@Devs yes pvp needs fresh blood but no cannon food!
PvP has always been endgame and in pve is a min IL for different stages of difficulty in as well. We had a very huge pvp community in the good old days with more than 40k ppl doing pvp at their best times but this is long gone.
Last season was also flawed by bad match making and should not happen again this way. A min IL is needed for a more fair match making, less bots and preventing new player from getting humiliated. Top player are around 27k and the weakest player I have met 10k which was maybe a bot...
What else can a 14k toon for example in there except dying over and over again? He cant kill anyone, he cant hold a node longer than 3 sec and get kicked in the end..bad xp for him and his team... He gets frustrated and his team as well.
Pls make the season with min IL and a different que were ppl can learn, practice maybe with scaled IL but no rewards to prevent bad habbits again.
I think it should be at least like lomm 20k min IL
Comments
Im more concernded about real player with bad gear and no expierence just want to try out pvp and match making based on leaderboard standig on the other hand. I had days with 5 or more lopsided matches in a row past season
But I've had a different idea for a while. How about we disable mount powers (passive, active or both), insignias and their bonuses, guild boons? Perhaps make stat enchantments less effective (I had a lot of hope for the m16 rework, sadly they doubled the stats). PvP at its best had only enchantments and artifacts players needed to worry about. This alone won't fix things, but it'll reduce the power gap significantly, and that is one of the main issues as of now.
The issue also isn't solved by dumbing down and needing the high end of enchants and such in order to "level the playing field". Neverwinter wants to make money so they will never create something that removes the drive to reach the peak. Also, while it might be fun for low geared people. End game people who love PvP and have spent lots of time perfecting builds and getting gear would be rendered useless. Bad idea all around.
Having a minimum Item level seems like the best option. It's not brackets, so you're not slitting the population. It's simply a threshold to enter the Q like with high level dungeons and the like.
This would keep low level players from entering once - getting rolled - and never Q'ing again; as well as eliminate the very frustrating outcome of veterans being stuck with 12k players who have no business playing domination without gear.
I think the dev's made great strides making PvP more accessible this mod with the gear set that can be purchased with AD in the trade of blades. If you put an item level barrier into Q'ing I think it will help greatly - something in the ballpark of 18-20k that is very reasonable but still let's people in at an early state.
Solo Que Domination (counts for Season, min IL 20k)
Solo Que Domination (doesnt count, no rewards)
The idea to diable mount powers, insignias a.s.o. is good but it also leads to less motivation to buy stuff and I dont think Cryptic want that. In mod 5/6 ppl tried already to bypass the BiS delusion forming naked premades (nothing besides a blue main /offhand without any enchants was allowed)...I never had more fun in pvp than there.
Or others did just a few matches not to loose their position. Que synching for example and also really bad behavior when a lopsided match allready is won...they get bored and start chasing and killing ppl they just waited for that match to end simply cause they were able do that...
All that has nothing to do with fair play.
Match making based on win / loss in Neverwinter is no wise joice...we dont play chess and pvp is not brain vs brain...but if everyone would accept how it is and not trying to change to his advantage via kicking and we would have some standarts in human behavior I wouldnt have to say anything
I would rather try to reduce the gap by making bis expensive items and such matter less. For those that may not remember, some of the biggest hits PvP (population) took were introduction of artifact gear, upping enchantment level to 12/transcendent and artifacts to mythic with 4 slots, introduction of guild boons and introduction of insignias, all this coupled with frequent drastic meta and flavor of the month changes. But I also understand that a way back now that people have put effort into upgrading and adjusting builds seems very complicated.
Its about the signal it sends to bots and new player:
to bots: the effort is maybe not worth the rewards
to new player: carefull this is endgame u may face more than u can handle! No 12k is allowed to do ToMM even if they wanna try.
So I really wonder why Cryptic sends the signal : as soon ur lvl 80 u can jump in and earn awesome rewards during the pvp season...u dont even need a mount or enchants...green gear is enough! ...and then those player face reality!
Im 100% positive we loose more new player if they jump in right now and get destroyed, humilated with no rewards and kicked at the end vs. they know they have to work for it like in pve...dont underestimate curiosity!
