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Upcoming Queue Adjustments
nitocris83
Member, Cryptic Developer, Administrator Posts: 4,498Cryptic Developer › Cryptic Developer
Greetings Adventurers,
In an attempt to improve the experience provided by the Random Queue system, we are making a few adjustments which will be available on the preview server soon.
The challenges:
Currently the Random Queues suffer from a couple of issues:
The first is the variation in length and toughness; due to the mixing of types of content, the time to complete a given queue can vary significantly, while the queue reward is always the same. This creates a scenario where some of the content in a queue is avoided, creating a loop where a smaller set of maps are played over and over. A system where you do not get to experience the breadth of the gameplay isn’t fun, and as you have let us know, starts feeling tedious.
The second challenge, is that due to the time vs. reward, players feel encouraged to run the easiest queues more frequently than the ones that offer a balanced experienced for their character. Again, not the best.
The solutions:
With these challenges in mind we are making a few adjustments to the Random Queue organization and structure.
First, we are re-organizing the queues by content type, to better inform you of the content you want to play. We now have a Skirmish Queue, Dungeon Queue, Epic Dungeon Queue, and a Trial Queue. Low level skirmishes will currently be removed from the random queues as we look at improvements we can make to that content to make it fit better within the queue structure.
With these reorganized categories, roles are no longer required for the Skirmish queue, while the other queues still require a tank, healer, and 3 dps. Shores of Tuern and Kessell’s Retreat have been moved to the skirmish queue category of content as they better align (and were originally created as skirmishes) with other skirmishes than with Epic Dungeons.
Second, we have adjusted some of the maps in the queue with the goal of bringing the average completion times closer together across a given queue, in order to allow all maps in that queue to be more equally rewarding. Time played for rewards granted is the true goal of this, so that you will be able to better choose your queues based on your game play styles and time. This will be an ongoing set of adjustments as we see how the completion time and success rates compare across a given queue.
Third, we have adjusted and improved the AD rewards on the new Random Queue groupings to provide a much greater bonus for Trials and Epic Dungeons than for Skirmishes and Dungeons, to encourage players to play more of the content that is balanced for their character. To incentivize this, the rewards for higher-end queues are greater for time played than the shorter queues.
Ultimately, our goal here is to better inform your choices as to how you want to play the Random Queues and give you the queues that best fit your play style!
-The Neverwinter Team
In an attempt to improve the experience provided by the Random Queue system, we are making a few adjustments which will be available on the preview server soon.
The challenges:
Currently the Random Queues suffer from a couple of issues:
The first is the variation in length and toughness; due to the mixing of types of content, the time to complete a given queue can vary significantly, while the queue reward is always the same. This creates a scenario where some of the content in a queue is avoided, creating a loop where a smaller set of maps are played over and over. A system where you do not get to experience the breadth of the gameplay isn’t fun, and as you have let us know, starts feeling tedious.
The second challenge, is that due to the time vs. reward, players feel encouraged to run the easiest queues more frequently than the ones that offer a balanced experienced for their character. Again, not the best.
The solutions:
With these challenges in mind we are making a few adjustments to the Random Queue organization and structure.
First, we are re-organizing the queues by content type, to better inform you of the content you want to play. We now have a Skirmish Queue, Dungeon Queue, Epic Dungeon Queue, and a Trial Queue. Low level skirmishes will currently be removed from the random queues as we look at improvements we can make to that content to make it fit better within the queue structure.
With these reorganized categories, roles are no longer required for the Skirmish queue, while the other queues still require a tank, healer, and 3 dps. Shores of Tuern and Kessell’s Retreat have been moved to the skirmish queue category of content as they better align (and were originally created as skirmishes) with other skirmishes than with Epic Dungeons.
Second, we have adjusted some of the maps in the queue with the goal of bringing the average completion times closer together across a given queue, in order to allow all maps in that queue to be more equally rewarding. Time played for rewards granted is the true goal of this, so that you will be able to better choose your queues based on your game play styles and time. This will be an ongoing set of adjustments as we see how the completion time and success rates compare across a given queue.
