Something needs to be done (Queue system issues)

martinibfc1 · August 2017

The queue system on this game needs sorting out first off private queues are ruining the game why? Because people are asking for stupid requirements! Nobody can progress further because of this and your public queues take forever just to find a game and theres a reason for that nobody is searching for them anymore because people have been pushed away because of private queues especially for assault on svardborg and other dungeons.

As someone that has tried to play this game and enjoy it as much as possible if this queue system dosen't change soon i will also be calling it a day just like loads of other people have done.

<font color="orange">Mod edited title for clarification purposes.</font>

omegarealities · August 2017

So what? You want people to be forced to play with other people.

Get a group of friends and play with them.

thegravelnome · August 2017

I'm thinking that you play a dps character correct? I've seen this thread in here before. It is always blaming the que system for the problems. The problems come down to 2 factors. The lack of support toons in the q, and players demanding High item level dps. Neither one of these problems was caused by the game developers. They are caused by the people playing the game.

For these problems to be fixed, a change in player mindset has to occur. Instead of complaining about the lack of Support classes how about you create one? Instead of complaining about everyone wanting a Ludacris gear score to join in their group, how about joining in with a guild or an alliance that specifically forbids setting item level requirements for groups? I know they're out there, I lead a helm that has currently six other guilds that agreed to this.

In short instead of sitting back and complaining about things try taking the initiative to solve the problem.

sundance777 · August 2017

I like the queue system it give us options to skip some requirements but I know what you mean about the queue wait times, they can be very long even for a support class now and then. Last night I tried to pug MSP, the average wait time said 11 seconds and I thought great, my tank should get in in a few minutes. I gave up waiting after 45 minutes....this seems excessive.

I agree with gravel, don't think it is the fault for the queue system, the end game content is hard and people seem to want to use their time for a win and not just a random luck test of people that might take 2 hours to fail. I think the issue is more about player behavior, the active player base and having enough players with gear to match the content.

I think the only small issue maybe caused by the queue system is the Item Level entry requirement....We redid the IL calculation but the entry requirements still seem to low on several of the dungeons. If I pug into MSP and land in a group of 4x 11K, that will likely not go well and waste my time. I don't want to be in there for hours, win or lose, I don't have that kind of time to spend on one run. Rather than chance a long (probably failed) run, I spend the time up front getting a group of players that have a specific purpose, such as a win, a learning experience or a carry group, and we skip the public part of the queue.

ecrana · August 2017

thegravelnome#9466 said:
The lack of support toons in the q, and players demanding High item level dps. Neither one of these problems was caused by the game developers. They are caused by the people playing the game.

I'm going to have to partially disagree with this statement. Yes, players aren't lining up to make support toons and that's a choice people make. I don't think people need to change their mindset. Some people like playing support and some don't. I like both and that's my preference.

But when I first started playing this game there was no shortage of GFs, OPs, DCs, etc to queue up with in a reasonable amount of time whether pugging or playing with a group of 2-3. Why is there a shortage now? Maybe because players invested heavily in classes that were "nerfed".

And i'm not here to argue about whether someone agrees or disagrees that classes were "nerfed" or "fixed". My point is people put a lot of time, and in some cases cash, into building a toon that wasn't just slightly tweaked but had powers completely driven into the ground. Whether you or I think that they should be able to recover from the changes is besides the point. Case in point, OPs bubble builds. Lots of OPs left the game or just scrapped the toons altogether after the bubble nerf. Players scrapped DCs after power sharing fix and AA fix. Do I think those things were overpowered? Yes, but besides the point. It still drove players away or made people stop playing their toons.

So to say that the devs didn't cause the problems is short-sighted. They may not force people to stop playing a class, or force them to leave the game over the nerfs, etc. But they do create the scenarios that allowed people to make the overpowered builds. They do let people ride these builds for a lengthy amount of time before "fixing" them and angering a part of the player base.