I say PvP has been always the unloved stepchild of Neverwinter and all they introdused (as u mentioned above) was to earn money! Something for the community like a new map...u know how long we waited...
So to await something were they even earn less money in the future is unrealistic.
#1)
The population is split but the que match balancing is improved a lot by this change and attracts enough of the geared players back to offset the undergeared pugs we lost.
Many of the geared players that were frustrated by all the scewed matches, dealing with countless clueless undergeared pugs, sense of helplessness over your success being mostly luck, ect, might come back if an IL restriction was placed on PVP. The more other good changes that happen alongside this, the more likely this is to happen. The IL cap would also benefit undergeared players and make many players introduction to PVP less traumatic and encourage the people that do start playing PVP to stay.
#2)
Is the population is split and the PVP ques are unable to function for a prolonged or indefinite amount of time because there weren't enough geared players still playing and not enough new/returning geared players want to come back to replace the undergeared players. If the que stays down for too long, cryptic may pull the plug on PVP if it doesn't recover, the same way they did foundry.
There is also the design of the IL cap and/or IL brackets system for PVP to consider.
Cryptic has a long history of creating systems that are based in good ideas but subject to design flaws that make them exploitable or defeat the purpose of introducing that system. Proper safeguards against things like taking off your gear and putting it back on once you are inside would be in order.
PVP Rogue,
--[----- "Your friendly neighborhood spawn of Satan." -----]--
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Main Character: Hurricane Marigolds (Rogue WK & Assassin)
Ingame Handle: trgluestickz
Discord Name: Hurricane🌀Marigolds#2563
Guilds: She Looked LVL 18 & Essence of Aggression
Alliances: Imperium & Order of the Silent Shroud
Platform: PC
The pool of players themselves seemed small still though, only 24 pages on the leaderboard by end of event. Better than I remember from recent past mods but still creeping up slow. The final week of the event had fewer matches happening at once, usually only 1 in progress at a time and the quality of those matches was noticeably worse.
Regular dom popped a few times durring the event but mostly it was dom solo popping.
PVP Rogue,
--[----- "Your friendly neighborhood spawn of Satan." -----]--
----------------------------------------------------------------
Main Character: Hurricane Marigolds (Rogue WK & Assassin)
Ingame Handle: trgluestickz
Discord Name: Hurricane🌀Marigolds#2563
Guilds: She Looked LVL 18 & Essence of Aggression
Alliances: Imperium & Order of the Silent Shroud
Platform: PC
Yes they sell the pvp starter kit now but I doubt that more than 50 ppl bought it....far too late for anything in that direction.
To the premade leaderboard: I doubt u would even get 20 different competitive premade groups which is less population and for sure less motivation for Cryptic to do anything cause this is not pve. ToMM can do right now only a small group of ppl but there are thousends in second / third line....for pvp not practicable I think.
We have already alot of immortal player again due their class + tons of broken stuff + current meta a.s.o. - premades would maybe be pretty quick back to 45min+ matches and I wonder if Cryptic gets more motivated than now to put recources to pvp if the population is down to barely 100 ppl doing premade. Dont fool urself if u think that a causual player based group which joined to try out and get rofl stomped 5 times in a row by veterans will que over and over again....no..premade leaderboard wont have many pages..
But for me personally I dont care and if Cryptic would make 2 different leaderboards: Dom/Solo then so be it and u can even have better rewards for normal Domination (premade vs. premade).
Speaking of which, premade only queue or ranking based on pmvspm only makes no sense. Basically nobody is interested in premades anymore. People are used to soloing and playing for themselves only and when they face someone who has premade experience it's just a stomp. How much are people willing to learn can be seen easily in TOMM complaining threads or generally in the direction this game has taken with M16. This system would see very little use and the only thing that'd actually happen is people gaming the queue for rank or consequently rewards.
Additionally, please no scaling unless we're allowed to check our PvP stats outside of PvP. Otherwise we'd have to adjust builds in private matches only and have to bother someone to help us queue in every time we need to make changes to our build.
Final note -- I often see the complaint that solo queue teams are random and as such not a good fit for competitive ranking. This solo queue model works just fine for many team based competitive games. Why? Because of population. Nothing we can do to improve the situation here unless we get much more people playing. Actually, solo queue is the fairest option, not the most fun, but the fairest one.
