Making the premade point-system better and harder to exploit

[Wegente]

(I know this topic might be useless because of the huge PvP changes due to happen soon with Stormblood. And we for all we know Feast might even not be a thing anymore with the possible introduction of new ranked PvP modes. Who knows)

(I'm pretty terrible at sorting rants to make them clear to understand, so I hope people will help me in the following posts)

I'm starting this topic because of some heated discussion that went on between some Aether players tonight.
The discussion was about people accusing one another of:

- wintrading
- dodging queues
- boosting characters with unranked alts / starting late in the season to gain easy points against higher ranked teams.

Let's examine these matters at hand in order:

- Wintrading
This is probably the hardest issue to solve.

The easiest way would be for GMs to actively check the match history of certain players (when they are being reported by a conspicuous amount of people) and analyze them to see if there is fishy stuff going on, such as teams getting matched up against each other countless times, matches lasting only 1-2 minutes, matches happening late in the night to avoid being spotted by other people, etc.

While some people did get reported and banned for this, there is sadly a much bigger number of cases where nothing was done to the people exploiting the system this way.

My proposed solution for this issue is to limit the number of times teams can face each other in a row.
Of course, this would damage the people who are playing fair as well - but arguably it could also help preventing the best teams to constantly "stomp" one weak team and gather a huge amount of points because of this, at least making them wait a while before being able to face them again.


- Dodging queues

People shouldn't be allowed to dodge other teams. Especially when they are doing something fishy like wintrading, and they don't want to be spotted.
So there should be harsher penalties for constantly dodging queues. You reject the duty 3 times in a row? Your team loses 10 rating because of this. Or something like that. The normal duty penalty isn't enough in PvP premade.


- Boosting characters with unranked alts / starting late in the season to gain easy points against higher ranked teams

While these are actually two different situations, I think the root of the problem is shared between them.

Right now, when two premade groups face each other the system calculates the sum of the points of each team.
If team A has more points than team B, team B will gain more/lose less points when they win/lose. Vice-versa goes for team A.
And with team A and team B, I mean ALL of their members.

This can lead to some very easily-doable exploiting, where a very high-rated player can decide to team up with 3 unranked players, or alts, to "balance out" his points and keep winning a lot more points than his (slightly) lower-ranked opponents.
Just because he is playing with 3 unranked people who are - supposedly - very bad at PvP (and thus having to carry their weight), but we all know this more often that not is not the case.
They are simply alts, or people who have been trying to find a group but couldn't, and are happily "poached" in the hope of one day getting their premade mount reward.

On the other hand, there are some people who just start queueing late in the season.

Of course, I'm not here to say all of them have a malicious will of ruining everyone's game experience by making the opposing teams lose loads of points due to them facing 4 unranked players.
But at the same time, I have a hard time blaming the higher-ranked teams - who have been queueing for the whole season, having gathered a massive amount of points - who complain and decide to dodge said players, because they know very well that they are victim of an unfair point system that penalizes them for losing against people who are, yes, far lower than them in rating. But most of the time, not in - actual - skill rating.

I have a potential solution for this issue, but I'm still not 100% satisfied with it working properly so I hope that more people can actually comment on this first and state their opinion.
Hopefully we can find a solution which is fair for everyone, and not easily exploited.

Thanks for reading.

[Koltik]

Good and much needed post. To be honest though, most of LP's issues wouldn't even be issues if:

1) There were enough teams who played that queues were more active than solo.

2) There was match making like in solo, except stricter to ensure more evenly distributed point loss/gain. (only works if 1 exists)

3) SE mentioned this before, there needs to be a set time of day for ranked queues. Example: you can only queue for Light Party from 6 PM - 12 AM EST. This is my preferred solution, and I know it will boost participation as well as completely resolve the win trading at [insert random time of day here] issue. I've already spoken with a couple of people who have teams on Primal that said they aren't sure when they'll LP in 4.0, but if there was a set time then they said they would jump in a lot sooner.

Like you, I completely understand why teams dodge unranked teams who definitely should not be unranked. The system is not fair for the top team at all right now, -50 for a loss +5 for a win? It used to be even worse, it used to be +1 for a win in S1/S2. Still, having to win 10/11 games just to break even is impossible if another group of good players queue up.

With that said, of course people are going to call out these players who dodge and only get their rating off of non-pvpers who decided to try LP for a day. It's cheesy, disgraceful to light party and PvP as a whole, and frustrating to everyone else who wants to have actual PvP matches but can't because the "#1 team" dodges all day long.

