Yeah, going into battle in a Tier 8 arty is sometimes weird. I don’t do it often, as the shells for my T92 are 2500 a piece, and if I get killed I will almost certainly lose money. But when I do, I sometimes get those 6 vs 5 matches that are mostly arty. Very funny, in a weird sort of way.
I think this is by design. The MM stacks the deck sometimes to change the experience. It’s fun to roll over another team every once in a while, just as it’s fun to have a match with no arty. It also throws hardships at you, as when you’re a tank in an arty party. We shouldn’t always be the one with the advantage, even if we would prefer it that way.
Of course, I think you’re arguing that this is a flawed design. That is a valid argument and I can understand the sentiment, but I personally think that perfectly balanced matches would eventually become boring.
Personally I find the lack of challenge from rolling a weaker team boring, as I find getting rolled with no chance boring. The matches I find exciting are the close ones.
Tman
5164
I will stick around after I die if the match has been close. When it’s 10-2 and we’re getting rolled, there is no point.
Likewise, when on the winning side, I’m invariably in one of my slow tanks (ARL 44 anyone?) and lucky if I fire a single shot. I found it funny the other day, as I made it across the map without firing a single shot & still got 950 exp. (I’m on premium for this month).
ShivaX
5166
It happens because MM just grabs people randomly and throws them on a team. It then grabs an equal “point value” team and does the same thing. The problem is that teams don’t balance from the bottom at all. If I have good tanks on top and crap on the bottom and you have crap all the way down, but slightly better crap at the bottom - I have a better team.
And nothing is perfectly balanced, but the gross imbalances are stupid. One team lacking an entire tier while the other team gets 5 of them is far from uncommon. When that missing tier is say… Tier9, you just lost the match. Yeah they have a couple KV3s at the bottom and you get a Type 59 and a T29, but you’re going to be steam rolled by IS4s and E75s that your team probably can’t even dent reliably.
MM needs to grab people to form teams, then look at both teams and shift people around to some semblance of balance. Often its easy to balance the teams to a reasonable degree within the match. If one side has no tier9s, then you throw two on their side and compensate.
The other issue is that MM doesn’t seem to do a good job of rating the gaps in power that exist. The gap between 7 and 8 and 8 and 9 is just huge. If I get an E75 and a Tiger and you get 2 Tiger 2s, I’m probably winning that engagement. The E75 is basically impervious to the Tiger2s and will easily kill them, especially with the Tiger helping or just distracting them.
I don’t think it matters very much; you’ll benefit from mismatches as often as you suffer.
pyrhic
5168
I dont think anyone’s arguing that - it just makes for bad games.
I’m also in the ‘don’t prefer games where i steamroll, and dont prefer games where i get steamrolled’ - though i do prefer the former to the latter…
It also doesn’t understand what the roles of some tanks are - ie, 13 T8 and above, 1 t6 arty, 1 t5 scout, is really effective compared to 8 t8 and above, a T20, 5 T6s that are all meds/heavies and a heavy arty. That tier 5 is vastly more effective and important than the 2 M6s, Kv-3s and 34-85
I think this may be key–the “soft” factors that make a huge difference in the games but are hard to quantify.
FWIW, the matchmaker doesn’t bug me much. I just try to figure out what to do with my tank. In a public match, any teamwork or strategy is a bonus, so high or low I just try to be useful. Some of the matches though are pretty ridiculous.
Depends on what you mean by “benefit”. If I don’t enjoy lopsided matches regardless of which side I am on, I don’t benefit from mismatches at all.
I am annoyed by the MM lately as well and I also think it got worse lately. They are preparing to release a new MM and my guess is that they stopped fine tuning the old one some time ago. I hope they release the new one asap, they mentioned it could happen even BEFORE the 7.2 as it’s going to be a server side change, which doesn’t require a client patch.
Although I imagine the new MM is going to be pretty buggy and crappy in the begining. :)
As I said before, there are so many hidden variables in the game now (and will be even more of them once the new skill system is released) that IMO we are going to see more and more of those stupid 15-1 matches. Because even if they match the teams perfectly tank-wise and create “mirror teams”, if one team has a stock Tiger 2 with 80% crew vs. a fully upgraded Tiger 2 with 4 “extra” skills on its crew, well, that’s not exactly a fair match.
At least, with the upgrades, if you notice your top tank is stock, you will know why his flankdied so fast. Once the new skills are released, their effect will look completely random.
Matchmaker simply has too many variables to work with.
