1 hour 24 minutes (and counting) Skirmish queue!!

casekuk · June 2013

As the title says... and counting!

This is obviously very frustrating for the amount of time it takes to get into a skirmish.. But even more so when you start queuing 30 minutes BEFORE the skirmish event only to watch the timer tick down and eventually disappear without you even getting to go!

What's even MORE annoying, about the system in general, is when you have done say 1 or 2.. or even 2 of 3... Then you ding a level and that skirmish is no longer complete-able!

To add to the misery... And just to emphasize:

On my first character, I did the skirmish with the Dragon (cant remember its name sorry) SO MANY TIMES that I dinged enough levels to make the above happen... I was on 2 of 3 when I dinged beyond the level of the skirmish.

I'd played it maybe 9 or 10 times at that point and the reason was simply because people just wouldn't listen when you say 'Kill the Mystics first!' and ultimately someone would rage quit, and then it was all over, you couldn't do it with 4.... Rinse repeat... Start skirmish again!

This is something that seriously needs some love Perfect World, it's frustrating beyond belief!

Thanks for listening,

Art.

axetomouth86 · June 2013

Agreed, its the entire dungeon/skirmish/pvp queuing system that needs remaking from scratch by someone that isn't a trained monkey behind a keyboard.

mrsmon · June 2013

yea i know the frustration too. it should give you like a visualisation so you can see how many are queued up (whether it be just you or waiting for one more to join up) to make it easier to judge.

i dont like leveling when i wanna do a skirm so i can pop the achievements and stuff

and yea people who havent done garrundar the vile and let the OP mystics run rampant healing the boss and such are a pain

casekuk · June 2013

And another thing, I just thought of!!

How about letting us do instances (as most quests involves them) and retain our place in said instance when we are finally lucky enough to get to be called up for a Skirmish/pvp/dungeon... etc.

As if the queuing system isn't bad enough, to pile on extra problems of 'Shall I chance this instance while i'm in a queue?' Syndrome!

Please. please look at this!

Art.

mconosrep · June 2013

Another issue is when you finish a skirmish one minute too late and miss the extra reward. Why don't they just change the skirmish reward to act like the DD one - i.e. if you start a skirmish during the time it counts?

Also i did the Dragon skirmish before the last patch and it was painful, although we did manage it in the end. Some rebalancing (if they haven't already done this) would be nice.

casekuk · June 2013

Yes, I second that too!

Make all skirmishes like the DD one, whereby you 'start' while the event is running!

Art.

griffin230 · June 2013

That dragon skirmish is probably the first frustrating skirmish people will encounter. You don't actually need to kill the add healers. Whoever has mystic aggro can just lead them away from the dragon, so that it won't be aoe healed by them. Obviously, separating the add healers from each other makes it easier to deal with each one, as they won't be able to mutually heal each other.

mrsmon · June 2013

if they implemented that for skirmish theyd have to include it for foundrys going over time, pvp takes too long or if the professions buff ends while halfway through opening a box

ambisinisterr · June 2013

Honestly I don't think the queuing system is the problem with skirmishes. I think players just aren't doing them.
First of all we outlevel skirmishes stupidly fast. Then even when players can participate in skirmishes they are just, really, rather unrewarding. The last skirmish players receive, for instance, can be as challenging as some of the epic dungeons and even cost more in potions and ultimately it gives little to no good rewards except for 1K AD during the Skirmish Event and even then I just sat in the queue for a half an hour with no bites.

All in all I think Cryptic has to look into means of making Skirmishes more appealing to players. They're fun! But honestly they just aren't fun enough to justify doing.

casekuk wrote: »

How about letting us do instances (as most quests involves them) and retain our place in said instance when we are finally lucky enough to get to be called up for a Skirmish/pvp/dungeon... etc.

That's not possible due to the way instance technology works.

