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Updates to Random Queues
nitocris83
Member, Cryptic Developer, Administrator Posts: 4,498Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
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@asterdahl You didn't mention the dungeon experience for players new to Neverwinter.
I encourage you to random queue with a pre-70 character a few times and note the experience, bearing in mind that the long-term health of Neverwinter relies on new players converting to long-term customers. I hope the mid-term plans will address the fact that 70's trivialize that queue.
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(Suggestion: When joining downlevelled content, set all gear to the max IL for that content's level and reduce stats, bonuses, etc, appropriately. So when I join Cloak Tower I still have all my gear, but it all gives me bonuses as if the "level required" to wear it was 12 - and my enchants and runestones all downlevel to the same IL to match. So I'm a "BIS" level 12 character, with a full set of Rank 3 Enchants and gold-quality IL 65 Gear.)
Because, seriously, like he said, take a level 20 or 30 or 40 character with found gear into the random normal dungeon. Run a few of those. Is that fun? Did you have fun? Do you think that's fun for new players? Because it's not, and it's not fun for the L70s stomping the content flat with their eyes shut, either.
However, I'd like to leave my general opinion/feedback of the random queues system here for discussion.
In all honesty, I've been so bored with Neverwinter since random queues were released. Prior, I would run dungeons many times a day, but now I have no desire to do so. I feel hardly any desire to run any content, since I know that if I run what I'd like to, I won't get as many rewards. And if I run what does give rewards, it likely will be something I don't want to run. I tried very hard to like random queues when they first came out, but I feel that they took away some of our freedom and enjoyment of being able to choose whatever dungeon we wanted in order to receive our daily rewards.
I understand that it was partially an attempt to get people to revisit older/less popular content, but I don't think this was the right way to go about it. This may seem brash, but if all of the content was interesting and engaging, then there wouldn't be a problem with alienated content. Perhaps a better alternative would have been to introduce varied rewards, or bonuses for running the less popular dungeons? If nothing else, have random queues be an option for people looking for something fun (or groups where everyone says they don't care what dungeon is being run, and no one can make a decision, haha..). Personally, I would have liked the option to choose a queue randomly, but I don't enjoy being forced to do so if I would like to make ad from dungeons (not counting salvage, of course). If I didn't have to run the random ones to earn AD, I wouldn't do them at all.
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There will always (hopefully) be new players. They will always run into this roadblock once it is returned to the queue.
As I've said elsewhere, the first lock comes in at 64 when you don't have the 7.5k il needed for Master of the Hunt. When you hit 70 the lock suddenly jumps to the 10k il requirement.
A brand new 70 should have the ability to get a reasonable amount of AD from both Dungeons and Skirmishes without having to get an ultra-high level just to queue up. No reason to lock people out of running daily skirmishes for AD permanently if they don't have 10K IL in the future just because you as developers "Feel like it." That's just killing the fun of gearing up alts alongside the change that makes you not able to get AD outside of Randoms.
Plus, it doesn't solve the problem of Skirmishes having too narrow of a level range (they are still WAY Too easy to outlevel and shouldn't even have a maximum level, and should just scale down higher levels) and requiring too many people to start (should be 3 people max for levelling skirmishes, just like dungeons). Most people are parked on their 70's honestly, and very few are leveling.
And with "Random" dungeons, there's still the issue of overpowered 70's trashing everything and running ahead of the party in lower level dungeons, especially in my most hated dungeon: Cloak Tower. Since everyone queues for it, that's all you get in your "Random" daily dungeon, and it's so faceroll easy and also so incredibly repetitive that it's just not fun anymore.
Up until this latest patch totally shafted my progress (particularly with the inability to run skirmishes for AD anymore with my 9000 IL Main) I was planning on staying in this game and spending a lot of money during the Black Friday sale, but since the terrible patch that made it impossible for me to earn AD running the dungeons and I want/need or run any skirmishes for real amounts of AD at all, I've just decided to not stick around and spend money, and will just open my daily keys for a while, then quit when my VIP's gone.
These new changes are not respectful of my time, and don't add any fun to my experience. On the contrary, it limits my options and forces me to do stuff I don't want to do, making this "game" into something more akin to work that I'm supposed to want to pay for. When a game turns into work for me rather than play, and the developers don't listen to what me or like-minded people say, then I don't see a need to stick around.
