PvP Crystalline Conflict Duoqueue good idea?

[Iyrnwaen]

I'm not wildly overexaggerating at all and can provide video footage next time if thats what it would take. If I queue up with one to three people I am almost always in the same match. It is not difficult at all and people have been gaming the frontlines system for a long time. So not sure how this is news.

2-3 FC mates and I did it one night and got in the same match but not on the same team (usually 2 on one team 1 on the other) 90% of the time. It is not hard to do.

Every now and again one of us wouldn't get a queue pop but 9 times out of 10 we were in the same match and this was on a Saturday night. So I dunno. I'd lean more towards my own experience and experience of all the players I know who are currently doing so over a single statement of how difficult it is personally.

I mean all it takes is one person on a team of 2-4 to be on your team to throw the match to provide win trades. My friends and I are just jerks to each other enough to be willing to murder each other if we end up on opposing teams haha

EDIT: I should add that we lost plenty when doing so lol. Some team matchups and player skill is objectively better than us and/or sometimes you just have a bad match. Our win/loss ratio was about the same with way more fun had between the group and we coordinated our glams as Dwarves so it was "fun" even.

You're really moving the goal posts if this is about win-trading now.
First of all, there's virtually zero incentive for win-trading in CC. The matches are already short, winning doesn't generate substantially more resources than losing, and the rank rewards aren't particularly desirable.
They designed it this way specifically to make that behavior less appealing.
As for the synchronous queuing, your experience is the same as mine. If you're in the same bracket with a small group, you can somewhat reliably get in the same match,
but you have no control over who ends up on which team.
There's a huge difference between 5 people queuing separately and fighting each other 3v2, which is what you can manage right now with a little effort,
and 5 people queuing as a group and wiping the floor with every pug they're matched against, which is what you're suggesting should be implemented

Edit: I feel like I'm being needlessly hostile. I totally understand your desire to play with your friends, and I'd like to be able to play with mine as well.
It's silly that there's no easy way to do that right now. I just don't think letting groups queue into solo ranked is the right solution.

[Tobias_Azuryon]

I just don't think letting groups queue into solo ranked is the right solution.

I was going to ask where the assumptions were coming from but I see your edit and no harm done at all.

Especially with the other frustrations in the mode and the other problems in it, I get how it can be really irritating to see people speak about something they want to do even if for good purpose when you've seen it abused in the past.


In terms of win trading, as one other post is on the front page, one of the tops on Aether is someone who does such and the reason I shifted the posts so to speak is to promote the following tangent:

People are already queueing together by gaming the queue system > Then people are using that to their advantage and making it 4v5 > Then people are climbing the ranks > If people are cheating already but people just think they aren't at least knowing that people can group up means you can stack the odds in your favor with some friends/fc mates at some point.

This is happening in the background but because there's no "official" group queue people act like it isn't. I think most/all the people I've talked to want to play with friends not because they want to roflstomp anyone in particular. I mean for everyone I've talked to it's just because even having ONE other person you know who won't eat dirt in the background can change the way you feel about the mode and engaging with it constantly you know?

I agree that letting groups do ranked SOLO is probably a problem, but solo "group" or multi tiers are scaring people because they think the modes will be empty in the future. The issue is if you have no tiers or structure those same people who win trade and cheat and group up will still be the ones dominating hte mode and playing it the most pushing out literally any other players who want to engage with it.

Combine this with the fact that CC will look for people above or below your current tier to level up it could easily be:

I get alt to silver, alt gets main to gold, I get alt to gold, alt gets me to plat, and so on.

Because the system is fundamentally broken and we have little/no control over it, I'm always going to prefer having even the slightest bit of power by comparison. Even if I get stomped by a group of 5 with a friend, at least I got to play with a friend and not get watch someone dick around so their friend could win or phone it in because their group got split.

I understand your perspective and where it's coming from, and I get that I'm presenting an "absolute" vs a chance, but at the same time that can push the absolute in our favor so I'm going to vouch for being in control of what my match could be vs not.

All that being said, I like the idea of a duo match up or something where two people can join up together or something because if you have 2 pairs of 2 that means singles are never locked out which means the queues stay populated, and it means that that you're not splitting it off into like 3v3 2v2 etc.

At the end of the day I'll jump through hoops like I have to with front lines if I need to, I just want to play with friends and have fun.

I'd give full team Ranked Queues their own special leaderboard, should a nascent esports community start developing around CC this would be the queue to watch. You'd probably get a decent interest from Streamers and content creators, a lot of the big ones like Zepla and Mr. Happy have been super into PVP so giving them the ability to team up and stream matches would do great for the mode.

This is another thing. Before the mode dies it's a wonder why we have premade pvp teams that can be formed and like no way to use them outside of feast apparently?

As a newcomer to pvp this is baffling to me as we all prepped because we thought we'd HAVE to have a team to compete but now there's no reason to and there's no good way to play with friends, making it annoying. Like I said before my friends and I wanna play as Dwarf glams because our FC is named the Laliho Lolligaggers. Sure it'll be a meme but some of us are good at pvp and like the mode and some are just here to have a good time. It'd still be fun to do.