Unfortunately, if the OP does want a fast queue pop, building support is the way to go. But no one should be forced to play a class they don't want to and it's their prerogative if they want to complain about what has become a shortfall in the game.

draco16 · August 2017

You are correct, something needs to be done. A positive suggestion includes starting to socialize with other players to get to know people a develop friendships. You can join a guild to game with other folks that are likeminded. You need to take steps here since the game is not going to resolve /facilitate social interactions. MMO are social games so approach them accordingly.

rjc9000 · August 2017

ecrana#2080 said:

But when I first started playing this game there was no shortage of GFs, OPs, DCs, etc to queue up with in a reasonable amount of time whether pugging or playing with a group of 2-3. Why is there a shortage now? Maybe because players invested heavily in classes that were "nerfed".

And i'm not here to argue about whether someone agrees or disagrees that classes were "nerfed" or "fixed". My point is people put a lot of time, and in some cases cash, into building a toon that wasn't just slightly tweaked but had powers completely driven into the ground. Whether you or I think that they should be able to recover from the changes is besides the point. Case in point, OPs bubble builds. Lots of OPs left the game or just scrapped the toons altogether after the bubble nerf. Players scrapped DCs after power sharing fix and AA fix. Do I think those things were overpowered? Yes, but besides the point. It still drove players away or made people stop playing their toons.

...

You are partially right that the devs are partially to blame for lack of support characters.

Campaigns are long and slow, although this is partially mitigated by the loadout system allowing for full DPS builds for solo and a pure support build for teams. Still, I doubt many have the motivation to run Storm King's Thunder or Cloaked Ascendancy on another alt that has worse DPS than their main DPS character.

But, you're also partially wrong with the nerfing of those particular builds.

Why did people leave those classes?

Because their win button got nerfed and people were unable to cope with the changes.

If those were truly dedicated OP or DC players, then they would have stuck on through the bubble and AA changes to find that, yes, their class still works, and yes, it still functions pretty well. But, being bandwagon players looking for an easy solution, they only bothered to learn the cheese and never bothered to learn the extra depth to playing the support classes.

thegravelnome · August 2017

rjc9000, you beat me to it LOL.

ecrana#2080, I agree with you 110% that people shouldn't play a class that they don't enjoy. I personally cannot stand a Scourge warlock and will never play that class except to unlock the artifact.

However this world is not about always having your way. If you wish to obtain something and the requirements set down by other players is to play a support class in order to have a chance, then you can either fight against what they want or accommodate what they're asking for in order to obtain your goals.

The game developers never intended for Flaws to occur that allowed for massively overpowered characters. These flaws have, do, and will exist despite the best efforts of the Developers. Creating a patch to fix something sometimes can be incredibly tedious and painful work. A good example was the update that we just had this week. it was massive by patch standards and yet all those lines of code had to be replaced in order to stop the problem of being randomly kicked out of the game. Another problem that occurs is finding where the problem is. Contrary to popular belief developers do not have a magic button to click that automatically identify where the problem in all of their millions of lines of code is. The last part of fixing probloms is resources. A company such as perfect world, cryptic has a finite amount of resources to be used for fixing bugs. Their other resources are devoted to things like creating new content. As a game player I'd be very disappointed if they chose to take a year off from new content due to fixing bugs that are not a high priority or only impact a very small slice of the population.

I truly do appreciate your thoughtfully worded comments and the polite way you expressed yourself. I eagerly await your input on my thoughts

destrowod · August 2017

rjc9000 said:

You are partially right that the devs are partially to blame for lack of support characters.

Campaigns are long and slow, although this is partially mitigated by the loadout system allowing for full DPS builds for solo and a pure support build for teams. Still, I doubt many have the motivation to run Storm King's Thunder or Cloaked Ascendancy on another alt that has worse DPS than their main DPS character.

Exactly why i don't want to play my tank anymore. Its not even a point of doing less DPS, altough yes it make even worst, its the same fact i don't even feel like restarting such a huge grind for a second time.

Yes the game lost a lot of OP and DCs when they where nerf, that didn't help. Then at that point in the game not much peoples would be able to restart from scratch. Im still lucky in a way to be able to switch all my rank 12s azure from GWF to GF, but there is other items i can't switch like artifacts and my vorpal is not really usefull to a tank...

