Narrowing Tier Spreads Discussion - How to Fix Matchmaking

salihe, on Jul 22 2011 - 01:33, said: No worries; considering we've gotten used to one-answers from Overlord in the Q&A thread, this is a virtual buffet


Quote Btw, I was wondering...so, did the other devs promise you a liter of fine Russian vodka to come in here and shut up the complaining Americans?


Quote lol, just joking. We all know you just drew the short straw in the straw-drawing contest to see who 'got' to come talk to us


Quote All kidding aside, thanks for taking the time to come in and address a lot of the concerns a lot of us have. I know better than a lot how much time it takes to compose those mammoth multi-quote posts, and it's appreciated.


Quote Keeping in mind I'm not a developer, balancing tanks out by their credit earnings seems....unrelated, lol. I suppose it could be made to be related, but on the surface, it appears that there are a lot of other, more suitable categories with which to balance tanks out, like average damage or armor qualifiers. With the rest of it, that sounds fair enough. I'll mention the content development below.


Quote A lot of points have been brought up about how the NA playerbase is a fairly miniscule part of the overall scheme. One thing that's been mentioned is that, while that may be the current state, I and others believe that it doesn't have to be that way. The NA population could dwarf the Russian one, if it were to conform to a play style American gamers have become accustomed to, that is to say, balanced, fair, each person on each team having just as much chance to kill the rest of the team. It's likely a cultural issue that causes the voices on the NA server to be so much louder than the rest (though I've seen evidence that EU players are fairly unhappy about MM, as well). I realize it's probably against the principle of the development team to change your game to an extent like this in order to suit what appears to be a relatively small segment of the overall population, but, say you guys did do that, and say WoT's popularity in the US skyrocketed, drawing in thousands of new players. Imagine an influx of hungry US gamers, all eager to open their wallets and dump out the huge amounts of disposable income they have (I know you said that's not necessarily a priority, but WG.net is, above all else, a business, and every business needs money to survive, and the ones that make more generally end up doing better). In short, imagine what could happen if the US player base ended up moving from a relatively small segment of the overall player base to the majority of it.


Quote There has also been a lot of contention regarding how many people are unhappy overall, how many have left the game because of it, etc, etc, most times being criticized as not carrying any validity or having any "solid" evidence. The problem with that is, short of surveying every single person who plays or has ever played WoT and asking them specifically what they don't like or why they quit playing, there's no way to scientifically quantify exactly what percentage of people are in favor of changing it or have quit because of it. But, I've known a few people who quit because of matchmaking; another guy said he personally knew 27; somebody else named a similarly high number; just in the past month, I've seen a lot of people talking about knowing others who quit, as well. Also, the thing that really gets me is, fairly often, someone will come up the forums for the very first time, and their very first post will either be something about hating the matchmaker, or quitting because of it. In however long all those folks played, they never felt the need to come on the forums and post about anything, until then, with that one thing. I see people in-game complaining about it fairly constantly (and I always direct them here and the Official thread), as well. All that leads me, and others, to believe the problem is a lot larger than immediately obvious. Though, like I said at the start of this paragraph, there's no logistical way to know for sure. We can infer, though.


Quote With regards to content, I was under the impression that there were probably a few different teams, working on different areas, rather than everyone working on generally the same area. So, knowing that, I, myself, can be more understandable about things taking more time. Though, I am curious (somewhat unrelated, but not entirely), why you guys save up everything for those big, giant, mega-patches, rather than releasing smaller, but more frequent patches. That's how a lot of games do it, and it tends to keep the impatient players sated, knowing something new is always around the corner. Releasing them that way would, as well, let you focus more on each individual things, rather than the way it is now, where 60 changes get put in place all at once, then you have to keep track of them all simultaneously. But, like I said, that's somewhat unrelated.


