Pixonic & Players Round Table Apr 21/17 Video/MP3

My Mother & Grandparents are Ukrainian so trust me when I say, they were polite

That's because we are not Russians.  We are Cossacks & Gypsies  Let's just say that Eastern Europe shares a certain "Warmth". 

I just have to say, thank you. You guys did a great job and I am proud to be apart of this community of players. It's crazy how this game has brought all of us together, and this community of players gives me more enjoyment than the damn game! Let's hope pixonic can fix this 「dookie」 , because this game and the community has become a permanent part of my life( which is crazy) and I would hate to lose it.

All that cabbage, potatoes & vodkka keep the fires burning 

Yea...
As I've said before, People can NEVER be happy!

I've never played a game where the developers were so involved with any community at all.

Now they sit down to really hear us out. They try to make it more clear by having community members gather the most important key points and present it to them. That is all they needed, a few of us to gather the overall thought patterns and give it to them. This saves a lot of time and possible mistakes in it for themselves trying to browse and analyze a TON of info. No real direct feedback was required from them, all they needed was the info.

Yet STILL... yes STILL, I see a lot of complaining. It almost makes me laugh how unhappy people can be with EVERYTHING!

EDIT: I mean, yea they definitely could work on their PR a bit but they're definitely trying at least.

Thank you guys! It's up to Pixonic respond with actions since they get the messages of customer wants.

Right now Pixonic is like United Airlines beating up then dragging the passengers out with tone deaf responses afterwards. We need more Richard Branson's or Jack Ma's that don't treat customers like frenemy.

Just wanted to thank all of you for your time and effort!
I'm a pretty new player, and have repeatedly thought about just quitting once the LQ was put in place. I've only ever known the league system, but by the time I made it to silver I, I was completely non competitive due to all the seal clubbing, so I tanked back to bronze in an effort to run into people with comparable gear. I've been paying for that decision ever since, and I had no idea I would even be punished for it until after the fact. Just thanks again for you guys all stepping up to try to get this mess fixed.

I'd like to thank everyone that participated. Well done.
Think we should just give pixonic a chance to respond.

Finally I managed to listen to the rest of the discussion I think it was a good discussion from the player side, and a lot of things were brought on the table, especially the ability to squad with lower ranked teammates and the dynamics of the game.
I was disappointed about the way the Pixo guys handled the discussion. I'm just not sure if they are open to what we want. I mean, if players say "bring back the old matchmaking", and the response is "so you want a special game mode [...]?", I get the distinct feeling that they haven't gotten what we want. New game modes are fine and would help making the game more interesting, but somehow doubt that Pixo would implement them in a way that we could get rid of the regular battles (and still find enough players).

There were some excellent comments there. Just to name a few that really struck a chord with me. (Sorry I didn't catch all names as I was listening to part of this while biking, and try to understand something if a Lorry passes you...)

• I fully agree with Caustic Grip. The game is broken now, very good analysis, and I liked that one guy really brought down the hammer on Pixo. I had the feeling they just shrugged off the previous comments to some degree. I think his solution would work too, although I think there is an even easier solution: Tweak the old matchmaking just a bit. See below.
• "You're making the game you would like us to play, which is very different from the game we want to play". Touché!
• I also fully agree that playing feels like work now. 
  I have encountered this in some previous games, and in most cases I quit the game shortly after that. There is just no variety, run your normal hangar as you did in 1000 games before, or run something fun like Garys, Stalkers, Cossacks and Gepards, and set goal to - what, survive 5 minutes? This won't keep you occupied.
• I was positively surprised that just about everybody mentioned as a major problem that the ability to squad with lower ranked teammates was lost. 

There were some points that I might have added, had I been in the discussion:

1. I was pretty surprised that tanking wasn't brought up as big problem right at the start, but I guess that many players on the round table play the high leagues and therefore have a different view on the severity of this particular problem.
   By definition, tanking happens only in the lower leagues. Tankers want to get some competetive advantage over their opponents, and since we have 9/9 hangars even in gold 3 on Android, they will be found mostly in silver and low gold leagues. If you play diamond or higher you just won't see a lot of tankers. And of course players who play the majority of their games in squads won't encounter the problem either.
   Tankers are still rampant (and of course the LQ didn't help a lot). It's very hard to spot tankers now, I am encountering a lot of games now where players walk right past a beacon or self destruct and respawn just before they get to the beacon. Other players self destruct 4 robots and let themselves killed in the 5th robot. For a player who plays in the Silver/Gold leagues on Android (which I would expect to be the majority) there is IMO no bigger problem.
   
