Better skill base matchmaking for Hourglass

Hourglass needs love.

Lets hope Rare reworks hourglass as a part of season 12. The mode is not casual player friendly whatsoever.

Here’s things they could do emphasis on could.

(1) More progression for winning; the grind is a slog. One level of allegiance minimum for a win.

(2) Less of an emphasis on streaking; not everybody can streak. Streaking is still always worth more allegiance than your first win but not as much as now.

(3) Additional progression for actively trying to battle. This can be earned in every battle by both crews irrespective of who wins. This should be a behind the scenes type thing so players aren’t focused on trying to maximize participation progression.

(4) Smaller battle boundaries (especially for sloop battles).

(5) Option to re-queue with default supplies from the screen that shows your ship underwater and in pieces.

(6) Sink a ship and you get their hourglass value not a fixed amount; encourages people to fight crews they’ve lost to before.

(7) Chase cannons added to the game to counter runners (this isn’t an hourglass specific change but still would help).

(8) Increase default supplies: chainshot, blunderbombs and firebombs by 50%.

(9) Allow for more time to elapse before the matchmaking opens up to higher skilled players.

(10) Lose three times in a row while you are actively participating in the three battles lost and your next matchup will be against a skeleton crew for a practically guaranteed win.

(11) After achieving a 10 win streak you can be matched with any crew size automatically. This is to ensure the crews that almost never lose against a crew equal to their size can eventually find a crew that is challenging to defeat.

(12) Similar to gold rush have a designated hour (or several hours) everyday where allegiance gains are increased by 150%.

@farendiil said in Better skill base matchmaking for Hourglass:

@meekkitten64978 It's not supposed to be casual, most of your ideas wouldn't work at all cause it's literally supposed to only be pvp.

(1) One level is too much, ½ to ¾ would be fine though.

(2) Streaks are fine as they are now, hg is not made for casuals.

(3 to 6) These are good ideas.

Hourglass is not made for casuals is the problem. Failing to see and correct that will result in low participation. Sea of Thieves is a CASUAL game. Like it or not.

@farendiil said in Better skill base matchmaking for Hourglass:

hg is not made for casuals.

and that's why it has struggled since day 1 lol

that's why loss farming became a thing, it's why skilled pvpers are rolling dice and running from each other just to "protest" whatever they think they are protesting about the other player.

Yeah it's an inconsistent and unpleasant thunderdome but if it's ever going to succeed beyond just taking pressure off pvers outside of HG then it has to become appealing at some point.

Incentives for a little bit of daily participation rather than extreme unrewarding grinds can help. Getting people in the habit of 1-3 fights a day can help consistency more than "it's not for casuals" where it's uninteresting fights with the same hardcore hgers over and over again

Getting a lot more people to have even 1 fight a day through incentives would improve HG.

@farendiil

I’m not complaining about anything. I have both of my base curses. I would like to achieve level 200 in both factions but I don’t enjoy playing hourglass at all. It would be better if some of my suggestions were implemented or if hourglass was made more casual in other ways.

The number one issue for me is the grind is super tedious and the battles are super repetitive. It doesn’t help that every battle starts the exact same way which is why in the past I suggested adding a couple varying starting spawn positions.

We already have the start where you are sailing directly towards each other’s ships.. what about a parallel start? Where you spawn sailing parallel with the other crew similar to how skeleton ships spawn but not as close.

What about a start where both ships are anchored in each other’s broadsides and in relatively close proximity to each other?

Three unique starts would help break up the monotony of the mode.

Massive battle boundaries so people can reset with ease (I play solo sloop only) this issue doesn’t really affect full crews as much.

But really the mode just isn’t fun for the majority of players so they don’t participate and so I end up fighting the sweatiest solos in the game and of course they hate losing so battles can take forever. This goes back to how easy it is to reset in solo hourglass.

Anyway your attitude is I’m the problem haha no please. The implementation of hourglass is the problem.

Sea of Thieves is a casual PvPvE game. It is not Call of Duty, Battlefield, Apex Legends, Halo etc.

Super competitive PvP modes won’t do well in Sea of Thieves unless they also are made to appeal to casual players as well.