Third, we have adjusted and improved the AD rewards on the new Random Queue groupings to provide a much greater bonus for Trials and Epic Dungeons than for Skirmishes and Dungeons, to encourage players to play more of the content that is balanced for their character. To incentivize this, the rewards for higher-end queues are greater for time played than the shorter queues.
Ultimately, our goal here is to better inform your choices as to how you want to play the Random Queues and give you the queues that best fit your play style!
-The Neverwinter Team
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Comments
Will the issue of all dungeons being lumped together be addressed as it was a serious concern when we had this before. (Lostmauth and Master Spellplague together)
How is Lair of the Mad Mage being handled, as it is unscaled?
Will low IL characters be excluded from the queue until they qualify for the highest Item Level?
also when is the rebalance hitting preview
I have to say that moving skirmishes into their own area (again) makes nothing but sense. But I have to disagree on the part of Shores being lumped in here. It's never felt like a skirmish, it always required the trinity in queues and the only thing it had in common with other skirmishes was it's label for the queues. I honestly don't remember Kessells ever being part of skirms but that just shows you how long it's been since I queued up for older content.
I'll await final judgement until seeing what Q's get which dungeons. 2 Qs seems limiting to me for dungeons but this feels like a fight we've all had before. At the end of the day, I fear we'll end up with LoMM in the same queue as Epic Grey Wolf.
Also, what's going in the Trial Queue should be top of mind for everyone. We just got ToMM. Is Expert Q going away? Is ToMM going in with Demo? If it is, you've failed at queues again.
I honestly expect the worst at this point. Or just remove it entirely. With this restructuring of the queues, it seems there's finally some acknowledgement that, "hey, maybe our customers really didn't want this garbage we ja,,ed down their throats. maybe we remove scaling next?"
what will exactly qualify as an "epic queue" or even a "trial" i mean theres no way that trials like master demo or sva or evn msva hav anywhere NEAR the same difficulties as say the new trial
the same can be said abt epic dungeons.... some are harder than others like say t9 vs say malabogs castle
so the remains to be seen are wht exactly get placede into what queue catagory apart from wht has already been stated
Anyway, major updates are nice but you guys always seem to make the same mistake. What is the need of implementing several major updates at the same time frame? You have the new damage formula coming, the sw rework coming and this one aswel, all in the same space. When you do too much as the same time, there's alot more room for errors, so dont be surprised if you get another bugfest with these updates. I'd personally prefer if you guys took your time and implement these updates one at a time.
To me, it would make more sense to have two random queues: Standard & Advanced.
I would give each dungeon/skirmish/trial its own Weekly AD completion bonus, then lessen the random queue daily add-on bonus.
Same with many coins and merchant princes folly, which are both "skirmishes"
- The queue poped fast for DPSs and support classes
- It was tiered by complexity, I would not just pick RAQ for the badly developed alt. I would have preferred more tiers, but that situation was ok.
There were only few problems:
- Scaling for lv70 dungeons. They should be been moved just to lv 80, or there should be just hard caps on the stats instead of the current magic that is very hard to understand. Planning stats for these dungons is very hard because of scaling.
- Heist was too complex, and better solution would have been moving it to advanced queue and toning down damage from some enemies. This would have made RAQ to pop out fast too
Instead of fixig these two minor problems, you just burn the house again and cause DPS to queue forever again
Based on the above reasoning for balance, you're telling me that it's going to take me the same length of time to complete a Valindra's Tower or Epic Cragmire Crypts as it will to complete a Castle Ravenloft and that the rewards are essentially equivalent for the time spent in each. HUH? Unless you're overhauling the rewards from some of those older "lower level" dungeons this sort of doesn't make sense. In the really old days there were Tier 1 and Tier 2 dungeons for a reason - one was harder than the other and had different/better rewards. The Intermediate/Advance/Expert system worked in that it made sense VT wasn't in the same category as the most recent dungeon - like CR or LOMM. Just because I want to run a dungeon, doesn't necessarily mean I want a super difficult dungeon, and I don't like the idea of players being penalized for wanting a slightly more casual experience.
