Bring back 4man limit for warzones & rework arena limit.

[Beyrahl]

Match making gets completely broken when groups larger than 4 exist. They sit in queues for ages and end up going against solo queuers quite often. There isn't much more that needs to be said, it's an abomination and needs to change already, so here we are making another complaint about it. 

As for the arena, it's just not competitive and it could be. Hear me out.
Limit the premade queue to 2man and if you want to do a 4man, require tank & heal. 
Just that, it would make it more competitive and give a reason for groups to form for it. 

Also, enforce matchmaking more or give us a way to see whose in a premade or not so everyone can see how the match making did work. Sometimes there is a premade on your team and you just don't know it. 

[SentinalMasterWW]

I agree, Last few days spent fighting nothing but Imp side premades on Star Forge. 

I get wanting to play with friends, but it ruins the balance when you have an entire guild against solo pugs. 

Most Premades nowadays are not even trying to win, they just want to do the meta comp and farm solo players. How is a solo player expected to kill a player, when that person has 1-2 tanks and a healer with them 24/7? 

And like Cease stated, The wait times get ridiculous because the game cannot match evenly. I shouldn't have to wait 15 Minutes just to get into a match because a 6 man premade is on the other team.

Not to mention the final point, when you Q Warzones it literally say and I quote "Up to four players", so having more than 4 is overkill. 

[sithBracer]

On 2/22/2024 at 4:47 AM, Beyrahl said:

Match making gets completely broken when groups larger than 4 exist. They sit in queues for ages and end up going against solo queuers quite often. There isn't much more that needs to be said, it's an abomination and needs to change already, so here we are making another complaint about it. 

As for the arena, it's just not competitive and it could be. Hear me out.
Limit the premade queue to 2man and if you want to do a 4man, require tank & heal. 
Just that, it would make it more competitive and give a reason for groups to form for it. 

Also, enforce matchmaking more or give us a way to see whose in a premade or not so everyone can see how the match making did work. Sometimes there is a premade on your team and you just don't know it. 

While I agree with everything you said, you haven't addressed the most important question for BS. How does this help the cartel market?

[BallisticKaine]

I would rather just see solo que and group que back along with 4 man max for group que.

Newer players get bullied out of PvP when they que solo and end up just getting nuked by premades in the match. Even for most part veteran solo que players can't do much against premades in a match.

I am sure some elitist PvP snob will chime in and say either get friends, the PvP maps aren't really PvPing, or why does it matter the game is dead. 

[TrixxieTriss]

At this point, the devs must have enough data to realise this 5-8 man premade experiment has been detrimental to the queue numbers & player retention. 

Surely they aren’t going to keep ignoring their own hard data that has to be showing that large premades kill the queues & that they rarely go up against other large premades.

This debacle has gone on for long enough that even those who support premades are now questioning their validity in this game. Because everyone who plays PvP regularly, can see the negative impacts a low population & premades have on the queue & quality of play. 

If the devs don’t decide to make some radical changes to the system soon, PvP will cess to exist as content in this game outside of PvP season farmers AFKing in matches to get season rewards. 

Again this was predictable back when 7.2 launched with these changes. And we were told to make friends to premade with. Those of us who said large premades would kill PvP have been proven right. And many of those that argued for premades to stay have left the game again. 

[Exly]

49 minutes ago, TrixxieTriss said:

At this point, the devs must have enough data to realise this 5-8 man premade experiment has been detrimental to the queue numbers & player retention. 

Surely they aren’t going to keep ignoring their own hard data that has to be showing that large premades kill the queues & that they rarely go up against other large premades.

I think the devs work off the theory that our memories are shorter than their willingness to stick by their decisions (no matter how bad those decisions are).  

I really don't think they care that much about player retention.  Instead, I think that they rely on a steady drip of new people to keep the game marginally afloat, and they are happy with that.

So no, I don't think that they are willing to believe that they were wrong about allowing premades to negatively impact the game.  I think that they just wonder how long it will take for people to stop complaining about the change.

[TrixxieTriss]

47 minutes ago, Exly said:

Instead, I think that they rely on a steady drip of new people to keep the game marginally afloat, and they are happy with that.

