I don't know, is this only me, or the SBM doesn't exist at all? I, a guy with 20 ships sunk total, highest streak of 2, got jumped by faction champions with skelly curses. 2. TIMES. ALREADY. I'm not the one to complain all that much, sure, there are people better than myself, many people, but this is literally disencouraging. How am I supposed to win against a faction champ with a skelly curse who probably spends all their time grinding? I believe the system works on a win-lose base, meaning it's based on your win-lose ratio compared to other people, I might be wrong though. My suggestion? Include highest streak and ships sunk overall in the system. Or make it a thing, because I'm really questioning it's existence at this point
Skill-based matchmaking does not exist
To my understanding, the way the MM works is it will try to find someone similar to your skill, but if it can't find someone then it opens the pool to be less strict, and continues to do this until a match is found. when there's not a lot of people in your server stamp, this can mean that the closest match available could be a skelly group/ghost group. Hope that makes sense, and again this is all to my understanding from what Rare said
@dabomb139 This is pretty much it.
What happens here OP is that if the SBMM only aimed at giving you roughly similarly skilled opponents, you wouldn't get any match at all most of the time. Because the current mode population and arguably stamps system don't allow for it.
It might be fixed when Rare find a way to allow cross-stamps matchmaking.
Ultimately tho, what your experiencing now is the future of the mode without a healthy population with evenly distributed skill ranking.
@captainsokol213 said in Skill-based matchmaking does not exist:
I don't know, is this only me, or the SBM doesn't exist at all? I, a guy with 20 ships sunk total, highest streak of 2, got jumped by faction champions with skelly curses. 2. TIMES. ALREADY. I'm not the one to complain all that much, sure, there are people better than myself, many people, but this is literally disencouraging. How am I supposed to win against a faction champ with a skelly curse who probably spends all their time grinding? I believe the system works on a win-lose base, meaning it's based on your win-lose ratio compared to other people, I might be wrong though. My suggestion? Include highest streak and ships sunk overall in the system. Or make it a thing, because I'm really questioning it's existence at this point
It's not level that gets matched, but win/lose ratio. Someone with skelly curse can be on or close to your ratio.
@grog-minto said in Skill-based matchmaking does not exist:
@dabomb139 This is pretty much it.
What happens here OP is that if the SBMM only aimed at giving you roughly similarly skilled opponents, you wouldn't get any match at all most of the time. Because the current mode population and arguably stamps system don't allow for it.
It might be fixed when Rare find a way to allow cross-stamps matchmaking.
Ultimately tho, what your experiencing now is the future of the mode without a healthy population with evenly distributed skill ranking.
This is the big problem that needs to be fixed. It's a delicate balance between making hourglass the endgame, long-term goal that it should be, and just making the grind seem endless and near impossible for the casual player. If they award too much allegiance, people will get the curses and leave the game mode to nothing but the mega-sweats, a.k.a. Arena 2.0. If they make it too hard the casuals won't join at all because they don't feel it's feasible to ever get the curses loss after loss after loss, and only the mega-sweats will be left, again.
The challenge is, how to do keep a healthy population with evenly distributed skill ranking? I'm frankly not sure that's possible... I think the overwhelming majority of the players are PVEVP. Most of us are quite happy doing some vaults, finding a lost shipment, chasing that ship over there, having a good laugh, then GG. Most of those, I posit, will leave the game mode after they unlock the curses some time this new year (happy new year y'all) and then hourglass will see the same 3% player time that caused arena to shut down. The only saving grace is there is nothing stopping Rare from adding another 1000 levels with more cosmetics to unlock after the grognards have all gotten there. The problem is, if the bulk of players aren't level 1000, they're certainly not going to be attracted to another 1000 levels.
I like the hourglass mode well enough at face value, it achieved many goals from slimming the codebase and reducing support costs to bringing the PVP players back in. I'm just not sure in a PVEVP sandbox game with a strong PVEVP community a "PVE mode" or "PVP mode" will attract enough of the player base to survive. The only reason I go to sunken kingdom content is to get tridents to kill skeleton lords with. I go to sea forts for supplies and a good start to a treasure haul (and the music, you guys really hit the nail on the head there). Do I replay the tall tales for fun? No. Do I lament the adventures being in the rear-view mirror? Not particularly. Will I mourn the loss of hourglass when it inevitably goes the way of arena? Only if I haven't unlocked the curses yet. 🤷♂️
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