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Post by stokr on Oct 30, 2017 14:23:31 GMT -5
I just need to note that this is all anecdotal, but it's all I've got. I'm too lazy to track everything in a spreadsheet.
I've been playing War Robots for over a year now. I've played it on both Android and GR. The super majority of my time is solo. If one can separate the MM challenges around population levels the behavior is very consistent. When I reach a 72%-74% win rate I will eventually begin to lose. I believe the starting value for the losses varies depending upon pilot skill and/or gear. Essentially, the pilot's ability to overcome their own teammates deficiencies dictates when the losses will start. The more capable they are, or the more they over gear their opponents the higher the win rate before they start to see problems. The lesser their gear and/or skill the lower the win rate is when the MM shifts gears.
I used to think I was being matched against tougher opponents to bring me down, but after being in GR my view has shifted. If I review the end of every match, there are a couple of consistencies in the majority of my wins and the majority of my losses. Those two are the average damages of my teammates, as well as their beacon counts.
When I'm on a downward trend two things will start to happen. First, my teammates average damages will start to go down. Second, my teammates will almost cease to flip beacons. Mixed within are some very close matchups which could go either way, but aside from those, when I'm going down, until I hit bottom my teammates will barely average 200k and beacons are ignored.
I know this isn't just me, because I've been on the other side and watched good players take a beating, 'cause their team isn't doing anything to help them. I've seen solo F/\L with near a 12/12 hangar end up losing, 'cause no one, not a single other player on their team picked up a beacon. Not one. Plus, none of them did squat for damage. He didn't have a chance.
It's when I started paying attention to not just my team, but my opponents I started to see it more often. In particular, are the beacons. I am convinced at this time that the average and peak beacons collected are tracked and are used by the MM to swing matches along with average damage.
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Post by Poopface on Oct 30, 2017 14:42:27 GMT -5
I still read folks expressing frustrations with the MM. I'll be doing an article that touches on this (and much, much more) shortly, and wanted to get some more current examples of what the problems are, particularly since I don't experience them for the most part for whatever reason. Okay. General frustrations with the game. I feel there's a bit of a gear ceiling now. I don't know where to point my finger at, but despite my attempts to stay reasonably close to "The Joneses" I'm drifting farther and farther back from the pack. For a short period of time, I was really close to getting my core mechs to 9 and my weaponry to 11. I don't know if it's the recent flurry of mech releases (「fluffernutter」ing Haechi) or the weapons or what, but very recently I'm finding that I'm spending much of my matches just trying to burst Anciles. As a result, I'm doing far less damage which means much less silver intake. Until recently, I was doing reasonably well in matches -- typically scoring #3 or #4 but with the occasional #1 thrown in. Since 3.2, high points have me at #3. My average damage has dropped 100k since. I'm looking at another hanger overhaul just to do some damage. And I'm still not making much in the way of silver. If it weren't for the occasional 12h boost from the recent event, I'd be scraping by with 150k silver per match. I've been Expert 2 for quite a while, but my ranking has dropped 150 points recently, too. I'm still seeing a lot of 11/11, 12/12, and now MK2 stuff thrown in. My hanger is largely level 8 mechs with level 10 and 11 weapons. I'm getting bent over by Dashes, picked off by Trebs, water tortured by Hydras, and bled out by Tulus. I guess I'm not adjusting fast enough to everything. I can't wait to see the Soultrain or whatever the hell the chain lightning thing is called. The game still seems buggy. A lot of graphical hitches where they didn't seem nearly as obvious before the last few patches. It's hard enough to hit dash mechs without having crap stutter-stepping across the screen. As I've been saying for close to a year now, Pixonic drops their content so quickly, there is no chance to even remotely get close to "catching up". I'm a F2P player. I've never denied it and I haven't said those that spend money don't deserve some sort of edge or bonus vs those of us who're leeching off of them. That said, the imbalance is so overwhelming that unless you're nearly bed-ridden (as one of my clanmates is), you seem to stand no chance at gaining anything close to similar standing as a "whale." I'm fine with not getting all the super awesome stuff. I would like to be able to play a competitive game, though. I don't want to get farmed. I'm rapidly getting to the point where I'm feeling farmed, unable to compete, unable to improve my equipment, and circling back to " finding my happy spot" which I'd really rather not do. Returning to the same spot a month and a half later is a bad thing.