Sadly that steady drip doesn’t keep up with the amount of players that leave. That’s why we have population issues in PvP because we don’t have enough people to repopulate those that leave. Which means this business model is one designed to fail eventually. Where if they concentrated on player retention, the game would actually grow from that slow drip of new players instead of shrinking constantly. They’d have more players, which equals more income. Even if their profit was only just higher than now because development costs would be higher, it would allow the game to grow & not always feel like the next patch might kill it.

[meddani]

premade in general needs to go, put them in a seperate queue, don't care if they have to wait for 4 hours for a pop, it's unbalanced AF.

[Beyrahl]

On 2/23/2024 at 3:03 PM, BallisticKaine said:

Newer players get bullied out of PvP when they que solo and end up just getting nuked by premades in the match. Even for most part veteran solo que players can't do much against premades in a match.

Veteran's will still bully new players, without proper mm that'll always happen, proper mm can't even work due to population but it's still a step forward from than current state. 

[Crazykidddd]

On 2/23/2024 at 5:19 PM, TrixxieTriss said:

At this point, the devs must have enough data to realise this 5-8 man premade experiment has been detrimental to the queue numbers & player retention. 

Surely they aren’t going to keep ignoring their own hard data that has to be showing that large premades kill the queues & that they rarely go up against other large premades.

This debacle has gone on for long enough that even those who support premades are now questioning their validity in this game. Because everyone who plays PvP regularly, can see the negative impacts a low population & premades have on the queue & quality of play. 

If the devs don’t decide to make some radical changes to the system soon, PvP will cess to exist as content in this game outside of PvP season farmers AFKing in matches to get season rewards. 

Again this was predictable back when 7.2 launched with these changes. And we were told to make friends to premade with. Those of us who said large premades would kill PvP have been proven right. And many of those that argued for premades to stay have left the game again. 

The problem is those of us who regularly PvP have been saying this from the get go, unfortunately the 2k dps players who fancy themselves good and knowledgeable can't comprehend basic logic and have been trying to object and write speeches about why we're wrong, so why expect a bunch of clueless devs to be better off when they don't even pvp at all.

Edited February 28 by Crazykidddd

[Zumbanerdzen]

On 2/24/2024 at 12:43 PM, meddani said:

premade in general needs to go, put them in a seperate queue, don't care if they have to wait for 4 hours for a pop, it's unbalanced AF.

Do you think they will ever listen? I used to really love PVP, but these premades are killing my spirit for it.  Before recently, it was extremely rare for me to say anything in general during a match about it. Now, I am finding that the win trading, and premades are making me have an urge to actually call it out in general (I am fully aware it will do me no good, but it feels good verbalizing frustrations sometimes). 

[dftu]

1 hour ago, Zumbanerdzen said:

Now, I am finding that the win trading, and premades are making me have an urge to actually call it out in general

I'd love to hear your definition of "win trading" since there's literally nothing to win trade for anymore in this game. No special flairs or titles are tied to Elo rating anymore, no expensive crafting materials are tied to missions that only progress from winning, and no leaderboards are up anymore either to check people's progress relative to your own. 

[RACATW]

On 2/25/2024 at 11:56 PM, Beyrahl said:

Veteran's will still bully new players, without proper mm that'll always happen, proper mm can't even work due to population but it's still a step forward from than current state. 

Their simplistic MM based on wins giving elo works for arena, but not warzones.
 

You'd need to make warzones ranked and arenas unranked to see people start to improve in play again.

[Artemisswtor]

8 man premade bad (unacceptable)

7 man premade slightly less bad (unacceptable)

6 man premade again slightly less bad (unacceptable)

5 man premade again slightly less bad (unacceptable)

4 man premade again slightly less bad (unacceptable)

3 man premade again slightly less bad (unacceptable)

2 man premade again slightly less bad but still bad (acceptable )

I got it.

Constructive part: SWTOR needs to look into improving its matchmaking software whose job it is to strive for perfect balance which will result in competitive gameplay.  Premades are absolutely part of matchmaking and not separate: The biggest thing the matchmaking making software could do in striving for perfect balance is to put premades in their own separate queue.

 

lets work on balance first and after we can work on population.

[Beyrahl]

31 minutes ago, Artemisswtor said:

Constructive part: SWTOR needs to look into improving its matchmaking software whose job it is to strive for perfect balance which will result in competitive gameplay.  Premades are absolutely part of matchmaking and not separate: The biggest thing the matchmaking making software could do in striving for perfect balance is to put premades in their own separate queue.