[SuperZay]

These issues would never existed if rewards from Light Party were removed. Which SE did initially till petitions started.

[Moonlite]

These issues would never existed if rewards from Light Party were be removed. Which SE did initially till petitions started.

Which is funny. Light party should be the one with rank/reward and solo should be the one with out rank/reward. Then we probably wouldn't have the chat ban. Solo should just have achievements to lower the ragers and haters. Also some sort of team save like they have for PoTD leave team reset rank and start over. If the game doesn't have enough players to support actual teams pvp resources should be focused elsewhere.

[Chilla]

With that said, of course people are going to call out these players who dodge and only get their rating off of non-pvpers who decided to try LP for a day. It's cheesy, disgraceful to light party and PvP as a whole, and frustrating to everyone else who wants to have actual PvP matches but can't because the "#1 team" dodges all day long.

I think one of the main problems here, as Koltik mentioned, are players who exploit the system by farming an absurd amount of points by exclusively fighting non-experienced players while actively dodging real teams through constant monitoring of player activity on other servers.

It completely invalidates the intended purpose of the current ranking system when the highest ranked players point gains have entirely been from farming non-experienced teams 24/7.

If Stormblood ends up having the same ranking system as now, then Light Party rewards should indeed be removed if Square Enix cannot actively police the system.

[Zojha]

Which is funny. Light party should be the one with rank/reward and solo should be the one with out rank/reward.

Heh. Or better yet: Merge solo and light party queue and ranking. Stick'em all into the same queue and don't even bother with special MMR/Rating adjustments for premades. Just to make a point of how "competitive" and "serious" solo queue actually is.

[Wegente]

I think one of the main problems here, as Koltik mentioned, are players who exploit the system by farming an absurd amount of points by exclusively fighting non-experienced players

This is indeed one of the biggest issues in the Light Party queue.

But what could be done about it? You can't really prevent "Garo" premades from queueing up, or players new to PvP from trying the mode in the first place (ironically, it's the opposite - if more and more players queued, the matchmaking would balance itself out on its own).
The only two solutions I can think of would be to either:

- "lock out" the unranked players from the rest, and thus basically letting them play only against other unranked players. But this would be a pain for them, because queues would be even longer, basically screwing over anyone who starts the season late

- introduce a limit to the amount of times you can face the same team in a row (or possibly to how many times you can win against the same team in a row, so basically if you won like 5x matches against a certain team, you would have to wait a while before being able to play with them again)

Sadly, due to the extremely low playerbase of Light Party it's very hard to stop the "Garo farmers". In the long run, those who start playing early in the season and queue more often than the others will have an edge over their opponents in terms of points.

[Commander_Justitia]

This will be even bigger issue when players can participate with just a lvl30 character in PvP (you could even skip leveling with jump potions if you wanted to). They will just make an alt to prevent their team from losing 2 many points in premade.

I am too in favor of restricted access to premade pvp, it worked in other games. Timed windows on a day where you can play it.

The rating system needs to be reworked in premade pvp, only because a group is unranked shouldn't mean you will lose up to 50 points against them as ranked. These rating spikes should be way smaller, vice versa you should gain more than 1 point for unranked teams. It would just even things out. There needs to be encouragement that you don't want to play with an alt or that the risk playing with the main character is suitable.

In some other games, ranking systems work like that a team has to prove themselves first in a number of matches, if they are glorious they rank up and get "real" points for any further matches. We got unranked and bronze, if unranked players would be considered out of the equation for rating until they reach bronze, you would minimize the benefits of playing an alt in premade aswell.

[HaelseMikiro]

Could do like some other games, and have an official team charter for premades. Changing out a team member for a new one will cost you team rating. I think one of the problems with premade teams right now is specifically that SE has it set up to allow a single person on a team to jump ship anytime they want and boost themselves and screw their teammates. How many of the data centers have a team of 4 people ties for the number 1 spot on party ranked? None. Chaos has 2 people who have stuck together for the entire season, meanwhile Aether has a single person sitting at 600 points higher that the second highest person from ANY data center.
Team Feast needs to be about the team, and it isn't right now.

[Cleanse]

Instead of a dark week, hold a tournament with the top teams. The CM team can run it in place of their Culling Time show.

Who grinded the most does not reflect who is the best team.