Understand that the above is a response to changing what the leaderboard itself prioritizes, and not a response to changing which PVP ques the leaderboard is applied to.
PVP Rogue,
--[----- "Your friendly neighborhood spawn of Satan." -----]--
----------------------------------------------------------------
Main Character: Hurricane Marigolds (Rogue WK & Assassin)
Ingame Handle: trgluestickz
Discord Name: Hurricane🌀Marigolds#2563
Guilds: She Looked LVL 18 & Essence of Aggression
Alliances: Imperium & Order of the Silent Shroud
Platform: PC
Win to loss "ratio" probably needs some clarification on my part; I will also explain a little more of what I know about the leaderboard:
Wins to losses is definitely the priority for the leaderboard but it doesn't seem to be a ratio exactly, its more like the number of wins above your loss count with a few other factors thrown in.
Players who have done fewer matches often end up with a much better win to loss ratio than players who played a lot of matches. The more you play, the more pug entropy seems to catch up with you. As an example, early on, you may have 30 wins and 10 losses, for a ratio of 3 wins for every 1 loss. Someone else could have 133 wins and 100 losses and score above you, obviously 133 to 100 is a lot less than 3 wins for every 1 loss, but their lead in wins is larger and that + the impact of the other factors can put them above the people who had a better ratio. This is good since otherwise, it would mean mostly people who did very few matches would automatically rise to the top.
There is still a temporary advantage you get from having played fewer matches, especially if you stopped playing once you got your high score. This is something I'd like to see fixed, I think the board should penalize your score if you remained inactive for an extended period of time during the season.
The fact that the win leads for everyone are so small is also concerning, 40 something wins more than your loss count is about as high as it gets right now. It means everyone's performance is severely bottlenecked by randomness, luck, and que/leaderboard design flaws.
That all said, win to losses do seem to reflect skill more than the other options available, and I do think it should remain the dominant factor for the leaderboard. The que also seems to have more issues with it than the leaderboard does though they are connected.
PVP Rogue,
--[----- "Your friendly neighborhood spawn of Satan." -----]--
----------------------------------------------------------------
Main Character: Hurricane Marigolds (Rogue WK & Assassin)
Ingame Handle: trgluestickz
Discord Name: Hurricane🌀Marigolds#2563
Guilds: She Looked LVL 18 & Essence of Aggression
Alliances: Imperium & Order of the Silent Shroud
Platform: PC
PVP Rogue,
--[----- "Your friendly neighborhood spawn of Satan." -----]--
----------------------------------------------------------------
Main Character: Hurricane Marigolds (Rogue WK & Assassin)
Ingame Handle: trgluestickz
Discord Name: Hurricane🌀Marigolds#2563
Guilds: She Looked LVL 18 & Essence of Aggression
Alliances: Imperium & Order of the Silent Shroud
Platform: PC
Item Level and proper gear doesn't decide your victory.
How you do play your character doesn't decide that too.
Only Shadowclad enchantment does.
You have it - you win.
Everything you wrote, i think is wrong.
- You propose to scale iLvL of those under 20k, up to 20k. And leave those over 20k untouched. I can tell you, here and now, that this would not change not even one bit how these guys will get stomped. First: how do you plan on scaling up 14k toons with green gear and not even artifact sets? A 20k toon scaled up will still get killed in 1 rotation by those "untouched" geared players. As simple as it can be, for example, a toon with rank 14 shadowclad and one of the few BiS overpowered artifacts, will still stomp the enemy. A much better way, knowing how PvP works in this game, is to scale DOWN ( or up) everyone to rank 10 enchants and epic artifacts/ artifact equipment. Most of the worse unbalanced things, show up when you start to pile up maxed up gear and boons. Get rid of SH boons in PvP. Scale mount bonus down to epic, scale insignia bonuses down to uncommon level. This would provide a much more balanced PvP. It's the extreme (too geared (with broken stuff, usually) or too low geared (14k toons with blue/green gear) that create lopsided matches.
