Nostalgia Trip Leads to Prophetic Vision

[krackcommando]

I did a forum search of my old account and came across this gem (not mine):

On 4/17/2014 at 12:12 PM, Darslk said:

Ranked should not be for the best. It should be for everyone who enjoys arenas, for everyone that wants rewards, for people that want to learn their (other people's) class better, and for people that want ranked comms.

to which I replied:

On 4/17/2014 at 2:30 PM, foxmob said:

 

at the risk of stating the obvious, then what is the point of separate reg and rated queues?

2014, the future was foretold. There would be no rated queue. the rated queue would be for everyone. now it is. in the most prophetic and sad of ways. right down to the dissemination of "rewards"....

[Zunayson]

Unsurprisingly, some people still treat arenas as if it was ranked. I tried out a class I was bad at in arenas and got globaled, and kids act like warzones are the proper place to practice. What if objective players also don't want global garbage in their warzones?

[krackcommando]

uh. you lost me. are you complaining because arenas are hard? that arena players get mad at you when you die fast? or are you complaining that you die fast in WZs?

[Theshadowbehind]

Ranked was pretty much infested with wintrading, q-syncing, match throwing etc etc

Elo only really worked for the first two seasons, without cross server it was pretty much dead on arrival. (after the population was just too little to make elo work)

The system basicly put people with a similar rating together, so after a few days you had high rated people just farming low rated ones. Because the game would put them together because how the system worked, fun fun.

 

Edited June 12, 2023 by Theshadowbehind

[Sappharan]

On 5/28/2023 at 10:14 PM, krackcommando said:

I did a forum search of my old account and came across this gem (not mine):

to which I replied:

2014, the future was foretold. There would be no rated queue. the rated queue would be for everyone. now it is. in the most prophetic and sad of ways. right down to the dissemination of "rewards"....

Prescient.

[krackcommando]

50 minutes ago, Sappharan said:

Prescient.

melange-infused vision.

[Zunayson]

5 hours ago, krackcommando said:

uh. you lost me. are you complaining because arenas are hard? that arena players get mad at you when you die fast? or are you complaining that you die fast in WZs?

Back then, ranked players correctly said ranked matches were for skilled players and unranked matches (warzone or arena) were for unskilled players.

Now, some arena players incorrectly say arenas are for skilled players and warzones are for unskilled players. It doesn't seem bioware intends it to be like that.

I would have predicted this state of affairs before seeing it because most people seem to think arenas somehow take more skill. You phrase it like, "rated queue is for everyone" instead of just, "there is no rated queue" E: I guess you phrased it both ways nevermind

I don't know what you found unclear about my original post

Edited June 13, 2023 by Zunayson

[krackcommando]

1 hour ago, Zunayson said:

Back then, ranked players correctly said ranked matches were for skilled players and unranked matches (warzone or arena) were for unskilled players.

Now, some arena players incorrectly say arenas are for skilled players and warzones are for unskilled players. It doesn't seem bioware intends it to be like that.

I would have predicted this state of affairs before seeing it because most people seem to think arenas somehow take more skill. You phrase it like, "rated queue is for everyone" instead of just, "there is no rated queue" E: I guess you phrased it both ways nevermind

I don't know what you found unclear about my original post

the what if objective ppl don't want being globalled in WZs was unclear. it sounding like you were complaining about being globalled in both formats.

fwiw, arenas are a higher difficulty level than WZs. they just are. for myriad reasons. here are a few: being one person in four makes you more important than one in eight, so it's easier to "hide" your bad dps players in a WZ. objectives also allow you to "hide" your poor dps or dcd management by giving them less intensive tasks like making call outs and sitting in position for a pass. likewise, the larger maps allow weaker players to escape, runaway, or simply keep distance from the crush of heavy/intense battle. lastly, when you die in a WZ, you simply respawn and continue trying. in arenas, you die once, and you're done. it takes a lot longer to "git gud" in the arena format than it does in WZs for the simple reason that yolo.

this all leads to the factual reality that many (most?) players avoid arenas. and I see many many more faces in WZs than I do in arenas. so that much is definitely true.

fwiw (again), anyone can join arenas. it is a mixed queue, but...it's more brutal for the inexperience or undergeared than WZs. on the other hand, so many ppl in WZs don't even try to work together, don't care about winning at all, or are so misguided about how to win, that I find WZs to be the more "toxic" of the experiences in this game. I have to go into WZs expecting to DM, b/c if I want to actually play the game I queued for, I'm usually disappointed. but I digress. WZs are a better and easier place to learn your class over arenas. that much is definitely true. imo, you should at least be fully aug'd (286) with a tactical and two legendary implants (only need the minimum lvl which I think is 326?). you should also be working on raising one piece up to 332. once you get there, you can buy 332s with credit. but the rest of one's ilvl is kind of irrelevant imo. this is all opinion, obviously. ppl gonna do wut ppl gonna do. however, most ppl will have a miserable time of arenas if they don't have some ability and gear that they wouldn't really need for WZs. that's just the facts of life. /shrug

I assure you, the complaints about undergeared players were much louder in the rated arena days. much much louder.