Instances are areas of the game devoted to you. As long as the instance is occupied that location will remain allotted to you but if it is unoccupied after 5 minutes? (unsure of the exact time) that location is wiped clean and allotted to another person/group. The amount of data that would have to be stored in order to save instances is not economical in the least and would likely be extremely slow due to read/write limitations on hard drives.

Until there's massive improvements to the price of data storage and major improvements to the speed in which the data can be read and written this won't happen on any game that uses instance technology.

redscarecrow · June 2013

If I would be so bold to make a comment,
1) I agree with you
2) I think the queue system is a bit 'misunderstood'

My opinion on how the queue system works is like this;
Lets say for argument sake, you are a level 25 DC. Press K, join queue. Done.
Not quite as easy,
The system or whatever, in my opinion, will look for players in the same queue, at level 25...
If there is no level 25's then it looks for 26's and 24's.
Then 27's and 23's,
22's to 28's
And then stops at 21 and 29.

If there are no players who are in the same queue as you at the same level range, more or less likely there is less than 5 players in queue. And when players say, "Press K to join queue, its faster..." Its not.
This is an obvious story that has been brought up when there has been less than 5 players in queue, you'll sit in queue and sit there for as long as it takes...

And because of # 2 it makes the game less enjoyable "potentially", if 'we' could somehow resolve this dilemma, which is
1) As a player find alternatives to find similar players who have the same idea (i.e., Skirmishes, Dungeons, PvP, etc.)
2) Ask the people behind the magic of the game to "update" an already working system to better fit the needs of the players.
and 3) Try to refrain from complaining 'bout a 'broken' game.

After all, Neverwinter just transcended from "Open Beta" to a full blown launch, just recently, of course there will be things that might not be exactly "perfect" right now. There is always things that can be improved upon.

As a suggestion, I recommend that those that are LFG, (Looking for group), Try to press "O" or your social menu equivalent keybind and change your preferences to something that is more recognizable, for example for a starters, if you are not looking to find a party, please change your settings to not be visible to the public(in-game wise).

I ask this of you, politely as I can, on an online forum, to take the time to "fiddle" with your social settings in-game.

I actually use the social menu in-game, and to be frank, I don't like it. I would suggest that it be updated for the very reason that no one changes their social settings. And it makes it harder to do a broad search when everyone has the same settings from day one of their char. creation. For example, if I go to a find party, or find person tab, I can't tell if someone is actually looking for a party or not because if you check the social status of people, it always says "Looking for party+ autoteaming", "Visible to everyone", Status "..." (to signal that its blank).

For example, I always change my Status to "TR-MI Saboteur, Alchemy III, LFG" (Trickster Rogue, Master Infiltrator paragon, Saboteur paragon tree, My alchemy is level 3, I'm looking for a group).

I am more likely to invite someone who has something similar or something at all to let me know they are Looking For a Group, than to "just hit K and click to join a random party with un-beneficial party members".

A little exaggeration...

Anyway, If those of you are having a problem finding a group, please take the means to find alternatives than to rely on a system that is not working for you. I mean seriously, You were waiting for an hour and more by your claim.

Didn't you at least use the zone chat to see if anyone was in the same zone as you?

I know their wasn't a lot of people out in zones during the event. So if you say this was during the event, I understand. But to experience this, I have to be honest, I am "Concerned" that you could not find a party in an MMORPG, when there is many ways to find people...not just a button away that says "join"....

Last train of thought, I made a Custom Chat Channel that I use for communicating with specific individuals who I met in this game. During our time playing online we'll chat in my personal custom channel, and if we are interested in doing, say "Dungeon Delve" and we don't want a random person to take loot that they don't seriously need. And if we are in need of loot, we will party up, sometimes there would be only two of us, sometimes there would be 3 or even four, and we'll do dungeons during the event. If we are doing an easier dungeon we'll go again to get the bonus event chest twice. And the best part. I didn't need to make a guild or ask people to leave their current one so that we can "hang-out" without the traditional method of befriended each other on our friends list. Or making a guild and things like that.

