My thoughts on Feast

[Zetsumei_Tsunarashi]

I'm not going to talk about the class balance issues or CC or anything like that, there's already a bunch of threads on that stuff.

I just wanted to talk about some things that I've been thinking about while playing this season. Some of this is stuff that has been a problem all along but I just feel it's gone far too long without being addressed and need to be said again. Mostly going to talk about what I feel should be changed to improve player matching and have better quality matches as well as ways to improve the ranking system.

First off, the ranked 4v4 season is a competitive game mode, so the only reason people should have to queue for this mode should be to compete in the ranked season. Please can we get rid of things like experience points, wolf marks, tomestones, minions, etc. Anything that does not have to do with your feast rating should be removed from this mode. When you're trying to compete and you get people showing up in your game who have no idea what they are doing and are just there to level up their class for PvE or grind tomestones or wolf marks for glamours, it becomes really frustrating when you keep losing because of these people. People can queue up for the 8v8 practice mode if they want to do that stuff.

Now that we have that out of the way, let's talk about player skill levels. Let's a have a qualifier at the onset of each season to separate players by skill level. This is common practice in other competitive games with a tier system. How it would work is similar to what happens when you do the promotion qualifier that is already in the game. Players will be required to play a number of games the first time they queue up for the competitive ranked mode. The win rate at the end of this qualifier will determine what tier you start in. Players with close to 0% win rate would be untiered, while players with a close to 100% win rate would be placed in diamond tier immediately. This qualifier would not effect your rating number however, so everyone still starts from zero and works their way up. So in effect, your tier (bronze,silver,gold etc) would no longer be obtained through meeting a certain rating number, but instead be a reflection of your win% only. Going up and down a tier can still happen based on your win percentage and promotion qualifiers would happen if you cross certain Win% thresholds. Additionally the matching system would have to more strictly enforce placing players with similar tiers in games with each other, however, since the tier is based solely on win% you should have more players falling around the silver,gold areas. which means only those players with the highest and lowest win% would experience long queue times. This would create a balance where bad players will occur in matches less frequently as well as prevent the highest tiered players from earning rating points too quickly and allowing mid tier players an opportunity to catch up.

So then the name of the game becomes who can maintain their win% throughout the season AND emerge with the most points at the end of the season. Which leads us to our next problem. Players can just grind out enough rating points and sit on their points with no negative consequences for not playing. This creates a downward spiral where less and less people queue up because of players dropping out and sitting on their points until the end of the season, and makes it harder and harder for the players who are still trying to climb up the ladder to catch up to them simply because the queue times become longer and longer, reducing the number of games they are able to play. Meanwhile the players at the top have no risk to lose their points since they are not playing matches anymore. This needs to be addressed in the form of a system where players will lose rating points if they do not play a ranked match after a period of time. I feel like imposing a requirement of 10 games every 48hrs to avoid the penalty should be sufficient. The penalty should be pretty harsh if the requirement is not met and should be higher for higher tiered players (let's say something like -100 points for bronze, -250 for silver, -500 for gold, -750 for platinum, and -1000 for diamond). An alternative option might be a slow decay system where every hour without playing a game you lose a small number of points (1/hr bronze, 2/hr silver, 3/hr gold, 4/hr platinum, 5/hr diamond).

The next point I wanted to make is in regards to the way rating points are earned. I feel with a random queue where you can not control the skill level of, or communicate very easily with the people you are playing with and the win/loss ratio is the entire basis for the ranking system, you effectively create a reward system that is unbalanced towards people with more time to play and classes that have faster queue times while having little or nothing to do with the skill level of each player. Instead the rating points should be awarded, at least in part, by your own individual performance. Yes a victory should reward you more than a loss, but in the event of a loss if you performed well, you should suffer less of a penalty, or perhaps even mitigate the penalty entirely. Currently, you can spend hours and hours making absolutely zero progress because every loss incurs a rating penalty, and unless you get a really lucky streak of wins, you won't make up those losses. Instead of having only a set value for wins/losses, create a system where you can also earn bonus rating points through performance factors such as kills, assists, damage dealt, healing dealt, and so on. This will reward players who performed well by moving them up the ladder more quickly, while also creating a way to maintain your position in the ladder if your team didn't do as much as they could have. This may also have side effects such as encouraging players to fight until the end to earn their bonus points instead of giving up after a couple of early deaths or encouraging players to play as under utilized classes due to bonus points being more easily obtainable (healers getting bonus points for most healing done for example).

