EdiJo

Another matchmaking thread. Of course if by "protected" you mean "+/-1 tier" - it is badly NECESSARY to have fair games for most players. For EVERY tier, not only for T1-T4 and for carriers. And of course WG doesn't want to do that, because somebody has to be a cannon fodder for their marketing target: T9-T10, and there needs to be incentive to push towards this target as fast (and as expensively) as possible. And of course here on the forum all the seal-clubbers, divisioned-fully equipped-premium unicums will "democratically vote" to have +/-2 tier MM, and they even will wishfully recall golden (for them) times of even more bizarre matchmaking from the past.

Generally the idea is tempting, but I would really want first to see the unification between different servers, EU + US especially. Regarding "buying XP" - you know that we struggle vs High Tier Potato Wave already, right? And you propose to introduce another massive potato channel into already struggling WoWS? Because there is already another (premium) potato pipe open? Where is the logic?

"Randomness" works only if you have sample size large enough. If you have 4 good players in both teams and roll dice again to assign them to either uber-plus-2-tier sealclubbing ship or to a weakling-minus-2-struggler in the long run this will average, but in particular games you will get extremal results quote often. For example in one team 3 skilled guys will get CV and top tiered BB division and in other team they will get low-tiered cruisers. Result is easy to predict, right? Stomp. I know nothing about WoT, but because of longer games (-> smaller sample) it is true that you get larger "daily" variance. Nothing surprising, but maybe that's another issue why WG is wrong when copying the WoT approach. Regarding "playing hours" - you mentioned that it is possible to get fair MM if playing in specific server load. This happens at specific hours/days of week. I replied that you shouldn't rely on specific server load to get fair MM, but it should be fair ALWAYS. Limiting MM to +/-1 wouldn't cause 5-minute limit to be exceeded if there are allowed different team compositions, like 7 BB vs 7 BB (or even 12 BB vs 12 BB). Having +/-1 tiered BB fighting only each other is way more fair than including poor single -2 tiered cruiser and a few DD in this company. And yup, +/-2 is not fair nor balanced in any hour - should be ideally +/-0 or (if there is not enough different ship lines) max +/-1 for some variety

Looking at "matchmaking monitor" and then on a game play I usually I find 2-4 reasonably skilled players in a team. If you roll another random assigning those few to +/-2 tiered ships, you often end up with more difference in power both teams - and this contributes to what we see now: the increased rate of stomped, one-sided games. Sure, MM depends on the time of day, or on day of week, or on a current missions active - but avoiding bad MM by playing during "low tier hours" is not a solution, sorry ;) Giving +/-1 MM for all tiers all the time is. And don't tell me about queue times, we can cope with 200 BB in queue now pretty well

This "perhaps" comes with large dispersion as it is now. Potato shoots a shotgun, not aiming much, and even a single hit is a big chunk of cruiser's hp. Cruiser can't do anything to avoid that. But if potato shoots his narrow group badly, nothing will hit. This effect is already visible when you compare shooting in Iowa or NCal vs ze Germanz. And premiums are not the main problem. We had waves of Tirpitzes before and it wasn't as bad as now. Current issue is the mass potato wave which slowly but steadily died up their way to T7-T10, with "honest grinding" and without learning much. Economy is not the solution, because it is just a bit slowing the non-paying potatos, and gives further advantage to paying potatos. Although it looks like the way WG will go

Don't be that grumpy Campers are potatos. If shooting & dodging at max range will be made more skill dependent the potato campers will 1) hit nothing, because they can't aim 2) be hit hard, because they can't dodge So why your nope, exactly?

Seal clubbers (if randomly assigned to both teams) are not the problem. The problem is when your teammate-seal clubber is assigned a -2 tier ship and can't carry, and the enemy seal clubber has free lunch. Yes, not every ship is equal, but having +2 tiered ship AND being skilled is too much, sorry my Unicums Nope. Me me me is about those few who have everything in this game and say "for ME +/-2 MM is fine". The "bigger picture" is thousands of average Joe's who just want to have a chance. They already have stock/grinded ships, not fully trained captains, no premium consumables, no skilled divisionmates. And here on the forum a few purple guys, often even not playing most affected ships, argue that "for THEM being -2 is not a problem"...

Actually, the paradox would work. BB dispersion should be tighter (at high range only) - for a fragile boat (like a cruiser) it is actually EASIER to avoid tighter salvo. You can at least try, and it is your skill vs BB shooter skill. In a current situation some Bismarck fires at max range and he doesn't care much about aiming - something always can hit, and do 5-10k easily even without citadel (which can happen regardless). Range has to stay, BB needs the range advantage over any other class. But shell flying time can be made longer, too, and it is possible without breaking "no-premium-nerf" rule. The idea is to limit BB potatos from benefiting from max range shooting, and still allow that to be doable for skilled players, and allow skilled cruiser players to counter that. There is already a dependence dmg/penetration vs range. Limiting the range is not good because there are cruisers which shoot 19-20+ km, and ~17km is quite common cruiser spam distance.