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Post by H1151 on Oct 30, 2017 14:46:06 GMT -5
I’m iOS Expert 2 with a roughly 10/11 hangar of 3 Griffs, a Carnage and a Rhino. Here is my feedback and experience on the MM, because I believe fixing this will reinvigorate my interest in the game. Note: As a F2P pilot I now accept I will not be able to get new equipment (which had been one exciting element keeping my interest), so resolving the MM or expanding the custom match support to find/place pilots outside the MM is all that remains as a possibility to retain me as a player who is admittedly drifting away. - Expert league is painful. I entered as a 9/9 hangar in May and have remained here until today. I do believe part of the pain is a steep learning curve (skill), but this is compounded by facing max hangars (gear). It is difficult to learn when you face gear you have no hope of overcoming (maxed pilots always lament “why do noobs use so much LR and MR?” - the answer is so we can survive longer than 3 minutes). It is also hard to identify in-game who has a higher hangar. In the all to common back and forth between E2 and E3 you can face anywhere from 8/8 to MKII 12/12 hangars in an Expert match. Different tactics are required for each with no clear way to identify which to use. - There is no (zero) incentive to climb leagues. In fact the incentive is to drop leagues so you can gain resources over lower players, giving you an advantage to leveling your hangar. But there is then incentive to remain low so as to acquire even more resources for the newest gear. Insta maxing new gear or going to MKII is only possible with stockpiles of AU and Ag or lots of cash. - Damage focus for leagues encourages narrow leveling of meta gear to that which yields the most damage (and subsequently more resources and league progression). It also encourages damage focus in game at the expense of winning and teamwork - chasing damage vs trying to win. - New bots have created a significant shift in player placement across leagues, as the significantly greater damage potential certain hangars provide has caused the rapid rise of newer players with specific gear and the drop of older players with older gear. Example: in the two weeks after Dash bots were available for direct purchase vs random BM spins I dropped from Expert 1 to Expert 3 without changing my hangar or play style. I have remained in E2 ever since. - When exactly were they planning to remove rewards from the LQ? And what is the plan after that when the strategy then becomes to just take a little longer and Fade? - I don’t squad and am not in a clan. I see no reason to do so anyway until I have a maxed hangar for reasons mentioned already in this thread. I am already thrown into squad matches as a random and can confirm that any non-full-Champ squads always face full champs and almost always lose badly. - MKII: for all the long/time players with maxed hangars who do not spend a lot on this game - see my first post about the experience in Expert as a 9/9 hangar. This will be your world soon, as it’s clear MKII is part of the E-Champ MM and not excluded from lower pilots. - Consistency: IMO one out of every 10 matches ends in under 3 minutes (route/spawn raid). I have not had a match that went down to the wire in weeks. My placement as a 9/9 hangar was consistently at the bottom of the damage table and I only maintained placement due to wins (which I often contributed little towards). Now as a 10/11 hangar I’m either top or bottom of damage table but no consistency for win/loss - often I see big streaks one way or the other (but always between 40% - 60%). You really can feel the tug to stay around 50%. Final thought: I yearn for a “fair” fight so skill can determine outcome. I had previously accepted that I needed to wait a year or so to level a max hangar before that would happen, so I leveled a narrow “meta” hangar to get there. Now MKII doubled the mountain size and increased the challenges to climb. If I’m always at a disadvantage vs opponents there is little or no incentive to play except to grind so I can get better gear. Right now, grinding for new gear is no longer a reasonable proposition - so I have no more real incentive to keep playing. I can second this. Every word. I sincerely applaud hi5 for bothering to write all of this up. However, haven’t we been through all this ”what’s wrong with mm” bovine excrement already like a few (hundred) times? Isn’t it already clear, that it is there, because it makes money for Pix/mail.ru?
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Post by Deleted on Oct 30, 2017 15:39:06 GMT -5
I will be going on a bit of speculation and rant right now. Matchmaking has been absolutely terrible for me and my entire clan -- to almost the part where half of use are not playing War Robots anymore. I am in Champion's League on iOS and the matches are complete 「dookie」. In every match, it is always a 4-1 beacon spawn raid for either the blue team or the red team. Games rarely last longer than 5 minutes and a typical match consists of 2-3 Champions, 2-3 Masters and an occasional Diamond player and the other team consists of 0-2 Champions, 3-4 Experts and a Master or Diamond player. If you want to talk hangar strength, there's always a team with one or more 'Whales' and the team with the 'Whale' or more 'Whales' is almost guaranteed to win. In other words, the team with more Dash robots will mostly win, clan battle or not. And in Tankers Ditch Match, the team with more tankers who eject their robots all out from the start loses. I think it's just pretty sad that the previous sill-based environment of War Robots has just come to that. Also, the MK2 is a huge problem. Pixonic should just remove the MK2s from the game and give the Whales their money back or swap to the hangar matchmaking. The entire point of an Elo Matchmaking is based on or mostly based on skill. And I really do see that as the entire problem with the matchmaking. If you want to admit it or not, War Robots is a complete Pay to Win game. If you could buy an entire hangar of 12/12s, not even. 10/10 Orkan Haechis, you could shoot up from Private's League to Champion's League in a month if you play a decent amount. With so much of the match being dependent on gears, no amount of tweaking with an Elo system will work. It must be hangar based with hefty penalties for overpowered gear if Pixonic still has the faintest idea of keeping War Robots fun. I run 9/10s and 9/9s in Champion's League and I'm used to a slight gear dominance when fighting enemies. I can only imagine how hard it must be for Silver and Gold Leagued players to compete with Tankers with gear that is double their level. And Pixonic knows about the problem. The Elo Matchmaking was implemented around February so that would make it about 9 or 10 months ago. Pixonic basically heard all the complaints in the Roundtable about the matchmaking and took it for 「dookie」. I speculate that Pixonic does not want to fix the matchmaking, but to keep it unbalanced to encourage spending. It does not take 9 「fluffernutter」ing months to introduce a matchmaking system and make it presentable. It doesn't. The Matchmaking is in a worse state that it was 6 months ago and it's getting worse. I want to pull up the issue of clan battles and squadding for a moment. As Pixonic claims, squadding will pit you against another squad. But, that isn't really the case in Champion League. I made it a point to myself a week ago that I was going to leave the battle from the start if I am to fight a Dash bot clan. It's simply not fun having zero chance to fight back and deal decent damage to said robots. A lot of the time, I would leave the battle only to join the battle against another completely different squad battle (all Dash bots). The Matchmaking could not wait 20 seconds to pit those two squads together and decided to put them against complete random teammates. This is been happening for a while, especially. I got 3 Dash bot clan battles (which I left) in a row today. No amount of articles criticizing Pixonic for their Matchmaking will work anymore. They know the problem, and they refuse to fix it. The point was clearly made when Pixonic decided to ignore basically all the criticism about MK2s in many of the War Robot social media sites and head on with it. I understand that you may not have the time to actively play the game Dredd77, but I think you'll find the problems with the matchmaking if you squad with someone from [AuEx] for a few matches with no Dashers, to see what the majority of the players are complain about. I do see guys from [AuEx] a decent amount in solo matches and they are some great players.
