s pretty nuts here atm. 

you'll need to contextualize that a bit because if you're talking about premades (plural) at the same time, and they're constantly getting matched against pugs, I'm calling BS.

[AwesomeTacoCat]

11 hours ago, krackcommando said:

you'll need to contextualize that a bit because if you're talking about premades (plural) at the same time, and they're constantly getting matched against pugs, I'm calling BS.

I mean you can call BS all you want still was happening nonstop. Sometimes premades were probably playing premades but non-premades were getting half matches against premades half not. And there were like 3 different ones on. These are just facts. 

[krackcommando]

11 hours ago, krackcommando said:

you'll need to contextualize that a bit

🙄

 

6 minutes ago, AwesomeTacoCat said:

I mean you can call BS all you want still was happening nonstop.

did you count the different premades that you were against? were they on your team as well. how many? how often? you're spitting garbage right now. you make it sound like there were five 8m groups out there going against full pug groups every time. and you contextualize that with, "well...maybe they sometimes played against each other." do better.

how large were the grps (on your team and the other team)? etc.

Edited April 5, 2023 by krackcommando

[Crystal_Mind]

The more I queue, the more obvious it is that people are also fairly bad at identifying premades in 8s. I've been solo-queue matched onto the same team as a guildmate more than once, and almost every time the opposing team assumes we're queued together. Nevermind that we'll probably be on different teams in the next match... 🙄

[darksidenerd]

On 4/3/2023 at 10:57 AM, winpersec said:

Did 3 WZ and 4 Arena Weeklies, noticed like zero premades who made a change. There were probably one or two, but they were the same garbage as the average solo queue player, so that changed nothing. DM server, played in prime time.

 Posts like this will be ignored here. Those of us who don't run into/complain about/ see a problem with premades in any sort of post get instantly canceled lol.  

 

It's post 2016 now. opinionated nerds can now QQ months in a row for losing. They need to point a finger in some direction.  
I personally like premades, it improves my gameplay.  Wins handed to you is all these people care about. #EveryoneGetsATrophy mentality.  pathetic. 

 

If you win = you're a premade. 

[steveerkcanjerk]

1 hour ago, Crystal_Mind said:

The more I queue, the more obvious it is that people are also fairly bad at identifying premades in 8s. I've been solo-queue matched onto the same team as a guildmate more than once, and almost every time the opposing team assumes we're queued together. Nevermind that we'll probably be on different teams in the next match... 🙄

bro this happens literally all the time especially when i play on my tank. As someone who actually guard hops and i am just gonna be honest is pretty good at pvp everyone says premade premade. Just because i put guard on my healer or a dps being tunneled or taunt. And when i am on a dps and hard swap to someone they think we are all premaded up. When in reality you should be watching dcd's and health bars. There is alot of L2P issues for alot of players. And now that ranked is gone alot of us who played the game as hardcore pvpers are now being put in the regular queue and its pretty easy to stomp people and i dont need 3 or more other players to do it. There are literal players who back pedal, don't hit dcds, pop all their dcds at one time etc. and then cry about getting globaled. Its funny and even when i do occasionally go up against a premade of players its weird how my damage taken is higher then most of the team but yet i am still competing very close with them in dmg. Its almost like if you space out dcds. Premades didn't make you pull 3k dps in a pvp match. Thats a you issue, thats a skill issue. And these aren't new players either I have seen people with filled out legacy achievments pulling like 2k-5k dps in 2023. There is no amount of matchmaking thats gonna fix that. 

[steveerkcanjerk]

2 hours ago, krackcommando said:

🙄

 

did you count the different premades that you were against? were they on your team as well. how many? how often? you're spitting garbage right now. you make it sound like there were five 8m groups out there going against full pug groups every time. and you contextualize that with, "well...maybe they sometimes played against each other." do better.

how large were the grps (on your team and the other team)? etc.

Also that is another really good point. Alot of people don't consider the fact that they might have premade on their side to. And if your premade gets stomped by the other well you are gonna feel it to. But 8 man premades are very rare in reality. I have also been dabbling in the new pvp season in ff14 that started this week and its no different. Even in a 100% solo queue one team usually stomps the other. Its even like this in WoW and i say that as a 2,000+ rated player in arenas in there that stomps happen there to more frequently. I think this is because well the skill gap in mmo's is really big between players. Like even in a shooter right you can get lucky head shots or gernades etc. on the a player. But in a mmo, you can't just 1 tap a player better then you with luck. The TTK is longer and if a player knows more then you well you aren't gonna win most likely in that fight. This is just how rpg type of pvp is because its more about knowledge and timing abls more then anything and if you know all the classes and when they are weak vs a player who maybe has played 2 classes well guess what you are gonna get stomped because while you used your whole burst into my mercs energy shield i held mine until your reflect fell off and took out 50% of your hp while mine went back to full. Or when I see players go full tilt into a Enraged Defense meanwhile i fired 2 rapid shots removed it from them and then bursted them back down in 2 gcds. Or my favorite when you dps on your team tank tunneling then going like "why no one dying?"

