Be careful with those numbers. I've played this game since the beginning. The population was HUGE at that time, and there were three shards, not one as there are now. They were merged when numbers declined, though they of course wouldn't admit that, and you have to take into account alts, bots, and multi-boxing. Probably cut that number at least in half, if not more.
Look at my join date.
I know what happened to NW at last October.
Also look at this.
We got thousands of new people from steam when Mod2 came out.
You can look at the GG PvP to gauge the number of players.
On your average day, there will be 10-15 instances of GG PvP open. That's 400-600 players. Maybe another 100 that didn't make it due to faction imbalance. So 500-1000 players who are at least interested in the rewards GG provides, glory, rAD, seals and most importantly, (possible) access to a quick T2 dungeon. I'd say 25% aren't interested in PvP at all, just want the dailies and a chance at some coins and a epic.
So, on a normal day, outside of PvP hour, you're probably only looking at 100-300(lol..) people queuing for level 60 PvP. If there actually is an ELO system attempting to match-make, you're probably only have a few dozen who are at your relative skill level. So, it pulls from below (if you're relatively vocal on the PvP boards, you're probably high ranked) and you end up in ****ty matches.
Not enough of a population to ensure competitive, balanced, and FRESH matches. If matchmaking ever does balance out and the tighten the restrictions, I hope you enjoy fighting the same 10 people.
Standing at the campfire right now because once again I'm the highest geared player in my team and I'm only 12.5k GS. There are 7500 TR and 10k HR with all blues plus GWF and another HR at 11k. Needless to say that their team melted all my teammates within 3 seconds in Astral Shield and Foresight buff. And I waited for the queue pop for 10+ minutes.
UPD
The second time queue popped almost immediately, and I got 7500 GWF in my team. But we won cause I was lucky to get 2 13k HRs also. The fifth member was 10k CW that had never dodged any skill. He even got killed by Thorn Ward because he was stupid enough to stay in it's range.
UPD2
The third match was just amazing. Those CW and GWF were against me combined with some I guess 8k GS CW, TR and somebody else. None of them had soulforged, the highest critical strike they dealt to me was 4k (Ice Knife). And here comes my team: 2 14.5k sentinel GWFs, perma bilethorn TR, 14k Greater Vorpal HR and me - 12.5k DC. We won with 1000/27 score.
Dailies done, such an amazing PvP day.
M6 almost drains your soul given how boring it is. (c) joocycuzzzzzz
It seems to me that there are more even matches now than there were before. Still, quite some unbalanced ones.
Before the matchmaking i would say it was 95% unbalanced, 5% balanced.
Now, i would say 50-50. Which is better to me. Not perfect, but way better. Hope it improves.
Gear score fluctuates a lot. Plus, weapon-armor enchants are not counted in your GS. So you can see a 13k GS with perfects, and a 13k GS with normals (like me). Which still makes some difference.
Look at my join date.
I know what happened to NW at last October.
Also look at this.
We got thousands of new people from steam when Mod2 came out.
Interesting charts. The game population has been steadily declining since december, and not by a small margin. 2 times less players. I hope module 3 will be good enough to get some of these people back.
0
pers3phoneBanned Users, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
Interesting charts. The game population has been steadily declining since december, and not by a small margin. 2 times less players. I hope module 3 will be good enough to get some of these people back.
Yeah kinda sad to see.
Oh well, at least now there's proof for the claims that the game is hemorrhaging players.
Interesting charts. The game population has been steadily declining since december, and not by a small margin. 2 times less players. I hope module 3 will be good enough to get some of these people back.
I could be wrong, but I think those charts only show people who play NW via Steam. Certainly the title would suggest this.
I have no idea what percentage of the total NW playerbase uses Steam to play the game but my guess would be a minority.
I could be wrong, but I think those charts only show people who play NW via Steam. Certainly the title would suggest this.
Yes.
/10char
0
pers3phoneBanned Users, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited March 2014
Back to ELO.
This ELO thing is surely malfunctioning or way too lax. So we group 5 people. All with r9-10s and greater/perfects, and probably 90% wins or so.
And what we get, repeatedly?
People with 50% mounts, some with no enchants, basically just poor pugs thrown in for the kill, and the queue still took 5-10 mins to pop.
By the way I think all of us have 50-100 matches played, so I doubt there's an issue with correctly determining our rank.
Then I queue solo or with a friend, and we get grouped with people without enchants, and put against full 5 men premades from PvP guilds?
