Game lacks anti-snowball mechanics.

[anonym_PYC0RAuRIwe4]

And to those unfamiliar with the term, 'snowballing' refers to a situation where small victories for one team quickly add up and translate into a landslide of a victory with no chance of a comeback for the other team. Basically a one-sided stomp that's not fun for either team, which is how most matches go these days in WoWs.

 

The problem with WoWs however, is that this game doesn't have any anti-snowball mechanics in place to reduce the number of completely one-sided games. Before WoWs I used to play a lot of other team-based PvP games, mostly MOBAs, and what most of them had in common (aside from skill-based matchmaking) was the inclusion of comeback/anti-snowball mechanics. For example, in MOBAs there's typically some sort of leveling system where a character gains levels for doing objectives, farming minions, killing other players, however the EXP reward from kills scales with level so the team that is ahead will typically gain less EXP from kills than the team that is behind.

Another good comeback mechanic example is the Bounty system from League of Legends, when an individual player in on a killing streak, a bounty is placed on his head and increased for every subsequent kill he gets, when that player is finally taken down the person that did it gets the accumulated bounty. This is a clever anti-snowball mechanic that also incentivizes focusing on taking out prime threats.

 

Anyway, I think you see where I'm going with this already, I believe WoWs could benefit from appropriating some of these mechanics into its core gameplay. Now I know WoWs doesn't have EXP or Gold, but the principles behind these concepts could still be incorporated into the game in one manner or another.

 

For example, what if the Point gain from sinking ships had diminishing returns for the team that's well ahead. We all experienced those games where your team was starting to make a comeback, but the enemy team was too far ahead on points for it to matter.

We could even have a psuedo Bounty system where sinking players with a kill streak would give your team extra points.

 

I know this post will disappear into the ether and nothing will become of it, but since I'm quitting WoWs anyway due to matches being extremely one-sided and boring I thought I'd leave my nugget of knowledge I gained over the years of playing competitive games, who knows, maybe a lost WoWs Dev will stumble upon this post and make something out of it, one can only dream. 

[DFens_666]

The problem being, wows doesnt have a respawn mechanic. There are only 12 enemies. And being on a killstreak happens quite rarely in wows. By the time you have like 4-5 kills, the enemies are already well.. mostly dead?

And a respawn feature simply doesnt work in wows, atleast not with how things are currently balanced.

 

So your idea makes sense for other games, but it doesnt for wows.

[HassenderZerhacker]

10 minutes ago, Vardog said:

And to those unfamiliar with the term, 'snowballing' refers to a situation where small victories for one team quickly add up and translate into a landslide of a victory with no chance of a comeback for the other team. Basically a one-sided stomp that's not fun for either team, which is how most matches go these days in WoWs.

I'm familiar with the term, but understanding your title correctly took some second-guessing ;-)

[anonym_PYC0RAuRIwe4]

9 minutes ago, DFens_666 said:

The problem being, wows doesnt have a respawn mechanic.

 

Irrelevant, the principle still applies. The idea is to diminish the number of games that end prematurely and these ideas WOULD in fact do just that. Plus I'm not saying that these are THE ideas that should be implemented, just a few of my own pitches to showcase how the match quality could be improved without adding skill-based matchmaking.

[HaachamaShipping]

7 minutes ago, DFens_666 said:

The problem being, wows doesnt have a respawn mechanic. There are only 12 enemies. And being on a killstreak happens quite rarely in wows. By the time you have like 4-5 kills, the enemies are already well.. mostly dead?

Imagine carrying your sorry [edited]team and then getting focused down completely because you give bonus exp. Or carrying your team, then succumbing to attrition to some potato that got lucky and collects the bounty. 

[anonym_PYC0RAuRIwe4]

4 minutes ago, Bunny_Lover_Kallen said:

Imagine carrying your sorry [edited]team and then getting focused down completely because you give bonus exp. Or carrying your team, then succumbing to attrition to some potato that got lucky and collects the bounty. 

 

If you're out of position then you deserve to be focused down. You're approaching this idea completely backwards.

[kfa]

I searched the term "snowballing" but it is not strictly connected to wows 

[Jethro_Grey]

13 minutes ago, Bunny_Lover_Kallen said:

Imagine carrying your sorry [edited]team and then getting focused down completely because you give bonus exp. Or carrying your team, then succumbing to attrition to some potato that got lucky and collects the bounty. 