[krackcommando]

5 hours ago, Theshadowbehind said:

Elo only really worked for the first two seasons, without cross server it was pretty much dead on arrival. (after the population was just too little to make elo work)

this has to be one of the most ignorant statements I've ever read regarding rated arenas. just awful, dude.

let's review s1 and s2:

• at that time, there were numerous servers. that means many different player pools. the rating thresholds for every class were, however, the same across the entire game. that right there is a major flaw in the system. if the thresholds are not on a server by server basis, then they are irrelevant. but that didn't matter. it gets worse...
• the was no x-faction in the queue system. this meant that when a bad player joined the queue, one only need hop over to the other faction, and you're guaranteed never to have the worst player on your team and usually he'd be on the other team. you see, there were rarely more than 2 or 3 matches popping concurrently. (smaller servers, remember?)
• hybrid specs. sorcs were q'd as dps but they went halfway up the heal tree and were able to function as defacto healers for their teams. this was a massive advantage is most pops b/c the most common pops were all-dps and dps+tank. but even if they landed a team with a healer, their extra healing and slightly nerfed dps meant they had extra survivability, and in arenas (especially for sages) being able to survive longer than your counterpart was what was most important.
• server hopping. I should know. I had toons on 3 separate servers, and I could pick and choose which one had the weakest competition that day, that week, that season.
• no games played requirement. get lucky in your first 10 games, and you were gold tier by game 15. 15 games is not nearly a meaningful representative sample for ELO to work with any sort of accuracy. nor is it enough to allow for the nights when a thrower or just horrible player is online. again, I should know. I personally farmed some dude for 5-10 games a couple nights. that's like 10-20 free wins over the course of just 2 nights. fluffing one's rating like that (perfectly legal) is an absolute joke and could not happen in later seasons.

long story short, s1 and s2 were the absolute worst, jokes of rated in the format's life cycle. also the only ones I achieved gold. and also the ones where huge swathes of players were up over 2k rating. not by cheating. just because all of the above made it ridiculously easy to snag a high rating.

 

[steveerkcanjerk]

I don't think the game ever truly had a healthy time for ranked. I mean when you know everyone in the queue by name 2 weeks into the season is never a good sign. And since there wasn't any cross server queues so you could just go were the competition was the least get your rewards and call yourself good. Also this goes for pretty much any role based game using ELO for ranked is a huge flaw. In games were pure mechanical skill are the deciding factors (fighting games, games like CS, Valorant, Halo etc.) it tends to work better. But in role based games you can lose because someone on your team decided to get globaled, or your jungle decides to never gank, or the rein doesn't put up a shield can cause you to drop. And unless you got a large player pool like LoL, were there is a very good chance that everyone in every role is gonna be pretty close to skill it just leads to a bad experience. TBH it was ineivtable for it to stop being supported, and if we are being honest since they got rid of it this is the most consistent I have been able to actually play arenas in a long time. And they are not all washes I have ran into some very solid players and the more I win (sitting 78% win rate on merc, 67% AP PT, 60% on sin tank, 65% PT tank, 58% on sniper Engi and Marks) we get stiffer competition. But at least we can play arenas and only arenas which is alot more fun the warzones to me at least. 

I know not every player will agree but removal of ranked didn't decrease my enjoyment of the game at all. At the end of the day i like how the game plays, I enjoy pvping in it, I don't need a flair or a reward to do so. I got my personal stats i can keep trying to improve spec to spec. Now would it be nice to have something for winning alot yes sir I would love it. Dont get me wrong, but I am gonna rush back a super long queues for ranked arenas nah. If two players or guilds really want to determine who is better there are other avenues for that you don't need a leaderboard that people manipulate to tell you who is good. Also it shows in a match who is good, there are plenty of people running around with flairs that clearly win traded for them getting their butts kicked by people who they thought less of and its quite funny to see it alot of the times. Not all of course I am sure someone will be like I dominate the queue etc. but yeah if you are just that much better then most players you should? That is the reward for the time you put in. 

[krackcommando]

35 minutes ago, steveerkcanjerk said:

there are plenty of people running around with flairs that clearly win traded for them getting their butts kicked by people who they thought less of and its quite funny to see it alot of the times.