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Post by Mammoth Mk-2 on Oct 30, 2017 15:44:42 GMT -5
I actually have very little MM problems. Not common, just wanted to throw in my 2¢
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Post by Deleted on Oct 30, 2017 17:56:30 GMT -5
I just need to note that this is all anecdotal, but it's all I've got. I'm too lazy to track everything in a spreadsheet. I've been playing War Robots for over a year now. I've played it on both Android and GR. The super majority of my time is solo. If one can separate the MM challenges around population levels the behavior is very consistent. When I reach a 72%-74% win rate I will eventually begin to lose. I believe the starting value for the losses varies depending upon pilot skill and/or gear. Essentially, the pilot's ability to overcome their own teammates deficiencies dictates when the losses will start. The more capable they are, or the more they over gear their opponents the higher the win rate before they start to see problems. The lesser their gear and/or skill the lower the win rate is when the MM shifts gears. I used to think I was being matched against tougher opponents to bring me down, but after being in GR my view has shifted. If I review the end of every match, there are a couple of consistencies in the majority of my wins and the majority of my losses. Those two are the average damages of my teammates, as well as their beacon counts. When I'm on a downward trend two things will start to happen. First, my teammates average damages will start to go down. Second, my teammates will almost cease to flip beacons. Mixed within are some very close matchups which could go either way, but aside from those, when I'm going down, until I hit bottom my teammates will barely average 200k and beacons are ignored. I know this isn't just me, because I've been on the other side and watched good players take a beating, 'cause their team isn't doing anything to help them. I've seen solo F/\L with near a 12/12 hangar end up losing, 'cause no one, not a single other player on their team picked up a beacon. Not one. Plus, none of them did squat for damage. He didn't have a chance. It's when I started paying attention to not just my team, but my opponents I started to see it more often. In particular, are the beacons. I am convinced at this time that the average and peak beacons collected are tracked and are used by the MM to swing matches along with average damage. You're right. The beacons are tracked. As a Master1 player, I've noticed the same thing about my Expert teammates. They don't know what a beacon is. I have a screenshot, but 4 camper blues were next to the home beacon on Canyon, and no one moved to get it. As a Master with a sea of Experts on my team, my bots are only level 9. They don't last long out there against the other red Champion (yes, most likely higher than me) that is maxed or maybe Kbots and MKII gear. So I can't make a push and hope to survive. So I can only hope to do 800K to 1M in dmg, and maybe 1 or 2 beacons and that will be a lose. The rest of my team literally does nothing, like 300K or less and no beacons. The other Champion on my team will have less dmg, maybe 600K but more beacons, maybe 3. It basically becomes a battle of the state-sponsored seal clubbers, like the old Magnum Gepard days where the match was decided by the top player on each side. These matches used to be fair before, but now 1 red Champion Kbot hanger can decimate my entire team with 1.3M+ in dmg in 3 minutes by himself. Only on small maps like Powerplant, do I notice I can keep up with the red Kbot hanger, and I can inflict damage somewhat close to him. The only hope I have of winning is playing lights out, and doing 1.2M dmg by myself, which I have never done yet. But I have seen sometimes I get a blue Kbot Champion that has won the game by himself with 1.2M - 1.5M in dmg, and I'm left with the crumbs after 3 minutes thinking that was easy, where'd they all go, and then at the results screen go O, now I know what happened. I would be happy with a 50% War Robots. During the event, it took me 5 hours to win 8 games for the first 4 Magnum tasks. That's at least 6 games an hour, so let's say 32 games played during that time. I took screenshots of my profile during that time, and so my War Robots was 8/32 so down to 25% despite saying 42% or whatever. Even before the event, I was down in the dumps to 28-34% War Robots, and I have another clanmate with similar playstyle and stats to me, with same low War Robots. So NO, I don't believe it enforces 50% War Robots. Instead, like the above poster said, it gives you dumber and dumber teammates until you crack. Then it might throw you a bone. As a Master, I'm stuck in the middle. If I push for beacons and sacrifice my bot, I'll mech out and my team won't be able to hold it together for long. I watch them lose the advantage, and then start meching out entirely. Or I try to hold out, play cautious and just maintain 2 beacons, but I end up being the last man standing and/or lose at the 5 min mark due to beacons or being overwhelmed. Outside of the event, I employ the second strategy so I keep gaining points while losing over and over again. I've also noticed this in my smurf account, Gold1 4 slot hanger, 7/7 bots. I frequently get put up to play all Diamond 1 game with 2 Expert3, 2 Diamond1, and Diamond 3, with me being the sole Gold player. Only when I have a bad losing streak, then I get the all Gold games. And yeah, sometimes I see the same Expert on both accounts.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 30, 2017 19:32:31 GMT -5
