When I kill or cap (even in tournaments), my rank point total doesn’t instantaneously go up like it used to. I get all the rank/glory points I earned in that match added to my total at the end of each match only. I’ve confirmed that this happened to at least one other player. Is this intended? Perhaps as a way to encourage people to finish matches?
This was to stop an exploit players were using to farm glory and rank points. You will still get all the glory and RP you earned during the match when the match concludes.
Deimos Tel Arin.7391, can you explain what part of the change legitimate players are unhappy with?
Is it possible that this change could help to improve hot join in the long run, though? Just curious what your thoughts are, without bias. I know the feeling of disappointment when something is taken away, but I’d like to know if you think this change could actually help the growth of PvP.
From what I understand, people are upset that they can’t come and go from hot join and still be rewarded before the match ends. If hot join is the place where new players are learning PvP, is it healthy for people to be coming and going as they please? Is it good to promote that habit?
In 15-20 minutes a hot join match would be over, though.
Common legitimate use cases that this change negatively affects include:
-Playing in Hot Join while waiting for solo/team queue now rewards essentially no glory because it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to finish a match before queue ends. Even if you do finish your first match, the early half of your next match would likely reward nothing.
-Players with flaky connections dc’ing before end of match will not be rewarded glory for anything they accomplished before that point, even if they connect back before match ends.
But more importantly, this change doesn’t put nearly enough of a dent in those disgusting glory farm servers that can still gain glory at many times the rate of regular play.
Ban the server owners and anyone who has spent more than a dozen hours in those servers since their introductions (I’m being generous with the definition of willful exploitation here).
This is an exploit that completely destroyed whatever pitiful value Glory, the only currency sPvP players had access to, had remaining. Please deal with it with at least a fraction of the gravitas that you have demonstrated for exploits that devalue gold and undermine the PvE economy.
Frankly this double standard you have shown so far on this issue speaks volumes on how seriously you guys really take sPvP as a game mode.
Sorry, what double standard? Could you explain what you mean by that?
We realize that the change is only a band-aid for any exploiting that’s happening, which is why we are looking into other options for that specifically (I literally can’t give any more details than that, as we see the number of players participating in this increase when we do share more).
What if this change was thought of not as an exploit fix, and more of a change to hot joins to improve them? How would you feel about it in that case?
It depends on what aspect of sPvP you’re trying to grow.
Growing the Hot Join Only playerbase isn’t exactly healthy for the game. Hot Join should not be the mode that is the most rewarding when considering an equal time investment. This is counter-intuitive to its intended role as a mode to ease players into the officially supported gamemode of 5v5 Conquest.
My suggestion is to change their official names to Practice Arenas to reflect their actual usage in the sPvP realm. They should be something that people can use to jump in, test their builds, jump out, and get rewarded for whatever they accomplish in that time, as was the case in the previous reward model.
Solo Queue and Team Queue, however, need to have their reward models revamped to completely overshadow whatever you can achieve in the same amount of time in Practice Arenas. Because this is the gameplay that the classes, skills and builds are balanced around, and until a new player has experienced these modes, you can’t honestly claim they have contributed anything positive to the health of sPvP.
Growing hot join is bad, why? Because of the way the format is? What if changes were made to the format to alter your opinions of it? Or are you saying that there is no possible way that hot join could ever be good for the game?
If hot join is a mode to ease players into PvP, why is it a bad thing that we are discouraging people from leaving the game in the middle?
I think the current HJ format is perhaps a bit too “random”.
Growing HJ as it is is bad from a “competitive PvP/rules/skills” standpoint, but good from a “population” point of view (so overall, I would say it is still a positive thing if HJ is growing, as more population = more fun).
I would like to see some changes to HJ, I’m not sure about the priority over other changes though.When you have experienced the more “intelligent” soloQ/tPvP, HJ feels a bit of a let down sometimes.
I still play HJ from time to time, though, but the best HJ games are the ones ending with the teams scores very close to each other, when there was an actual challenge winning.People should be allowed to leave the game in the middle of it (and get points for leaving during a game as well, frankly), as I don’t think that because 1-2 people left or joined that the game becomes imbalanced and that you lose 100-500.
I think that the main problem with HJ is that teams aren’t balanced by player level (as people can chose their teams, this can create huge imbalances) – people “hot joining” isn’t the problem, for me the dispatching system is the problem.Maybe it is desirable for people to be able to chose their team manually so that they can play together? I don’t know.
Sure, I totally get where you’re coming from. I think the context here is that players are saying that the change we made to hot join is bad because they want to still earn rewards even if they leave the match early.
What I am asking is whether or not these changes made to hot join could actually make hot join a better place for new players. What I’m asking is whether making changes to hot join, away from what it currently is, could be better for the health of PvP. What I am not saying is that we are trying to build a playerbase on the current system.
Also, to add to what you are saying “the best HJ games are the ones ending with the teams scores very close” – is it not difficult to achieve that type of game when people are coming and going as they please?
We’ve had tons of threads and players upset about leavers in tPvP, but why should it be ok for people to randomly leave hot join?
These are questions I hope you are all asking yourselves when you share your feedback about this change here.
Thanks so much for keeping it constructive!
But if it’s supposed to also act as a place for new players to learn PvP, is it not setting a bad example for them with all the leavers?
I’m just trying to understand – do you guys think this is bad for the health of the game? Or is it just bad because you want to rank up without playing the full match? You want to leave the match without being punished?
People say hot join is bad because it’s a FFA, but this change takes an aspect of that discord away by encouraging players to care more about playing the full game. Or am I completely off-base here?
I’m not asking the designers, I’m asking you. These are all questions that we ask ourselves internally, and are a huge part of development. I’m trying to help you analyze this situation without bias, and with the overall health of the game in mind. This is what we do.
It feels like you’re saying there will always be leavers, so we should just let them run rampant and stop caring. Is that wrong?
I’m not denying that disconnects feel bad, but other players are being punished by people leaving these matches. If this is one step in the direction of reducing the amount of leavers, should it not be taken?
Here’s another interesting question: If this change was something that was always a part of the game since launch, would it still be bad? I know it’s hard to think without bias, especially when many of us have been playing the game for a very long time, but try to imagine what it would be like if this were always the case.