Quote Oh, but since you mentioned new content...any word of a new game mode? Historical battles, maybe? I know that was one of the biggest selling points for when I started playing back in closed beta, and I've been looking forward to it ever since. [/s]  woops, I didn't see the post Overlord made about...new game modes, lol. Go figure. Awesome news, tho


Quote Ooooo, Overlord's not gonna give you that bottle of vodka now


Quote Seriously, though, I'm sure that alleviated a lot of people's concerns. It's like the Russian bias thing...something that occurred to people, then grew and grew, and, without any official denial, generally grew to be assumed true. I mean, like I said, I know WG.net is a business, and businesses need money to survive, but it's nice to hear someone say it's not a priority at the expense of the players (though, in order to get a Lowe now, players will have to break the don't-spend-more-than-$20 rule about 4 times over, lol). I think a few things that contribute to players feeling neglected are, while the Q&A thread is awesome, it does seem fairly vanilla, which is to say, questions that probe uncomfortable territory tend to get deleted without mention, while other, genuine questions get deleted repeatedly (for instance, Steeltrap posted one question regarding the 0% critical hit issue 7 times; after it got deleted the last time, I believe he just game up). Plus, things like this thread (a list of bad press WG.net and WoT has gotten), plus the fact that a lot of issues that are currently going on, have been going on since closed beta...all those things add up to an overall negative feeling. I'll admit I've just assigned some things not getting fixed or changed to the fact that you guys didn't care. In the absence of even minor things like posts saying, "Hey guys, we know about this, this, and this, and we're working on getting them fixed as fast as we can!", we tend to fill in the blanks ourselves. Add in the spaced out, huge, mega-patches, rather than smaller-but-frequent ones, and you have a recipe for disgruntled players.


Quote Here's the thing...I, and most others who have posted, don't mind bucking the odds or being at the bottom of the list for matches. Despite the few pro-MM posters who insist that we all just need to L2PLAY and just suck at life in general, it's not a skill issue. It's a matter of continually being placed in matches where, not only are we at the bottom of the list, but we're incapable of really doing much to impact the match. Take your example of being in your Hetzer; that's the majority of our matches in medium tanks. And scouting's not really an option, since they don't go fast enough, and the heavies on the other team have equal or better viewing ranges. Most of us don't want to be a mere distraction to the other team most of our matches; we would like to actually fight, damage, and kill other tanks, as well. I mean, that's the whole premise of WoT: exciting tank battles, and matches where we're matched up evenly against other tanks generally around our tier are awesome. They shine with the potential of what this game really could be, and they're fun as hell. The problem is, matches like that are the minority. I was going to mention this before, but forgot, so I'll stick it in now: hell, if I had matches where it took me 25 hits to die, I'd be excited and pretty proud, too! The only time that happens, though, is if I'm in my Pz2, and a Loltraktor is shooting his pellet gun at me, lol. Most of the rest of the time, it's anywhere from 1 to 10, depending on what tank I'm in and what's shooting at me, but closer to 1 in my mediums, and anywhere from 2-10 in my Tiger. Similarly, I don't know if I've ever tracked or even really caused more than a few percentage points of damage to a Lowe, even in my Tiger. I don't have the long 88 yet, so I'm stuck using the same gun the tier 6 VK3601 uses, and that thing bounces half the shots I fire. But still, the Tiger's tier 7, and everything that bounces my shots is tier 8, only one tier higher, so I don't complain. Well, I mean, I do complain, but I don't lobby to get it 'fixed' (though I do think the Tiger is in sore need of some attention; I mean, what used to be the most legendary and fearsome tank of WWII has been reduced to an over-sized bullet magnet with mostly impotent guns).


Quote I'm willing to stick around and see what you guys can come up with to help remedy the situation. The only thing is, I just hope it's not too late, at least for the NA server. Not many people, generally, have the desire to stick around with a game they feel is imbalanced and places them in unfair situations the majority of the time; not when there is so much competition out there.


Quote In the end, we all want the same thing: to have fun, and for WoT to do awesomely. Now, to find a way to make those two things happen