I have noticed this only on players with season 8 and 9 flairs (gold). is that weird? was s8/9 particularly known for win trading? it's not just one class. it's any class. but I only notice it with s9 flairs. I'm on SF.

I'm happy with the arena pops. I'm unhappy about the rewards structure. although tbf, if you're going to reward players based on record, you really should separate grp queues or at the very least separate win rates for when you're grp and solo as that can drastically affect things...and it's rather impossible to build balanced matches in a mixed queue, especially when more ppl would grp b/c obviously easier to win. nah. the more I think about it, the more I think just creating two separate win percentages for when you're (personally) grouped vs. solo. leave everything else as is. you could created tiered rewards out of that. I think flairs would be cool. maybe a new armor/weapon set. I'd say just reskin things, but the creation of dyes really killed the reskinning game.

[steveerkcanjerk]

2 minutes ago, krackcommando said:

I have noticed this only on players with season 8 and 9 flairs (gold). is that weird? was s8/9 particularly known for win trading? it's not just one class. it's any class. but I only notice it with s9 flairs. I'm on SF.

I'm happy with the arena pops. I'm unhappy about the rewards structure. although tbf, if you're going to reward players based on record, you really should separate grp queues or at the very least separate win rates for when you're grp and solo as that can drastically affect things...and it's rather impossible to build balanced matches in a mixed queue, especially when more ppl would grp b/c obviously easier to win. nah. the more I think about it, the more I think just creating two separate win percentages for when you're (personally) grouped vs. solo. leave everything else as is. you could created tiered rewards out of that. I think flairs would be cool. maybe a new armor/weapon set. I'd say just reskin things, but the creation of dyes really killed the reskinning game.

I just dont think separating group queue is ever gonna be possible it just leads back to the same issue which is group queue will be dead. Atm if you are in a group at least on SF you will generally get matched against a premade. My and my friends often 2-3 stack and its often against a similar group composition. At the end of the day this isn't a competitive game like other games are. It doesn't have the playerbase to sustain so much queue stratification. Just keep everyone in the same thing like it is now and just play. Because 4 dps vs 4 dps also gets super old after a while, overcoming different comps adds variety to the game. Is the dice gonna roll in your favor sometimes and sometimes it won't. But just reverting back to the old systems still doesn't solve the issues the old system had. And we don't need a elo system just give people tokens for winning that you only get for winning and let them spend it on stuff easy. If you win more then you lose you will eventually be able to get some stuff. And the game already tried to use rewards as the main motivator to get people into ranked, it didn't work then and it won't work now. Ironically despite all that has happened giving people stuff they can actually earn and feel like they can earn has brought more people into the arena queue and they actually stay in queue for some time. Some might even say they get better the more they play. 

[Samcuu]

32 minutes ago, krackcommando said:

have noticed this only on players with season 8 and 9 flairs (gold). is that weird? was s8/9 particularly known for win trading? it's not just one class. it's any class. but I only notice it with s9 flairs. I'm on SF.

This makes sense because at the time there were more servers and swtor was on the verge of a server merge but hadn't pulled the trigger yet. So to help players get to more populated servers they cut the server transfer cost to 100 cartel coins. I would travel to all the servers with friends to catch win traders in the act. So yeah because of less populated servers randoms were just win trading with no threat of real teams hopping in the queue. We threw a wrench in their plans temporarily but couldn't stop everyone lol.  

[krackcommando]

25 minutes ago, steveerkcanjerk said:

I just dont think separating group queue is ever gonna be possible it just leads back to the same issue which is group queue will be dead.

yes. I said as much. I was suggesting that you could keep the same mixed queue system just as it is but maintain two different win rate: one for when you're solo and one for when you're in grp. these are personal win rates. it doesn't force separate queues. but from there, you could build tiers and reward simple things like flairs. or slightly different armor sets from what they drop for seasons. iunno. I'm with you on the existence of the queue.

[septru]

20 hours ago, steveerkcanjerk said:

I don't think the game ever truly had a healthy time for ranked. I mean when you know everyone in the queue by name 2 weeks into the season is never a good sign.

It doesn't matter much since ranked is gone, not coming back anytime soon, and the game is about to go into maintained mode... 

 

But this is so far from the truth. At least on SF, the beginning of each season had a huge population of players. 5+ games going at the same time, new faces in every match. It was only until about the 3rd month that you would see a steep decline in the ranked population. And I wonder why? It's almost as if BioWare promised to keep ranked seasons to 3 months, but let them go up to 1 year.

 

But ya. Game is gonna die when Broadsword takes over, so this is all really pointless. 