At the same time the private queue made the game so much easier for tiamat and edemo and such, i couldn't go back to a time without it. I rather play MSVA 1 time and get a win than try it 10 times and loose because the other 5 people group is way too low for it.

I think the problem comes from the fact that old content is not paying enough, nobody want to play lair of losthmoth anymore for just blue items... they need that stuff from the newer dungeons. But the newer dungeons are hidden being a huge requirement (much more than the actual in game IL) Even with very good solid characters they are extremely hard. They require tons of scrolls of mass life and therefore you don't make AD out of them cause of this.

I think what needs to be done is lock the baby dungeons to a certain level. Too much peoples run those for there quick AD fix... I queue Baby Spider and i hardly wait 1 min... even at 5 am i still get people to run it. These dungeons should lock themselves once you get to 70... forcing peoples to play ELOL, Malabog, Valindra etc if they want AD. That would help the private queue im sure.

ltsmithneko · August 2017

destrowod said:

rjc9000 said:

You are partially right that the devs are partially to blame for lack of support characters.

Campaigns are long and slow, although this is partially mitigated by the loadout system allowing for full DPS builds for solo and a pure support build for teams. Still, I doubt many have the motivation to run Storm King's Thunder or Cloaked Ascendancy on another alt that has worse DPS than their main DPS character.

Exactly why i don't want to play my tank anymore. Its not even a point of doing less DPS, altough yes it make even worst, its the same fact i don't even feel like restarting such a huge grind for a second time.

Yes the game lost a lot of OP and DCs when they where nerf, that didn't help. Then at that point in the game not much peoples would be able to restart from scratch. Im still lucky in a way to be able to switch all my rank 12s azure from GWF to GF, but there is other items i can't switch like artifacts and my vorpal is not really usefull to a tank...

At the same time the private queue made the game so much easier for tiamat and edemo and such, i couldn't go back to a time without it. I rather play MSVA 1 time and get a win than try it 10 times and loose because the other 5 people group is way too low for it.

I think the problem comes from the fact that old content is not paying enough, nobody want to play lair of losthmoth anymore for just blue items... they need that stuff from the newer dungeons. But the newer dungeons are hidden being a huge requirement (much more than the actual in game IL) Even with very good solid characters they are extremely hard. They require tons of scrolls of mass life and therefore you don't make AD out of them cause of this.

I think what needs to be done is lock the baby dungeons to a certain level. Too much peoples run those for there quick AD fix... I queue Baby Spider and i hardly wait 1 min... even at 5 am i still get people to run it. These dungeons should lock themselves once you get to 70... forcing peoples to play ELOL, Malabog, Valindra etc if they want AD. That would help the private queue im sure.

Really wish it was based off how fast the dungeon can be beat for its base rewards, so doing a 5 min spiders isn't going to pay out as well as a Cragmire that will take a bit longer. :P Not based on how fast you can beat it. So dungeons you can't just rocket through should have higher pay-outs.

destrowod · August 2017

Yes, if we follow that logic you should be able to make 50k-60k minimum out of a spellplague upon a win... sadly i hear the reward are really TERRIBLE for how hard it is. Have not beat it myself... due to second boss BS...

omegarealities · August 2017

The only thing locking out "baby dungeons" to level 70 characters will do is cause those players to move into the private queues for the level dungeons so they can complete the dungeons more quickly.

destrowod · August 2017

not sure if they do not have peoples to play with... cause if they did, they wouldn't do baby dungeons to start with.

randomdigits · August 2017

Quite frankly I have many reasons to believe that NW server side queue matching and instance management algorithms are buggy.

For example, I've noticed more than once that:
1) Once you complete certain dungeon and re-queue you are getting much shorter wait time as if your were re-inserted into the queue near beginning.
2) Sometimes you may sit in a queue to a popular dungeon for an hour and not get matched. Yet leaving queue and immediately re-queuing could result in almost instant match. It feels as if the matching algorithm is trying to match people in their queueing order but sometimes it deadlocks and changing the queue list unblocks it.
3) Judging by the messages in the match confirmation UI which can display waiting status well after the timer has expired there are also likely bugs in that synchronization procedure.