Yup, AI is a bit too dumb now. It is better than significant part of "homo sapiens" players, but still lacks the IQ to compete with those few who can play. I'm looking forward to those scenarios, seems they can mask AI flaws a bit. It's fine that 2 full-purple guys who >2/3 games play in a division (purple too, I assume) think that Kirov can work and Omaha has bow-on trick But most of Omahas and Kirovs I meet in my Scharnhorst, Shchors, Fiji, Belf or Pepsi (not to mention T7 BB) don't feel they can work... they just explode with lots of black badges for me. Don't lie to them then. Generally Kirov doesn't work vs T7...

Yup, but rewards there are pitiful, and it kinda contradicts the purpose: they gave more fair game where you don't compete with other players Anyhow, it is still +/-2 although I admit it is easier to deal with +2 bot than with player (for me, at least) ;) I think the rewards in co-op should be equal to those in PvP, but also co-op players should pass the "test missions" before being allowed to bring their shiny high-tiered ships to PvP.

Nope, it is not fair if you add "pseudo-random" ship composition and overlay it with random player skill. If you are in a cruiser or BB vs mostly +2 tiered enemies you can't do much, if you're not (very) skilled player. And yes, actually now eu.warships.today names you as the purple one: 1434 for the last 5 days (although I didn't talk about you personally )

This "misconception" has one obvious reason: a player can expect to have FAIR game. If he's placed vs "+2" ship he expects WG made it such way that he can compete. Of course he is mistaken, and hence the misconception ;) He is expected not to compete in T5-T8, but to pay and advance to T9-T10 as fast as he can afford. I don't care if WoT is even more unfair than WoWS - this is not the subject here. No, you can't "put up a fight against anything": * -2 CA has to be afraid of everything: BB, CV, CA. Usually he's just free XP for 2/3 of enemy fleet * -2 BB has to be afraid of BB, CV, CA, DD. Yes, BB have a health pool, but if you're focused you don't have time to use it. CV have protected (hm...) MM already, and DD are the only class which (somewhat) can cope with being -2 (if not matched vs +2 tier DD...). Sure, unicum players can manage being -2 tier, but majority of players can't. They expect fair fight and don't get it. His whine has more common with the true situation then "for me it's fine" from some unicum... Yes, it is obvious you have 0 idea about playing T5 cruisers during current meta. In last few months, all your T5 cruiser experience is 30 (20 solo) games in Murmansk.

His "feelings" mean as much as mine, and that's exactly why I don't talk about what "I feel". It is not hard to see an effect of unfair matchmaking for most of players. This just requires stopping the "for ME it's OK" thinking. Even WG noticed the problem, but they are too greedy to extend "the protection" to T5-T8 as well.

Can I? A bit? Maybe? Yes. I need to repeat. You know what. You are NOT a representative sample, my fella forumitez. You play a lot, buy a lot, have a lot, you play in divisions, trained your admirals etc etc. - and an Average Even-Non-Casual Joe doesn't. You do much more destruction when you are +2 than you get being -2. So your "feelings" are very subjective and simply do not mean much

Evidently being -2 tiered is not welcome by new players, and clearly some are very surprised when "the T4 protection" suddenly ends in T5 They don't see any logic in that, and they are right, because there isn't any.

Really? I just wanted to use +200% bonus to push my (now-) hopeless Zuiho a bit, so I entered co-op with her. It is always easy +1.5-2k exp, without having to "play" against "perfectly balanced" manually driven T6 carriers or vs Bogue for which Zuiho planes (without strafing ability) are just food. But it happened that friendly "human-driven" Kongo caught one of my poorly "auto-dropped" torps. It wasn't a detonation, yet this one single aerial torpedo caused ... 27500 damage! WHY? No flood, no nothing. And... somehow... for that one torpedo I got penalized with, vnimaniye: 19 PINK GAMES. Anybody has any possible explanation? I was pinky a few times in my career, but always it was 5 games, not 19... WTF happened?

Nope. It actually says that it doesn't work in very varied teams - but claims that it works better than "more sophisticated" approaches Even if we exclude (intentional or not) bias in playing hours causing systematic errors in "player rating", still this doesn't apply at all to 12-member team with - totally varied skill (potatos - surprise! - do NOT behave randomly) - various ship classes played (this is NOT random) - divisioning (skilled players division a bit more often) - +/-2 tier matchmaking (some ships behave/fulfill their role better than others when undertiered) - often not enough games in a particular ship to conclude a statistics from them - varied consumable & captain investment on a given ship Sorry, too much non-random stuff to describe everything as "a gaussian with sigma"