I've not had a fun experience with this random queue. Requiring the item level needed and everfrost resistance needed to get into a epic queue... only to get Malabogs castle? I don't think that is right. Get placed into a Fangbreaker island only to have people quit after coming into the dungeon? It's not the right approach to do this.
What needs to be done to Epic dungeon queues is to divide them in to tiers. Because then your smaller level 70's can access at least some type of random epic dungeon queue and get rewarded for it. It also allows for those more powerful to challenge themselves in other queues.
(please note: Fangbreaker island and Master Spellplague are almost impossible to do with random people. Very rarely will you get good enough people to make it through. Or even people wanting to do the dungeon.)
While we are at it, why not make "random dungeons" privateable? The idea of going in with a group of guildies on an adventure into the unknown sounds great. However, what doesn't make it fun... is when you try and gather a group of people and have to reject people because they are not the right "class". So private random queues sounds great.
What the devs have to realize is that some people LOATH heading in with random people and feel safer with their friends/ guild mates. That means that this whole queue system is punishing them for wanting to stay in their safe bubble? That doesn't sound right. It's not ok to push people to do something they do not want to do. Especially if that means earning rough AD with people they feel uncomfortable to be playing around.
Finally. Random Trials. Specifically Svardborg/ Master Svardborg... FOR HEAVENS SAKE. Please tell us is Svardborg is master or not! it's not fun having a cleric go down and not being able to get in because "well heck, it's master. Didn't know that was coming!"
Whenever you load into Svardborg, it only comes up with "Svardborg". It never says "master/ epic" if it is that level. It's not fun tricking people into thinking they are in a normal... but in actual fact they are in master.
That's my 2 cents worth. I hope I made some sense.
A definite improvement would be trying to take item level in to consideration when trying to match a group.
Both in respect of overpowered characters getting put with low level characters in random dungeons or in respect of matching parties for harder dungeons. I haven't completed a randomly matched FBI yet...first one, we didn't even get past the first encounter!
I don't mind about the skirmishes, though I was very surprised when my (what I would consider ery underpowered) 10k DC got thrown in to the Merchant Prince's folly!
Also,
"We’ll be monitoring the activity in that skirmish, and at some point in the future, we’ll be returning it to the random skirmish queue once everyone has had some time to adjust and increase their item level."
Really? Dude, do you really think there is not going to be new level 70's after the current ones? Do you know something we don't?
I don't feel that's really the case. What I've seen, repeatedly, is that players love the idea of dungeon roulette but hate that they're being forced to random queue in order to get AD. I'm feeling the pinch on it because even though I'm nearly 15k I can't queue for random trial or random epic. I've never unlocked FBI or Zoidberg because I hate SOMI and its ridiculous reputation reward/requirements. It's a massive time suck that I'm just not willing to grind through. I doubt the devs actually read these but for what it's worth, how about putting the old dungeon rewards (AD and seals) back and just award an additional 1000-1500AD for successfully completing a random queue?
It's not fun watching as the other two members of the party run off and leave you behind because you simply are not necessary to the run. At all.
Going through Cloak Tower, the very first dungeon, and that was where my Paladin found himself.
I got a couple of swings in during the first fight because it was right there. I got some swings in during the last fight because they had to wait on me to catch up to them before they could start the final encounter.
In-between I had to fight a group of 3 mobs that wandered into the path after the other two people had already passed.
I was worried that they might try to kick me for slowing them down, and stopping to type "sorry for slowing you down" not only shouldn't have been necessary, but doing so would have only slowed me, and them, down that much more.
That's not fun.
Being of no use is not fun, and make no mistake, even though I got some swings in during the first and last fights the only one where it mattered was the second fight where I was all alone, because the others were burning through enemies/the enemy far too quickly for them to be a threat to their characters.
I'm not new. I haven't been around for a while and decided to start fresh in order to get my bearings back, but I did not think that that was a fun experience. I can not imagine too many new players would have found that first dungeon experience to be a fun dungeon experience either.
It was suggested above; Cap stats/ranks as if the character was the appropriate level for the dungeon using gear of whatever quality.
That is character stats, gear stats, power ranks (shouldn't be any rank 3 or 4 powers in a level 12 dungeon, for example), and even companion ranks. A high-quality companion at max rank can be overpowered for a dungeon too.
If possible, even limit their feat progress.
If someone wouldn't normally have access to feats at whatever level the dungeon is then turn off their feats.
If they should have 15 points then give them their first 15 points and turn off the rest.
