Queue: still unused.
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2011-06-29 06:02 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
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It seems like this would be a great idea, but I don't think it would help much. People will enter the queue and then start doing tip missions, and after 30 minutes they'll forget they're even queued. Then at the least opportune moment the trial will be ready to start and the dialog will pop up while you're in the middle of a big fight.|
Originally Posted by Bubbawheat
3. Players should be able to enter missions while queued.
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With the announced reduction to 90 seconds of the waiting time after the minimum team size is reached, it's probable that most trials would be started with the minimum team size. If even one person in queue cancels out because they're this close to finishing the mission and don't want to lose the credit toward the tip mission, the trial will fail to start because not enough people actually joined. Aborted trial starts would be the next thing that we're all carping bitterly about.
But I think your point about seeing the number of players in the queue is dead on. I would go further, and say that we need to see the names of those in the queue, what trial they're waiting for, what ATs they are, and so on. Basically, there should be a team search window for people who are in the LFG queue.
Finally, there should be a global channel for everyone who's in the LFG queue to talk to each other on to facilitate the whole process of forming leagues.
1. Create a new zone or zones that are used for staging*
2. When player enters queue, warp them to the appropriate staging zone
3. Profit!**
* As long as all necessary time-killing amenities - including a market interface - are in the zone. Assuming we're never going to be able to run missions while queued.
** Or at least use Broadcast to state you're looking for a trial, which should be pretty obvious if you're in the zone.
(Ok, this probably isn't a flawless plan. But many have asked for staging areas, and warping a player to one - possibly a trial-specific one - would cut the reliance for knowing if/where/for what players might be assembling.)
Suggestions:
Super Packs Done Right
Influence Sink: IO Level Mod/Recrafting
Random Merit Rolls: Scale cost by Toon Level
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It includes wait times of full leagues entering the queue - which have a wait time of less than a minute, to use my wording. 20 pre-formed leagues with a wait time of practically zero plus 1 person waiting for 100 minutes creates an "average wait time" of about 5 mins.|
Originally Posted by NuclearToast
What does the wait time even mean? It doesn't seem to signify anything. That's one of the frustrating parts of the queue: when you've waited 5 or 10 multiples of the "average wait time", it's meaningless.
--NT |
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Originally Posted by Rodion
But I think your point about seeing the number of players in the queue is dead on. I would go further, and say that we need to see the names of those in the queue, what trial they're waiting for, what ATs they are, and so on. Basically, there should be a team search window for people who are in the LFG queue.
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Open Leagues in a trial need to let people in until the league is FULL. If that happens, people might actually get into trials, and people might actually use the queue. Also, people need to be able to go do other stuff.
As it is, useless feature is useless.
I think the queue in general will be more useful when its applied to average teaming rather then just the incarnate trials. We need to remember Freedom will have limited chat communication.. a queue will solve teaming issues and replace the LFG flags basically.
You will see the queue used more when the difficulty drops and players are just looking for a good time and they don't care who they team with. But as the difficulty rises you need those that have experienced the content to walk others through it the first few times so that they can start doing the same for others in turn.
During that first week or so that the I trials were opened.. I played on mostly Queue pugs and it was absolute hell. Very rarely did we finish and it was frustrating to continually fail. Now when running the same trials on a group that was established via broadcast or globals and ... breeezey peezy with slim chance of failure.
The Queue is a good feature.. just not a good feature for difficult content.
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You should also realize that a fair number of pre-formed groups were failing during that first week, and I'm sure most random pick up groups would be breeezey peezy now. It doesn't so much have to do with the queue, rather the fact that the trials were new, and no one was +2 or +3.
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Originally Posted by Montaugh
During that first week or so that the I trials were opened.. I played on mostly Queue pugs and it was absolute hell. Very rarely did we finish and it was frustrating to continually fail. Now when running the same trials on a group that was established via broadcast or globals and ... breeezey peezy with slim chance of failure. |
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I'm sure that on a pug things would be much easier now, but it was a learned response for a lot of people. Form a pug queue and die, or join a team that was forming and have a greater chance at success. |
Originally Posted by Bubbawheat
You should also realize that a fair number of pre-formed groups were failing during that first week, and I'm sure most random pick up groups would be breeezey peezy now. It doesn't so much have to do with the queue, rather the fact that the trials were new, and no one was +2 or +3.