This is an objective fact. And the cause is pretty obvious. Advancing to higher tiers doesn't require ANYTHING except of time, and is mostly accelerated by money. 35-40% WR potato is going to T10 only 2-3 times slower than a 60% WR "knowing-what-he's-doing" player. And if potato pays he can be almost as fast. So the result is what we have now: more and more potatos in higher tiers. They finally went out of the T5-T6 area and now have shiny T7-T8 boats, some more persistent have T10 ships without any problems. If you throw a few average to decent players into a potato team, you get very random game outcomes, depending on which ships good players have, where spawned, whether they are in a division, whether potatos listen to their advice or just follow them etc. Potatos don't even need to win to get to the high tiers. Losing just slows them down a bit ;) Of course on weekends there is more "casuals" which don't bother to L2P and "just swim around". They are thrown into PvP "because they can". Nothing new. Casuals' plays are much more than average concentrated during peak hours. You have much more potatos in your team if you play on weekend afternoon than on Thursday midnight. Yes, you can influence your WR by choosing most efficient tier/ship to play vs potatos on peak hours, and for example to play support/more concealed ships vs higher-tier sealclubbers. In your "experiment" you actually played more BB than CA, and had very varied, totally random results. Only your good 16-game 75% WR streak on the Baltimore stands out, and rest of the work was done in Mex & Arizona or Scharnhorst, which are excellent potato clubbers. In other ships - same as your average: ~45-50% WR... Of course you can't have decent WR when playing against equal opponents. By definition it will oscillate around 50%, right? As far as I understand, ELO and similar ratings work only when you have well established level of your opponents, and they don't work when you try to base your rating on results of 12-member teams of very varied skill. Regarding Nikolai and 500 games - this is actually a bit easier example to estimate skill ;) Not long ago we had discussed on this forum example of a unicum player which played most of thousands of his games in a single DD... This is hard to believe. Even your won games during this "experiment" were like 24k dmg in NCal, 17k in Orleans, 24k in Gneis, 15k in Bismarck, 7k in Kaiser, 8k in Atago. Sorry man. Those wins were not result of your influence... I looked for sudden influx of Leanders / Bayerns in the maplesyrup data, and surprisingly it is not very visible. But WG is trying to improve: they will give away T8 BB now Stats are just ... statistics. After many enough games they show your skill. You can pad them up by selecting special time of day or day of week, by playing a premium with 19pt captain vs lowtiers etc. or you can be punished for playing mostly during times when "sharks do hunting" (like T9-T10 on weekend evenings )... - but in your case you seem to play a lot, and as you said apart from "experiments" not focus on specific times. So it is not the cause of your stats being as you described it... There is though clear dependency of WR decreasing with tier.

This became important for T4-T5 carriers, when you can't strafe. Japanese fighters are just food for the US planes, and there is nothing they can do about it. Bogue fighters eat Zuiho planes alive, I simply stopped playing Zuiho in PvP games, because you have ~50% chance of having very very unpleasant experience.

Probably they are preparing Petropavlovsk as The Ultimate Hipper Premium Stalinium shells, Kutuzov smoke, Soviet T8 radar, German hydro and armor, and 1950's AA which would've been installed according to some recently discovered secret plans Something like a Murmansk on steroids

Of course. It is impossible to balance ships if players themselves are very frequently brainless. Just like you can't establish usability of any tool by giving it to someone who doesn't have a clue how to use it. "Casual" potatos have to be limited to co-op, and allowed to do PvP only after passing "exams": missions proving they understand given ship line enough for the next tier. Co-op then needs to have its rewards much increased - many "casuals" would prefer to "spend time" fighting vs bots anyway.

Never give up! A few? 2 is few, but you said that even with decent machine somebody can be offline so long that misses the whole game. Standard game time is 20 minutes, I've seen AFK-ers which started moving at less than 5 minutes remaining and this surprise was quite influencing the result ;) Even moi remember being surprisingly killed by a BB which was staying AFK for at least 15 minutes... I was too sure, came too close, carelessly did my pew-pew into him and he suddenly woke up Nothing to "figure out". Either game is loading in time (+/- 10 seconds...), or it isn't... Sorry, just summing this up: 1) nobody with a contemporary machine loads longer than 1-2 minutes (even if he has to reboot). If it lasts longer he has a problem and needs to solve it before playing online PvP games... 2) even if it lasts a bit longer it is still not an excuse to stop trying to rejoin.

... and I said even if you reboot it takes 2 minutes typical. Quite a part of that is looking at your BIOS... If you just kill WoWS and restart the game it is below a minute. On the vid you have Win10 reboot example from more than a year ago, not very fast compared to current standards

i7 with enough ram and with SSD needs so much time that you're AFK through the entire battle Nope. You have something wrong in your setup. This "loading" hangs happened to me a few times during last month or two, and the biggest problem was to see the Task Manager because in full screen mode WoWS when not responding stays above all other windows. But even before learning how to solve that, when I just used to reboot the whole machine, I always was online before the timer hit 18:30. 2 full minutes (from -0:30 to +1:30) are perfectly enough to do a full @#$%n reboot + restart WoWS + re-enter the game on a contemporary PC.

I would gladly put this -5% win rate change on the Recent Potato Flood which is objectively observed and widely reported I don't think any decent player abused DD stealthfire in this tier - apart from end game stages or rare occasions when on very low hp. I really really really prefer seeing someone with 10^3 games in a single ship and with 75% WR in her, rather than someone with 10^3 games in a single ship and winning less than 40%, which unfortunately are much more abundant.