Season 8 Disappointment

It's day 2 dude.
The sbmm has only existed for about 2 days.
Nobody is sorted.
Think of it as if the game had only just launched, like right now.

Every single player currently has the same skill rating, because no matches have happened yet.
Time has to pass with the lesser players losing a lot, the better players winning a lot, and the average players having an essentially random experience, before the betters finally rank up and the lessers rank down away from the starting point.

The first day of sbmm existing is pretty much the same as it not existing. The first week many people won't be able to tell it's there.
The first couple weeks it's barely noticable.
Get past a month, and it starts to actually seem like it exists.
Multiple months and people are actually quite sorted, except for any new accounts that have to start dead center and deviate the same way everyone did at launch.

You could wait until after that first month to partake yourself, if you were so inclined.

The update just released, it makes sense that ELO still has to settle in order for us to get proper matches. You can't expect people to be "ranked" accordingly out of the blue, I'd give it a week or two before we can judge how good the matchmaking is.
When it comes to respawning at an outpost after a loss I think this should definitely be implemented as to not break the flow of combat and not discourage people for hopping back in. Although I'd say that it's far from miserable, just leave the server and start a new boat.
On your last point about the queue times I definitely agree, the estimate is pretty much always a lie and "more than 10min" can turn into instant queue whereas "2-4 minutes" can last ages, that's a weird one, especially after release, I'd still give it a week tho to see if it somehow fixes itself but I do think something went wrong there.

They just need to rework the supply system, imo ships get double to the standard stock max and curse balls are only from player inventory. The ship supplies reset for every battle.

@chronodusk

Skill based matchmaking takes time to work. They covered this a bit in the deep dive video. They didn't want to use old stats (like a K/D ratio) that didn't reflect how the new system works. So it's effectively stats from scratch, and that'll take weeks to start having meaningful impacts.

Your second point is valid. This is meant to exist in adventure so restocking needs to be a part of it, or it'd break adventure. It can't be a direct arena replacement. But if it's faster just to log out and log into a new server after a sink that already forced a server migration, that's also an issue they need to tweak. But I don't think that makes the existing experience "horrendous" nor does it cause the system to be disappointing. It's a minor inconvenience relatively speaking.

I haven't had the experience with queue times you have. When we actively hunted, we always chose the side of the hourglass with the fastest queue times. And we saw that change sides several times throughout our evening. It always seemed spot-on. Most times we barely experienced the underwater tunnel.

Once we got tired of restocking, we went passive. And we're getting matched every 15 minutes or so. So it seems even the cooldown worked as expected.

We did experience one significant bug. We were passive slooping and got invaded. A boarder ran THROUGH my partner's blubderbuss at the top of the ladder. I was guarding the anchor and witnessed it firsthand. Frustrating yet typical hitreg shenanigans. My partner is still not used to standing back from the ladder a step to get a better backtrack hit. It's a learned skill....but hitreg is not the significant issue, so I digress....

We were winning the naval game, but once boarded, the tide was turned. The boarder was a beast at personal PvP. Swept us multiple times and, of course, their partner was able to lay down cannon fire unabated. So we sank... No biggie.

I had just come through the ferry door when the ship sink gong tolled. My partner was still on the ferry. Here comes the long-winded road to the significant bug. Once the gong finished, I got teleported to... A random island. And I see a mermaid. My partner goes through the door and gets.... Pinwheel of death. Somehow we got into a limbo state where we did NOT get merged away from the server we lost. Dunno if him being on the ferry played a part or what.

I take my mermaid. Same island opposite side. We chat while waiting for SOMETHING to happen. After a few minutes of me killing snakes, taking the mernaid half a dozen times, and other tomfoolery, I suggest that I'll log out and start a new sloop.

He suggest I try dying first.