[steveerkcanjerk]

On 6/15/2023 at 10:41 AM, septru said:

It doesn't matter much since ranked is gone, not coming back anytime soon, and the game is about to go into maintained mode... 

 

But this is so far from the truth. At least on SF, the beginning of each season had a huge population of players. 5+ games going at the same time, new faces in every match. It was only until about the 3rd month that you would see a steep decline in the ranked population. And I wonder why? It's almost as if BioWare promised to keep ranked seasons to 3 months, but let them go up to 1 year.

 

But ya. Game is gonna die when Broadsword takes over, so this is all really pointless. 

Thats fair i am just about where the game is going but i would not call a boom for a few weeks then practically dead is considered healthy. And its only 1 of many issues with the system. But at the end of the day you are right it doesn't matter anymore. 

[TrixxieTriss]

I think BioWares biggest mistake with the whole ranked PvP vs reg PvP thing was them artificially making it seperate to start with.

The game started out with 2 queues.
One for mixed players and one for 8 man group. And arena was added later.

What if BioWare had always had a leader board for both queues. People would have gotten used to it right at the start and there wouldn’t have been a seperate ranked population or people too scared to play “ranked” PvP because of leaderboards. If you played any PvP, you’d automatically have your name on the board somewhere.

Now imagine one step more where BioWare had setup the 4 pvp queues like they ended up setting up ranked arena, with leaderboards for all. You wouldn’t have had nervous Nelly’s not wanting to step into ranked because of leaderboards because they would have always been a thing & ranked as a seperate format wouldnt have existed. And you’d have had better match making because you never would have had solo players vs premades. 

1. Arena solo queue

2. Arena Group queue 

3. WZ solo queue 

4. WZ Group queue 

It also would have made balancing easier if BioWare had set up separate ability trees for PvP and PvE. And maintained seperate gear for PvP & PvE progression. 

I believe if they had originally setup PvP like this at the very start, it would have been a much better & stable community. 

Edited June 19, 2023 by TrixxieTriss

[Zunayson]

Thats true, and most likely the reason something like that doesnt happen is ultimately because this game has to ship last Christmas. if I recall, Rateds weren't even added to the game until later, and as is infamously known, some devs say that the game as it was at 1.2 is when they would have considered it ready for release. 

[Nee-Elder]

4 minutes ago, TrixxieTriss said:

What if BioWare had always had a leader board for both queues.

People would have gotten used to it right at the start and there wouldn’t have been a seperate ranked population or people too scared to play “ranked” PvP because of leaderboards. If you played any PvP, you’d automatically have your name on the board somewhere.

That is exactly what i & many others begged BioWare to do from the start back in BETA testing. (  just for like the Top 5000 players, per Class )

Then, a couple years later after ESO basically did it with Cyrodiil  'Emperor' pursuit ,  i started campaigning for SWTOR to merge  Ranked & Regs.

Unfortunately i had no idea  once that merge eventually came years later with 7.0 , it would also mean the total eradication of said leaderboards and removal of Ranked.

11 minutes ago, TrixxieTriss said:

I believe if they had originally setup PvP like this at the very start, it would have been a much better & stable community. 

Better?  Probably.

More "stable" though?  uhhh, have you met PVP'ers before?

Community stablity in MMO's, especially theme-park MMOs, is an unattainable myth, just like "balance" in combat.

Then again the GSF community is pretty stable, comparitively.  So who knows?

[krackcommando]

3 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

I think BioWares biggest mistake with the whole ranked PvP vs reg PvP thing was them artificially making it seperate to start with.

you cannot do leader boards and have games without stakes, and you definitely cannot have an elo system. you could do simple win/lost ratios.

what i mean is this: in rated you take the pop or your rating dropped the maximum amount. you leave for any reason, then your rating dropped the maximum amount. you aren't a good player and lose a lot, ppl see you at the bottom of the leader boards. you're embarassed and stop queuing. (fwiw: i think this is the primary reason "most ppl" avoid rated - ego). my point is that it's impossible to do things like leader boards without very strict enforcement, which would mean a tightening of things for the majority of players who would rather not (for w/e reason, but my vote goes for ego).

also, four queues never would have worked at any stage of the game's life. what happened with arenas would happen with any format. grp is harder. more ppl would flood solos. grp would eventually die or become rampant with cheating. you're just not going to maintain 4 queues 24/7. and remember: strict enforcement required.