- Everything you wrote about queues is either wrong or useful only from the point of view of an elitist premade player. I play PvP since 2013, and saw it all. Want the truth? PvP died WAY BEFORE solo queue. Solo queue was an attempt to bring more people to PvP. You know why? Cause premades, or better, partial premades, were one of the main reasons why matches were lopsided. In PvP you will ALWAYS have random players joining. The issue in the past, with normal queue, was that normal players would queue and end up fighting partial premades of 2-3 PvPers from the top pages, grouping together. In solo queue these BiS, experienced top PvPers get separated. In normal queue, in the past, they ALWAYS grouped up together, making matches lopsided. The "pug" argument is laughable. Elite PvPers want to avoid pugs? Simple: create a chat (we have already a PvP chat), arrange PMvsPM matches, queue together in normal domination. No need to get rid of solo queue. The only reason would be to get back to partial premades stomping random teams, trying to force everyone to form premades. Elite PvPers are coming back and want to avoid "pugs"? Arrange PMvsPM. Your normal queue is there. You don't even have the issue to meet "pugs" there as in the past, since they are all in solo queue.
So, your argument here makes no sense. I've been going solo queue in PvP since 2013 and i can tell you that soloQ has a much, much, much lower rate of lopsided matches, compared to how it was when we got only normal queue.
- You say PvP season is competitive and so it should be only premade vs premade. Wrong, again. While i do agree that leaderboard positions based on win/loss are not good, i also disagree when you say that premade vs premade is the way to go.
First, you still have the same issue: win or loss depends on the team. Forcing people to go PMvsPM in this game means you'll have players forming premades always with the same friends, which means the top 50 players will try to form premades picking players from the top 50, and rejecting players that do not meet their standard. "Normal" players will form premades with what's left, and what will this bring? Lopsided matches, top players ganging up against the rest of the leaderboard instead of splitting to make matches more even. Which is what happened in the past when there was no soloQ. Even now, most "top PvPers" (the ones you want to please) treat the rest of the players like trash, insult them in PvP when they do not meet their standard or when they lose. I've seen players in top 10 doing so. Only a few players trying to give instructions to their teams. A guy in top 3 always insults the team when he loses. Which brings us to the second thought: soloQ results gives the idea about how a player is able to adapt and coordinate the team to make it work better. Jon Irenicus (1st in leaderboard) is BiS and ALSO coordinates the team. I've seen him reversing losing matches just making the team understand how to rotate. Other BiS PvPers don't do that. They just run around killing, or insulting team mates, and lose much more matches. You must keep that into account. Being able to play in PMvsPM does not make you a better PvPer. On the contrary, premade players are used to have their geared team there ready, they do not learn how to adapt and react to a random team where you have to compensate. They also want "pugs" to know rotations, build, and also be strong. But they never take the time to teach them what to do. I've seen very few players writing to their team what to do, how to change rotations on nodes exc... They just want random PvP to adapt to their premade vs premade mentality. Pretty selfish.
Normal PvP is random. Even PvE is random with the option to preform teams if you want a better "performance". Normal gameplay is random, with the option to organize with friends/ preformed groups/ guild. You can solo queue for a dungeon, or go with a your guild/friends.
You want competitive premade PvP? Ask for a premade "competitive" season. You want premade vs premade? You've normal dom to do that. It's empty, so if you coordinate 10 players you've a fast PMvsPM match there.
What the devs must do is balance soloQ so that gear is scaled down or up to a middle range level, avoiding extremes and limiting broken stuff (for example, an epic OP sigil will pop less than a mythic one) and limiting gear difference (those with blue/green gear might get scaled up with standard PvP gear and artifacts/standard PvP build). After that, you will have a more balanced PvP. A strong PvPer with a specific build will still be stronger, but not to a point where he can 3v1 pugs. Even 2v1, the BiS player should die. 3v1, die fast, no matter how strong you are. This is what the devs said they wanted to achieve in PvP. And what they should achieve.
Last point would be to ask experienced PvPers like Jon, for guidelines about rotations and strategies, then create a PvP tutorial you MUST complete before joining real PvP. In this tutorial the player is taught basic strategy and rotations to use in PvP.
In PvP season, ranking might be made more accurate, keeping into account not just win/loss ratio (ability to make a team work/work with any random team), but also keeping into account the score achieved, rank achieved in each match (ability to perform well even when you lose), points capped, assists, K/D ratio. So pretty much everything summed up together. Would make the ranking more accurate.