I've killed all the snakes and there are no environmental threats. So I start swimming out and down to drown. Proximity to the island, however, seems to have been the key. Once I get out past the island banner area, before I am even close to dying, he suddenly says "whatever you did Worked. The green wheel is gone." And moments later, I also get pulled from the ocean. It's pretty clear at this point we ARE being migrated to a new server.

So, TLDR, is there is an edge-case migration bug on a loss that can cause a person to get stuck and need to take extra steps to get migrated. That can be significant if you have to give up voyage progress or similar by logging out.

But bugs happen, especially with new significant mechanisms. The positives farm outweigh the negatives with season 8 and I don't find it disappointing at all. Frustrating at times (taking a loss from the jaws of victory because of a single blunder hitreg is still a sore spot for me) but overall we've enjoyed our first evenings with the system. I'm looking forward to seeing how the matchmaking starts having an impact.

As an aside, if matchmaking DOES work as expected, I suspect a couple of le of the streak commendations will require an adjustment. The best matchmaking should make win/loss near 50/50 and thus make long win streaks highly improbable. That was my first gut-check when I read the new commendations. But time will tell.

The first thing to note is that the promised skill-based matchmaking appears to be non-existentr dont spend gold and just freely gather supplies from the barrels. Maybe do some prep work before hand than activate hourglass

I kind of agree. No matter, Solo vs Solo, I seem to be very poorly pvp here. There shots never miss, waves block my view so i have to "guess" and end up missing anyways. Idk maybe I am a horrible pvper (I knew that) but dang...

Once you're at the outpost, you get to spend your gold and your time loading up supplies

Or dont spend gold? idk nobody forces you to do this.

The alleged "1 to 2 minute" wait times were more like 10 to 15 minutes.

and? Try switching Factions. :p But anyways, 5min wait or 10. Not much a big deal if you ask me. Nothing is "On demand" as they claim. It will happen, just be happy you havn't hit the "Couldnt find a match" message.

As others have said, matchmaking doesn’t actually exist right now because according to the game no one has any skill. It isn’t until you show the game through playing the mode that you have skill, can it start to match you.

If you want to avoid being matched with people better than you, wait a week or 2 to play. By then the people you match with will either be: new, closer to your level, or also have waited for 1-2 weeks before trying as they wanted the ELO/MMR to have taken the sweats to their proper rank.

As for the rest, I agree you should only ever spawn back at an outpost when you sink so that you can raise a flag if you wish and you can get supplies if you wish. I’m not sure about any given advantages though. If you don’t want to spend gold, hand loot the barrels like we did for the first 3 years of the game.

@bloodfrenzy187 said in Season 8 Disappointment:

This update was made to appease a minority of hardcore PvP players the rest of us can apparently kick rocks.

I’ve already decided to just wait until next season to play again if they add more PvE content.

7 straight Seasons of nothing but PvE focused updates and you balk at PvP having just one update to itself. Oh my sweet lord 😂🤣

@mad-bomber-man Hit reg is really bad in this game. The people you came across were likely skilled players (that awful matchmaking op mentioned) and your shots were simply not registering because of this games awful hit reg. (here is a video explaining how bad hitreg is)

If rare cared about the player base they would if fixed the PVP issues before adding this in, Blunder still broken, double gunning insanely broken, sword is terrible and the waiting time is junk, this is a terrible update and idea should if just brought back the arena not this junk

@mad-bomber-man clearly you haven’t played many games these days. But also if you hate the game so much why are you spending your time commenting about it on the forum? Surely you could just idk, move on?

@ninja-naranja it's not that ppl hate the game it's the development of the game it's a decent game and has a few good things in but realases an update for pvp based and not fixing the pvp problems in the game is what makes this update terrible

@chronodusk I agree with some of these points:

Also a BIG factor that people tend to forget is all things considered I think people over blow the actual ACTIVE Playerbase of this game a bit to much. Furthermore players that are queuing up for actual PvP might be in the minority compared to PvE Enjoyers as it always has been.

im 50/50 on the MMR system, ok its better that new players don't get trashed on constantly but that also comes at a cost that higher players have really long queue times.
At this point im not even sure if the MMR is working, seems to put you in a mixture of Sweaty teams/namers and other times against day 1 players. Weird.