I do think you could do something simple like win percentages that are kept private like they are now (so no leader boards), but rewards for various thresholds in the form of flairs et al. that BW did for rated. but that still requires much stricter queue enforcement. and I have to tell you, most players in this game aren't in it for the strict enforcement. if I could hazard a guess, I'd say 40%-50% are upset about the deserter debuff. imagine the uproar for losing standing for a d/c or not taking a pop? but then you have to enforce it b/c otherwise it would be too easy to cheat and fluff your win percentage. iunno.

the population of this game torpedoed long before preseason rated WZs ever came about. BW was ill-equipped for end game content of any kind in 1.0. that right there cost them any chance of nuanced simultaneous queues. WoW does that with massive x-server and battle group mechanics (and populations) that SWTOR never had outside of the first 4? 6? months.

Edited June 20, 2023 by krackcommando
first sentence made no sense!

[TrixxieTriss]

3 hours ago, Nee-Elder said:

More "stable" though?  uhhh, have you met PVP'ers before?

Community stablity in MMO's, especially theme-park MMOs, is an unattainable myth, just like "balance" in combat.

Then again the GSF community is pretty stable, comparitively.  So who knows?

I meant stability in player retention more than personalities 😉

Bioware themselves once said that the data showed that swtor’s pvpers were their most stable & loyal subscribers. I think it was around the 3.7 era they said this. 

And not long after that, they started taking swtor’s pvpers for granted. Like they could do anything they wanted & we would also stick around.

Looking back, it would seem something or someone decided during 4.x period to start to fundamentally start make changes to the semi stable PvP eco system.

I know we all blame Ben Irving for the 5.x fiasco, but he was there during the 3.7 era. So what changed? I know I would love to one day read a history of swtor development over the years, especially from 3.x onwards to see what changed towards their PvP development.

[krackcommando]

3 hours ago, Zunayson said:

Thats true, and most likely the reason something like that doesnt happen is ultimately because this game has to ship last Christmas. if I recall, Rateds weren't even added to the game until later, and as is infamously known, some devs say that the game as it was at 1.2 is when they would have considered it ready for release. 

rated wasn't instituted until some time during the first sever consolidation/merger. I vividly remember it on Canderous Ordo (my 2nd server). It was huge for the first few weeks...maybe two months. I think most guilds bowed out pretty quickly. there were a handful that played for a while, and the 2nd server merger (Jedi Covenant for me) saw a short-lived revitalization as there was some new competition for the dominant guilds. but outside of "kick ball" nights (technically cheating) I think RWZs were dead pretty quickly on that merger as well.

then BW allowed paid transfers, sucked up everyone's money who transferred their guilds to consolidated RWZ servers, and then announced the death of RWZs. ha! 😄

[TrixxieTriss]

7 minutes ago, krackcommando said:

you cannot do leader boards and have games without stakes, and you definitely cannot have an elo system. you could do simple win/lost ratios.

what i mean is this: in rated you take the pop or your rating dropped the maximum amount. you leave for any reason, then your rating dropped the maximum amount. you aren't a good player and lose a lot, ppl see you at the bottom of the leader boards. you're embarassed and stop queuing.

I don’t think that negates what I said. Sure there maybe a few snow flakes that might have deleted characters etc if they got embarrassed early on. 

But I think if the PvP part of the game had been like that from the very inception, people would have either not cared or just become desensitised to it. Especially when you consider how many thousands of players there were at the beginning. 

Then again, that’s just my opinion. I know it wouldn’t have affected myself or anyone I know in RL who played swtor PvP at the beginning. 

Of course, if they’d been able to implement cross server for each seperate region, they would have been able too at alleviate that anxiety. 

Anyway, these are just some of my personal thoughts on how it could have been better in retrospect. We’ll never know wether I’m right or wrong & I think we can agree that it’s too late now with EA divesting BioWare Austin of swtor & sending off to permanent maintenance at Broadsword.

[Nee-Elder]

34 minutes ago, TrixxieTriss said:

I meant stability in player retention more than personalities

Bioware themselves once said that the data showed that swtor’s pvpers were their most stable & loyal subscribers.

ahh ok, then in that case YES  i totally agree with you!

The only players more dedicated might be endlessly hopeful super-SW-nerds like me who remain  $ubbed for 12+ years, despite all the awful changes & content lacking & GSF neglect.

[krackcommando]

24 minutes ago, TrixxieTriss said:

I don’t think that negates what I said. Sure there maybe a few snow flakes that might have deleted characters etc if they got embarrassed early on.

you are wrong. a certain tier of player would play rated. and would play multiple classes in rated. vast swathes would not. you can hide behind ping. you can hide behind toxicity. but what's really going on there is ego. you'd get ground to a pulp and you know it. I say this as a person who only ever queued rated with meta specs (PTs in first few seasons; mercs in mid-later seasons). well...I also queued merc early and got pooped on.