I just need to note that this is all anecdotal, but it's all I've got. I'm too lazy to track everything in a spreadsheet. I've been playing War Robots for over a year now. I've played it on both Android and GR. The super majority of my time is solo. If one can separate the MM challenges around population levels the behavior is very consistent. When I reach a 72%-74% win rate I will eventually begin to lose. I believe the starting value for the losses varies depending upon pilot skill and/or gear. Essentially, the pilot's ability to overcome their own teammates deficiencies dictates when the losses will start. The more capable they are, or the more they over gear their opponents the higher the win rate before they start to see problems. The lesser their gear and/or skill the lower the win rate is when the MM shifts gears. I used to think I was being matched against tougher opponents to bring me down, but after being in GR my view has shifted. If I review the end of every match, there are a couple of consistencies in the majority of my wins and the majority of my losses. Those two are the average damages of my teammates, as well as their beacon counts. When I'm on a downward trend two things will start to happen. First, my teammates average damages will start to go down. Second, my teammates will almost cease to flip beacons. Mixed within are some very close matchups which could go either way, but aside from those, when I'm going down, until I hit bottom my teammates will barely average 200k and beacons are ignored. I know this isn't just me, because I've been on the other side and watched good players take a beating, 'cause their team isn't doing anything to help them. I've seen solo F/\L with near a 12/12 hangar end up losing, 'cause no one, not a single other player on their team picked up a beacon. Not one. Plus, none of them did squat for damage. He didn't have a chance. It's when I started paying attention to not just my team, but my opponents I started to see it more often. In particular, are the beacons. I am convinced at this time that the average and peak beacons collected are tracked and are used by the MM to swing matches along with average damage. You're right. The beacons are tracked. As a Master1 player, I've noticed the same thing about my Expert teammates. They don't know what a beacon is. I have a screenshot, but 4 camper blues were next to the home beacon on Canyon, and no one moved to get it. As a Master with a sea of Experts on my team, my bots are only level 9. They don't last long out there against the other red Champion (yes, most likely higher than me) that is maxed or maybe Kbots and MKII gear. So I can't make a push and hope to survive. So I can only hope to do 800K to 1M in dmg, and maybe 1 or 2 beacons and that will be a lose. The rest of my team literally does nothing, like 300K or less and no beacons. The other Champion on my team will have less dmg, maybe 600K but more beacons, maybe 3. It basically becomes a battle of the state-sponsored seal clubbers, like the old Magnum Gepard days where the match was decided by the top player on each side. These matches used to be fair before, but now 1 red Champion Kbot hanger can decimate my entire team with 1.3M+ in dmg in 3 minutes by himself. Only on small maps like Powerplant, do I notice I can keep up with the red Kbot hanger, and I can inflict damage somewhat close to him. The only hope I have of winning is playing lights out, and doing 1.2M dmg by myself, which I have never done yet. But I have seen sometimes I get a blue Kbot Champion that has won the game by himself with 1.2M - 1.5M in dmg, and I'm left with the crumbs after 3 minutes thinking that was easy, where'd they all go, and then at the results screen go O, now I know what happened. I would be happy with a 50% War Robots. During the event, it took me 5 hours to win 8 games for the first 4 Magnum tasks. That's at least 6 games an hour, so let's say 32 games played during that time. I took screenshots of my profile during that time, and so my War Robots was 8/32 so down to 25% despite saying 42% or whatever. Even before the event, I was down in the dumps to 28-34% War Robots, and I have another clanmate with similar playstyle and stats to me, with same low War Robots. So NO, I don't believe it enforces 50% War Robots. Instead, like the above poster said, it gives you dumber and dumber teammates until you crack. Then it might throw you a bone. As a Master, I'm stuck in the middle. If I push for beacons and sacrifice my bot, I'll mech out and my team won't be able to hold it together for long. I watch them lose the advantage, and then start meching out entirely. Or I try to hold out, play cautious and just maintain 2 beacons, but I end up being the last man standing and/or lose at the 5 min mark due to beacons or being overwhelmed. Outside of the event, I employ the second strategy so I keep gaining points while losing over and over again. I've also noticed this in my smurf account, Gold1 4 slot hanger, 7/7 bots. I frequently get put up to play all Diamond 1 game with 2 Expert3, 2 Diamond1, and Diamond 3, with me being the sole Gold player. Only when I have a bad losing streak, then I get the all Gold games. And yeah, sometimes I see the same Expert on both accounts. I just wanna say despite my criticisms, I'm mostly content to happy with the MM. If I don't play to win, and I just wanna do top damage, it's fun. But when I want to farm gold and get wins for event tasks, that's when the problems and biases of the MM become more of a problem for me. I was in a bad slump, and my dmg went down 100K around the time of the last patch and all the new bots/weapons/MKII came out. I came out of my slump, and my avg dmg went back up +130K to a new high and my War Robots went as high as 54% which I had not seen for months. But this was just part of the waves of up and down that the MM tries to impose, so I got the worst MM smack down when the event started. So even though as I was doing better than ever, my matches were going worst than ever at the start of the event. (25% win rate) Now, I'm afraid that if I try too hard, I will get the MM smackdown when I need to get wins again.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 30, 2017 19:36:47 GMT -5