What the hell... how are we supposed to do anything when when we get people with 19k HP at 60 in the party without Tenacity gear or wep/armor enchants? At least if you put us against fully geared people with emblems and stuff, give the same type of players to us from the queue, or just don't pop it at all
And to think it started very promising after the patch with a series of almost all good matches, and now it's again fully random...
0
ranncoreMember, Moderators, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 2,508
Including information like time of day for feedback like this will help us and the developers in determining adjustments to the matchmaking algorithm for width of Elo bracket vs. available players for time spent in queue.
I believe that part of the problem is that the minimum/maximum time spent in queue is not variable according to Elo brackets right now: whatever Elo bracket you are in, matchmaking seems to be automatically adjusting to include a wider Elo bracket in order to shorten queue times when players aren't available.
I think it would be better if the higher your Elo score, the longer the matchmaking system waited to find similarly ranked players before widening the bracket differential to reduce queue time. This means that the higher your Elo rank, the longer you will wait in queue.
I would rather have long waits and good matches than fast queue times and lopsided matches, but the majority of people (who belong in the "widest" Elo bracket), would presumably like to queue and play. This system would allow for both.
The matchmaker also seems to try to balance teams by placing lowest - rank Elo players with the highest ranked Elo players against mid ranked Elo players. I cannot stress enough that the highest and lowest ranked players should never, ever be in the same match together, whether they are on the same side or opposing sides. This is what NO ONE likes about PvP and matchmaking is supposed to PREVENT this.
We just don't have enough information about how Matchmaking works right now to give real feedback on it besides our own experience.
Including information like time of day for feedback like this will help us and the developers in determining adjustments to the matchmaking algorithm for width of Elo bracket vs. available players for time spent in queue.
I believe that part of the problem is that the minimum/maximum time spent in queue is not variable according to Elo brackets right now: whatever Elo bracket you are in, matchmaking seems to be automatically adjusting to include a wider Elo bracket in order to shorten queue times when players aren't available.
I think it would be better if the higher your Elo score, the longer the matchmaking system waited to find similarly ranked players before widening the bracket differential to reduce queue time. This means that the higher your Elo rank, the longer you will wait in queue.
I would rather have long waits and good matches than fast queue times and lopsided matches, but the majority of people (who belong in the "widest" Elo bracket), would presumably like to queue and play. This system would allow for both.
The matchmaker also seems to try to balance teams by placing lowest - rank Elo players with the highest ranked Elo players against mid ranked Elo players. I cannot stress enough that the highest and lowest ranked players should never, ever be in the same match together, whether they are on the same side or opposing sides. This is what NO ONE likes about PvP and matchmaking is supposed to PREVENT this.
We just don't have enough information about how Matchmaking works right now to give real feedback on it besides our own experience.
I'm sorry, but I'm 100% with pers3phone on this one..There is no way that the ELO system is working correctly..Maybe I'm missing something but how do I go from one match ( as a 17k GS GF ) with all sub 10k GS toons, slow mounts, no enchants..to a match were all of my teammates are now 15k+. Matches don't seem to be any more balanced then before. Only difference is most classes can survive longer, getting back up now, where as before they would be dead before any help arrived. This has made for more intresting battles, but by no means do I think any ELO factor is at work here..:(
I wish Cryptic would just admit that they pretty much turned it off...
p.s prove us wrong and provide visible ELO rankings !!!!
So it's entirely feasible even with a properly working ELO system for 17k players to be thrown in against 10k players if both of those players have high win/loss ratios.
0
pers3phoneBanned Users, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
So it's entirely feasible even with a properly working ELO system for 17k players to be thrown in against 10k players if both of those players have high win/loss ratios.
Of course, but how can a guy without any decent gear have 90% win/loss ratios? Since I've played against this type of people many times and they die in 1 rotation even with the base 10% resistances.
It's a bit crazy that ungeared people have to go through 30-40 matches of pain and suffering to reach their intended brackets... also it's a bit crazy as well they can be put in my 4 man premade and get carried to brackets where they don't belong.
Not sure how this could ever be solved, but I fail to see how this is a pleasant experience for many people. Including for me when I pug and play with people like this that cannot hold point, cannot DPS, cannot do anything basically but die die die, and then all I do is die myself, since my CW needs decent team to perform We all get frustrated and angry and it's nobody's fault.
0
ambisinisterrMember, Neverwinter ModeratorPosts: 10,462Community Moderator
edited March 2014
Elo is not a win/loss ratio.
A person with High Elo and Low Elo can have the exact same win/loss ratio.
Your Elo Rating is effected by your wins and losses compared to the Elo Rating of the players you win and lose against.