[TrixxieTriss]

10 hours ago, Crystal_Mind said:

The more I queue, the more obvious it is that people are also fairly bad at identifying premades in 8s. I've been solo-queue matched onto the same team as a guildmate more than once, and almost every time the opposing team assumes we're queued together. Nevermind that we'll probably be on different teams in the next match... 🙄

That’s always been the situation in WZ’s. it’s a bit easier in Arena.

It is hard to tell a pre-made on the other team unless they are all in the same guild. But as you pointed out, that’s not always the case.

If it’s a pickup pre-made, the only way you’ll really know is if you keep popping against the same configuration of players many times or they tell you in chat or you pop with them on your team for a match & see them chatting.

Sometimes more experienced players can spot a pickup pre-made by the way others play. But they’ll never be 100% sure unless they’ve played on that side for a match.

But the more matches you play per session, the easier it is to identify pre-mades if you keep being put against the same ones. 

Edited April 6, 2023 by TrixxieTriss

[AwesomeTacoCat]

21 hours ago, krackcommando said:

🙄

 

did you count the different premades that you were against? were they on your team as well. how many? how often? you're spitting garbage right now. you make it sound like there were five 8m groups out there going against full pug groups every time. and you contextualize that with, "well...maybe they sometimes played against each other." do better.

how large were the grps (on your team and the other team)? etc.

I started the night solo, ran into two four man premades 2 out of my first 3 matches. I know the people playing in these groups the community isn’t that big. I was then in a four man premade for the rest of the night. There were at least three other four man premades. Again, I know the people playing in these groups I pvp/raid with them. 
 

And when I was in a four stack every other match was against solo que’ers and the other 50% of matches were against another 4 man premade. 
 

The whole “premade vs premade” que thing just isn’t working as implemented…

[AwesomeTacoCat]

On 4/3/2023 at 12:57 PM, winpersec said:

Did 3 WZ and 4 Arena Weeklies, noticed like zero premades who made a change. There were probably one or two, but they were the same garbage as the average solo queue player, so that changed nothing. DM server, played in prime time.

I think I’ve done about 10 of each now. And for maybe 3/10 WZ weeklies and 4/10 arena weeklies I have been in premades (usually 4 man for arenas and 5-6 for wzs) that just crush people and rarely, if ever, lose. I have no problem identifying the premades BECAUSE I AM IN THE PREMADES. Nonetheless I think they’re a problem and make the game entirely unfair and far less fun and I would much prefer to just have more balanced solo ques…

Edited April 6, 2023 by AwesomeTacoCat

[krackcommando]

5 hours ago, AwesomeTacoCat said:

I started the night solo, ran into two four man premades 2 out of my first 3 matches. I know the people playing in these groups the community isn’t that big. I was then in a four man premade for the rest of the night. There were at least three other four man premades. Again, I know the people playing in these groups I pvp/raid with them. 
 

And when I was in a four stack every other match was against solo que’ers and the other 50% of matches were against another 4 man premade. 
 

The whole “premade vs premade” que thing just isn’t working as implemented…

you are playing...arenas then? what happened when you went back to WZs?

arenas:

have you considered that there weren't enough SOLOs in the queue? SF queue is predominately solo + 2m with the occasional 3 and 4. rarely does the 3+ include both healer and tank. But if SS has 2-3 4m grps in the queue and (let's say) 7 solos, 2 2m, 1 3m, those solos are never going to get a pure solo pop, and even if there are 10 solos, they're still going to hit 4m premades b/c the 2m and 3m grps need to pull from them to fill the grp.

how many ppl exactly do you see in the arena queue? b/c I've never seen that many on SF, and I think the SF arena population is more healthy than it has ever been (comparing current state to rated pop, ofc...and not making judgements about player skill).

incidentially, I only saw one instance of someone throwing in 7.2, it was someone who didn't like Prum. but I'll take it. iunno what's going on with gunnery, but it feels like hot garbage. think I'll swap everyone over to IO spread.

