So, recently I started my grind towards skeleton cosmetics. I have to be honest I'm pretty bad at PvP. At the moment, I'm level 10 in Servant of the Flame and I get matched with people that don't miss a shot.
It's pretty frustrating to try win such fights, so I think it'd be nice to at least have an option to go with longer wait time but be matched with someone of my skill, so I have a chance to have some streaks and farm the level.
Introduce MMR or any other balance to the Hourglass
@lboostedanimal there is already skill based matchmaking however the system prioritises matching speed in favour of it
@CallMeBackdrafT thank you for the response.
It's good to know that it already exists and prioritizes speed over quality. That is why I specifically mentioned that it'd be nice to have a choice to wait longer but to get a better-quality match.I second this. I have made a post where I stated that I wished to be able to wait for longer to have a fair match instead of taking less time to have an unfair one. In my time of pvp on demand I have met more gold curses than I can count on my fingers and toes. I'd love an option to wait longer, would make this whole problem so much better
@burnbacon Last time I checked, you are not able to run away once you start a hourglass fight, which is far different then meeting a crew on the open seas proper. So I'm pretty sure the hourglass IS technically a mode inside the open seas. And the only "balance" this person has suggested, is the ability to opt in to wait longer for a proper mmr based fight instead of just random
I’m not necessarily against the idea of having a somewhat filtered matchmaking system which would allow you to choose only similarly ranked players, but I think the demand for such a thing would be extremely low. Maybe you would use it, but anecdotally from what I’ve seen, most people just want a match. There are regions out there with matchmaking struggles due to low participation.
Also consider that currently the only matchmaking methodology that I’m aware of is based on streaks. You’re supposed to be matched based on your streak. So if you’re 0 streak, theoretically you’d be matched with other 0 streaks. This of course depends on availability in the queue. In other words, Rare would have to create an entirely new matchmaking system to suit, what I assume would be, very few people who’d use it. For that reason I’d say this is very unlikely to happen.
In my opinion, you should be happy to get to fight really good players, that’s a great way to learn, but everyone does HG for their own reasons.
The NA West queue is really healthy right now, far healthier than it’s been since I started playing 1 year and 2 months ago. I attribute this primarily to the effectiveness of EAC, and the hype for upcoming content. In my guild there are some very inexperienced players who are dabbling with hourglass, their reports the last week or so indicate that they’re actually getting matched with similarly skilled players most of the time, which is great.
Edit; My perhaps controversial opinion regarding HG post is that they often read like this: please make the curses easier to get so that I can quickly get them and never look back. I had the personal goal of reaching 200 in each faction, after I reached that goal I backed off HG a bit, but I still play it… because I like it. I’m helping a friend get his to 100 currently and I’ve passively reached ~ 350 in servants just from passively playing with others, or solo whenever I felt like it. Point being, if you like HG it doesn’t necessarily feel like a grind. I have 25/45 for the shores of gold curse, and I’ve hit a serious mental wall with that, hopefully I’ll get back to it. Never once did I think it should be quicker to suit me. For those who don’t like HG (not saying that’s you), they shouldn’t expect a game mode to be tailored to suit those who don’t like it. We aren’t entitled to any curse in this game.
I'm not really against this I suppose. But I'd just like to say the curses are supposed to be a show of status and achievement. I didn't start my grind for the skelly curse till season 10 or the ghost curse till season 11 I think, I've got both now so I do know the struggles. I feel if they did do this it would make the grind easier and you probably wouldn't learn as much from each fight if that was the case. But with perseverance and a willingness to assess why you lost and learn from it, you will get there. I don't know if it was intended to be like this or if it's just a bi product, but I kind of like how these curses can be very difficult to get because it means fewer people have them and it wouldn't make sense if everybody was running around with them, seeing someone with the curses in high seas instantly puts you on high alert because you know they will be good.
Yes I do know loss farmers and exploiters have them so it's not always a show of skill but they are the minority and you can tell pretty quickly who got them properly
@capt-greldik @Rotten-Rocko That's the exact reason I created this post. The "I feel like" metrics aren't really useful. That's why I create this post, so that everyone who wants this feature can vote for it and we can actually see numbers. If nobody votes for it - it means that the idea is useless and I can live with it. If "a lot of" people vote for it, than it means that it's a nice one and maybe Rare can take it to their backlog.
Not sure where your "Streak Based Matching" info comes from, but Rare themselves said that Hourglass uses an ELO based (Albeit slightly modified) system. That's the matchmaking system. A modified ELO system that should match with evenly skilled players, based only on Wins and Losses. Did they make streaks matter at some point? Because I always get/got matched unevenly with streaks, even when the mode was new and I was on 7, 8, 9, 10 streaks, still got matched against 0s, 1s, and 2s. But anecdotal so idk, grain of salt. I stopped caring about hourglass when I got what I wanted. I enjoy PvP, but I enjoy the open world PvP, not the structured PvP of Hourglass so much. Only really do it out of extreme boredom now.
But even then, the system was further modified after launch to prioritize queue time more heavily, causing imbalances in match skill. On top of dwindling player counts in the mode, causing more imbalances in match skill.
Thankfully the PS5 release should help reawaken the mode at some point for a little while. But it'll likely die down again.
I like your opinion of Hourglass though. But I do think everything in SoT is a "grind" because "the grind" isn't the point of the game. It's finding what you enjoy doing, and doing it, and being rewarded for it. I get that people are upset such cool cosmetics are locked behind a Forced PvP mode, but it should incentivize people to WANT to PvP to get them.
My PERSONAL opinion is that losses should award nothing. But wins should award much more to compensate for that. You don't play a competitive game or a competitive mode in a game to expect them to hand you rewards for losing. And in a game that was designed with PvP at it's heart, the thing that makes everything we do worth our time is the constant threat of other pirates coming to steal our treasure, and players should WANT to BE ABLE to defend their loot. I get it though, some people want a single player experience. But this isn't it. I believe that the Curses SHOULD be a symbol of Skill and Effort. And they are not. Some of the cosmetics show serious dedication especially after all of the changes to the mode, like the Broken Wheel Chest for skeletons, WINNING fights against that many ATHENA ships was hard when they added Same Faction Battles. So when you see it, you know the person put in serious time and effort to Hourglass. And obviously the Golden Variants But honestly the curses themselves should be like that.
Curses should elicit "Wow that person's good" reactions.
Cosmetics should elicit (with some exceptions so that some people can get goofy or easy to obtain cosmetics) "That person must be an absolute monster" reactions.
But at it's core, I assume every ghost player is a nonthreat. And most skeles with unimpressive cosmetics are nonthreats. To me personally, but I'm the 1% so, grain of salt.MMR and ELO are essentially the same thing. Hourglass already has an ELO based system, but low player counts effect the matching heavily. Players wanted a way to toggle to only fight Opposing Faction options as well (because Reaper players far outnumbered Athena players early on, and the Same Faction Battle implementation did not award credit to certain commendations), and we never got it. They would not implement any kind of toggle that would further elongate matching time. If you toggled to wait longer, you now made someone else wait longer who would've been matched against you, and they didn't ask for a longer queue. It's good for you, bad for them. The queues take long enough for some of us as it is. They shouldn't take longer.
It sucks to lose to an unfair fight. But you still get rep for it. So just take the loss and move on TBH. It's not a big deal. You'll get it all eventually if you stick with it.
The more you play the mode, the more the system will determine where you belong. It WILL SUCK at first, the system places you in a Higher ELO and scales you down as you lose to start with. Stick with it, and watch what people that are beating you do, and try to mimic it in the future. It will help significantly.
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