Until players get more accurately dispersed Elo will have little to nothing to do with GS. A person could have some odd matches and get pushed up or down the ladder wildly.
People with High or Low Elo Ratings at this time may not necessarily deserve that placement. As such there may be high gear score players with Low Elo and Low gear score players with High Elo. Those types of matches will cause a rubberbanding effect sending people back and forth especially when you account for the leavers and AFK players which can effect match outcomes.
Ambisinisterr, you do realize that 1v1 ELO may actually work ceteris paribus, but 5v5 is a whole different thing, don't you ?
I would trust NW ELO ranking to make decent matchmaking if there were an adequately large PvP player base online all the time, if classes were balanced and if skill would actually mean more than Class+GS+Enchantments/Artifact level... as it stands now, ELO and Tenacity are just a marketing novelty.
0
ambisinisterrMember, Neverwinter ModeratorPosts: 10,462Community Moderator
edited March 2014
The Elo Rating System was originally a 1v1 concept but has been put into a wide number of instances since it was originally proposed for chess.
The argument that the Elo System doesn't work for group activities is more or less a myth and since it rates the likelihood for each faction to win it will include gear scores indirectly as higher geared higher skilled players will rise to the top and lower geared lower skilled players will fall to the bottom.
I don't know if it's been mentioned, but they should put similar classes into opposing groups. I played in a group with 2 DCs, 2 CWs, and an HR, against a group with 2 GWFs, and GF, and whatever else. We didn't stand a chance, because none of us could fight on the points for long.
Dungeon queues insist on a GF and DC, before all else. PvP queues should do something similar.
ELO, may be working as they intended but its not working for the average gamer. Cause sure, the 10k players will most definitely be able to keep up with your 15k opponents. Just pure nonsense. Fails all weekend long and today as well.
I would go as far as saying ELO is probably not enabled at this point. The reason I say is that there is no way i should be playing against some of the teams i am with all these loses. Its been me at 14k with 10k players all weekend. Whomever developed this needs some serious assistance. If GS isn't considered at all, its just fail. It may not be the only consideration but it needs to be a part of it.
Something is defo wrong. Since the patch rolled out I have 0 losses(yep, i'm that good) and about 28-30 games played on my GWF and on my CW i have 50% win rate at around 25games. Both of them get matched up with/against the same players and a lot of sub8k entry level players with no knowledge of pvp, though funny enough my CW always ends up TEAMED with them while my GWF is always against them and has about 2-3 other 15k veterans on his team. Something is not right.
0
adernathMember, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited March 2014
I've made a similar experience. On my HR I win around 80% and more of all my matches, significantly more than on my CW (which has even better gear) in which its perhaps 50% but probably not more than 60% at best, because I am mostly grouped with undergeard players and CW is alot more team dependent.
During PvP time it is getting worse on both chars, then I am often grouped in horrible teams most of the time. So currently I avoid many matches during PvP hour. Outside of PvP hour I am in way more balanced matches.
Suggestions to improve NW:
- Dualspec
- Better rewarding foundry and foundry pvp maps
- Custom PvP leagues with leaderboards instead of the current 'matchmaking'.
- Armory
- make jumping cost stamina (to reduce hopping in pvp)
My experiences since the weekend indicate it's been switched off. Or is just an epic fail. Lopsided matches are back to being the majority with the odd balanced match every now and again. Utter garbage.
I only find 1 kind of loopsided match out of 6-7 avg... and the loopside is because people is clueless about teamplay, not because discordance on individual skill, i guess im lucky.
0
pers3phoneBanned Users, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
My experiences since the weekend indicate it's been switched off. Or is just an epic fail. Lopsided matches are back to being the majority with the odd balanced match every now and again. Utter garbage.
Nah, ELO is 100% present and (partially?) working.
Almost each time I play in 4-5 men teams we get matched to worthy adversaries (sometimes too worthy for our usually mismatched pugs with 3 CWs and stuff :P).
However... solo queueing is not good at all. It ends up in anger for me almost each match, because I keep getting matched to very bad players. Really, really tired of games where I cannot play my CW as support as it's meant to be, because I'm forced to backcap or contest many times against 2-3 people.
Nah, ELO is 100% present and (partially?) working.
Almost each time I play in 4-5 men teams we get matched to worthy adversaries (sometimes too worthy for our usually mismatched pugs with 3 CWs and stuff :P).
However... solo queueing is not good at all. It ends up in anger for me almost each match, because I keep getting matched to very bad players. Really, really tired of games where I cannot play my CW as support as it's meant to be, because I'm forced to backcap or contest against many times 2-3 people.