 

lets work on balance first and after we can work on population.

The game has a mercy rule but it never goes into effect unless enough players leave. 
Leaving has a penalty.
Backfills take anyone regardless of role.
Declining is possible, regardless of role.

These all play into each other, but generally, anything above 4 is too much. 
They had it at 4 for a long time and it mostly worked outside of the double premade queue sync. It'd still be a gamble most of the time if there were more than 4 groups. Arena is centered around T/H double DPS for the most competitive ranked format, which is gone now but it'd be a shame to see that go, so adamantly against it. However, a 2-man limit for the arena would work and the only way to have more is if you queued tank & heal also, preventing 4 dps abusing solo queue players. The same concept could be applied to 8v8 too without harming matchmaking much, it'd also likely make the matchmaker work better due to not having to deal with odd-sized groups. 

Making a separate queue would just kill things regardless, good players are still going to stomp solo queue, and premade will die out because the majority of them only want to be the meat grinder, not the meat that is ground. There are countless times this has been shown, including in group ranked when we still had it & ranked 8v8s. 

 

Off-topic of what you said but rather to add more to the post.

Inevitably in today's state of game we just see TDMers playing against nobody for the most part, then OBJers fighting against TDMers who don't care about the OBJ which is just a never-ending loop of neither facing anyone in their style of gameplay. Sadly, most join up for rewards and conquest instead of learning anything or attempting to, it's very easy to be discouraged but everyone starts somewhere. If you cannot fight you are not useful to either TDM or OBJ player. You are also neither style of player and need more time to understand the game, the larger groups won't give you that chance to ease into it, it'll be trial by fire which immediately puts everyone off. This is completely understandable, so a step forward and arguably the easiest is just limiting group size back to how it was and calling it a day. 

Until there's some sort of ranking, you can't convince players to play competitively in a certain style that directly takes away from their fun. Most don't stop to think - Hey, why did he throw the ball away? Well, there are only negatives of holding it and if you can't do anything with it / don't have someone to pass to objectively speaking you're a ticking time bomb. The increased penalty for holding the hutt ball should have gone away with 7.0.

Why isn't anyone guarding? If there are not any suitable classes and you ask this question, just guard yourself, a lot of players nowadays have no patience to sit there and defend a node that isn't attacked, let alone defend a node that won't ever receive backup - which is often nowadays. It's far from a fun activity and I wish it'd be redesigned the game is much more fast-paced than it was back then when those modes were created. 

Why is no one capping? You make yourself a target, someone who can cap from stealth is arguably the best to do so, plenty of times there are distractions but no one caps, simply everyone rather have fun fighting other players than clicking a shiny button. If you ever have to ask you should already understand the players you're with. You also should be aware of when you should be contributing to the team fight instead of spam-clicking the shiny, which is important. 

And generally, there are a lot of reasons someone may not do the objective but there's little reason for someone to not attempt to fight or attempt to learn to fight. The basis of most objectives is to give more than just fighting, it's to create a fighting point and create control over it. Including being able to defend and react to calls. I played a lot of objectives in the past and the majority of the people who queue today that call themselves objers would never get the ball, cap the node, etc. The basic fundamental they all ignore is how to fight and kill or pressure someone out. If they don't know how to deal with it they get pushed out and capped on, then killed until the game is over. It becomes a stale and generally boring thing unless everyone is on the same page. The maps are always the same, the players are different, the specs are different, and the combat is always different. Leaving TDM style players more to do in the game in the long run while objers only continue to get more frustrated. 

Simply a redesign of these archaic modes incentivizing things like mid-control would go a long way. I doubt we'll ever get it.

While a victory screen means nothing to me, neither does defeat, it's gone far beyond that point for me at this point - I understand why most want to see the victory screen but it's also majority of the time the people who see the action the least. 

[Artemisswtor]

1 hour ago, Beyrahl said:

Since you are quoting me I figure that your post is addressed to me specifically so I'll respond to your points.
 

"The game has a mercy rule but it never goes into effect unless enough players leave. 
Leaving has a penalty.
Backfills take anyone regardless of role.
Declining is possible, regardless of role."

Okay?

