155 replies to this topic

[JC Daxion]

Aside from just having more people playing what could be done from a game side of things that would make this group be in a better spot? It was one thing i really noticed about going 8v8 was that T1's were not dropping in t3 matches anywhere as much.

On the same token t3's were not in t5's doing the same.

For me i'm a middle of the road player, I'm too good to play with 5's, but not quick enough or i just don't play top/meta mechs to be consistent in t1 matches so that leaves me in no man's land. I play the game to have fun but it's also nice to be playing around with folks near your level of play.

So what can be done to improve the middle class so to speak? Do you think possible the event cue could be used to improve it? Similar to a Solaris single tier match weekend, maybe have a Tier event? T1 mash up only letting top T1's fight it out, or maybe it's t5 weekend or something. i dunno if that would make folks made though saying why can't i play this time. i'm missing out on x rewards! But perhaps it could be used to give folks the chance to just play against their own tier. (locking the event so maybe it takes someones rating from the previous month or something so people don't just tank their tier to play said event.

i know mm is an issue that people want looked into as well, but to me this is more about how to make the middle level skilled players have a better experience and in turn help out the new player experience so they are not getting tossed in with them as much.

I realize that part of the issue is T1's only make up about 15% of the player base which is why T3 get sucked into those matches fairly often but i guess there is the crux of the issue.


Let me just add, No it's not that i just want to be stomping newbies and getting stomped is obviously not fun. The point i'm making is there really isn't a middle level road at this time. In that middle group you either end up stomping or being the stomped, the matches and levels swing so wildly. Maybe outside of more players there isn't a fix, but it's something I've been pondering.

[LordNothing]

middle tier is the best place to be, matchmaking wise. you more likely to be placed with people of your own tier. also if placed with other tiers, you alternate between the upper and lower tiers with equal frequency.

[MW Waldorf Statler]

its not the Game ,its not the MM, its the Playerbase and 70% of the Mankind is egomanic, narcistic and stupid

[1Exitar1]

It seems like the middle tier people are the ones that have been here long enough, or played enough matches to have finally clawed their way out of tier 5, but they just want to make things go BOOM. So, they will run all over the place shooting at whatever. Just slightly better than tier 5s. Most of them do not want to put in the work to become top tier.

That being said; I am pretty much in that grouping. I try to do well, I pay attention to my fellow teammates and try and follow their lead and I watch videos of some of the tier 1 players. I'm just getting old, slowing reflexes and bad eyes. Hopefully the last one will get better once my new glasses come in!

How do we make them better? No clue. Getting the mm to make better groupings would help. I mean, I played a match that had at least one tier 1 player and 2 cadets! This was right after the 8v8 weekend.

[Akamia Terizen]

“Do well, but not perfect” seems to be the key to not only get out of the bottom tier, but stay in the middle tiers, if one wants to be there. lol

[PocketYoda]

To make the tiers better overall you need to one remove groups and two stop mixing and matching different tiers together.

[Curccu]

Nomad Tech, on 29 March 2022 - 10:14 PM, said:

To make the tiers better overall you need to one remove groups and two stop mixing and matching different tiers together.

once again groups are not really an issue.
and to stop mixing tiers would mean extremely long queue times outside prime times

[LordNothing]

1Exitar1, on 29 March 2022 - 08:55 PM, said:

It seems like the middle tier people are the ones that have been here long enough, or played enough matches to have finally clawed their way out of tier 5, but they just want to make things go BOOM. So, they will run all over the place shooting at whatever. Just slightly better than tier 5s. Most of them do not want to put in the work to become top tier.

That being said; I am pretty much in that grouping. I try to do well, I pay attention to my fellow teammates and try and follow their lead and I watch videos of some of the tier 1 players. I'm just getting old, slowing reflexes and bad eyes. Hopefully the last one will get better once my new glasses come in!

How do we make them better? No clue. Getting the mm to make better groupings would help. I mean, I played a match that had at least one tier 1 player and 2 cadets! This was right after the 8v8 weekend.

thing is the ultra bads are about as rare as the elites. most players are average, they started average and they have never moved above average. ive never been lower than t3. which is where i was placed with the initial seeding when the tier system was implemented. now that they start new players in t4, the average people bubble up to t3 fast and stay there. the ones who are good enough continue on. if a player is exceptionally bad they go the other way. the players who seem to complain the most about the mm system are those in the edge tiers. they are the ones with the fewest peers in the pool. so having middle tiers complain is silly to me. its the best place to be.

8v8 was part of the reason i bubbled up to t2. i certainly wasn't playing any better. but it did remove a lot of inept players and a lot of skilled players from my matches. there have been several 1s and 5s who say that mm is worse under 8v8. but thats because its impossible to source 16 (or 24) t1-2s or t5-4s at the same time. you might be able to source a lance at most. it is however possible to source that many t3s, the most numerous tier.