So that means your attitude and others who share a similar attitude is actually hurting the mode not mine.

@farendiil said in Better skill base matchmaking for Hourglass:

@wolfmanbush I mean, it's supposed to be a hard pvp grind, Idk why y'all want it to be casualized. Look, I'm mainly a pvper, and adventure pvp is my thing, I got what I wanted from hg and now I'm only doing it from time to time(been helping a friend lately so I went back in).

There is no sustainability in any content without casual interest.

Hg has always and will always need lots of interest and participation, that only happens by offering a quality experience for non-extreme players that want to improve at pvp.

Very few want to play HG all day or as their main content.

Far more would be open to incentives that keep them satisfied at a couple of fights a day, that's manageable, that helps hg and opens opportunity for more hg participation at a variety of skill levels.

Hourglass should have never been viewed as "the best of the best" it should have always been viewed as training content that builds up from inexperience into experience. That serves the most skilled at the top but prioritizes mass participation for a little bit of the day rather than all day of being miserable and sacrificing random adventure.

@farendiil said in Better skill base matchmaking for Hourglass:

@meekkitten64978 I don't have the attitude your saying, I'm just putting my point of view. These curses are not meant to be achieved by casual means. Also, when the pvp community gets something(this time its big), people will always feel like they should be able to get everything from a casual eye, the Reaper Runs event for example was not meant for casuals, same for arena and hg. SoT is not just a casual game since pvp is a thing.

The curses mean nothing even the gold ones. You’ll figure that out after you earn them and wear them and then stop wearing them.

What you and others actually care about are decent fights and decent participation across the board. Without those the mode is practically dead.

@farendiil

What do you think about having two new starts to hourglass battles?

Parallel start both ships sailing same direction like how a skeleton ship surfaces when spawning but not as close.

Anchored start both ships bow pointing opposite directions but in each other’s broadsides and relatively close.

Having only one start like there is now sucks because the best PvP players with a ton of hourglass experience know exactly how high and far to lead their cannons to hit on that initial broadside. Like they cannot miss that opening exchange. That’s why a lot of the time I immediately anchor turn and set up a different rotation to throw them off.

@meekkitten64978 Problem is sometimes people are still in a blackscreen when the ship surfaces, so directly having them next to each other would give you (or your crewmember) no time to get out of that blackscreen. Especially with solo sloop matches this could mean that you already lost before you could do something.

And even without that blackscreen issue: sometimes people are not in the correct spot yet when the ship surfaces, since you get no warning when the ship is going to surface and your stuck in the position you're at then (and with a larger waiting time, you have to move to not get afk-kicked, but also want it to get a lil less bored). Again it would give you an disadvantage or advantage over the other ship. The little start-up time you now get after the ships surface and you can move again is just important to keep matches fair.

@super87ghost

I think they had a solution for this in arena where they kept everyone in a loading screen until everyone loaded in fully but still I would be happy with one new start a parallel start as opposed to only having one start.

The parallel start could work with a defender and an invader and it could work with two invaders without issue.

I guess you could argue the defenders would have a small advantage over invaders but still I think having only one way to start every hourglass battle is one of the main reasons why it feels so repetitive.

@meekkitten64978 If just different starting positions is the thing you're looking for, perhaps you could make it so ships can also spawn with a 90 degree angle of each others sailing line. So basicly if you are coming from the south, that the oposing ship can also come from the east of west instead of only from the north. This would already make it so you can't just do the basic thing of sailing a lil to the right and start a counter-clockwise circle like the meta is now, since you could then be nosing your opponent.

@super87ghost

I’ll take that as well. But I still think it would be cool to have several different unique starts to battles.

There’s always a solution to make it fair when it comes to games if you really want to do something.

Anything to help break up the extremely repetitive feeling of playing hourglass would help imo.

I would say add entirely new types of battles that involve more than two crews but given the low participation in the mode I think that would be more of a waste of dev time at this point.

So focus on making hourglass feel less repetitive, make the grind less of a slog for casual players who can’t win the majority of their fights and the rest of my suggestions are pretty much QoL.