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You don't see pug Hamidon raids for this very reason, the raids take place at set times or by someone deciding they want to run and letting others know. If a pug hamidon raid were tried I'd hazard a guess that it would be a disaster of epic proportions.
My overall point still stands that as the content gets harder, the queue has less of a use as there is less "Pick up and Play" and more "Listen to what I say" aspecs going on.
In average teaming the queue feature would be heavily used as the average mission content is not overly difficult and needs no more thought outside of your role on a team.
Incarnate trials.. what your AT has been doing all along goes out the window in some cases (masterminds, controllers, dominators come to mind) those ATs just do not play the same as they did in normal content verses how they play Incarnate trials. Certain powers and tatics just don't work. On top of that certain things need to happen or not be done in order to defeat the incarnate trials. The Incarnate trials have become eaiser but that's more from understanding and adapting to tatics used then it is from the missions themselves becoming easy. Toss a pug group at the trials which is what the Queue is meant for and all hell breaks loose as they are not really pugable. They need tatics, strategy, adaptation to new rulesets.. all of that goes against a pugs basic idea of lets get some random people together and beat the crap out of stuff. They don't need to know the game, just their characters.
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I didn't even know there was a five-minute delay. |
Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood
I think that the 5 minute delay was a poor design decision on the Devs part, unfortunately the Open Beta patch notes did not actually reveal that was what it was doing (I don't know if others found out earlier, but I had no clue until the patch went live).
The problem with the 5 minute delay is that it encourages people pre-forming leagues to either make the league closed or recruit a full league in order to avoid it. This in turn means that pre-formed leagues are much less likely to pick up people from the queue. Therefore the 5 minute delay is actually making the queue situation worse. Previously I would leave a few open spots on my league in case someone was in the queue. Now I'm penalized for doing so. With that in mind I would suggest one of two solutions. First option is to remove the 5 minute delay entirely. The "willing to join event in progress" option seems to work now (I've seen people pop into open leagues that lost people) so starting with a minimum size open league is no longer the death sentence it was before. If a league is understrength then the queue should allow other people to trickle in so it has a full complement for the AV. The second option (which I prefer) is the intermediate method of starting an open league once either it has reached the mid-point between min and max size or 5 minutes has passed. This allows a pre-formed league to leave some spots open (4 on Lambda, 6 on BAF/Keyes) and still start the league immediately. Hopefully overtime this will become more common encouraging other people to use the queue to try and grab those spots. |
What is it for? Just to wind us up?
Eco.
MArcs:
The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
[The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."
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This.|
Originally Posted by BrandX
Giving an Emp merit for using the queue would go along way in getting people to use it.
Just saying  |
Eco
MArcs:
The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
[The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."
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The 5 minute delay is there to give the league time to fill up in the queue. Instead of mostly launching with a minimum body count.
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Originally Posted by MrCaptainMan
I didn't even know there was a five-minute delay.
What is it for? Just to wind us up? Eco. |
Let's Dance!
Why doesn't it just automatically insert us immediately into any Leagues that exist at that time? At least then we'd know that if we didn't get allocated straightaway that that meant there were no leagues extant. And the League Leader should be able to start the tiral immediately whenever he wants, with no delay. Having an arbitrary 5-minute timer's silly. What if someone joins the LFG Queue 5 minutes and 10 seconds after the leader's hit 'go!'?
Eco.
MArcs:
The Echo, Arc ID 1688 (5mish, easy, drama)
The Audition, Arc ID 221240 (6 mish, complex mech, comedy)
Storming Citadel, Arc ID 379488 (lowbie, 1mish, 10-min timed)
Quote:
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Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow
[The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."
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Because the league system will only fill an in-progress league up to the minimum. I imagine this is mostly to reduce the need for the league to have to re-explain everything while in progress. Of course, it's moot point in general since we're not talking about there being that much traffic from the queue. I did think that the new league invite method allowed the league leader to grab folks from the in-progress queue though, that doesn't appear to be the case, but it would have been nice.|
Originally Posted by MrCaptainMan
Why doesn't it just automatically insert us immediately into any Leagues that exist at that time? At least then we'd know that if we didn't get allocated straightaway that that meant there were no leagues extant. And the League Leader should be able to start the tiral immediately whenever he wants, with no delay. Having an arbitrary 5-minute timer's silly. What if someone joins the LFG Queue 5 minutes and 10 seconds after the leader's hit 'go!'?