   
2. Many players complain "how comes that I'm matched up with diamond guys, I'm in silver III".  Two comments there.
   • There will always be some rubberbanding, the need to fill a spot to get 6vs6. And if we have a battle "centered" on gold 2, and we can't find enough gold guys, matchmaking will have to add silver and diamond guys. However, the problem with MM is that placement in teams seems rather arbitrary at the moment: Sometimes you have all the silver guys on one side and all the diamond guys on the other side, even if all guys are randoms.
   • At the moment, leauge placement does not correspond to playing ability at all. Tankers obviously play in a much lower league as they should, but there are also guys who advance on account of squading with strong teammates. If you manage a full squad in silver, you'll win a lot of battles simply because there will be a lot of matches with tankers in the red team.
   
   
3. I would add the perspective of the lower ranked player to the "add insult to injury" discussion (if you play random, you often lose and find after the battle that (a) you never had a chance due to tankers or inequal matchmaking, and (b) you are penalized by losing league points).
   As a lower ranked player like me, currently playing high silver/low gold on Android, it has gotten very hard to find suitable squads. Prior to the old matchmaking I had some clan buddies that would be online and squad with me when I played in the evening, and they were roughly at the same level as I was. But now playing activity has dropped, so very often if I want to play a game in the evening only 1-2 clanmates will be online at all, and usually several leagues above me. So I have the choice between playing solo (and play in tanker hell) or form a 2-man squad with a high level teammate (and get clobbered from TT hangars).
   
   In the end, I run 80% of my games solo because I'm tired of trying to find a squad mate. 
   
   
4. I would have asked this simple question to Pixo: "You have an easy solution to all problems mentioned here, especially for the tanking problem (because all incentives for tanking are removed): Go back to the old hangar based matchmaking. Twist it a bit to make it a bit more fair. With the old matchmaking, you had a prospering game that apparently turned into a cash cow too. Why kill the cow? Why don't you even consider to go back? Why do you invent absurdly complicated solutions that either don't work (tanker league) or are very questionable to work (new game modes) instead of returning to what worked?"
   Personally, I think we can fix the matchmaking by doing 4 very simple things.  I assume that the old matchmaking calculated a hangar score, and tried to fill battles with players centered around a certain score. 
   • One problem with the old system were that weapon levels were undervalued. A 4/12 robot is much better than a 7/6 robot, but they had the same value under the old matchmaking. 
     For simplicity, we could stick with the old system, but make a robot level be worth 6/10 of a weapon level. The rationale behind this is that a robot level adds 6% HP and speed, while a weapon level adds 10% damage output. (Add a bonus for speed if you like.)
     A more complicated way to solve this, and to get rid of the WSP and gold "penalties": Assign a base value for every robot at level 12 (say 1000 for a Lance, 950 for a Griffin and a Fury, 930 for a Lance, 900 for a Carnage, 800 for a Gary, 700 for a Gepard, 550 for a Vityaz - you get the idea, approximate the percieved value of the robot in that level). Then scale take off 10% for each weapon level below 12  (exponentially scaled, as each level increases weapon power by 10%, so a 9/9 robot would be 10% more powerful than a 9/8 robot), HP (take off 6% for each robot level) and speed (subtract flat 3% for each speed point below max speed). 
   • Do not consider only the strongest robot, but build a true hangar score. For simplicity, say 100% value of the first robot plus 80% of the #2 robot value + 60% of #3 + 40% of #4 + 40% of #5. 
   • Add newbie protection by adjusting the hangar score (significantly) for players under a threshold, say 1000 victories. This eliminates seal clubbing. Reduce hangar score by 50% for players under 20 victories, by 30% for players under 100 victories and by 15% for players under 1000 victories. 

One further remark as far as matchmaking is concerned. I like the idea of a hard cap that Caustic Grip proposed. This is IMO not required to solve the most pressing problems, but it would help to avoid further "gaming" of the system. The general ideas is this: If a player is placed in a "tier" where the matchmaker expects 6/6 heavy robots, we don't want a player with a 10/12 Trebuchet Fury and four light 1/1 robots in there. But instead of forcing players to back out and reconfigure their hangar as suggested, I would just duce effective weapon and robot levels in battle, in a way that the weapons perform in battles as if they had a lower level. So if we had a cap of 8/8, that 10/12 Treb Fury would perform as a 8/8 robot. 

We need to give some leeway here, a 6-year-old piloting a 8/8 hangar (or possibly a Zenit Nori Natty driver) will play not as well as an experienced player. The exact algorithm capping would have to depend on the hangar score implementation, but just to give you an idea what I mean: Assume that we have rough "tiers" as in the old system, and we have a tier (let's call it "low silver") where we place players with 6/6 heavy robots and maybe 7/7 mediums and 8/8 lights. Then, we might introduce a cap of level 8 for heavy robots, 9 for medium robots and 10 for light robots. All heavy robots and their weapons would be capped to 8, all medium robots and their weapons would be capped to 9, and all light robots and their weapons to 10.  That also would take care of rubberbanding (the higher level players would receive a handicap), if we really get a TT player drawn into a "low silver" battle, his levels would be capped. 