Also the Queue time is random, some times its an instant Queue into a battle, other times it takes 10-20 minutes to find a game for some reason, I fail to see a pattern as to why that is. Streaks/sinks/time of the day/night in regions etc. Can't put a finger on it.

All that being said I still prefer this season/system then server hopping on a galleon say and not finding a single enemy galleon for the whole day.
This system is GUARANTEED to find semi-decent fights of the same ship size which im super grateful for, glad to wait 10-20 mins then server hop for the same time + More in supping up and chasing a R5 sloop directly into wind or brig that is uncatchable unless your also a brig for 30 minutes before giving up on the game...

As buggy as this game has always been I think its Queue times/mmr are just scuffed currrently.

@mad-bomber-man every update up until this one has catered to pve players. You can literally get Pirate legend in a day with all the pve things they’ve added. Let us have our fun now

@bloodfrenzy187 quit whining about the update pve lord. You’ve had 8 seasons of pve content. If anything it takes focus off of you and puts pvp v pvp

@pithyrumble

1/4 of a level is not enough to keep people wanting to fight. If they see that level tick up after each match, they will physically see the progress and think that at least they got something out of the experience. It's like the psychology behind slot machines. The flashy lights and sounds will keep them coming back even though they are losing. Getting a full level reward for participating will entice people to return. Without those people returning, this will die off just like Arena.

@major-bones said in Season 8 Disappointment:

@pithyrumble

1/4 of a level is not enough to keep people wanting to fight. If they see that level tick up after each match, they will physically see the progress and think that at least they got something out of the experience. It's like the psychology behind slot machines. The flashy lights and sounds will keep them coming back even though they are losing. Getting a full level reward for participating will entice people to return. Without those people returning, this will die off just like Arena.

I think this makes a lot of sense, but it should not become an easy way to cheese the levels through discord communities where you would just end matches ASAP to get that level.
I would dare to guess that once the ELO system has more data and players have more games under their belts, it will be adjusted to the player levels.

So let's say if your elo is 1000 and you win against someone who is 500, it won't go up as much. Equally, if you are level 500 and you win against someone who is 1000 it would be a lot more meaningful and your level will increase a lot more.
Same for losing, if you lose against an opponent who is 1000 and you are 500 it should give you more reputation for losing, but if you are 1000 and you loose against someone 500 it wont give you as much reputation.

Other games take time into account, but we don't have this feature

After talking to other day one players and so on we all agree this update just destroyed the core game experience, the game has been and always will be about loot and stealing loot the pve and pvp aspect, not knowing how that ship on the horizon is going to react, this update you can't turn loot in for rep you are forced to dive and fight sink or win the rep is so little for it, rare didn't think this threw like the arena and yes overtime it will be a longer wait time for matching just like the arena it will die off, but as for the update it didn't keep the core experience for the game just took all that away cool effects nice graphics but no core experience no loot collection no stealing no adventure just the same thing over and over just bring back the arena at this point it might as well

@atomicfire4098 I don’t think hit reg could be fixed or they would’ve done that already. Aside from going to hit scan that is, and even then it could still be buggy

@bloodfrenzy187 said in Season 8 Disappointment:

This update was made to appease a minority of hardcore PvP players the rest of us can apparently kick rocks.

I’ve already decided to just wait until next season to play again if they add more PvE content.

That;s not true, most people aren't in either of the extremes, I enjoy some good pve but this update also provided the game with a nice welcomed quick acting hype boost injection. It has its issues but so does everything else in the game. I'm satisfied with the pvp portion, they jsut need a few patches and updates to the system and it's good, then I'll like to see more tall tales type of voyages with better rewards

@hrhboudii what regain is that?