[Feedback] Item rewards and queue times in MP incentivize resigning

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So I managed to get my first epic chest from multiplayer, something I was never able to do during the beta. Here's how I managed to do it:

-During beta, I had to learn my way through multiplayer as my ranking increased. So slowly but surely, my ranking creeped it's way up. But even playing for most of the day, I could only get about half way to the epic chest. I wasn't skilled enough to win much more than half my games, and my games took a while because I was playing against evenly matched opponents. By the time I was sitting around in the top 20, the best I could hope for was to earn my 3 daily wins against other hardened players...
-Now, out of beta, I waited to play mp until I had beaten the campaign. With a decent collection of items and a now under-equipped player base, I steamrolled my way up the ladder, and got 20 wins in about 4-5 hours. Even just not having to wait in the queue shaved a good hour or two off of what it would take me now, not to mention 3-4 players surrendering in the first 2 minutes.

Although I'm glad I managed to pull it off, the fact that I'll never do it again unless my rating tanks is a little frustrating.

Now I'm sitting in the top 20, and I have to grind out my wins again... oh well

 

You know what else incentivizes resigning? Trying to get a game against the AI. Some people would like to just play a skirmish match against AI and will just resign unless they get Gary. I have been doing this, and I'm sure others are as well. I have no idea why the option to simply select an AI opponent isn't available. Just seems silly. Let me stop wasting my time and other peoples time and play the way I want.

 

You can play against the AI if you choose to play a custom game rather than a ranked MP game. Custom games won't win you chests on the ranked multiplayer reward track. But no one is stopping you from playing against the AI if that's what you want to do.

As for the item rewards, the rewards need to be high for ranked MP so that players are encouraged to participate; and the rewards are balanced around the assumption that ranked MP matches should provide a strong challenge. By contrast, experienced players generally have a very high win-rate against the AI. And so if players were allowed to choose to only play against the AI while still using the same rewards system, it would become by far the most effective way to farm items and it would undermine the intended effect of encouraging people into multiplayer community. It's good for the multiplayer community to have an large number of active players of all skill levels. Having a large number and range of players helps provide relatively balanced matchmaking for everyone.

If you want to play against the AI, you are free to do so either in a custom match or in any of the single player modules. If you don't think that's good enough for some reason, then I encourage you to suggest some form of new content. Perhaps you'd be interested in something like this suggestion. I just don't think it's fair for you to imply that you are being forced into wasting time or that you are being prevented from playing the way you want to. If you join the ranked multiplayer queue, then you should expect to be paired in a multiplayer game. That's whole point.

 

Obvious suggestion for topicstarter's post:
Make (values as exemple) 250,500,800,1000,1200 and so on rating bariers. If you reach 250 you cant go bellow. If you reach 1000 one time - you can go highter but never fall back.
Simple and working.

 

I have a partial solution. I don't think it would be enough to handle the problem by its self, but mitigating solutions still have their worth.

Make it so winning a match by short-term resignation does not grant the winner any prizes. Maybe a list of circumstances similar to what was mentioned earlier would dictate what is a played-out resignation and what is a knee-jerk resignation to prevent people from denying opponents prizes.

This would do two things:
First, it would give people a hell of a lot more incentive to report people who are resigning simply to go after low-hanging fruit. I'm sure just about everybody in this thread already does it, but I doubt the majority of the people who play online do since there's nothing actually telling you knee-jerk resigning is a reportable offense.

Second (and more importantly), it would change the associated experience of getting a knee-jerk resignation. I suspect a large factor in to all these resignations is the perception that it's not bothering anybody, or heck, it's even helping them by giving them quick and easy access to loot, with the unspoken agreement being that you too will enjoy this easy access to loot when karma comes around and gives you a knee-jerk resignation victory. By changing the nature of a knee-jerk resignation from overall positive to a neutral or even negative experience, it will likely make doing so less desirable.

 

While I agree that ai matches shouldn't give rank I think they should provide rewards. Also I disagree that multiplayer needs or even should provide good rewards. The rewards are exactly what promotes cheesy play like dropping rank intentionally and quitting out of tough matches immediately in order to breeze through the reward track. Get rid of the reward track and people won't be doing that, they'll just be playing for wins and rank. Because you have item drops in multiplayer, half the people playing multiplayer aren't even playing for rank, they're playing for loot, so until you take the loot out of multiplayer, people will strategize their gameplay to optimize loot and that's going to be in conflict with people who strategize their gameplay for rank. You're seeing these problems because people are going into multiplayer with different goals.