WZs:

(doesn't sound like you're describing them but) there's no chance that multiple 4m teams queued simultaneously are going to continually land against 8m pugs rather than each other. they'd have to be q-syncing for that, and with 7.2, they don't even need to q-sync.

Edit: fwiw, b/c the arena population on SF cannot handle more than one or two matches at a time, when I run into a meme team more than once, I do one or two WZs then come back to arenas, and it's almost all new faces. even then, I only bother with this late night when I'm not seeing enough players on to pop at least 2 arenas. but that's happened all of twice in the past week (can't remember beyond that).

Edited April 6, 2023 by krackcommando

[HeatRacer]

On 4/3/2023 at 8:48 AM, hunKAIn said:

I hope it won't be the standard, but I kinda feel like Mondays and Tuesday mornings are really broken when it comes to solo arenas. It seems like ppl are rushing for their weekly pvp objectives desperately before the reset, meaning as a solo player you either get picked to the premade of 3x339ish team or to the ~330ish (324-334). (While there is a scaling system, we all know how trash that is.)

Of course, people started to use /stuck as they don't want to waste even a second on such games. So, I am wondering how bad it gets as sometimes you can see this behavior even if you might have some chance. Yet, I admit that sometimes it is a relief that I don't have to spend like 10 mins on games, where I might get 0-1 medals.

The irony of /stuck-ing in Arenas, as a response to premades, is that it becomes a snowball-effect; if I solo queue and get stuck with people who don't even want to try, then I would have to form a premade to avoid getting saddled with such people. 

[septru]

1 hour ago, krackcommando said:

I think the SF arena population is more healthy than it has ever been (comparing current state to rated pop, ofc

For the first 2-3 months of a season, ranked usually had 3-5 matches at the same time. 

 

Despite the fact that BioWare promised to keep ranked seasons to 3 months, ranked seasons usually went for 6-8 sometimes even 12 months. It was only then when ranked started dying, because obviously, people started getting disinterested. 

[krackcommando]

27 minutes ago, septru said:

For the first 2-3 months of a season, ranked usually had 3-5 matches at the same time. 

 

Despite the fact that BioWare promised to keep ranked seasons to 3 months, ranked seasons usually went for 6-8 sometimes even 12 months. It was only then when ranked started dying, because obviously, people started getting disinterested. 

last time I played was s12 (and I only know that b/c of the flags in my inventory! 😄), but I cannot think of a season since s1 that popped a ton (not 24/ 7). current arenas are popping 24/7.  not saying the quality/mm or anything is better, but yeah. rated has never popped 24/7 in my experience.

Edited April 6, 2023 by krackcommando

[steveerkcanjerk]

1 minute ago, krackcommando said:

last time I played was s12, but I cannot think of a season since s1 that popped 24/7. current arenas are popping 24/7.  not saying the quality/mm or anything is better, but yeah. rated has never popped 24/7 in my experience.

beginning of seasons felt pretty solid but then it the activity fell off pretty quick. Like after 2 weeks or so even at prime time things got very stale. Running into the same few people on their alts is also not super engaging or fun. And if you are a tank good luck finding matches past first few weeks and when you do, you better hope that you are either way better then the other tank or at least same skill level. Because either 3 things happen 

1. You both go at it keeping each other stuck at the same elo for a after noon juggling the other 6-9 dps in queue between your teams. 
2. He farms you and should not even be matched with you. 
3. You farm him for like 2 games and he drops out of queue and now you sit there. 

It was also way to easy to cheat. Just tell your homie to get on a support role and throw against you. Because you have people who literally watch leaderboards and then added person to friends or track through /who and throw on them to send them down. Its also not something that is easily catchable and bannable. Someone could "just not be playing as well" at that moment. And they get themselves enough of a stat line to say darn we just lost. But ranked hasn't been healthy or close to it in a long time. I enjoyed it but i can't pretend to be shocked that it has finally gone away. The only MMO that i have seen that has some what of a healthy ranked playerbase is WoW and thats just because well its got alot of players. Even GW2 gets really quiet towards the middle of a ranked season, FF14 1 week in starts getting 18-30 min queue times. ESO doesnt have ranked, BDO has arena of solare but that shows up once a year and is dead after 2 weeks, so yeah ranked as a mode tends to not do well in mmo's for the most part. 

[TrixxieTriss]

8 hours ago, Wulfurkin said:

I was just reasoning from my perspective that in its current state pvp is completely inaccessible to new players like myself and if you want to keep a subscription based game going you do need an influx of paying players, nobody sticks around forever. So something should be done about this accessibility which i dont see happening because the existing pvp community is more interested in crushing everyone who steps into warzones and arenas for the first ime. This is a recipe for the gamemode bleeding out and eventually just being a drain on resources.