[TheCaptainJZ]

8v8 is better able to match tiers because it only needs 2/3 of the normal amount of players to make a match. Given the same number of players, this translates into 50% more matches. If the game was rebalanced (especially MM) around 8v8, it might be more successful. Short of lowering the number of players in a match, the only way to make matches better is to greatly increase the number of players playing the game or reduce differences between players. That last part means to reduce the number of variables between player performance which won't happen. It would be like reducing the variety of mechs or builds possible to reduce the kinds of variances between players. If all players played the same mech and loadout, the PSR values would be far more reflective of individual player skill. Of course, none of us want to play that kind of game.
Obviously, groups have the largest skewing power over the MM. I wonder if it would be possible to have group queue back (maybe even reduced to 6v6) if QP was dropped to 8v8 with groups of only 2 allowed.

[Akamia Terizen]

LordNothing, on 30 March 2022 - 05:14 AM, said:

thing is the ultra bads are about as rare as the elites. most players are average, they started average and they have never moved above average. ive never been lower than t3. which is where i was placed with the initial seeding when the tier system was implemented. now that they start new players in t4, the average people bubble up to t3 fast and stay there. the ones who are good enough continue on. if a player is exceptionally bad they go the other way. the players who seem to complain the most about the mm system are those in the edge tiers. they are the ones with the fewest peers in the pool. so having middle tiers complain is silly to me. its the best place to be.

8v8 was part of the reason i bubbled up to t2. i certainly wasn't playing any better. but it did remove a lot of inept players and a lot of skilled players from my matches. there have been several 1s and 5s who say that mm is worse under 8v8. but thats because its impossible to source 16 (or 24) t1-2s or t5-4s at the same time. you might be able to source a lance at most. it is however possible to source that many t3s, the most numerous tier.

That reminds me... How did I end up in tier 5?

I only had maybe 5 games on a dinosaur of a PC that MWO was practically unplayable on, in the game's earliest years... I didn't even recognize there was a tier system until last year, when I started borrowing someone else's PC to play just so that I could grind out some specific events I wanted before I got a PC of my own in January of this year.

Did I end up in tier 5 because I was playing on a potato?!

[DaZur]

Middle tier is exactly that... The middle. That's the whole premise of a tiered ranking.

If you are middle tier (3) you are actually above average as you statistically perform well enough to maintain that station. It takes a lot more effort to climb statistically that it does to regress in the MWO format.

Tier three IMHO is the toughest tier to have consistent success as you have the widest sampling of players with potentially the widest disparity in personal skill level, experience and game-play mechanics...

There is no real fix for this... Either a player gets better, maintains status quo or regresses. The problem is not tiers... The problem is that middle tier is preverbal Wapatuli of the player base.

Edited by DaZur, 30 March 2022 - 07:16 AM.

[martian]

Akamia Terizen, on 30 March 2022 - 06:58 AM, said:

That reminds me... How did I end up in tier 5?

I only had maybe 5 games on a dinosaur of a PC that MWO was practically unplayable on, in the game's earliest years... I didn't even recognize there was a tier system until last year, when I started borrowing someone else's PC to play just so that I could grind out some specific events I wanted before I got a PC of my own in January of this year.

Did I end up in tier 5 because I was playing on a potato?!

Here comes the explanation:

► All MWO players - every single one, fresh Cadets included - were moved to the mid-Tier 3 in July 2020. ▼

► In December 2020 PGI made another movement: All players registered after July 2020 with less than 20-25 games have been moved to Tier 5. The PGI's original intent was to move those new Cadets (i.e. new players registered after July 2020 and with less than 20-25 games) to Tier 5, so they would not have to face skilled Tier 1 and Tier 2 players. ▼

► How I understand it, that was the intent ... ▼

► Now insert a piece of PGI's programming. ▼

► All players with less than 20-25 games played after July 2020 were moved to Tier 5, even if they have been registered since 2011. ▼

► Have fun!

[KaptinOrk]

I've solved this by surrendering to apathy and accepting the tier/PSR system and MM for what they are. Yes, they're flawed in a lot of ways and some matches are wildly f****d up, but the game is approaching 10 years old, I'm just happy that it's still around and more playable now than it has been in the last few years.

In my opinion, the best way to improve the middle ground is to just play for the fun of it. Pull out your favorite 'mechs, load up your favorite builds and just try to go with the flow.

[JC Daxion]

DaZur, on 30 March 2022 - 07:15 AM, said:

Middle tier is exactly that... The middle. That's the whole premise of a tiered ranking.

