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Narrowing Tier Spreads Discussion - How to Fix Matchmaking

Дата: 21.07.2011 21:37:14
View Postsalihe, on Jul 20 2011 - 04:26, said: Yay, now I can write out my list of questions for the devs and actually have a reasonable chance of having them answered :P

ChrisK: No.  :lol:

Quote 1. Realistically, what would it take for you guys to narrow the tier spread for the middle tiers? 1000 signatures on this poll? A petition on another site with tons of signatures? I know for a fact that you guys know it's a huge issue, and it has been for quite some time. Which leads me to my next question...

ChrisK: It would have to be functionally balanced across the spectrum in terms of progression through the Tiers (i.e., it would have to have the exact same effect on Tier V German SPGs as it would have on Tier V American TDs), and the amount of credit income would also have to balance out exactly (since this is what our balance system is based on). This would require a ton of testing and tweaking to implement, and with 10x as many players in Russia (and yet more on other server clusters as well), the priority of work will continue to go to developing new content and tweaking the system we have until we can find a better way or allocate the resources to the task (that is, we take a break from content development for a couple of months). It has a lot more impact and ramifications than the simple change it appears to be.

Quote 2. How come you've let it be such a large point of contention for such a long time? There have been people lobbying for matchmaking changes since closed beta. You had to know it was a problem when those posts, not to mention the comments in various game reviews, kept popping up.

ChrisK: It hasn't been a large point of contention - sure, there are dozens of vocal players in the forums, with anecdotal evidence of potentially hundreds more, but the complaints are a relatively minor number compared to the requests for more content. Likewise, there is less evidence (proportionally) on other server clusters that this is an issue, making it prevalent only on the smallest server cluster here in North America. It's not that we aren't important, it's just that right now we make up less than 5% of the entire customer base. If even 20% of the NA players are dissatisfied with matchmaking (and the forum evidence shows that to be less than that actually, in spite of the high activity in this and related threads), that's still just 1% of the entire player base. And if the other 99% would rather see more content and can live with the MM, than we need to deliver that content first. I personally support changing the matchmaking system in several ways, not all based on Tiers or spreads or the current algorithm used to allocate spots in battles. We'll see if we can get any of them approved, implemented in a build, tested, and refined enough to use. If you're even more curious to see what's coming, I suggest joining the Supertest team. :Smile-playing:

Quote 3. Would you be willing to test a system that narrowed the spread? It can always be rolled back, in the event it fails hardcore, though I don't see that happening.

ChrisK: Yes, we would not test that in public though. Aside from implementation testing, it would have to go through QA and Supertest. Again, it's a matter of where we want to use our resources. I'm not saying we'll never change MM - I expect we will make some changes as we move forward, probably with every release - but that there will certainly be no overnight sweeping changes, and the resource allocation and development time and priorities are the reasons you won't see this happen until at least after v 0.7.

Quote 4. There have been a lot of people saying that the middle tiers are set up as they are intentionally, in order to coerce people to pay for premium, or to buy premium tanks. We've never gotten a definite denial of this (though I'm sure it's not the type of thing that would be made public, even if it were true), so could you lay our concerns on that front to rest?

ChrisK: We have an internal document that is not for public release (so don't ask for it!) that goes over our entire concept of what we're trying to do and why, so that everyone on the team knows what our goals are. Breaking the rules (yup, that's me Overlord!), I am going to mention a couple of things from that document. These are not direct quotes (and since I translated the document from the original Russian, I can be sure of that!), but they are the accurate and sincere desires of the entire development team: Our goals are to provide fun and excitement to our players - note that there is no mention of profit in there - with very little advantage to Premium players except a savings of time, also players should not spend too much money (seriously! If you're spending more than $20 a month, slow down and enjoy the game more!), and we want to focus more on casual/light gameplay than hardcore competition (such as Ultimate Conquest). Yes, you read that right - wanting player to NOT spend too much money is one of our core values! And to break my own rule about paraphrasing the document, here's a direct quote: "Our basic approach to working with the players is expressed in our three rules: do what we know, do what we love, and respect our audience." If you're not feeling that from us, we do need to improve. And we're working on that. Please continue to tell us how we can improve without just criticizing what we're doing now, and expecting a miraculous change overnight. We're not going to promise you the moon, but we are going to continue to improve the game for as long as it's around, which we expect to be a long, long time. :Smile-izmena:

Quote 5. Overlord mentioned that narrowing the spread would be a controversial move. Aside from the very few posters who are happy with things as they are at the moment, controversial to who? Players want it, reviewers want it; I can't see it being controversial to really much of anyone.

ChrisK: As I explained in the answer to #1, controversial to us, because we depend not only on the support of the minority of vocal players who may or may not want the MM spread reduced, but also on the millions of others who are fine enough with the system to play instead of complaining. Not that you don't have valid points - I hate getting Lowed in my Hetzer as much as anyone else - but when I'm the sole T4 TD in a team of T8 heavy tanks (which happened to me the other day actually) I understand that my role is to scout and distract, survive as long as I can, then move on to another tank when I inevitably get one-shotted by an ISU. You have to burn a few tanks to make a good crew, and even though I got killed, as I knew I would, my challenge wasn't to get kills but to help my team succeed. And I still got way more than enough credits to pay for repairs and ammo, and some decent XP for assisting in the victory. I don't see it as a forced defeat, just another challenge and another way to play. I mean, let's face it - I'm not going to waste my time bragging about killing a Hetzer with my Lowe, but if I can track a Lowe with my Hetzer long enough for arty to hit it and another heavy to move up and knock it out, that's something to be proud of! Heck, my 7-year-old was excited to tell me the other day he played a battle where he got hit 25 times before he was killed! He dies all the time, but he enjoys the gameplay because it's just plain fun. And no, I don't spend any money on his account. He gets the free stuff only, just like anybody else.  :P

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