"These all play into each other, but generally, anything above 4 is too much. 
They had it at 4 for a long time and it mostly worked outside of the double premade queue sync. It'd still be a gamble most of the time if there were more than 4 groups. Arena is centered around T/H double DPS for the most competitive ranked format, which is gone now but it'd be a shame to see that go, so adamantly against it. However, a 2-man limit for the arena would work and the only way to have more is if you queued tank & heal also, preventing 4 dps abusing solo queue players. The same concept could be applied to 8v8 too without harming matchmaking much, it'd also likely make the matchmaker work better due to not having to deal with odd-sized groups. "
 

Again, I got it. 2 man premade ( pick whatever number less than eight) bad but less bad than whatever higher number of premade.

"Making a separate queue would just kill things regardless, good players are still going to stomp solo queue, and premade will die out because the majority of them only want to be the meat grinder, not the meat that is ground. There are countless times this has been shown, including in group ranked when we still had it & ranked 8v8s. "
 

Separate queue will kill things? Why?

if you're saying a separate queue will kill pvp because we already have a low pvp population and it would divide it then my answer to that we should work on matchmaking first and give it the tools like allow matchmaking software to put premades into a separate queue because this will be the biggest change while it strives for perfect balance.

  (After we work on balance we can work on population.  I can create a thread if you want to address the separate issue of population and ask for suggestions like server mergers or whatever and the pros and cons and feelings about if they'll make whatever changes.)

Good players will stomp bad players, sure. It's the matchmaking software job to strive to even out the good players on both sides.

If your argument is that good players are only premade players than let me address it this way.  
The best pvp players are solo 1 v 1 players and takes the most skill.

let me explain why in this way.

premades will focus on one person to kill them as fast as possible and thusly remove any skill.

100 vs 1. This fight uses no skill on the side of the attacker or the person being attack and the fight ends instantly.

20 vs 1. Same thing but maybe more skill is used on both sides

10 vs 1. Same thing but more skill used on both sides.

4 vs 1. Even more skill is used on both sides.

2 vs 1. Even more skill is used on both sides.

1 v 1. The most skill used on both sides. 1v1 takes and uses the most skill.

Many of those that premade won't 1v1 and there is a reason for that. It takes the most skill and those that premade need to keep practicing in premades to get to this level.  My suggestion is that if you want to see how skilled you are, make everything as equal as possible in the 1 v 1 ie gear, class, etc.

skill is not game knowledge.  My game knowledge is zip and yet I kill those with way more game knowledge even with everything,  like gear and class or whatever, being equal. Why can I kill those with more game knowledge? With everything being equal the person with more game knowledge should win, right? Not so because there is another factor that makes a difference and that difference would be skill.

A utuber once said that 1 v 1 takes no skill and he couldn't be more wrong.

But I have digressed.

 

Again, I got it. 2 man premade ( pick whatever number less than eight) bad but less bad than whatever higher number of premade.

Separate queue will kill things? Why?

if you're saying a separate queue will kill pvp because we already have a low pvp population and it would divide it then my answer to that we should work on matchmaking first and give it the tools like allow matchmaking software to put premades into a separate queue because this will be the biggest change while it strives for perfect balance.

  (After we work on balance we can work on population.  I can create a thread if you want to address the separate issue of population and ask for suggestions like server mergers or whatever and the pros and cons and feelings about if they'll make whatever changes.)

Good players will stomp bad players, sure. It's the matchmaking software job to strive to even out the good players on both sides.

If your argument is that good players are only premade players than let me address it this way.  
The best pvp players are solo 1 v 1 players and takes the most skill.

let me explain why in this way.

premades will focus on one person to kill them as fast as possible and thusly remove any skill.

100 vs 1. This fight uses no skill on the side of the attacker or the person being attack and the fight ends instantly.

20 vs 1. Same thing but maybe more skill is used on both sides

10 vs 1. Same thing but more skill used on both sides.

4 vs 1. Even more skill is used on both sides.

2 vs 1. Even more skill is used on both sides.

1 v 1. The most skill used on both sides. 1v1 takes and uses the most skill.

Many of those that premade won't 1v1 and there is a reason for that. It takes the most skill and those that premade need to keep practicing in premades to get to this level.  My suggestion is that if you want to see how skilled you are, make everything as equal as possible in the 1 v 1 ie gear, class, etc.

skill is not game knowledge.  My game knowledge is zip and yet I kill those with way more game knowledge even with everything,  like gear and class or whatever, being equal. Why can I kill those with more game knowledge? With everything being equal the person with more game knowledge should win, right? Not so because there is another factor that makes a difference and that difference would be skill.