Bottom line: I am glad that queueing algorithms are working at least as good as they are, and I wish devs have patience to troubleshoot them and make the them work better.

earlgreybeard · August 2017

martinibfc1 said:
Because people are asking for stupid requirements!

There are many non-elitist groups (dungeon channels etc) ,guilds and alliances that have discarded this way of forming private queues

Just find one. GL

fantasticm · September 2017

> @martinibfc1 said:
> The queue system on this game needs sorting out first off private queues are ruining the game why? Because people are asking for stupid requirements! Nobody can progress further because of this and your public queues take forever just to find a game and theres a reason for that nobody is searching for them anymore because people have been pushed away because of private queues especially for assault on svardborg and other dungeons.
>
> As someone that has tried to play this game and enjoy it as much as possible if this queue system dosen't change soon i will also be calling it a day just like loads of other people have done.
>
> <font color="orange">Mod edited title for clarification purposes.</font>

Well, seems like your wish is coming true in mod 12b. Have fun!

mahburg · September 2017

The simple solution to these issues Is account wide campaign completion so it encourages people to play support roles having completed on their main.
Clearly they recognise the issue as they are selling us campaign completion tokens, we should not have to pay for this it should be automatic.

It would sort many q issues and negate the need for the proposed random q scenario which wont work as they intend imho!

armadeonx · September 2017

Before we had private queues people still ran in premades and had high IL requirements - as such, removing private queues would not solve your problem.

The reduction of players in pug groups is more down to alliances. People form their groups via a pool of anywhere up to 1,950 players in their alliance.

They won't remove alliances, so you have 3 options:

1. put up with it
2. join a guild
3. quit

I really can't see a 4th option.

randomdigits · September 2017

This is actually a very good point about guilds and alliances. While their main goal was, probably, to bring similarly-minding people to play together (which helps to keep users playing from the gamification standpoint), they also fractured that player base into shards.

I see the latest queue changes trying to reverse that effect, but the tools, used for that purpose are still very blunt, so they won't help, imho. A player should have a way to filter out ill-behaving players (which is done today through queueing with guild/alliance members) and that should not bluntly screen out majority of players.

Multiple solutions were suggested - karma based, vote to kick based, TIL-based, though possibly none was perfect. E.g. karma based is too prone to manipulation, assumes everyone values the same kind of behavior, does not help with high-TIL/low-TIL separation. Vote-to-kick was not working due to loot conflicts, not-enough-TIL and not-playing-your-class-right issues. And now the TIL-based approach is being criticized for proliferation of private queues with PUG queueing mostly gone.

I'm sure there could be a solution, but that design process should start with setting the specific requirements for the developers crystal crisp first. Which behaviors should be promoted, which behaviors should be allowed, and which behaviors should be punished, and which behaviors should be disallowed.

sundance777 · September 2017

randomdigits#2166 said:
Quite frankly I have many reasons to believe that NW server side queue matching and instance management algorithms are buggy.

For example, I've noticed more than once that:
1) Once you complete certain dungeon and re-queue you are getting much shorter wait time as if your were re-inserted into the queue near beginning.
2) Sometimes you may sit in a queue to a popular dungeon for an hour and not get matched. Yet leaving queue and immediately re-queuing could result in almost instant match. It feels as if the matching algorithm is trying to match people in their queueing order but sometimes it deadlocks and changing the queue list unblocks it.
3) Judging by the messages in the match confirmation UI which can display waiting status well after the timer has expired there are also likely bugs in that synchronization procedure.

Bottom line: I am glad that queueing algorithms are working at least as good as they are, and I wish devs have patience to troubleshoot them and make the them work better.

I wonder about this observation...perhaps a having a character in the Queue, that logs off or times out, disconnects or what not causes the queue for that content to have issues....I know I have been in Queue for a long long time and forgotten that I was, and logged off...and not just for MSP, even Malabog's which should pop within a few minutes, IMO.

Something needs to be done (Queue system issues)

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