Yeah, that’s the dumbest thing possible.

8 minutes ago, Vardog said:

 

If you're out of position then you deserve to be focused down. You're approaching this idea completely backwards.

You don’t have to be out of position to get focused. If you paint a big target on someone by making him an xp piñata, all you achieve is that the enemy team will yolo that guy down and die even faster. 

 

Besides, non of your suggestions would do anything to fix landslide games. 

 

Educating the playerbase might help in some cases, but you have to accept the fact that WG failed to educate players from the get go and had no interest whatsoever in fixing the situation now. 

[ThePoisonDwarf]

The problem is MM which can create teams with huge difference in skill/experience.

[HappyFella]

It would not be in WG’s interest to create mechanics that shorten the length of battles. I assume lengthening battle time would reduce their income.

 

i assume it is that simple. Would love to be proven wrong though! :)

[invicta2012]

56 minutes ago, Vardog said:

This is a clever anti-snowball mechanic that also incentivizes focusing on taking out prime threats.

Lose five ships in five minutes, receive a free bot Yamato for your team! 

 

That'll sort out the one-sided ROFLstomps.

[ThePoisonDwarf]

9 minutes ago, invicta2012 said:

Lose five ships in five minutes, receive a free bot Yamato for your team! 

 

That'll sort out the one-sided ROFLstomps.

You will receive speshul RNG... In the next game.

[Prospect_b]

15 minutes ago, ThePoisonDwarf said:

The problem is MM which can create teams with huge difference in skill/experience.

The problem is weegee was incompetent enough:

- to create an economic system that doesn't punish consistent bad players

- made that system even worse to make sure those same consistent bad players can easily and quickly reach any high tier vessel

- to not care the slightest about decent-to-very-good players who have left more and more, and who were often the reason at least a minimum of games weren't a total roflstomp

 

Also, OP, don't waste your time and energy with proposals (be it good or bad) regarding quality of play. Weegee doesn't give a dying duck unless there's money to be made and will just ignore it.

[anonym_PYC0RAuRIwe4]

33 minutes ago, Jethro_Grey said:

Besides, non of your suggestions would do anything to fix landslide games. 

 

Probably because they're not meant to fix one-sided stomps. The only thing that could somewhat do that would be skill-based matchmaking but that's never going to happen since WG is too stubborn and greedy.

 

I made it very clear that these mechanics would only serve to slow the games down and in some cases allow one team to make an actual comeback. 

[NobleRipper]

Nobody wants skill-based matchmaking. The potatoes wouldn't need to spend money to improve their chances anymore, and the thuper-speshul rainbow unicums would find their winrates plummeting if they weren't able to farm potatoes or club seals. There are games for which it would be appropriate, but this ain't one of 'em...

 

Although it would be hilarious of the winning team's reload speed started slowing down or their shell dispersion got wider the bigger the kill gap got

[lossi_2018]

44 minutes ago, ThePoisonDwarf said:

The problem is MM which can create teams with huge difference in skill/experience. 

80% of the problem imo

 

I will add here ship types

[CptBarney]

18 minutes ago, lossi_2018 said:

80% of the problem imo

 

I will add here ship types

same problem in world of danks, except imagine a ship that is smoll as hell, screeches at over 85knots and packs a wallop, thats the ebr for you, but swap it out for a ship/boat. Not too mention some tanks/ships that are just pointless are horrible to play due to weegee adding more instead of refining what they already have.

[Verblonde]

Unless you fundamentally alter the nature of the game, there will always be regular snowball games. This discussion comes up periodically both in the context of WOWS and WOT, and the answer is always the same.

 

If one side knows about focusing (or does it by accident) and gets kills as a result with the other side not doing so, then the likelihood of a snowball increases; that fact is baked into the game.

 

@DFens_666 summarises the crucial reason.

 

So, the choice becomes change the game's essentials, or leave it as it is and accept periodic snowballs. WG have chosen the latter, because their current model is demonstrably successful (at least financially).

[anonym_PYC0RAuRIwe4]

10 minutes ago, NobleSauvage said:

Nobody wants skill-based matchmaking. The potatoes wouldn't need to spend money to improve their chances anymore, and the thuper-speshul rainbow unicums would find their winrates plummeting if they weren't able to farm potatoes or club seals. There are games for which it would be appropriate, but this ain't one of 'em...