I'll try to make this as brief as possible.
First of all, huge thanks to all 15 guys who participated in this chat, specially to shaolinrogue for he has been "the voice" of this forum and gathered all our thoughts.

My wife introduced me to this game few months ago and we had a wonderful time playing together in squad, but one day they released the league system. Our weapons/robots level is 7, and after some battles we were promoted to silver league. There the hell begun.

95% of the battles we met one or two 12/12 players.
If this player was red then we died in a couple of minutes, we had to struggle to deal 20 or 30k.
If this player was blue then we had to rush to deal 20 or 30k before he oblieterated all the enemies and the battle ended.
This situation went worse and we had to fight along with players with weapons >=10.
We were not able to play anymore and we thought of quitting the game.
Then we came out with a possible solution to be able to keep on playing, that was loosing battles until we lowered to bronze league in order to play with players of our level (or 1-2 levels up/down).
In bronze we met some 12/12, but it wasn't that often, so we could play.

Then in april the 10th we were put in the leavers League.
We tried to escape seal clubbers and now we were locked up with them in the same room.

Since then, we have played hundreds of matches, every day, not skipping a single battle and using all the robots in our hangar, even if they were going to be destroyed as they spawned.

It's april the 26th and my wife and I are still stuck in the leavers league. Can't go out.

I have opened tickets to Pixonic (one of them currently open), just to know how many more battles do we have to play there to get out of the leaver league. Their reply always is that we were punished for leaving battles, that we had to "clean our karma" and that they couldn't tell us nothing else about our karma points since it is a secret (!?).

I've listened to the whole conversation and developers claimed that they will intend to be more transparent.
I'm abusing your patience by writing all this, but we are desperated and we are not getting answers from the developers.

I'll keep on opening tickets and we'll keep on playing straight "by the book" (although nowhere in the game says you can't leave a battle or face punishment) until we could be reintegrated in the regular leagues.
But since you have had some minutes to chat with the developers, our hope is that maybe in the future, some day you do it again and could spend 30 secons to ask them for a quick solution for all of us that have been punished for trying to escape the seal clubbers, and I say "quick" becouse it seems that developers will take some months to find a solution to the league system, but I don't know if we will endure that long, and we'd like to, since we loved playing this game...

Thanks in advance for your attention and patience and sorry to all for the lenght of this post.
Kind regards.

I think the basic flaw of the Leagues is that ELO is a system used to determine tournament matching but it's being applied to all War Robots players equally, most of whom are NOT "professional" or "competitive" gamers. So with the Leagues, everyone who wants to advance has to have "tournament-ready" equipment if they even want to make an impact in a match and that's where the complaints about lack of diversity and inability to squad with lower ranked friends come in. I feel that's why it's also more tiring and stressful to play now, because every match is like a tournament match. I mean, sometimes you just want to shoot some hoops with your friends on the street, but if every basketball game is like an NBA game I'm sure you're going to get burned out with the game, too.

It's easy to say, "Just play what you want and don't look at the stats" but it goes against human nature. No one likes losing, and no one certainly likes a publicly available badge that says it (i.e. League level) so the natural drive is to try to advance but again the only viable route is the tournament-build route.

I think Pixo should just introduce two Battle buttons, a "Casual Battle" and a "Tournament Style" button. League points only get awarded or subtracted if you choose "Tournament" battle. So professional gamers in squads or solo players looking for a challenge can go "Tournament" mode and really battle it out for glory, but if two friends just want to team up and shoot some reds then they can choose "Casual" battle and have fun with Cossacks or something, regardless of their Tournament League level.

Pixo already showed they can separate the queues with the Leavers server, so they should be able to do this as well.

Yes, the game interface is terrible for squadding.
So much has been left out. Such as, first off, a light for 'in match'.

We've been using discord to cure those issues and allow for voice comms too!

Rockwelders Discord server (Explicit Content)
discord.gg/tWjNv2N

Flexpoints Discord server (1000+ Members)
discordapp.com/channels/260517920084328458/260517920084328458

After two frustrating days in the annoying rise of a tanking ?poo-poo? show due to the event and League season ending, I have resorted to playing a fresh account in order to take advantage of extra gold in a new account that I may end up playing more.

Yes, it is a bit cheap to be a veteran player running up through the lower levels but so far it has been a very interesting ride!
Match #13 revealed my first Rhino and Galahad! Match #29 saw a Lancelot for the first time already. Event winnings I presume.

The variety of play and faster pace of advancement is actually quite enjoyable.