TLDR: Cross region match making didn't actually have the positive impact on HG as intended. You or you opponent are fighting ping issues and there is no way to run from cheaters if you have a high win rate. They could get creative and increase the player base by finding ways to draw more players to HG instead of taking the existing players from all surrounding stamps and smooshing them together. An example is adding a rank, alongside allegiance, that goes up and down based on the outcome of each fight.
UPDATE: We finally got a streak going at 5:00AM, we got queued against EU players when my teammate is NA west and I am NA central. Our ping never went below 200. This cannot be real.
Initially, I had mixed feelings about cross region match making when it was announced. On the one hand it would improve match making quality because there is a larger pool of opponents, on the other hand you will have a bad ping in half your games because you wouldn't be on native servers.
The change turned out to be worse than I thought. It had the positives of giving us higher quality opponents most games, because now we aren't stuck fighting the 3 comp crews on the south central stamp. But the negatives far outweigh the positives for decent crews.
Firstly, most games have similar skill players BUT one of the crews is always at a disadvantage of high ping. We used to make the conscious decision to switch to non-native servers, but it wasn't that bad because only some of the fights were competitive. Now you have no choice. You are playing people of your skill level more often but one crew is fighting the server as well. In a game that is poorly optimized, it is painful to get stuck on stairs, get back tracked by a cannon ball or sniper shots, have cannon and wave desync, get fake buckets or inaccurate bucket throws, reg mast with chain shots, and battle your own cannon when it doesn't reload after you press 'R'. I recognize this may not be an issue for the average HG player, but I can't imagine anyone enjoys poor game performance, even if they are saved from queuing the stamp champs.
Secondly, it is impossible to dodge cheaters now. This game has a cheating problem, there is no denying that. It doesn't make much sense. There is an anti-cheat and they have made strides to stop the use of packs, but people still get away with running external software when launching the game seven years after release (discussion for another thread). We used to be able to choose to play on a different stamp if we knew there were cheaters on ours. But now that's nearly impossible. Having an 80% win rate up to this point is now a curse, we find every cheater on every stamp near us. In the last 2 days I have seen more cheaters than I have playing every day in the last 4 months, and my friends all have the same experience.
Rare was looking for a way to improve match making quality and queue times. Their solution was to take the existing HG player base and smoosh them all together, instead of finding a creative way to increase the player base size. I'm no developer, but I am sure there are solutions that keep players on their own servers. An example would be to add a rank to HG. Not to replace allegiance, but along side it. A rating that goes up and down based on wins or losses, with the amount of gain or loss being based on the rating of the opposite crew. They could get creative and make ranks such as bronze, silver, gold, platinum, diamond, etc. each designating a range of ratings. The rank could reset each season with the seasonal update. There could be simple rewards such as trinkets, clothing, boat cosmetics, or weapons/tools that show you ended a season at a specific rank. There could be a ranked leaderboard, showing the best crews across the world, region, or stamp. This would be a great way to draw a larger, more consistent player base into HG. This is only first idea I had, and it took me 5 minutes to come up with, I'm sure a paid dev team could refine it or come up with a better idea.
The big picture is that SoT does not run well enough and has too many cheaters for cross region match making to be effective. All of my friends have expressed the same concerns, I'm surprised I'm not seeing more people complain in YouTube comments, the Tavern, the Forums, or Twitter. They have to revert this feature, give players the option to opt out of cross region queues, come up with a different tactic to increase player base, or some combination of these things. At the very least give us the option to stay in our own servers. If something doesn't change soon, they will have lost multiple dedicated players, with thousands of hours of play time, and hundreds of dollars spent on the emporium and season passes.
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