I will be going on a bit of speculation and rant right now. Matchmaking has been absolutely terrible for me and my entire clan -- to almost the part where half of use are not playing War Robots anymore. I am in Champion's League on iOS and the matches are complete ?poo-poo?. In every match, it is always a 4-1 beacon spawn raid for either the blue team or the red team. Games rarely last longer than 5 minutes and a typical match consists of 2-3 Champions, 2-3 Masters and an occasional Diamond player and the other team consists of 0-2 Champions, 3-4 Experts and a Master or Diamond player. If you want to talk hangar strength, there's always a team with one or more 'Whales' and the team with the 'Whale' or more 'Whales' is almost guaranteed to win. In other words, the team with more Dash robots will mostly win, clan battle or not. And in Tankers Ditch Match, the team with more tankers who eject their robots all out from the start loses. I think it's just pretty sad that the previous sill-based environment of War Robots has just come to that. Also, the MK2 is a huge problem. Pixonic should just remove the MK2s from the game and give the Whales their money back or swap to the hangar matchmaking. The entire point of an Elo Matchmaking is based on or mostly based on skill. And I really do see that as the entire problem with the matchmaking. If you want to admit it or not, War Robots is a complete Pay to Win game. If you could buy an entire hangar of 12/12s, not even. 10/10 Orkan Haechis, you could shoot up from Private's League to Champion's League in a month if you play a decent amount. With so much of the match being dependent on gears, no amount of tweaking with an Elo system will work. It must be hangar based with hefty penalties for overpowered gear if Pixonic still has the faintest idea of keeping War Robots fun. I run 9/10s and 9/9s in Champion's League and I'm used to a slight gear dominance when fighting enemies. I can only imagine how hard it must be for Silver and Gold Leagued players to compete with Tankers with gear that is double their level. And Pixonic knows about the problem. The Elo Matchmaking was implemented around February so that would make it about 9 or 10 months ago. Pixonic basically heard all the complaints in the Roundtable about the matchmaking and took it for ?poo-poo?. I speculate that Pixonic does not want to fix the matchmaking, but to keep it unbalanced to encourage spending. It does not take 9 ?firetruck?ing months to introduce a matchmaking system and make it presentable. It doesn't. The Matchmaking is in a worse state that it was 6 months ago and it's getting worse. I want to pull up the issue of clan battles and squadding for a moment. As Pixonic claims, squadding will pit you against another squad. But, that isn't really the case in Champion League. I made it a point to myself a week ago that I was going to leave the battle from the start if I am to fight a Dash bot clan. It's simply not fun having zero chance to fight back and deal decent damage to said robots. A lot of the time, I would leave the battle only to join the battle against another completely different squad battle (all Dash bots). The Matchmaking could not wait 20 seconds to pit those two squads together and decided to put them against complete random teammates. This is been happening for a while, especially. I got 3 Dash bot clan battles (which I left) in a row today. No amount of articles criticizing Pixonic for their Matchmaking will work anymore. They know the problem, and they refuse to fix it. The point was clearly made when Pixonic decided to ignore basically all the criticism about MK2s in many of the War Robot social media sites and head on with it. I understand that you may not have the time to actively play the game Dredd77 , but I think you'll find the problems with the matchmaking if you squad with someone from [AuEx] for a few matches with no Dashers, to see what the majority of the players are complain about. I do see guys from [AuEx] a decent amount in solo matches and they are some great players. I think the new Kbots are great for noobs because it allows them to pay and move up to the top where there needs to be more players. But their lack of skill comes in, and I find that Kbots are easy to defeat when being piloted by noobs.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 30, 2017 19:51:28 GMT -5
I still read folks expressing frustrations with the MM. I'll be doing an article that touches on this (and much, much more) shortly, and wanted to get some more current examples of what the problems are, particularly since I don't experience them for the most part for whatever reason. Okay. General frustrations with the game. I feel there's a bit of a gear ceiling now. I don't know where to point my finger at, but despite my attempts to stay reasonably close to "The Joneses" I'm drifting farther and farther back from the pack. For a short period of time, I was really close to getting my core mechs to 9 and my weaponry to 11. I don't know if it's the recent flurry of mech releases (?firetruck?ing Haechi) or the weapons or what, but very recently I'm finding that I'm spending much of my matches just trying to burst Anciles. As a result, I'm doing far less damage which means much less silver intake. Until recently, I was doing reasonably well in matches -- typically scoring #3 or #4 but with the occasional #1 thrown in. Since 3.2, high points have me at #3. My average damage has dropped 100k since. I'm looking at another hanger overhaul just to do some damage. And I'm still not making much in the way of silver. If it weren't for the occasional 12h boost from the recent event, I'd be scraping by with 150k silver per match. I've been Expert 2 for quite a while, but my ranking has dropped 150 points recently, too. I'm still seeing a lot of 11/11, 12/12, and now MK2 stuff thrown in. My hanger is largely level 8 mechs with level 10 and 11 weapons. I'm getting bent over by Dashes, picked off by Trebs, water tortured by Hydras, and bled out by Tulus. I guess I'm not adjusting fast enough to everything. I can't wait to see the Soultrain or whatever the hell the chain lightning thing is called. The game still seems buggy. A lot of graphical hitches where they didn't seem nearly as obvious before the last few patches. It's hard enough to hit dash mechs