 

Although it would be hilarious of the winning team's reload speed started slowing down or their shell dispersion got wider the bigger the kill gap got

 

Unfortunately, you and many other people playing this game have a very rigid and simplistic understanding of the purpose of a skill-based matchmaker. It's not put in place just to separate the good players from the bad, but to give the players that strive and want to improve an opportunity to do so in a fair and relatively stable environment. It's very difficult to improve in a system where your teammates and opponents are picked by pure chance alone.  

 

 

[Verblonde]

6 minutes ago, CptBarney said:

thats the ebr for you

WOT does seem to try and balance the number of wheelies on each team though, not that it makes me hate trying to hit the little any less though...

I can see the appeal though: if ever there was a vehicle type to drive like you stole it, it's the wheelies.

[anonym_PYC0RAuRIwe4]

2 minutes ago, Verblonde said:

If one side knows about focusing (or does it by accident) and gets kills as a result with the other side not doing so, then the likelihood of a snowball increases; that fact is baked into the game.

 

If one team knows about focusing and the other doesn't then the outcome of the game will be the same regardless of there being comeback mechanics or not, therefore this point is moot. Next.

[NobleRipper]

Just now, Vardog said:

 

Unfortunately, you and many other people playing this game have a very rigid and simplistic understanding of the purpose of a skill-based matchmaker. It's not put in place just to separate the good players from the bad, but to give the players that strive and want to improve an opportunity to do so in a fair and relatively stable environment. It's very difficult to improve in a system where your teammates and opponents are picked by pure chance alone.  

 

 

Unfortunately, a lot of people with bright ideas seem to think that the problem with said ideas being implemented is that people don't understand them, rather than them not being all that bright in the first place. The game has places for people who want to strive and improve in a relatively stable environment, and with like-minded people not picked by pure chance alone to boot; you should look into Clan Battles some time. If you're imagining that all Random needs to be some kind of utopia is a way of separating the casuals from the try-hards, then in realistic terms that's going to take more than an implementation of yet another matchmaking modification, and the gains are likely not to be worth the effort for WG as a company.

[anonym_PYC0RAuRIwe4]

1 minute ago, NobleSauvage said:

Unfortunately, a lot of people with bright ideas seem to think that the problem with said ideas being implemented is that people don't understand them, rather than them not being all that bright in the first place. The game has places for people who want to strive and improve in a relatively stable environment, and with like-minded people not picked by pure chance alone to boot; you should look into Clan Battles some time. If you're imagining that all Random needs to be some kind of utopia is a way of separating the casuals from the try-hards, then in realistic terms that's going to take more than an implementation of yet another matchmaking modification, and the gains are likely not to be worth the effort for WG as a company.

 

This feeble attempt of a comeback is not even worth my time dismantling so I'll leave you with a hearty "Yikes!" instead.

[Verblonde]

2 minutes ago, Vardog said:

Unfortunately, you and many other people playing this game have a very rigid and simplistic understanding of the purpose of a skill-based matchmaker.

They also have an understanding of basic maths: all the proposals for SBMM that I've seen tend to use a measure that will inevitably move towards a median value (50% WR, say) for everyone.

Say a potato like me makes a serious effort to get better and manages to nudge my WR a bit higher; all that happens is that I start to meet more players of a similar standard which starts to inevitably depress my WR; this will happen to everyone. Potatoes meet potatoes and their WR (or whatever measure) gets pushed towards the middle, and exactly the same thing happens to the unicums as well.

 

The only useful thing that WG could do - in theory - is to try and balance the number of players between each team by WR; sounds simple, right? Actually, no; take me - my overall WR is (last time I checked) 48% and my class and specific ship WRs vary around that by quite a large margin. If you used my overall WR to assign me to a team, the results could easily be as bad as the existing system, depending on which ship/class I'm playing. In the process, you would inevitably slow down MM drastically, as it now has to run a lot more calculations and you would achieve very little in return.

[NobleRipper]

Just now, Vardog said:

 

This feeble attempt of a comeback is not even worth my time dismantling so I'll leave you with a hearty "Yikes!" instead.

No counter-argument found, eh? Ah well!