BM: A large part of your job has been spearheading matchmaker development. What is the next major step to hone this experience for players?
SB: The next major thing we’re doing is finding ways to help players coordinate parties and roles so that everyone walks into the match happy with the role and position they have and generally agree on the who goes where. This is a big project, so not something in 3.9 or 3.10 but we’re in the planning phases.
BM: A common misconception is that players are reaching higher tiers with less skill than before. Could you explain how tier distribution is handled and how the growing player base affects this?
SB: Our distribution of players by tier hasn’t changed, it is still just as rare to reach PoA and Vg as before. Our distribution is like a skewed bell curve, skewed as in the bell curve falls off sharply on the lower end because very low-skill players tend to quit the game, while higher tier players are more likely to stay. Vast majority of our players live in tier 4-6 and the Elo [meaning Visual Skill Tier] difference (think of this as win-chance difference) remains the same between the tiers. So when you think of Vg as “someone who has a 90% win rate vs someone who has a 90% win rate vs someone who has a 90% win rate vs T4” that fact has remained the same this whole time
FIVE pros against five SA players. The match maker is absolute crap and no one can disagree to this statement.
I PRAY that its going to get better-because I was guild searching and most of the guilds on the list were DEAD and almost a year old. Just shows how much players have left.
Blah blah blah blah. Same old story, same promises as always – soon to be forgotten. He doesn’t even answer the poorly-worded question about lower-skilled players reaching VG.
Guilds in VG are largely dead, because they’ve been ignored by SEMC for > 2 years. With the player base shrinking and interest in the game waning, I don’t see them ever coming back.
Ya, those interviews are just a waste of time to read. Same irrelevant answers with 0 real information on what’s going on, most likely nobody knows that, not even these devs.
Pure dumb posing with cringe photos and faces to pose for the boot licking chunk of vainglory’s community.
Why didn’t nobody ask him about what happened on during the 2 extra weeks they had to supposedly start fixing the shit ton of bugs the game has as they promised.
Those guys go make dumb annoying faces for their videos and photos yet this update makes 0 sense. Balance is a hot mess. Chat is broken, I still get crashed out of the game and logged off my account at random times for no reason. Rubber banding. Oh and 50% of the times I accept a match, I get locked into a black screen not being able to select a hero.
At this point this is just sad. Idk what those guys are even thinking at all. Like lol 5v5 still looks rushed, half baked and unpolished, these guys can’t even add a damn Gold Toad model. But now their priority is to make vg a pc-mobile crossplay game?
Lol so then just leave 3v3 as screwed and broken as it can be, 5v5 so uh… miserable and the app buggy as hell and then port that to pc.
Boi, if I have a pc I would rather play literally any other game before vg. At all.
Oh and the dude just revealed that they are so lazy the leave their game being a Frankenstein mix of old and new code. No wonder why the app experience sucks so much. They don’t even work on it. What a bunch of lazy procrastinating fams working on that field.
Right now, we’re cautiously watching energy consumption, Captains’ item economy, gold differences between winners and losers, and how often side-lanes come into play
This makes me think that they’re able to track players movements around the map, track items bought and how they use their abilities. With such a vast array of information data tracking - they should have no problem with afk detection and troll detection.
I also wonder if they need to do such detailed data tracking. They have their PBE testing server, which they use to answer all these questions. Anyway, my point is - if each data packet din’t need to get tracked through the server, would that improve the end to end player experience? less lag ?
I know the subject of server lag is age old ongoing until the end of time… but it is also the one and only thing that keeps me from playing. All you people who get to complain about how each hero feels OP or UP are so lucky. complaining about item changes… map changes… U.i… and all i want is lower ping - the dreaded ping that will never go away.
What did you expect? They are like politicians: talk a lot but say nothing. Promises that never come real. Why even bother reading it? Though it was more useful than Zekent’s “I will just repeat everything I’ve said in reddit”.
There’s a lot we wanted to follow-up on in this interview, hopefully in the future we can.
I was disappointed that guilds aren’t a high priority right now (partly because I’ve seen some of @Xhaos’s great work), but his answer does make sense - MOBA player habits do seem to trend to small groups/friends rather than larger, depersonalized guilds. If guild features were better, I think maaaybe that would change, but maybe not enough to justify sinking development time into it. So, it sucks, but I understand the why. “Coordinating parties and roles” could be initiatives like role-specific queue, player profiles, better chat options (which all fall into the “high quality interactions with other players”), so we’ll have to keep pressing to find out if that’s where they’re headed.
His answer about placement from casual to ranked confused me, because I thought that’s exactly how it already works, considering that smurfing players can and do get placed in T5, 6, and 7 straight after a casual grind and first ranked win.
I’ve been bitching in my reports about RNG and lack of transparency around item release timelines, and was wondering what they have planned related to that specifically. Because the Halloween skins were released for purchase directly, we held off on the question, but maybe in the future we’ll try to ask something like that if they don’t think players appreciated the change this season.
The problem with that answer is that guilds once WERE a big deal in VG – back when there were seasonal guild rewards, EVERYONE I knew was in a guild, and every guild I encountered was full of active players. Guilds were how I MET my friends in Vainglory.
To me, the answer is just an attempt to rationalize their abandonment of the guild system that existed 2 years ago.
This is the modus operandi of SEMC’s monetization team: keep players guessing as to what’s available when and for how much in order to push them toward buying things NOW (almost always for ICE), because no one is ever sure if there will be another way to get what they want.
I’d be the opposite of that, actually. I’ve hopped around a few guilds, but none were especially active, and the times I’ve partied have been through connections on the forums, or in streams. Part of that my personality and game consumption habits, but I don’t think guilds were as totemic as that. I’d say that back then the player base was more connected overall, through extra-game elements like dev streams and localized community venues like the forums or reddit, or regulars of particular streamers. Everything’s a lot more decentralized now.
I mean, I’m still disappointed that guild features aren’t a higher priority though, like I said. My hope is better features would lead to guilds being more relevant to VG players, but I think it would require something more radical too… rethinking events in terms of guilds, rethinking UI to highlight group features, etc… so it would be a big job to get it right so that it’s not just a veneer.
Yup, I can’t disagree with that, and it’s something I officially complain about a lot. It’s probably supported by sales numbers too. I think releasing the Halloween skins for immediate purchase was a great first step though. I have no problem with “ICE availability now” when the previous form was “RNG now, with no word of ICE or opals later”. The next step would be ICE availability now, with news of when other forms would be available later. From what I’ve been told, I think this is what they wanted to do this time, actually, but couldn’t because of localization issues with the update notes.
Actually, the people I’ve met through guilds gave me a reason to keep playing. It’s a bummer that guilds aren’t their priority. I was really hoping that the “Guild Badges” suggestion would take off. But oh well