without having crap stutter-stepping across the screen. As I've been saying for close to a year now, Pixonic drops their content so quickly, there is no chance to even remotely get close to "catching up". I'm a F2P player. I've never denied it and I haven't said those that spend money don't deserve some sort of edge or bonus vs those of us who're leeching off of them. That said, the imbalance is so overwhelming that unless you're nearly bed-ridden (as one of my clanmates is), you seem to stand no chance at gaining anything close to similar standing as a "whale." I'm fine with not getting all the super awesome stuff. I would like to be able to play a competitive game, though. I don't want to get farmed. I'm rapidly getting to the point where I'm feeling farmed, unable to compete, unable to improve my equipment, and circling back to " finding my happy spot" which I'd really rather not do. Returning to the same spot a month and a half later is a bad thing. I'm in the same boat as you. I've been playing 1y 1mo now, and my hanger is also solidly 9/11. Initially, I went thru a bad slump at the last update, and my dmg went down a lot. But, I made some adjustments, and got out of my slump so I'm moving up again and will probably try to go all the way to Champion. I'm still at 9/11, and no Kbots, none of the new items either. My dmg got a new high too, so topping all Champions on my team helped a lot for getting league points. At the worst point of my slump, I was down to Master3, but now I've been gaining really fast and I'm halfway through Master 1. My avg dmg went up +130K. I'm also ftp player, and I don't mind the whales and new bots and weapons. I just wish when I play lights out, that the MM didn't try to beat me down even more. Because, I'm not like Goku, and I don't know if there's another gear or Super Saiyan God 2 level in me. I can't sustain it very long either.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 31, 2017 2:08:17 GMT -5
The Matchmaking could not wait 20 seconds to pit those two squads together and decided to put them against complete random teammates. This is been happening for a while, especially. I got 3 Dash bot clan battles (which I left) in a row today. Do you think this is by design? As in, Pix are coding it so the whales don't end up competing against one another. In lower leagues if two dash players appear, they're often on the same team. So, it makes me consider that Pix have coded it that way so that they're able to gloat to their mates about how awesome they are and thus encourage further sales.
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Post by AηɗυηєɗнєƖ [ǀƬA] on Oct 31, 2017 3:21:00 GMT -5
Do you think this is by design? As in, Pix are coding it so the whales don't end up competing against one another. In lower leagues if two dash players appear, they're often on the same team. So, it makes me consider that Pix have coded it that way so that they're able to gloat to their mates about how awesome they are and thus encourage further sales. No, I think it's just bad or lazy coding. I think they made the algorithm to create as many matches as possible as fast as possible based on top squad player and squad numbers +/- 1 within the expert-champions league. Also because it's easier: you don't have to introduce any weighting factor on overall team strenght. So much so, if you end a game with a team and you start immediately within 15 seconds, you often get matched again against the every same team because you are probably the only two team with the same characteristics which are free at the moment.
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Post by frunobulax on Oct 31, 2017 14:27:05 GMT -5
Indirectly? I see massive tanking, probably due to the event. As tanking is a direct result of the new matchmaking, hell yes!, my game experience is diminished if at least 2 players leave after 2 minutes or do not play, and I'm in a 4vs6 or 6vs54 match.
Directly? Weeeell -I do have a 10/10 hangar in Android Expert. I'm not haappy to be matched up against maxed hangars, even Mk2 hangars, on a much-too-regular basus. But then, the whales play a lot, so I guess opponents are rare. There are some blowouts, but overall the matching is OK. BUT: Considering that Pixo has scrapped a perfectly good system that allowed everyone to run changeup hangars at will, I'd say yes, mainly for that reason. Playing on Android with the one hangar I have at 10/10 bores the feck out of me. So much that I only played recently when my daughter asked me to, because she loves watching the game.
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Post by vigusfatbelly on Oct 31, 2017 15:45:49 GMT -5
To me, it seems that the only time I really see any huge mismatches with the MM is when squadding. The magic number is 4. If I squad with some of my fellow AN cats, if we stay at 4, then most of the time the league levels are fairly average. Yeah some will have 12/12 bots at Expert 1, but that's more an issue of tanking vs being mismatched. But cross that line and get to 5 players in the squad, and it's over. It doesn't matter what we choose, it's almost always squads of champions from the same clan, or just a slew of champs on the red team. Those are the only times I really see any issues with the MM.
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Post by Cdr. Crimmins on Oct 31, 2017 17:02:38 GMT -5
In the 1850+ matches I have tracked in a Google sheet since mid-Jan, my overall win rate is a hair above 50%. Also, tankers have affected the outcome of 36.22% of all matches, resulting in what a I refer to as dirty wins and losses. Also, I had to halt all upgrades above my then current level so that I could continue to squad with my son when he wanted us to play together. He plays far less than I do, and I have no wish to subject him to high level seal clubbing. The old hangar based system was far superior in the respect. As a result of locking in my hangar bot and weapons levels, I oscillate between Gold2 and Diamond3. The introduction of the dashes has led to a gradual sinking though...