 

I maintained rank 1 for 4 days or so, before dropping yesterday. I had been avoiding Mom, as she counters me. After a UI reset force-queued me against her, I said screw it, and purposely kept playing her, knowing my rating would likely drop. I obviously still tried to win, but there was simply no reason to stress rating over speed. Sitting in queues for 15 minutes and not being able to reach my 11 or 20 win chests doesn't make sense, when there's no reward for being on top.

 

As someone else in the top 10, I agree with pliers. It can take me a few hours just to get my 3 daily mp chests; the combination of long queue times and long games against tough players can be grueling. I've had to wait as much as 30 minutes just to find a game...

The main incentive for being a top player is... just being a top player. I have a much harder time getting chests than when I was lower rated...

Personally, I'd like to see the mp chests based off victory points earned instead of just wins.

 

At the top, you should be roughly even on wins and losses, but you're fighting much better players. Getting a game in the first place can take a long time. Once you finally get in a match, it takes more thought, and you can't really afford to call it quits in round 2-3 just because you're in a rough spot, like my opponents do semi-regularly. It's a backwards system if the only reward for being on top is ego, when it comes at the cost of efficiency.

Staying at the top of the leaderboard cost me long term progression because of missing out on items, and it simply wasn't worth maintaining anymore. I was actually eager for something to happen to knock me out of first so that my ego wouldn't keep me from playing.

 

If you take out the bonus chests, I think it's likely that 90% of players will stop playing MP completely. At which point it may become nearly impossible to find an opponent at the lowest ranks.

 

A couple of days ago I saw one player resigning non-stop for most of the day. They were already down to a rating of just 300 and they were still resigning against everyone, including Garry. I don't know what they were trying to achieve...

Anyway, seeing those all those resignations dominating the Recent Results board made me wonder: should the maximum match-making wait time be changed to increase after losses in a similar way to how it increases after wins? Presumably the point of having a short waiting time to begin with is so that players get a couple of quick games without a long wait - and the point of increasing the time is so that players are more likely to be matched with someone of similar rating in their later games. Regardless of whether a person is deliberately resigning or not, it seems to me that it might be a good idea to give the match-making system a bit more time after a bunch of losses. If the losses are deliberate, then it makes the strategy of chain-resigning slower and thus less effective. And if the losses are not deliberate, it at least helps reduce the likelihood that the player will be mismatched with someone too strong. ...

Obviously we wouldn't want waiting time increases for losing to stack with the current waiting time increases for winning because that would just result in unnecessarily longer times for everyone and could be quite punishing. But I can think of a few different ways a waiting time increase could be implemented such that it doesn't become a burden for normal play and yet still have its intended effects as I described. I don't think the details are very important right now. I'm just putting the idea out there.

 

We could push Item rewards to 2nd consecutive win and higher and make the first one something cosmetic or a boost rather then direct goodie hand-out. Some ideas:
1st win of the day, reset daily: Pizza chest, 2 wooden chest item + 2 special item
Zero consecutive victory: 2 item wooden chest
2nd consecutive win: 4 item wooden chest
3rd & 4th consecutive win: gold chest
5th consecutive win: purple chest
6th consecutive win: orange chests containing 4 legendary treasures
7th+ consecutive win: A big congratulatory broadcast to the whole server. The chest is empty aside from a small note on the effect of sunlight on human health.

Special items are one of the following
Common: common treasures
Uncommon: uncommon treasures
Rare: Time machine ticket (Makes all shops immediately reset)
Epic: sleeping paintess (wake up randomly after the next mp win streak, chosen randomly between 2 and 4 consecutive wins, and make that chest one color better. Can only have only one at any time)
Legendary: one single pizza slice

 

I think requiring consecutive wins is a horrible idea. It dramatically encourages forfeiting to lower rating and increases the burden on players.

 

Agreed. While I think the system could use a change, I don't think that's the way to go about it.

Personally, I'm in favor of bonus chests being based on victory points earned per day in mp. Getting 100 victory points could give the epic chest. It might promote playing fast and risky builds, but it'd be nice to be compensated for losing a hard fought game.

 

I would love to see things based on Victory Points instead of wins. Just because you then have some compensation for those days where your head just isn't in the game, even though you keep trying. And the final few moves in a very close game would be far less agonizing, since it isn't an all or nothing affair.