In addition, if certain queued content is being avoided... wouldn't that signal a problem with that content rather than a problem with how players are playing the game? Clearly something about it is less favorable, so why are we revamping the whole thing instead of focusing on what about those avoided maps is less than desirable for players?
On a different note - why the removal of the normal versions of Demogorgon and Svalbard?
So far the only thing I'm still on board with is removal of the party requirements on the skirmishes as that never should have been there to begin with.
We have Tier 1 / 2 /3 epic dungeons/trials/skirmishes with 3 different rewards at the end. The higher tier, the more difficult and the better reward at the end of completion. As for simple dungeons this category no longer should fit in the system since all the dungeons will be moved in the same place as epic dungeons with now have tiers. This way everyone should play the content and difficulty they want, without being forced to face the maps rescaling for a silly reward at the end like old armors/rings and peridots.
EX:
Valindra's Tower - Tier 1 - easy run 10 minutes for endgame players - Tier 2 - 20 mins - Tier 3 - 30 mins , reward based on the tier.
What are the rewards mentioned on the queue page? e.g. Dungeon queue 5,500 AD and 45 what? Dungeoneer's shards of power? If so that is a big increase on the current and may offset the likely supply reductions for smaller guilds.
I expect a big drop in participation in the random queues in my guild. I doubt any players qualify for the trials and epics but that is not much of a change from the current position, folk are not interested in enough in that content to complete the quest lines that unlock it. The hit on donations is more likely from the skirmishes and dungeons. Few if any of will queue for skirmishes given the high chance of getting a skirmish they find too hard to be enjoyable. The dungeon queue would be doable for most in the guild but the likely very long wait associated with the group requirements is likely to put most off bothering.
For most the only purpose of the run was dungeoneer's shards as guild donations. It was never clear to me why shards were treated like daily AD and tied to the random queues in the first place. Either removing group requirements from the dungeon queue or untying dungeoneer's shards from random queues would make a big difference for my guild or possibly allowing pre-mades to queue for the random dungeon, we might get enough players together for that.
Winter Lily (CW) / Winter Rose (DC) / Winter Ivy (HR)
Pandora's Misfits Guild Leader
Glad to see role restrictions lifted from the skirmishes, but aside from the horrendous wait times, I actually enjoyed getting to know the paragon classes my characters seldom/if ever used. It's a shame it wasn't going to work out.
It might be worthwhile leaving role bonuses intact if the devs can make it so that no more than one tank or healer can queue into 5-person content. I've done the four healer, four tank skirmishes before, and they are not fun.
While the devs are looking at the queues, any chance they can do something about the starting gates in some of them? The ones where people avoid the leaver penalty by forcing everyone else to wait to be able kick her/him? Also maybe consider adjusting the kick system to a majority vote instead of a 4 vote?
Easier ways to run got throttled (with little regards to the original design I guess) or downright removed from the randoms and even got removed from the normal list like Demogorgon.
It's makes sense in the AD economy and how alting for expedition Zok boxes just fills you up with rAD anyway, but when the players on live find out the sole reason for this change and just can't feel the benefit... well, good luck hyping up mod18.
Edit: But to be more positive, the epic dungeon list looks way more palatable than the RAQ list, so people may not hate running into the top end, as it's closes at TONG.
Rogue - Setsuna F Seiei (XB1)
Rogue - Serenity (PS4)
As for scaling, I was totally against it at first. Now I like it. Pretty sure I'm in the minority on that one, though.
Nothing prevents players that only want to run with bis players from forming their party before q so this will not hurt BIS players since it will be easy to run (though they would not no reason too). this will however hurt players that want to run it. Please Reconsider.
RIP Real Tiamat, RIP Real Demogorgon RIP real Temple of the spider. Why remove non bis content to give to bis players ????
FORCING the majority of your player base to play 4 mod old dungeons and trial will have a bad result on player base
Changes are getting so bad i would rather prefer no new changes (RIP ICE FISHING in winter fest)
Thanks
M.K.
Cheers
M.K.