I like that there is a good way for individual people to get into groups for dungeons and skirmishes, it just needs a little tuning, I think.
Winter Lily (CW) / Winter Rose (DC) / Winter Ivy (HR)
Pandora's Misfits Guild Leader
Its almost impossible to find farming runs So i have no other reason to play and progress.
It's taken me well over a month to get River district to the point of unlocking the Dungeon, That may i add will be pointless running because the reward to time ratio is not worth it.
Ps. It was a kick in the Butt hearing that the October bug fix was being postponed till mod 13. my scourge warlock is pitiful now.
Edit: Over half of my guild has left. (yes yest story of each new mod) But the way its going there wont be anyone to teach and carry the new people through the hard stuff, considering they cant even reach 10k IL as they hit level 70.
Thankfully after the 3rd try everyone agreed to abandon the dungeon. But then you get the ones that refuse to leave so I end up being forced to repeatedly fail over and over until they finally give up or I have to just leave and suffer a penalty. Either way I end up wasting my time. How is this fair?
And then there is the issue with being forced to run dungeons we don't want to run. No, sorry but I do not like running EGWD, why? Because IMHO the reward is not worth the effort and it never has been. And there are other dungeons and skirmishes I feel the same way about. But for some odd reason the devs seem to keep ignoring this notable complaint.
And of course there is the whole thing of continually getting the same damn dungeons and skirmishes repeatedly. I cant even count how many times I've gotten Princes Folly since random queue was added to the game.... and im not a fan of it either. Why? Because getting gold reward is damn near impossible and no one want to listen when you try to explain to them that you don't have to kill the trex. And since gold is the only way to get any good reward without a key it make running it far less interesting and fun.
And to address the whole thing about people waiting forever in unpopular queues, wasn't that the whole point of guilds and alliances? To find more players willing to help you run content? Im sorry but if you're in a guild or alliance that refuses to help you then maybe you need to find another guild/alliance.
Also the random epic queue seems to take way longer then one would think it should. Before the random queue system I would just queue for all the dungeons I'd like to run and take whatever dungeon popped first. Now I have to sit and wait for it pop which really sucks because I don't like starting quests or tasks that I cant finish so I end up just standing around wasting time waiting.
That would have given us some more dungeons to run and at the very least be an interesting change. Also if you added back in the epic versions of the leveling dungeons plus the 5 I mentioned earlier, That would add a total of 12 new-ish dungeons to run daily.
But hey, I guess forcing players to do something they don't want to do sounded like a better idea and was probably easier.
all of this
Giving another avenue of dungeoneers shards is good. The way you are doing it is not good. You've changed very little else. I'm sure there are educated people working on this. Einstein had a theory about someone who does the same thing repeatedly and expects a different result...all you are doing is re-explaining "why" and slapping lipstick on the pig. You've failed to address the larger core issues of player feedback. I hope at some point someone at Cryptic comes to that realization, because I actually do want this game to thrive. You need to move MSP and FBI out so a larger segment of your playerbase can and will queue.
As for other feedback, I am still getting Illusionist's Gambit 99% of the time on any character high enough to run it. Something is seriously off with your "random" algorithm with such results.
On the subject of IG, Ive also seen a trend lately of botters in the skirmish queue, they stand there and occasionally heal and do nothing else to contribute to the skirmish. There should be a way to kick them from the skirmish, or at the very least easily report them for botting with a click.
The leveling dungeon queue is something I've discussed a bit before, and we definitely know that the experience can be less than stellar right now. Adjustments to level scaling is something we've had on our radar for a long time now, and it's something we're looking improving. Our goal is that when you're scaled down, it won't be much different from running it at the proper level, but of course at that time we would be making other adjustments to make sure the rewards feel fine for the time invested.
When we were looking at the timing for level scaling adjustments and random queues, we did debate on holding back random queues. However, when we looked at the data regarding the number of level 70 players already queuing for certain leveling dungeons, and then the infrequency with which other leveling dungeon queues were actually popping, we decided that it would be an improvement for leveling players to have queues popping because there was already a good chance they were going to run into a 70 anyway.
We know that by encouraging level 70s to run the dungeon queue, one of these problems has been exacerbated, but the issue with queues not firing has been alleviated, but do know that we are looking into improvements and we appreciate your patience. The collective answer for "why not split queue N into more queues?" is basically the following: we don't really want random queues to become the only thing everyone does when they log in. With 5 queues already, those players that can do all 5 will have to carve out a decent amount of time to get through all 5. We'd like to not create an even bigger list of checkboxes players feel like they have to get through every day to earn the top rewards.