The final gripe I have is in regards to the promotion qualifier. When you fail the qualifier you have to complete a match in order to attempt the qualifier again. Please remove this requirement and initiate the next qualifier immediately after the failure of the previous one. It's very annoying to win a game after you failed the qualifier and have that game not count towards your qualifier. Also just make it 2/3 instead of 3/5. Why make it take longer than it really needs to. If a person is really not good enough for a tier they will just lose rank, so requiring an extra match just seems arbitrary to me.

[Jigokunoreizasan]

I was with you all the way until point decay, 1000 seems pretty steep don't you think? as well as the hourly decay would also be kind of harsh since some people still want to do PvE content... forcing them to pvp all day everyday until the season is over is kind of unnecessary.

[Mofafafa]

For rank decay, SE can use what League of Legends does, if i recall correctly.

With decay immune points, like 7 points at max, each point for each day, which is 7 days, 1 week
Each day you went into ranked you get +1 points. When your decay immune points is over, your rates start decaying day by day


Not sure if LoL still uses this as i read their article from reddit like ages ago.

And their LP (ratings) only start decaying when its platinum and above. Not including gold, silver, bronze

[Cynric]

I was with you all the way until point decay, 1000 seems pretty steep don't you think? as well as the hourly decay would also be kind of harsh since some people still want to do PvE content... forcing them to pvp all day everyday until the season is over is kind of unnecessary.

1000 is definitely a bit much. Maybe I'd lower it to 100 max unless they overhaul literally everything even point gain /loss. And 10 games could be a lot depending on queue time for role. I think RDPS would have to wait(not even play just wait) for like almost 2 hours worth of time for pvp a day just to maintain their ranks, and honestly even though some of us are no-lifeing it right now, we totally have lives outside of the game and I think a lot of us have raid days too. So maybe like 2 - 3 games max.

They'd never make it that difficult to maintain it anyway.

[Zetsumei_Tsunarashi]

I was with you all the way until point decay, 1000 seems pretty steep don't you think? as well as the hourly decay would also be kind of harsh since some people still want to do PvE content... forcing them to pvp all day everyday until the season is over is kind of unnecessary.

There has to be some kind of incentive to keep people queuing throughout the season.

In the current environment, feast season consists of a heavy push in the first week or so to gain as high of a point value as possible, and once people are comfortable that their position in the ladder is relatively stable, all of those players will stop queuing so they don't risk losing anymore points. They will only queue up if their position becomes compromised, which doesn't happen regularly because most of the competitors have also stopped queuing. This leaves only people below the top 100 left in the queue, and the queue times become so long that it becomes nearly impossible to reach the point values that the people who played in the first week were able to achieve during that initial period of high activity.

The point decay gives players a reason to keep doing matches. In the scenario where players have to do a set number of matches to avoid a penalty, as long as the number of matches required is not an excessive amount, it's fair to have a harsh penalty, since you have a reasonable amount of time to avoid the penalty. It ensures that people can't just sit on their points the whole season, and without a harsh penalty, people would just ignore the requirement. In the slow decay scenario, yes there is a constant decay, but it's slow enough that you can recover from it as long as you play a few games per day. Either scenario I feel is a reasonable solution that would serve to eliminate the current problem.

[Jigokunoreizasan]

snip

I agree there needs to be some sort of penalty for sitting on points, but 1000 is just to much, 1000 is about 45-50 wins worth. 100 points is a reasonable decay, it's 4 wins worth.

[Zetsumei_Tsunarashi]

I agree there needs to be some sort of penalty for sitting on points, but 1000 is just to much, 1000 is about 45-50 wins worth. 100 points is a reasonable decay, it's 4 wins worth.

The number is not so important, it just has to work out so that the penalty for failing to complete the requirement is greater than the risk of losing all the matches. Otherwise people will avoid taking the risk. So for example, let's say the requirement to avoid the penalty is 5 matches per day, and failing to complete this is -100. You have to weigh this against the risk of losing all 5 of those matches. So if you lose 15-20 points per loss, you may decide that it's better to just not queue as the difference is not very much. Whereas if it was say -200 it's definitely better to do the 5 matches. So yeah it doesn't have to be -1000 but you see the issue.