I can understand your frustration at the situation. It’s your reasoning on how it came about & how to fix it that’s flawed.

Before last December, the over whelming majority of pvpers were subscribers & they probably still are.

Part of the reason BioWare have opened up PvP more to free players is to boost numbers & grow PvP.

Are there problems from what & how they done things? Sure. But most of them have nothing to do with the player base. It’s the systems BioWare have put in place.

Veteran players have offered many suggestions to BioWare over the years on how to make PvP more inviting & accessible to new PvPers. But those ideas fall on deaf ears 99.99% of the time. 

And when BioWare does pick up an idea, they usually change it from the intended idea to fit their preconceived notions & not the reason for the idea in the first place.  

Ie, players wanted 8 man ranked WZ’s set up like the solo Arena queue. Instead BioWare dump ranked altogether & make 8 man pre-mades a thing against solo pug players 🤦‍♀️

Another example is lowbie PvP (Lower lvl PvP). This is where new pvpers should be learning & experiencing PvP for the first time as they lvl up.

The game used to have a pretty good lowbie PvP culture & queue numbers till BioWare killed of PvP gear in 5.0.
They basically killed off lowbie PvP with one bad development decision.
We’ve been trying to get them to make lowbie a relevant again for several years. 

The takeaway here, is be careful what you wish for because Bioware never really think how it’s going to affect player enjoyment beyond their next move. And while we’re discussing multiple chess moves ahead, they think we’re talking about 1 move in a game of checkers 🤷🏻‍♀️

Edited April 8, 2023 by TrixxieTriss

[krackcommando]

3 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

Ie, players wanted 8 man ranked WZ’s set up like the solo Arena queue. Instead BioWare dump ranked altogether & make 8 man pre-mades a thing against solo pug players 🤦‍♀️

I doubt group WZs would have worked. the reason solo arenas survived (whereas grp arenas were...virtually empty or by appointment), is that you could reshuffle the deck each match. I have serious reservations about premade 8m rated WZs being a sustainable format b/c the same ppl are going to be doing the winning and (more importantly) the losing every time until the lowest team on the totem pole raises the white flag, and that attrition whittles the queue down to a few great teams and the occasional wintrading, or kick ball style event.

fwiw, those kick ball rated WZs on CO and JC were really great fun. but that's not really what rated is about, and it cannot be the dominant use of the format. 😄

[TrixxieTriss]

2 hours ago, krackcommando said:

I doubt group WZs would have worked. the reason solo arenas survived (whereas grp arenas were...virtually empty or by appointment), is that you could reshuffle the deck each match. I have serious reservations about premade 8m rated WZs being a sustainable format b/c the same ppl are going to be doing the winning and (more importantly) the losing every time until the lowest team on the totem pole raises the white flag, and that attrition whittles the queue down to a few great teams and the occasional wintrading, or kick ball style event.

fwiw, those kick ball rated WZs on CO and JC were really great fun. but that's not really what rated is about, and it cannot be the dominant use of the format. 😄

I agree. I don’t think group 8’s would have worked. Which is why I said solo 8’s 😉

I think they would have had a chance to work if they’d been implemented at least a few years before 7.0.

[RikuvonDrake]

the pvp population isnt large enough to sustain both a premade and a solo queue option, so instead the game prioritizes premades vs premades and solo vs solo but if there isn't enough players in queue the system will widen the parameters to ensure you don't wait too long for a game

devs want you to make friends and play with them so they don't want to disincentive pre-mades, so you end up with the pretty good solution they have now, sure they can readjust the parameters and wait times for when solo is put with/against premades but that something bioware is better at deciding since they have all the data

[Skolops]

12 hours ago, krackcommando said:

I doubt group WZs would have worked. the reason solo arenas survived (whereas grp arenas were...virtually empty or by appointment), is that you could reshuffle the deck each match. I have serious reservations about premade 8m rated WZs being a sustainable format b/c the same ppl are going to be doing the winning and (more importantly) the losing every time until the lowest team on the totem pole raises the white flag, and that attrition whittles the queue down to a few great teams and the occasional wintrading, or kick ball style event.

fwiw, those kick ball rated WZs on CO and JC were really great fun. but that's not really what rated is about, and it cannot be the dominant use of the format. 😄

This is only a problem if the population is low enough, which right now it probably is too low. However, back when 8 man rateds were a thing I don't remember it being a problem - and on our server it would have been. After the 2.0 update our guild went very nearly undefeated in rateds. We played every night for months, never losing, but the Qs kept popping. There were always a number of groups playing. Some were challenges for us, while many others were not at all - especially groups from some of those "mega guilds" that probably just had rated warzones as a Saturday night guild activity or something. They kept Qing, though, and a part of it was that there were lots of groups of different skill levels playing all the time.