Your suggestions about getting rid of soloQ and scale players up to 20k (useless) would bring us back 3 years. And again, PvP dies BEFORE soloQ, and one of the causes were partial premades increasing lopsided matches rate, to farm PvP.
This is my opinion.
I’m sure if u ask pve players if they prefer to pre-form teams or pug the random queues, I’m sure they will prefer premades. Imagine if random q are really random like dom solo where u can’t form teams, I bet u will see plenty QQ in the forum.
U say being in a pm doesn’t mean u are a good pvper. I agree but imo pm v pm is the best place to learn tactics, strats and how to play as a team. There is little teamwork in dom solo. It’s every man for himself. U see ppl chasing for kills, fighting off nodes, not rotating properly. Dom solo does not encourage team play. Normal dom does. If u do not play as a team, nobody will want u in their team.
As said, if players really want to learn PvP, they ALREADY have the option to form premades and go to normal domination queue. They don't do that. Why normal dom does not pop? Simple: because there are very, very few players interested in premade vs premade PvP.
You also can't compare PvP to PvE: in PvE, you preform a team against an enemy that is always the same. You can predict the outcome easily. In PvP, you can't. You can form a premade and still lose. 5 PvE friends can form a premade and queue, meet the usual old style premade of 5 PvP veterans, and it will end in a lopsided match. When you have humans vs humans, the best way to balance is to mix the teams. Else, the strongest ones will always gang up against the others, which is exactly what happened in the past, before soloQ was introduced. Gauntlgrym stopped popping, i remember it well, after months of premades farming it with teams fully equipped with BiS gear and T.Fey+T.Neg broken combo (millions of AD normal players couldn't spend).
They farmed GG over and over. 9 matches out of 10 were lopsided. Premades tried to sync. If they ended up in opposite teams, they would arrange the match (i remember clearly when you ended up in a team where 5 players somehow were not playing. All BiS and fully geared PvPers, doing nothing while their friends on the other side were dominating). That way, they farmed GG achievements and currency for what they needed.
Wanna know what would happen with the sacle-up you proposed and normal queue only, right now? 3-4-5 men premades of BiS players fully equipped with multiple OP sigil, farming the opposite teams of pugs. Over and over. All gangin' up together, instead of being split in different teams. The stronger players will gang up together and the new players or the pugs will get stomped. After a while they will leave, and only that small % of stronger veterans will remain. Which is exactly what happened in the past.
So what you propose is not a solution, but something we already got and that worked WORSE than the current system.
The FIRST thing to do in PvP is STRIP it from extremes. Scale DOWN (not up) the BiS and more geared players to a medium level where they can't exploit broken stuff. Scale up new players with blue/green gear giving them automatically a temporary set of PvP armor (don't remember the name of the one that scales up when used in PvP), and a predefined set of epic artifacts. Get rid of guild boons in PvP, companions, sacle down mount bonus and scale down insignias.
Now the BiS players are not demigod anymore and the pugs/new players can bring them down 2v1 at least.
Scaling up simply would NOT work because it's not a matter of iLvL. ILvL means nothing and any experienced PvPer knows that. Every mod there are specific builds/classes/pieces of gear/enchants that put together at max bring a player on a different level compared to another players with same iLvL but without the "cool toys". Everyone experienced enough knows that. Right now, it's the combo of high rank shadowclad and mythic OP sigil. If the devs do not fix it fast, role reversal boon too will make us laugh a lot in the next PvP season. I saw it when i helped testing it and it was absurd.
The only way to make it work is to scale DOWN the items so that the FoTM broken stuff will work less.
After that it would be easier to see if classes are balanced or not, once the toons are stripped from all the tons of stuff/boons and combinations of broken toys. And so the devs might balance classes in PvP once and for all.
It's always been like this but the devs never did these things. They kept piling up boons and stuff in PvP. Now we also have a map where companion bonuses work. And one of them was also broken the last time i saw it. More stuff, more chances that people will find some broken combo/ bug that breaks PvP. Less stuff, more simple to balance.
But how would, then, the BiS P2W players feel like demigods in PvP? They would not spend $$$ anymore to stomp others, and so the devs will never do what needs to be done.