I exclusively solo queue, hence my opinion of ELO.
My personal favourite is being mid battle at 2 only to suddenly realise my entire team have split off and headed for 1, 3, or the stairs leaving me to facetank 4 or 5 of the opposing team solo. That never ends well.
I only solo queue too, almost exclusively, and when people dont do what i say i YELL them, is the best of pvping... yelling at people till they obbey orders!
Comments
I know what happened to NW at last October.
Also look at this.
We got thousands of new people from steam when Mod2 came out.
True, but notice the pattern in the number of average players.....
Month Avg. Players
Last 30 Days: 4598.04
February 2014: 5038.78
January 2014: 6405.32
December 2013: 7187.49
Not exactly encouraging.
On your average day, there will be 10-15 instances of GG PvP open. That's 400-600 players. Maybe another 100 that didn't make it due to faction imbalance. So 500-1000 players who are at least interested in the rewards GG provides, glory, rAD, seals and most importantly, (possible) access to a quick T2 dungeon. I'd say 25% aren't interested in PvP at all, just want the dailies and a chance at some coins and a epic.
So, on a normal day, outside of PvP hour, you're probably only looking at 100-300(lol..) people queuing for level 60 PvP. If there actually is an ELO system attempting to match-make, you're probably only have a few dozen who are at your relative skill level. So, it pulls from below (if you're relatively vocal on the PvP boards, you're probably high ranked) and you end up in ****ty matches.
Not enough of a population to ensure competitive, balanced, and FRESH matches. If matchmaking ever does balance out and the tighten the restrictions, I hope you enjoy fighting the same 10 people.
UPD
The second time queue popped almost immediately, and I got 7500 GWF in my team. But we won cause I was lucky to get 2 13k HRs also. The fifth member was 10k CW that had never dodged any skill. He even got killed by Thorn Ward because he was stupid enough to stay in it's range.
UPD2
The third match was just amazing. Those CW and GWF were against me combined with some I guess 8k GS CW, TR and somebody else. None of them had soulforged, the highest critical strike they dealt to me was 4k (Ice Knife). And here comes my team: 2 14.5k sentinel GWFs, perma bilethorn TR, 14k Greater Vorpal HR and me - 12.5k DC. We won with 1000/27 score.
Dailies done, such an amazing PvP day.
Before the matchmaking i would say it was 95% unbalanced, 5% balanced.
Now, i would say 50-50. Which is better to me. Not perfect, but way better. Hope it improves.
Gear score fluctuates a lot. Plus, weapon-armor enchants are not counted in your GS. So you can see a 13k GS with perfects, and a 13k GS with normals (like me). Which still makes some difference.
Interesting charts. The game population has been steadily declining since december, and not by a small margin. 2 times less players. I hope module 3 will be good enough to get some of these people back.
Yeah kinda sad to see.
Oh well, at least now there's proof for the claims that the game is hemorrhaging players.
I have no idea what percentage of the total NW playerbase uses Steam to play the game but my guess would be a minority.
Aelar Hawkwind - Archer
Karrin Feywinter - Mistress of Flame
Errin Duskwalker - Executioner
Darquess - Soulbinder
/10char
This ELO thing is surely malfunctioning or way too lax. So we group 5 people. All with r9-10s and greater/perfects, and probably 90% wins or so.
And what we get, repeatedly?
People with 50% mounts, some with no enchants, basically just poor pugs thrown in for the kill, and the queue still took 5-10 mins to pop.
By the way I think all of us have 50-100 matches played, so I doubt there's an issue with correctly determining our rank.
Then I queue solo or with a friend, and we get grouped with people without enchants, and put against full 5 men premades from PvP guilds?
What the hell... how are we supposed to do anything when when we get people with 19k HP at 60 in the party without Tenacity gear or wep/armor enchants? At least if you put us against fully geared people with emblems and stuff, give the same type of players to us from the queue, or just don't pop it at all
And to think it started very promising after the patch with a series of almost all good matches, and now it's again fully random...
Including information like time of day for feedback like this will help us and the developers in determining adjustments to the matchmaking algorithm for width of Elo bracket vs. available players for time spent in queue.
I believe that part of the problem is that the minimum/maximum time spent in queue is not variable according to Elo brackets right now: whatever Elo bracket you are in, matchmaking seems to be automatically adjusting to include a wider Elo bracket in order to shorten queue times when players aren't available.
I think it would be better if the higher your Elo score, the longer the matchmaking system waited to find similarly ranked players before widening the bracket differential to reduce queue time. This means that the higher your Elo rank, the longer you will wait in queue.