If you are middle tier (3) you are actually above average as you statistically perform well enough to maintain that station. It takes a lot more effort to climb statistically that it does to regress in the MWO format.

Tier three IMHO is the toughest tier to have consistent success as you have the widest sampling of players with potentially the widest disparity in personal skill level, experience and game-play mechanics...

There is no real fix for this... Either a player gets better, maintains status quo or regresses. The problem is not tiers... The problem is that middle tier is preverbal Wapatuli of the player base.

That's the thing though, there really is no middle. Your either in with people that don't get the game, or have bad aim or just screwing around,, or your in with the T1's playing meta.. If your in the middle your constantly being made to carry,, Or your the one holding back top comp guys. It's just a very odd place to be. If Your lucky it ends up being an even split.. aka play 9 matches you have 3 t5 matches, 3 t1 matches and 3 t3.. but it doesn't seam to roll that way.. it seams to either stuff you in the low or the high and never just a nice middle ground. Could i grind up to t2 and play there in fact i was basically there for a bit when i restarted again, but i dropped down leveling lights. But it was just not as much fun playing those meta mechs and made the game stressful. What makes it worse is how often people start ranting about the horrible team. For me i can take the loss, i don't like the raging that happens far more often when i'm in the higher levels. (is that what people call try hards?)

Like i said, when 8v8 was here i really noticed the matches just were better. (most likely because t1 steam roller teams were not hitting my matches) but i was also not playing with total newbies either. Maybe it just happened that my night went that way, but i dunno, it was 3 hours one night and then i think an hour the night before and it was all just a lot of fun.

I dunno the answer, maybe if they did some MM work it would help and make that middle area a lot more fun. Challenging is good, but stomps aren't fun either way really. It's like it's the Stomp or Be stomped Tier.

Edited by JC Daxion, 30 March 2022 - 07:36 PM.

[MrMadguy]

Nothing can help. As more and more players quit this game, average shifts toward more hardcore players.

This slowly makes game more and more unplayable for average players like me:

[Dogstar]

Hmm, they could try this:

Tier 5-4 12x12
Tier 3-2 8x8
Tier 1 4x4

or some variation thereon

[cazeral]

With the current population, probably the only way to improve T3 would be to limit it to T4 - T2 instead of as I have been seeing ,T1 and T5 slipping in and throwing the balance off one way or the other.

Any kind of messing with X v X numbers will just end up in a dog pile. Yes there are some folk that enjoy 8v8, good for them, but all you have to do is keep reading the forums to see that the majority are happy with 12v12, so that's not an option.

Bringing back Scouting Mode could be a possibility if it was reworked to "last-mech standing" and so avoid the stealth-exit dive that made a mockery of pitting two lances against each other if one side didn't want to engage. This is most likely quite workable and could cater for the 4 man units far easier than trying to enforce wholesale changes across the population and see more folk leave because of it.

Of course, and likely to be least wanted, mechs could be forced to drop as stock, removing the reliance on meta. The uproar would no doubt been hilarious and prohibitive, but I have played in stock matches before and actually, they bring a whole new scope to the battlefield.

Short answer then is; nothing that can be done unless the population picks up significantly

[Curccu]

MrMadguy, on 30 March 2022 - 11:37 PM, said:

This slowly makes game more and more unplayable for average players like me:

Well you are improving... your average match score past 5 months is over 250 so I don't think its getting unplayable if you are actually doing better than earlier.

Dogstar, on 31 March 2022 - 12:53 AM, said:

Hmm, they could try this:

Tier 5-4 12x12
Tier 3-2 8x8
Tier 1 4x4

or some variation thereon

Why do I have to play scouting only? I mean I like scouting as long as scouting part (collecting **** and smokediving) is removed but 4v4 all the time and I'll quit the game.

[GARION26]

MrMadguy, on 30 March 2022 - 11:37 PM, said:

Nothing can help. As more and more players quit this game, average shifts toward more hardcore players.

This slowly makes game more and more unplayable for average players like me:

Don't forget over time damage output, potential damage taken have increased which means match score on average increased. If you played in beta with unquirked IS mechs there is a very different amount of damage to be taken on the other side, and potential damage output with quirks, clan and various tech additions. That's aside from the fact that early on by definition everyone was a newbie and now (unfortunately) there are less new players.

We'd expect average match score now to be higher then the early years of MWO.

[Vxheous]

MrMadguy, on 30 March 2022 - 11:37 PM, said:

Nothing can help. As more and more players quit this game, average shifts toward more hardcore players.

This slowly makes game more and more unplayable for average players like me:

That graph literally shows the vast majority of players sit between 201-250 matchscore...which is where you also sit, how is that skewing towards "hardcore" players?