We've had random Qs for a long time and people ran them just fine for ages.
Eventually, new content came out, old content became worthless and the need to run an old dungeon isn't there. For a level 70 artifact that's worth 200AD? For some RP that I can get quicker from just running around doing dailies with quartermasters on?
Scaling hurt the Qs as far as people being willing to run them but if the rewards were there you would get people running. I do miss getting AD from private q's though. The golden days. The most logical thing in game development is to leave your most recent dungeon content out of Qs. It's a winning strategy! Sarcasm aside, LoMM should have been kept in it's own Q or some form of Expert Q. I don't know why it's so difficult for this team to structure dungeons into Qs in a logical order. Once upon a time the Q's made sense. Then they decided to get cute and rearrange things and Q's have sucked ever since.
When a team is leaving content out of Qs because it's too hard to figure out how to structure things it's time to start questioning how they can handle the rest of the games systems. (I wont even touch your idea that running a LoMM while carrying 2+ new players is a good thing).
While it's a plus you are removing the class requirements for skirmishes, is this going to apply for CTA events like seasons? Because you don't have the player base to sustain this module on consoles and you're going to have a lot of anger people trying to play and hitting the forums next week when the one drops if this is still up and people can't even get in a queue for it. Right now on ps4 if you aren't running a tank or healer, you aren't getting a queue for hours even for random.
Secondly, you need to find improvements for low level skirmishes to fit into the structure? Tell you what I'll do this for free and assist. You need to first get the other two queues back in, battle for the bridge and aberrant assault (the one you call resonant evil now), or are you having difficulty balancing them with the scaling difficulty that wrecked mod 16 level players because of it? Skirmishes are a break and in some ways rewarding to run through instead of just doing a dungeon or area map as well as for the achievements.
Currently on playstation 4, I ran 55 characters to get all leveling skirmish achievements and many especially upto mod 15 and 16 I ran solo. That's right ran a 5 person skirmish by myself and in most cases without the use of a stone of health. Time consuming but possible as well as a giant headache. Because I wanted the achievements and skirmisher title because the queues wouldn't pop. It's been that way since mod 13 that less and less run them than they did. The point is you could create a second queue for players that are leveling for ad and they run the skirmishes according to their level so they do pop and it gives players more content. AND when they hit 70, they could play scaled versions of the content to 70 for all the skirmishes that were missed. Currently 3 skirmishes leveling can be missed and never gotten again if you miss them because there aren't CTAs.
Blacklake Terror
Defend the Village
Aberrant Assault (Resonant Evil)
What would also alleviate this problem is if you allow any leveled character in zone to run them at the skirmish master like storm front at icespire peak. I haven't checked this mod but it was possible to make your own group in previous mods to run it to get the achievement. It should be allowed for all skirmishes.
Thirdly, if you remove the leveling skirmishes from the random queues it does make it that much more difficult to queue them due to the fact that now others can't be compensated if they pick random and due the skirmish and further makes the content more difficult to complete.
Fourthly, I thought with the release of Storm Kings Thunder you had each zone and skirmish had companions and mounts drop in the skirmish boxes especially in all the zone skirmishes aside master of the hunt (which does do this) yet haven't seen any of that happen or did you scrap that? You want content to fit and make it runnable, how about getting themed mounts and companions drop from the skirmishes (doesn't matter if they're green or blue level) it would greatly get players to play more content instead of the grind.
Lastly, I know we are discussing queues but you botched up the leveling progression of the maps. You have a great deal of quests on the playstation 4 area to area that purposely outright kill the player in certain spots even if you are geared with ideal blue or green leveled appropriate gear. My 56th character I made had an issue beyond blacklake district that each of the other maps many of the mobs were increasingly taking off ridiculous amounts of damage. (Rotters and their groups are notoriously overpowered now and will kill a player in seconds along with archers and bandits with a group of 3 upon a player) You kept the combat advantage against leveling players too high and the mobs either need a 15- 30% hp drop due to how quickly a player's hp drops and healing potions under 70 do absolutely nothing beyond the level of unlocking them. It's a joke.