I still enjoy the game a lot, but it used to be far better.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 31, 2017 20:41:28 GMT -5
I had a match today that was 2 Champions on red, and I'm the only Master/Champion. I was playing solo, but there was a 3 man squad of 2 Experts, 1 Diamond3 so that made it even worse. Even if you forgive the mixed tier squadding, it was still unbalanced match before the game started. Plus I needed wins for event task, and I had been doing well for dmg and breaking new records, so I think the MM has gone bonkers if it thinks I am that good.
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Post by ᎶƦ℮℮ƊᎽ ƤΛƝƊΛ on Nov 1, 2017 0:40:48 GMT -5
My biggest problem is the league system, more specifically point distribution. It forces people upwards artificially if you have a moderate to high skill level. And it pushes you up at a quicker rate than you can possibly upgrade bots and weapons, so you end up in a league where you’re so outmatched you become insignificant in every match.
I have two accounts and both got into this conundrum, one was 8/8 when I hit Champion league, and my second account wasn’t even 6/6 when I reached Diamond. The only solution to this currently is to flat out tank, or at least intentionally play below my ability(which is basically tanking).
Basically, they’ve set up the game to have three options for the higher skill players: Spend all of your money, every month, to keep up. Tank so you don’t have to blow all your paychecks. Or have a bad time.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 1, 2017 21:23:16 GMT -5
Played my smurf account. It can more readily maintain a 50% win rate. I rarely play it sometimes, so MM tends to be nice to me and give me a win. When I try to get any more wins like today, it becomes impossible to grind for resources (wins/gold).
Here's an example. Last game, i was the only Gold1 player on both teams. My team had 1 Expert, 2 Diamond1, and 2 Diamond3 with one of them being a tanker, so possibly D1 or Expert level. Other side had 2 D1 and 4 D3. It was stacked so I would get a win, but get no resources, so obvious. But my team, still couldn't get a W.
I played 3-4 games, but only got 1 W. I gave up trying to grind resources and even finish my daily gold tasks. It's already punishing me because I'm skilled so get a lot of stacked matches, either W no resources, or lose finish top, and I'm the only Gold in a sea of Diamond/Expert. I get 800K in a loss so no 50% bonus, or score pidly due to lots of D1 and Experts with 10 or 11 gear.
So skill is punished. Playing more is punished by MM.
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Post by stokr on Nov 1, 2017 21:32:00 GMT -5
I've been putting off logging in for a little bit...got lucky with 76% win rate solo last night. Long string of losses coming.
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Post by AηɗυηєɗнєƖ [ǀƬA] on Nov 2, 2017 16:33:17 GMT -5
Practical example of what i wrote a couple of days ago on how the MM goes insane with teams of 4 or more: On the left side, one team made of 1 expert, 1 diamond and 2 gold (both with 4 slots hangars), plus 2 unfortunate EXPERTS as filler.... on the right, 6 champs. The MM looked for teams of approximately same size, equated expert top of team blue with champs top of team red... and spawn raid massacred in less than 5 minutes (Springfield, otherwise would had been faster) followed. This is not an exception, this is standard, at least on android.
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Post by Replicant on Nov 2, 2017 19:34:27 GMT -5
Facebook Gameroom League: Expert III (3244) Victory percentage 43%-80% 9/5 Cossack/Tulumbas 9/5:5 Carnage Thunder 7/5:5:5:5 Leo Trebuchet/Noricum 6/5:5:5:5 Griffin Punisher Victories: 484 Max Destroyed 10 Max Damage 805,538 Max winning Series: 13
The only way I go down in rating is if I limit my drops to just the Cossack and the Leo. Anything else and I inch up. MM will match me against Experts and higher. Most of my competition is 8/8+. I am rarely the highest league-ranked combatant, and both teams contain anything as far as leagues go. Most battles include at least three players of Expert or higher, and most contain at least 2 Master/Champion pilots. By the same token, the bottom-placing pilots are almost always bronze or lower pilots that have no business being in the same game as me.
Qualitatively, the play experience is all over the place.
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Post by AηɗυηєɗнєƖ [ǀƬA] on Nov 3, 2017 6:00:57 GMT -5
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Post by frunobulax on Nov 3, 2017 7:28:18 GMT -5
The only way I go down in rating is if I limit my drops to just the Cossack and the Leo. Anything else and I inch up. MM will match me against Experts and higher. Most of my competition is 8/8+. I am rarely the highest league-ranked combatant, and both teams contain anything as far as leagues go. But the problem with GR is: Often there are one Champion/Master/Expert on either side, maybe another Diamond player, and then comes Silver and Bronze. If you play somewhat seriously you'll be in the top 3 damagewise in every battle, so you'll continue to rise. What you can do is to squad with 3+ guys, you'll be matched vs. FAL and RBX and all those top clans. No problem to lose those. Problem of a small playerbase, which won't get much larger the way Pixo treats the game.
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Post by hyderier on Nov 3, 2017 8:13:22 GMT -5
The only way I go down in rating is if I limit my drops to just the Cossack and the Leo. Anything else and I inch up. MM will match me against Experts and higher. Most of my competition is 8/8+. I am rarely the highest league-ranked combatant, and both teams contain anything as far as leagues go. But the problem with GR is: Often there are one Champion/Master/Expert on either side, maybe another Diamond player, and then comes Silver and Bronze. If you play somewhat seriously you'll be in the top 3 damagewise in every battle, so you'll continue to rise. What you can do is to squad with 3+ guys, you'll be matched vs. FAL and RBX and all those top clans. No problem to lose those. Problem of a small playerbase, which won't get much larger the way Pixo treats the game. But so far there is no reason to not rise at FB Gameroom. The whale population is very small too (or they don't get matched against me much, at least). Been in Champs there for 1,5 months now with Rog-Rhino-3xGriffin hangar, levels 7..9. No problems what so ever. Just play to the max, go up and collect league gold on the way. Enjoy it while it lasts...