It seems like we're shooting ourselves in the foot by locking the mode from the most obvious forms of communication and group organization so that it's dead before it has a chance to lift off the ground. As someone who never took pvp seriously before I can understand why the pvpers of the past are upset that the mode has always been the red headed step child of the game. It deserves more imo.

I like the options presented here and I think it suits the best of both worlds honestly.

[Iyrnwaen]

I think most/all the people I've talked to want to play with friends not because they want to roflstomp anyone in particular.

I think this is correct, and I was just being pointlessly dickish about it because this forum makes me cranky. I'd like to play CC with my wife and our friends; not because I want to wreck pugs, but simply because it would be fun to play together. I have strong feelings about the integrity of solo ranked, but the lack of any kind of group queue is damaging that integrity by forcing people who want to play together to try to manipulate solo queue into letting them do so.

The challenge is finding a solution that creates a fun match for both sides. Running into a full pre-made in a pug feels terrible, but so does waiting 20 minutes in a queue with 4 other people waiting for a fair match. Striking a perfect balance between queue times and match quality is an art form no one has mastered yet (though there's an understandable tendency to err on the side of faster queues since people are going to complain about the matchmaking no matter what, and the present state of CC is a perfect example).

All that being said, I like the idea of a duo match up or something where two people can join up together or something because if you have 2 pairs of 2 that means singles are never locked out which means the queues stay populated, and it means that that you're not splitting it off into like 3v3 2v2 etc.

I'm drawing most of my feelings about this from my MOBA background. I remember Heroes of the Storm in particular going through, like, a dozen different iterations trying to solve the group queue problem. The issue always ended up being that solo players won't voluntarily queue into group play as filler, which means you can't field 2+2+1 or 4+1 comps, and duos vastly outnumber trios, so trios get instant queues while duos wait forever. On top of that, 5-stacks have a massive advantage over the 3+2's, especially if we're assuming an MMR band that loosens as the queue time goes up (meaning the duo that's been waiting the longest gets the first trio that queues, regardless of how far apart they are in MMR).

Allowing groups of any size to queue into Casual is a start, but the result tends to be the sort of trashy Quick Match mode you'll find in lots of games. It's way better than nothing if you just want to play with your friends, but it doesn't end up being a particularly fulfilling experience long-term.

I've always felt like the best solution is in the realm of building out robust in-game tools for finding other players who are interested in group play - something substantially more intuitive and less cumbersome than the silly Fellowship Finder, certainly - and then incentivizing forming groups aggressively enough to override the tendency for most players to just tunnel solo queue instead of going to all the trouble.

[AzureChrysanthemum]

I'm drawing most of my feelings about this from my MOBA background. I remember Heroes of the Storm in particular going through, like, a dozen different iterations trying to solve the group queue problem. The issue always ended up being that solo players won't voluntarily queue into group play as filler, which means you can't field 2+2+1 or 4+1 comps, and duos vastly outnumber trios, so trios get instant queues while duos wait forever. On top of that, 5-stacks have a massive advantage over the 3+2's, especially if we're assuming an MMR band that loosens as the queue time goes up (meaning the duo that's been waiting the longest gets the first trio that queues, regardless of how far apart they are in MMR).

Allowing groups of any size to queue into Casual is a start, but the result tends to be the sort of trashy Quick Match mode you'll find in lots of games. It's way better than nothing if you just want to play with your friends, but it doesn't end up being a particularly fulfilling experience long-term.

I've always felt like the best solution is in the realm of building out robust in-game tools for finding other players who are interested in group play - something substantially more intuitive and less cumbersome than the silly Fellowship Finder, certainly - and then incentivizing forming groups aggressively enough to override the tendency for most players to just tunnel solo queue instead of going to all the trouble.

Heroes of the Storm was... special from what I remember of playing before I ragequit out. It had a lot of design that would benefit 5-stacks WAY more than it would benefit them in other games due to how the shared experience worked. I detest Summoner's Rift in League but I will play with friends if they have a full team together and honestly they seem to more or less have the matchmaking well in hand, although that could be due to the relative player population. And that's with League matches in general taking way longer and having way less comeback potential. I think you can manage being a bit more loose in initial experiments with matchmaking for CC, the matches are so short that especially in quick play it's not going to be as big of an emotional investment as knowing you're going to lose 5 minutes into a 20+ minute game. Even running some ranked I feel the sting of defeat way less than I would in other long-form MOBAs because I can just jump in and try again and I also know that my rank can't degrade past a certain point which is also nice. All that to say I think SE has some room, and very much SHOULD experiment a bit. It won't be perfect for a good while, but it's worth having because we should be able to play together with our friends in this mode.

[FoxyAreku]

Duo queue and full premade queue should definitely be a thing.

Or really just let parties of any size queue into casual matches. Because who cares-it's casual.