We'd like the random queue list to feel like it's something you could complete in a somewhat reasonable amount of time, and in a reasonably long play session you could go on to queue for individual things you'd like to run. Fixing level scaling is something we're definitely looking into per my response to Tripsofthrymr above, and the solution we're looking into isn't too far from what you're describing. (Some of those things like ranking down enchants are a bit of a technical hurdle so we appreciate your patience!)
However, your question about the ability to run a second epic dungeon in place of a normal dungeon is a good opportunity to answer a popular line of questioning about opening up the system to give more options. In-and-of-itself your idea is not a bad one at all. Obviously we can't open up an easier queue to replace the reward from a more difficult one, because that would be abused regularly to avoid the harder content.
However, opening up a harder queue to reward the bonus from an easier queue would probably be fine. Enough players who were trying to get their bonus quickly would probably still queue for the standard dungeon queue to ensure queues are firing regularly.
Right now, everything in the random queue system is more or less 1:1, there's a bonus and repeatable reward for each specific queue, and there's no pool across all the queues or anything like that. It can seem complicated if you're thinking about how to map the old bonuses to the new system, but in a vacuum everything is fairly straightforward now, and the bonus rewards are fairly easy to understand.
We wanted to keep things simple for this initial release, and avoid complicated rules and substitutions. The other fairly straightforward approach would have been to have a maximum pool and allow you to reach that pool in any manner, however, as I mentioned before there are issues with allowing substituting something easy for something difficult, so it's not a straightforward option.
Of course, just because allowing a substitution would be complicated, both technically and in terms of presentation, doesn't mean we would never consider it. We plan to make improvements to level scaling, and continue to watch how everyone uses the random queues.
Hopefully this answers some of your questions! As I mentioned in the blog post, all of your feedback is valuable. There were a lot of things that I would have loved to cover in the blog post that I simply could not due to space constraints, so I will definitely be responding to more questions in this thread.
Like to see Beginner (under 70) , intermediate (70) and advanced (msp, fbi, tong)
I don't want to run random content, I want to pick and choose. For anyone who doesn't want to take part in the random feature, there's now less motivation for running specific dungeons - there used to be SH dungeon quests to run most of the epic dungeons so I would regularly run all of them, now I mainly just do the few that reward decent direct rewards in a good time/are more fun/have alliance members looking for party on etc.
Also, this means I now miss out on the bonus AD, and am generally just running less dungeons overall so getting less salvage AD.
Please, please, please make this optional and not something forced on us. Then you can see what people actually want overall by the usage statistics, rather than trying to push something that's not necessarily desirable for the majority of players.
This quick change is a big step forward to player satisfaction again. With just one minor change, the dungeon experience would be great again:
Install gathering points before *every* boss. Right now, top-equipped 70s just run through the mobs, leaving the slower group members behind, kill the boss with (mostly) just one or two hits and rush on. More gathering points would a) force these unsocial players to wait until the party has gathered and b) enable all group members to get Seals of the Adventurer after killing the boss.
That beside, the return to the "old" skirmish and dungeon queue is highly appreciated. I already started to create new toons to farm the shards for the guild. Thanks again!
Skirmish change is also interesting, however I'd love to see (as another poster) the zones skirmishes into the queue, or in another queue, maybe only private as you don't want to have more random queues. This way it's a bit more content available for everyone. It's already existing, just reserved for specific zones where players out-lvl the skirmish and don't do it because it never pops. It'd be possible to get the achievements granted by the skirmishes, and would add a bit of variety of what we can do. I'm sure that people wouldn't do that everyday, but at least it'd be available.
For the levelling experience if you're working on the scaling, I guess it'll be less of a bad experience for the new players, however this was kind of a bad idea to pop the random queues before the scale changes. For several weeks the experience of everyone concerning sub 70 dungeons will be abysmal.
The major problem remaining is with the epic dungeons, as we still have FBI and MSP in the same queue than ELOL and VT as said before. The difference in terms of difficulty and requirements is huge that these dungeons should be separated in tiers. yes it would add more and more random queues, but if you really monitor random queues data, you have to see FBI / MSP leave and fail rate. Not speaking of premade groups that do random queues and can possibly complete all dungeons, but random groups that can't.