This meant that the lowest tier groups often played against one another and so they had fun, competitive matches. The middle tiered groups got matches against the low and the high tiered groups and so they probably won and lost about half of their games, which is totally normal and sustainable. The high tiered groups won a lot of their games because they played other high tier groups and the middle tiered (and occasionally on a slow night a low tier) and they saw us as a challenge to keep working towards, and even though we basically never lost we still enjoyed it because 1) winning really doesn't get old and 2) the other top tier groups still provided a challenge and satisfied our desire for really high end play. 

I also think, going back to the main topic of the thread, that 8 man premades really helped with the premades dumping on regular warzones problem. I just posted in another topic:
 

"One thing I will say is that having played since the very beginning when the PvP community was much, much larger with far more skilled players overall, I do think that these days I notice people forming premades for what seems like the purpose of easily stomping on everyone in a way that I really don't think people did in the past. People have complained about premades since 1.0; it's not a new thing. However, back in the heyday I was always playing with the very best PvPers, not only from my guild, which was the top on the server for the second half of the rated warzone era, but also those from the other top guilds all used to hang around in the same voice chat, and I assure you none of us ever made a premade to stomp on anyone.

We grouped up for warzones because we wanted to play with friends, not to try to gain an advantage, and here's the other thing: we often lost to pugs because when we played in regular warzones we did not put in the same effort. It was our way of relaxing before or after the high intensity of rateds. We'd go in as a group and we'd be in voice chat but we didn't take it too seriously, or call focus targets, or any of that. The only time we'd do that would be if we wound up facing another premade group, and even then we wouldn't really get organized and take it that seriously unless it was a group of players that we didn't like that much. 

I'd say that 8v8 rated warzones (and probably arenas, though I didn't play them much) actually really helped eliminate the problem of premades. The state of affairs with premades these days really does seem toxic at times. It's so bad when you have an 8 made premade that thinks its fun to focus target the other team down one at a time. It just wasn't like that in the 8-man rated days, or even for most of the time when there were arenas. Some groups did this, but most didn't because they saw a regular warzone as a low-key way to relax."

[krackcommando]

58 minutes ago, Skolops said:

However, back when 8 man rateds were a thing I don't remember it being a problem

it was a thing. playing on the larger PVE servers, rated WZs died by the time of the first merger. That was also the first time rated WZs were implemented. Canderous Ordo. Long before the next merger, rated WZs were dead. The first few weeks saw a ton of activity. But participation waned incredibly fast for the vast majority of the population. I genuinely doubt most guilds played more than 10-20 matches. It very quickly devolved into 1 dominante guild that won every match. and it took a literal all-star team of players from imp guilds butting their heads against a wall before they finally defeated the ONE pub guild ONCE and then they broke up and rated WZs as we know it were effectively dead on CO.

Upon the next merger (JC), another very good guild arrived and they had a leg up on the CO guild. and the CO guild butted their heads against a wall for a month(?) until they finally defeated the newly merged guild. between that time there were a couple other guilds such as mine and at least one other that would queue and didn't embarras ourselves, but we weren't going to win unless it was something like HB. other than that, there was the occasional pug that got rolled and the occasional kick ball style pick-up games that went on until one of the 2 actual rated teams on the server crashed it.

the only time RWZs ever actually thrived was when the top guilds from each server PAID to transfer to an agreed upon server (east coast NA, it was Pot5). and there's no way of telling how that would have gone, because in less than a month, BW announced the death of RWZs.

edit: bottom line is that most ppl don't have the stomach to get their nose rubbed in it for (a) month(s) to improve. and those that do are already many levels above everyone else. so yeah. I guess you could say it's a population issue. but that doesn't resolve the issue that of the vast majority of players who did pvp, only a small percentage were good enough or dedicated enough to put together a team and grind the learning curve. and that is similar to the dynamic we see in solos vs. team arenas. solo queue is just much easier on the ego and opens up the game to more ppl. it also makes it more "toxic" b/c you tend to get mad at random teammates who cause you to lose rather than teammates you picked beforehand. but...tradeoffs. lol

Edited April 8, 2023 by krackcommando