Lol, I think the MM is just going to give up and die, when they finally release new game modes (escort, attack/defense, etc.).
schurem
5171
attack&defence modes should work with the current MM, just like another choice of maps. Escort is another matter. i really could go for some A&D tho, with just the one flag o fight for.
My feeling is that the MM produces MOSTLY even games. The actual payers who you happen to be teamed with or against have a far larger impact on whether the game will be a blowout or not.
You could have everyone driving the exact same tank in all respects and you would probably see a similar number of blowouts, one way or the other.
Are there problems with the Matchmaker? Sure! But I think it’s 80% psychological.
Some problems with the matchmaker are by design though - they let tier 5’s “fight” tier 8’s. Or more realistically feed tier 8’s, because very few tier 5’s are even capable of inflicting meaningful damage to tier 8’s in ideal situations. I’m pretty sure they intend this to push people to spend money to level faster.
Dejin
5174
I dunno I’ve had plenty of games where based on the match makers result I thought we were going to get rolled and we ended up completely stomping on the enemy. Other games where I really thought we had the advantage and we lost.
IMO the bigger determinant of whether or not your team is going to win is whether or not your team is stupid, and that’s not something the matchmaker can really determine (although I suppose it could if it really wanted to look at players win-loss percentages). Just to provide an example from a match I played last night, in one on match on Cliff the entire team minus two of us all herded in to the valley. I kept on pinging the rest of the map and chatted that we needed more defense on the rest of the map. I was ignored. While it’s theoretically possible we still could have won, if the valley group had really pushed, they didn’t. We got completely rolled. The team composition mattered not at all, all our tanks probably could have been an extra level up, and we still would have lost when the valley group ended up getting completely surrounded.
Dave47
5175
Haha, I may have been in that game! (Or, more likely, it just happens all the time on Cliffs.)
I agree that a lot of the time a team getting rolled has nothing to do with the matchmaker. But I also feel that a better matchmaker could at least reduce the instances of those terrible matches. I’m willing to tolerate weird things like one TD heavy team versus another fast-tank heavy team: Those can sometimes make for interesting games.
But I agree with the (several) previous comments about the composition of the “bottom tanks.” I have been seeing games where one team gets more good tanks than the other, at the “cost” of having worse tanks at the bottom of the list. Those sort of matches shouldn’t happen. The tiers don’t scale evenly, and the matchmaker needs to acknowledge that.
JoshV
5176
I think the matchmaker should go by the tier of your gun, moreso than the tier of the Tank. Might give the Panther some decent matches, since it’s guns are awful.
That said, I’ve had some great games as bottom tier PzIV platoons (2 platoons of 4), zipping by and causing havoc, we managed to cause a side protected by an IS-3 to get overrun, as the IS-3 really, really wanted me dead for some reason, and turned his turret to fire on me as we drove past, giving our side the courage to advance and kill him relatively easily at the cost of only losing my tank. We had another game where we managed to kill more than our tiers worth of tanks as well.
I did ping him for like 15% or so, maybe that enraged him? =)
Dejin
5177
Any suggestions for how to play Sand River with a medium tank? The South West tends to be a slugging match, which is not a good place for a medium to be. Sometimes I do park in the village which I guess is okay, but not great. North East tends to be peak and poke which again isn’t great for mediums. I’ve had some luck on the center ridge, especially as the team starting in the South East, but it’s a very dangerous place to hang out.
The problem with the Panther’s guns is doubly weird given that the 75 L70, its historical armament, was a hellaciously effective tank killer in WWII. In WoT, though, real-world ballistics have little meaning, so the only really effective gun for the Panther is the L100, which still is more of a plinker than a killer (though it is phenomenally accurate and has great penetration). But yeah, I generally hated the Panther (the Panther II with the long 88 is much better), and it came as a great disappointment as I had been looking forward to this iconic tank.
Yeah, it’s a tough one. In Clan Wars the only thing we’d use a medium for on this map was hide and seek on the dune ridges to the south east, near the lower base. Otherwise it was all heavies, maybe a TD for base defense, and arty. Arty is killer on this map if used properly.
When I’m in a medium I tend to go to the eastern dune ridges, which isn’t optimal as you point out. If I’m on the north spawn, I’ll run into the town down the main road and hide by the mosque sometimes.
Dejin
5180
Isn’t that the same issue that all the tanks face though, which is that they’re placed in tiers based on ability not historical deployment dates. It’s the same reason why the T-34, which was highly regarded as a tough tank in the actual war, ends up being a very light-weight medium in game.