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Post by frunobulax on Nov 3, 2017 8:38:20 GMT -5
Same here. Of course, as a Champion you'll meet some pretty high guys very often. I live with that, easily, as I can beat most "dolphin" 10/10 players with my 9/7 hangar. (12/12 whales, that's another story.) Guess if the OP has a problem with that, he'll have to drop pretty far down, and he'll still get his share of Champion opponents. But as GR tries to split the Champions, he may get lucky and have a Champion in his team, too
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Post by Replicant on Nov 3, 2017 12:12:51 GMT -5
But the problem with GR is: Often there are one Champion/Master/Expert on either side, maybe another Diamond player, and then comes Silver and Bronze. If you play somewhat seriously you'll be in the top 3 damagewise in every battle, so you'll continue to rise. What you can do is to squad with 3+ guys, you'll be matched vs. FAL and RBX and all those top clans. No problem to lose those. Problem of a small playerbase, which won't get much larger the way Pixo treats the game. But so far there is no reason to not rise at FB Gameroom. The whale population is very small too (or they don't get matched against me much, at least). Been in Champs there for 1,5 months now with Rog-Rhino-3xGriffin hangar, levels 7..9. No problems what so ever. Just play to the max, go up and collect league gold on the way. Enjoy it while it lasts... Games against FAL are silly... I can't help but wonder how much of the MM issue is really population size. It's (very) rare that I get matched up against the same opponent in the course of a day's play, and league score isn't an indicator of player competence to the degree it is on iOS. The lack of Whales/TT is definitely a major attraction, since I limit my hanger to Level 9 bots with an offensive weapon load out of not better than 2 level 5 heavy weapons. Dredd77One thing I've noticed as a result of grinding the Halloween event: The quality of any given game is highly variable, but on balance I get more interesting games on FB than I do on iOS. The variability of the match makes the "Win X games" tasks very grindy. MM over-determines the outcomes of matches to such a degree that my individual performance feels irrelevant. On the other hand, the "Kill X bots" and "Capture X Beacons" tasks are quite enjoyable. No matter who I'm paired with, if I play smart I can get at least two beacons a match. In an interesting game I might get as many as 8. Likewise with "Kills" where I should see at least 4 kills and might get as many as 10. With the proposed changes to rewards (Honor Points), I could see a War Robots environment where the pressure on MM to create "fair" matches with a balanced chance for each side to win would be less of an issue because the rewards are based on individual performance.
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Post by The VVatcher on Nov 3, 2017 15:53:38 GMT -5
My main issue with MM is when you squad with 3 people, you are going to face top clan Mk2 dashbots shinanigans regardless of your your groups leagues. As oppose to going solo or a group of 2. This poses a problem for small clans just trying to have some fun playing together.
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beaconator2000
Destrier
Posts: 102
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Pilot name: Beaconator2000
Platform: iOS
Clan: Sexy
League: Diamond
Server Region: North America
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Post by beaconator2000 on Nov 3, 2017 21:27:28 GMT -5
Just squashed with my son today. I’m E3 (3438 cups), he is D3 (2357 cups).
Teams as follows:
Blue: Me and son 5825 cups 3693 cups 4285 cups 3892 cups
Red Team: 6285 cups (squad) 5958 cups (squad) 5351 cups 5470 cups 5286 cups 3492 cups
Needless to say my son did poorly and I was just slightly better. We got steam rolled in 4 minutes.
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Post by anjian on Nov 3, 2017 22:33:37 GMT -5
I don't think the MM is working towards equalizing a 50% win rate. Rather, the game has profiled you and from there, determines you need to be seal clubbed into spending more money, buying new bots and weapons and upgrading them. Sometimes you are seal clubbed, sometimes you do the seal clubbing on other people. I am still able to maintain a 50% win rate though, and I have not had a long frustrating losing streak, mainly because as much as I am getting seal clubbed, I am also getting carried by my team who has its seal clubbers clubbing the cubs on the enemy team. I think I play better than before, I don't snipe or camp as much as I did before, I am much more aggressive grabbing beacons with my Kumihos and other medium bots, last but not least some pay to win is admittedly also helping me with my new bots and weapons, such as Tempest and Scourge, dash bots and my Inquisitor.
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Post by The VVatcher on Nov 3, 2017 23:01:00 GMT -5
Just squashed with my son today. I’m E3 (3438 cups), he is D3 (2357 cups). Teams as follows: Blue: Me and son 5825 cups 3693 cups 4285 cups 3892 cups Red Team: 6285 cups (squad) 5958 cups (squad) 5351 cups 5470 cups 5286 cups 3492 cups Needless to say my son did poorly and I was just slightly better. We got steam rolled in 4 minutes. This is also what I'm talking about right here. There's a problem with MM with squading. It's like they were put against that team because there are also a squad of 2 there -- and it totally neglected that the other squad are higher leagues.
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