See. There are alternatives. Just take the time to try something else if something is not working the way its expected too.

Here is my best game-analogy to describe this whole ordeal..."'If an elf mage adventurer can't find her magic orb in her study, then she'll look in the local pawn shop for her magic orb and the thief', The elf is not going to sit in her study and wait and wait for her magic orb to appear right in front of her just because its a "Magic" Orb. You can't rely on magic to happen like it has a schedule. Sometimes fire does come out the wrong end of the staff from time to time. You can't always trust it and believe in it to do everything for you. If you need to make a fire and your staff is broken, then get two rocks and start mashing...."

casekuk · June 2013

Thanks for the input all!

It's a shame about the technology, especially here in Neverwinter because it impacts 'everyone' at some point, and wastes a LOT of time. I guess its nice to get 2 lots of chest loot etc... But it's still a frustrating position to be in.

mrsmon: I dont think the pvp or foundry or professions ones need to be changed. They are not time dependant like the ones mentioned. You start a foundry quest whenever you like, professions is essentially a 'buff' and pvp never has a major queue problem anyway.

The 'problem' is 1 hour 42 minutes before I finally got into a skirmish!

It's obviously something that bothers everyone in some way or another, I don't have a solution unfortunately, not even a suggestion.

ambisinister: Interesting point about the skirmishes and people not doing them... Maybe your right, and the overall reward needs to be looked at.

Griffin230... This post is not really about 'how to's'... I know how to do the dragon skirmish, I spent 10 agonising attempts typing furiously to try and help others understand how to do it.. I will never do it again, thats for sure!

Thanks all..

Art

faeriestorm · June 2013

Please give manual entry into skirmishes. Then if you over level you can still do it you just have to find people yourself.

gibblefenwick · June 2013

ambisinisterr wrote: »

The amount of data that would have to be stored in order to save instances is not economical in the least and would likely be extremely slow due to read/write limitations on hard drives.

Until there's massive improvements to the price of data storage and major improvements to the speed in which the data can be read and written this won't happen on any game that uses instance technology.

With all due respect ambisinisterr: This is so totally and completely wrong: you couldn't be more wrong if you tried.
A quick online search of RAM prices and hard drive prices will quickly show that price of data storage has nothing to do with not keeping private instances. Even super-fast SSD drives are much cheaper (per GB) than RAM.

It would be infeasible to try keep unused private instances in memory - because RAM *is* too expensive to justify the cost.
But it would be feasible (within limits**) to temporarily save private instance data to disk.
The amount of data required is not nearly as much as you imply:
* The server game engine is designed to keep as little data in memory (per instance) as possible. (see cost of RAM above)
* The servers do not need the same amount of memory (per instance) as the game clients.
* This is because they just keep a small 'model' which 'represents' the state the instance is in.
* This data can be reduced further if the instance needs to be stored temporarily. (E.g. in memory, the model would track the health of individual mobs; however in storage, it need only track alive/dead statuses - reloading the instance would give living mobs full health.)
Since the amount of data to save is not that much it would *not* be as slow as you imply to write it to disk.
In fact the amount of data to store a private instance is considerably less than the amount of data required to patch the game client when the instance is first played. (And internet speeds are quite a bit slower than hard drive speeds.)

All of my arguments above show that there is *no* technology limitation preventing the saving of private instances.

The functionality would however require some effort to develop:

The limits** (as mentioned above) & rules about when/what to save of private instance data would need to be carefully considered and decided.
E.g. allowing multiple private instances per character *would* be infeasible.
E.g. keeping private instances for extended periods of time might be infeasible.
E.g. allowing instances to be retained accross patches would risk creating problems in the instance if the instance changed in the patch.
A mechanism would need to be implemented so that any instance's state can be saved/streamed somewhere (intention being to stream it from/to disk).
UI interfaces would need to be added allowing players to return to instances.