I would rather have long waits and good matches than fast queue times and lopsided matches, but the majority of people (who belong in the "widest" Elo bracket), would presumably like to queue and play. This system would allow for both.
The matchmaker also seems to try to balance teams by placing lowest - rank Elo players with the highest ranked Elo players against mid ranked Elo players. I cannot stress enough that the highest and lowest ranked players should never, ever be in the same match together, whether they are on the same side or opposing sides. This is what NO ONE likes about PvP and matchmaking is supposed to PREVENT this.
We just don't have enough information about how Matchmaking works right now to give real feedback on it besides our own experience.
I'm sorry, but I'm 100% with pers3phone on this one..There is no way that the ELO system is working correctly..Maybe I'm missing something but how do I go from one match ( as a 17k GS GF ) with all sub 10k GS toons, slow mounts, no enchants..to a match were all of my teammates are now 15k+. Matches don't seem to be any more balanced then before. Only difference is most classes can survive longer, getting back up now, where as before they would be dead before any help arrived. This has made for more intresting battles, but by no means do I think any ELO factor is at work here..:(
I wish Cryptic would just admit that they pretty much turned it off...
p.s prove us wrong and provide visible ELO rankings !!!!
So it's entirely feasible even with a properly working ELO system for 17k players to be thrown in against 10k players if both of those players have high win/loss ratios.
Of course, but how can a guy without any decent gear have 90% win/loss ratios? Since I've played against this type of people many times and they die in 1 rotation even with the base 10% resistances.
It's a bit crazy that ungeared people have to go through 30-40 matches of pain and suffering to reach their intended brackets... also it's a bit crazy as well they can be put in my 4 man premade and get carried to brackets where they don't belong.
Not sure how this could ever be solved, but I fail to see how this is a pleasant experience for many people. Including for me when I pug and play with people like this that cannot hold point, cannot DPS, cannot do anything basically but die die die, and then all I do is die myself, since my CW needs decent team to perform
A person with High Elo and Low Elo can have the exact same win/loss ratio.
Your Elo Rating is effected by your wins and losses compared to the Elo Rating of the players you win and lose against.
Until players get more accurately dispersed Elo will have little to nothing to do with GS. A person could have some odd matches and get pushed up or down the ladder wildly.
People with High or Low Elo Ratings at this time may not necessarily deserve that placement. As such there may be high gear score players with Low Elo and Low gear score players with High Elo. Those types of matches will cause a rubberbanding effect sending people back and forth especially when you account for the leavers and AFK players which can effect match outcomes.
I would trust NW ELO ranking to make decent matchmaking if there were an adequately large PvP player base online all the time, if classes were balanced and if skill would actually mean more than Class+GS+Enchantments/Artifact level... as it stands now, ELO and Tenacity are just a marketing novelty.
The argument that the Elo System doesn't work for group activities is more or less a myth and since it rates the likelihood for each faction to win it will include gear scores indirectly as higher geared higher skilled players will rise to the top and lower geared lower skilled players will fall to the bottom.
Dungeon queues insist on a GF and DC, before all else. PvP queues should do something similar.
You can blame that on how the game works. If you are doing PVP for your daily, it is more important to score in the top 5 than it is to win.
During PvP time it is getting worse on both chars, then I am often grouped in horrible teams most of the time. So currently I avoid many matches during PvP hour. Outside of PvP hour I am in way more balanced matches.
- Dualspec
- Better rewarding foundry and foundry pvp maps
- Custom PvP leagues with leaderboards instead of the current 'matchmaking'.
- Armory
- make jumping cost stamina (to reduce hopping in pvp)
Aelar Hawkwind - Archer
Karrin Feywinter - Mistress of Flame
Errin Duskwalker - Executioner
Darquess - Soulbinder
Nah, ELO is 100% present and (partially?) working.
Almost each time I play in 4-5 men teams we get matched to worthy adversaries (sometimes too worthy for our usually mismatched pugs with 3 CWs and stuff :P).
However... solo queueing is not good at all. It ends up in anger for me almost each match, because I keep getting matched to very bad players. Really, really tired of games where I cannot play my CW as support as it's meant to be, because I'm forced to backcap or contest many times against 2-3 people.
My personal favourite is being mid battle at 2 only to suddenly realise my entire team have split off and headed for 1, 3, or the stairs leaving me to facetank 4 or 5 of the opposing team solo. That never ends well.
Aelar Hawkwind - Archer
Karrin Feywinter - Mistress of Flame
Errin Duskwalker - Executioner
Darquess - Soulbinder