Thread: 3.2 PvP: Feast Game Mode Discussion Thread.

All this talk about matchmaking.

Let me just remind everyone what happened to WD when they implemented rank matching. It died.

In the perfect world we have enough of a population for match making to work and not kill queues, but be careful what you wish for. If doing this means increasing queue times from 1-3 minutes to 5-45 minutes, no thanks.

Originally Posted by Koltik

All this talk about matchmaking.

Let me just remind everyone what happened to WD when they implemented rank matching. It died.

In the perfect world we have enough of a population for match making to work and not kill queues, but be careful what you wish for. If doing this means increasing queue times from 1-3 minutes to 5-45 minutes, no thanks.

A lot more than that contributed to the "death" of Wolves den, quite a bit of it stemming from changes made due to player feedback. I agree, though, that this was a big one. Nobody wants to wait 15+ minutes to get into the den, another 2 for the match to start and then have the match end in under a minute because the healer died early.

The call for matchmaking comes from the frustration due to losing. So lets look at this from a different perspective, how can we make the current system work so that people are okay with losing? Obviously no one is going to be happy with a loss and people just love to blame others for it, but what if theres noticeable rewards for overcoming these differences in rank?

If you have a team of 4 bronze players and defeat a team that has 2 silver & 2 gold opponents, you should receive a good amount of bonus points for that victory. Enough points so that if in your next match when you go up against 4 diamond players, your loss of points due to your annihilation is padded thanks to your earlier achievement.

The current system is rather punishing for a variety of reasons(random matchmaking, unbalanced risk due to promotions, etc). This kind of harsh system works for 1v1 games, not random teammates of varying levels. Using another game as an example, my first online match of Street Fighter 5 was against a super silver player on a 30 game win streak. I also watched a mid-ranked player on stream go up against Daigo Umehara(one of the best players in the world) due to some matchmaking mishap. Since its all on you, you can laugh at the absurdity of it and maybe learn a few things. But in FF14 you aren't learning anything if you get your back blown out due it being your healer's first match. You aren't really laughing if you lost your promotion due to being helpless to change the outcome of an incredibly lopsided match.

Realistically, we don't have the kind of player base to support a strong matchmaking system. People are going to bow out once they get their minion or mount. Players will stop queuing once they get bored or frustrated with the feast(especially with the current reward system). The amount of players participating will be lower in a few months.

The ultimate goal is to have a system that is rewarding & fun for everyone. You want to encourage new players to participate. You want to reward players that have been putting in time & effort. You want a game that isn't going to die solely because of its own mechanics. The difficult part comes in balancing that. Having someone get to diamond tier with a 25% win rate is silly but its also necessary for players to feel like they're getting somewhere if they're doing decently.

We could come up with some system that would make this work, but its really up to S-E to consider our feedback and hopefully make this new game mode into something that will last.