A utuber once said that 1 v 1 takes no skill and he couldn't be more wrong.

But I have digressed.

1 hour ago, Beyrahl said:

 

 

"Off-topic of what you said but rather to add more to the post.

Inevitably in today's state of game we just see TDMers playing against nobody for the most part, then OBJers fighting against TDMers who don't care about the OBJ which is just a never-ending loop of neither facing anyone in their style of gameplay. Sadly, most join up for rewards and conquest instead of learning anything or attempting to, it's very easy to be discouraged but everyone starts somewhere. If you cannot fight you are not useful to either TDM or OBJ player. You are also neither style of player and need more time to understand the game, the larger groups won't give you that chance to ease into it, it'll be trial by fire which immediately puts everyone off. This is completely understandable, so a step forward and arguably the easiest is just limiting group size back to how it was and calling it a day. 

Until there's some sort of ranking, you can't convince players to play competitively in a certain style that directly takes away from their fun. Most don't stop to think - Hey, why did he throw the ball away? Well, there are only negatives of holding it and if you can't do anything with it / don't have someone to pass to objectively speaking you're a ticking time bomb. The increased penalty for holding the hutt ball should have gone away with 7.0.

Why isn't anyone guarding? If there are not any suitable classes and you ask this question, just guard yourself, a lot of players nowadays have no patience to sit there and defend a node that isn't attacked, let alone defend a node that won't ever receive backup - which is often nowadays. It's far from a fun activity and I wish it'd be redesigned the game is much more fast-paced than it was back then when those modes were created. 

Why is no one capping? You make yourself a target, someone who can cap from stealth is arguably the best to do so, plenty of times there are distractions but no one caps, simply everyone rather have fun fighting other players than clicking a shiny button. If you ever have to ask you should already understand the players you're with. You also should be aware of when you should be contributing to the team fight instead of spam-clicking the shiny, which is important. 

And generally, there are a lot of reasons someone may not do the objective but there's little reason for someone to not attempt to fight or attempt to learn to fight. The basis of most objectives is to give more than just fighting, it's to create a fighting point and create control over it. Including being able to defend and react to calls. I played a lot of objectives in the past and the majority of the people who queue today that call themselves objers would never get the ball, cap the node, etc. The basic fundamental they all ignore is how to fight and kill or pressure someone out. If they don't know how to deal with it they get pushed out and capped on, then killed until the game is over. It becomes a stale and generally boring thing unless everyone is on the same page. The maps are always the same, the players are different, the specs are different, and the combat is always different. Leaving TDM style players more to do in the game in the long run while objers only continue to get more frustrated. 

Simply a redesign of these archaic modes incentivizing things like mid-control would go a long way. I doubt we'll ever get it.

While a victory screen means nothing to me, neither does defeat, it's gone far beyond that point for me at this point - I understand why most want to see the victory screen but it's also majority of the time the people who see the action the least. "
 

This part you said wasn't addressed to what I posted so I guess I don't need to respond to your points other than to say that pvpers are competitive by nature and want competitive gameplay and that's why we should strive for balance by giving the tools to the matchmaking software to do its job.  Like give it the ability to put premades into their own separate queue which would be the biggest thing you can do when striving for perfect balance.  But PVE players have a roll too and that's to do the PVE(player vs environment) objective where that objective is the environment.  
 

Side note: I haven't learned how to use the quotes or how to work the reply software so I apologize to you and all if this is too hard to read.  If it is to hard to read and follow  then don't respond and ignore all that I've said.  I won't mind.

This part on the bottom you said wasn't addressed to what I posted so I guess I don't need to respond to your points other than to say that pvpers are competitive by nature and want competitive gameplay and that's why we should strive for balance by giving the tools to the matchmaking software to do its job.  Like give it the ability to put premades into their own separate queue which would be the biggest thing you can do when striving for perfect balance.  But PVE players have a roll too and that's to do the PVE(player vs environment) objective where that objective is the environment.  
 

Side note: I haven't learned how to use the quotes or how to work the reply software so I apologize to you and all if this is too hard to read.  If it is to hard to read and follow  then don't respond and ignore all that I've said.  I won't mind.

Edited March 7 by Artemisswtor