There would be much more work besides - and I'm sure the developers have contemplated it all.

However, they have taken an *implementation decision* not to do this.
They consider other things to be higher priority.
Their decision is a huge pity given the problems with queueing (the focus of this thread) and the fact that some private instances can take more than an hour to complete.

Just to reiterate: The fact that the game does not have a mechanism to temporarily save private instances is *not*a technology limitation.

In closing:

I'll point out one additional benefit to saving instances: it would put the brakes on instance farming for skill nodes.
I'll also volunteer a cynical reason why the developers may be wary of implementing such a feature: It would provide an easy means for a player to leave an instance half way through so they can empty bags and return. This would severely limit one aspect of the game's funding model - Bags of Holding.

runescapesucks · June 2013

Now you know how I feel when nobody joins PVP

alaric63 · June 2013

What can possibly be done to make people queue for Skirmishes? You can't force people into the queues. Some things are just not the Developers responsibility. The stamping of feet can't create players @ your level, and with your interests.

sockmunkey · June 2013

alaric63 wrote: »

What can possibly be done to make people queue for Skirmishes? You can't force people into the queues. Some things are just not the Developers responsibility. The stamping of feet can't create players @ your level, and with your interests.

If the rewards where better, there would be more incentive to do them.

Its a shame really, they are fun. They are like dungeons, but on high speed with only the good parts. In a lot of ways they are more fun then dungeons. The rewards for normal need to be bumped up a bit. The reward for completing during an event needs to go up as well, relative to the level of the Skirmish. This should prevent exploiting of Blacklake while still keeping the harder ones viable.

And we really need epic versions added, with rewards being competitive with Delves. Lets face it, most don't run dungeons to run dungeons. Its a race to the loot. Its all about getting to the boss at the chest at the end as quickly as possible. If epic skirmishes became a viable alternative. It would help to free dungeons for those who actually enjoy them as they were meant to be played.

deistik · June 2013

alaric63 wrote: »

What can possibly be done to make people queue for Skirmishes? ... Some things are just not the Developers responsibility.

Did you really just type that with a straight face? If skirmishes weren't just a second thought thrown into the game, people would queue for them. Developers (in ANY game) are directly responsible for making people WANT to do the content they make. People don't bother doing skirmishes because it's not worth all the time it takes. There's no other place to point the blame other than developers, sorry.

The fact that after a few levels (read: hours, for most people) you can't even do them, ever again, on that character... that's such a terrible fault in the skirmish system, I don't even know what to say. I have no idea whatsoever why they level-locked skirmishes with no other way to do them. Scaling mob levels isn't hard.

sockmunkey · June 2013

deistik wrote: »

Did you really just type that with a straight face? If skirmishes weren't just a second thought thrown into the game, people would queue for them. Developers (in ANY game) are directly responsible for making people WANT to do the content they make. People don't bother doing skirmishes because it's not worth all the time it takes. There's no other place to point the blame other than developers, sorry.

The fact that after a few levels (read: hours, for most people) you can't even do them, ever again, on that character... that's such a terrible fault in the skirmish system, I don't even know what to say. I have no idea whatsoever why they level-locked skirmishes with no other way to do them. Scaling mob levels isn't hard.

The really sad thing is. I know cryptic can do better. Skirmishes are really just a take off of the Alerts in Champions. Only done badly.

In champions, your character gets bumped up, or down, to the alerts level. So anyone can join one anytime they like. They do keep a few advanced alerts only available to players near level cap. For folks who like a challenge. And as a bonus the rewards are high. So might argue too high. Its actually easier to level totally via alerts then any other means and you can earn a ton of questionite (their version of AD) in the process.

For good or bad, alerts have become the focal point in Champions. So its kinda odd to see their version of them here, treated so haphazardly.

1 hour 24 minutes (and counting) Skirmish queue!!

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