Eco. |
If the queueing league leader doesn't want to wait for open players in the queue to join their league, they can form a closed league and move on, not that big of a deal.
The same thing that happens without a timer when someone queues 10s after a team of 8 launch into Lambda. They wait for the next matchmatching group to get made.
Most of the qualms should really resolve themselves if people used the queue directly instead of preforming teams. But there are a few issues that generally dissuade folks from using them. And largely it results in a chicken and egg situation that rather sucks. Personally, I feel that making it usable while doing Other Stuff would dramatically improve it's usability. It'd struggle with perception now however due to it's history of ineffectiveness such that it may still need more 'kicks in the pants' to get people to start using it.
Let's Dance!
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Agreed. Being able to do Other Stuff while waiting on a queue would make me use it occasionally, though it would still suck and not be terribly useful unless it kept filling leagues until they were full, rather than to the minimum.|
Originally Posted by reiella
Because the league system will only fill an in-progress league up to the minimum. I imagine this is mostly to reduce the need for the league to have to re-explain everything while in progress. Of course, it's moot point in general since we're not talking about there being that much traffic from the queue. I did think that the new league invite method allowed the league leader to grab folks from the in-progress queue though, that doesn't appear to be the case, but it would have been nice.
If the queueing league leader doesn't want to wait for open players in the queue to join their league, they can form a closed league and move on, not that big of a deal. The same thing that happens without a timer when someone queues 10s after a team of 8 launch into Lambda. They wait for the next matchmatching group to get made. Most of the qualms should really resolve themselves if people used the queue directly instead of preforming teams. But there are a few issues that generally dissuade folks from using them. And largely it results in a chicken and egg situation that rather sucks. Personally, I feel that making it usable while doing Other Stuff would dramatically improve it's usability. It'd struggle with perception now however due to it's history of ineffectiveness such that it may still need more 'kicks in the pants' to get people to start using it. |
Fix these two problems, and the queue suddenly becomes a worthwhile tool. Fix either one, and it improves dramatically.
Regarding the five minute wait:
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Originally Posted by Avatea
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Skimming through the thread - |
Originally Posted by Johnny_Butane
Four changes need to be made:
1. Allow people who are already queued to be invited to a League/Team. If someone is queued, that means they WANT to run a trial. Why should they then have to un-queue just to receive and accept an invite to a trial? Allow them to receive invites and then un-queue them automatically should they accept. 2. Queuing for a Trial automatically sets your Team Search status to "Looking for Trial". 3. SHOW the number of people who are queued for each trial. This will encourage people to queue if there are already a number of people in it. If there aren't many in the queue and it discourages them from queuing, so be it; the trial probably wasn't going to launch anytime soon anyways. 4. Allow people to see and join Trials in progress, provided the trial is not locked and has open spots. . |
I often disagree with Johnny_Butane, but he's spot on here. I think he's hit everything that really, 100% needs to be done to the LFG tool listed here. Especially getting rid of the need to drop from queue to join a league.
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This chapps my PANCAKEPANCAKEPANCAKE. If DC's were uncommon this would not be an issue, however, they are common and it is a issue. It is frustrating to endure the laggy warehouse map only to get booted during the Bizarro-Babs fight. I never had a problem rejoining before. Is it a closed/open trial thing? Should I avoid open trials to work around this?
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Originally Posted by Days_
I was on a league about to do Keyes when I crashed. Once I managed to reload I attempted to re-join but the instance could not be found.
'I know', I thought, ' I will use the queue system, mark myself as willing to join trials in progress and get in that way'. Needless to say this didn't work and they finished with unclaimed spaces in the league |
"The first rule of 'Tights Club' is,...We don't talk about Tights Club."
"PANCAKEPANCAKEPANCAKE?" What the PANCAKE is this PANCAKE?!....I can't say PANCAKE?
Fanboy: "The Devs don't want this to become city of jetbikes."
Struck: "Bite my shiny metal Jetboard, coffin stuffer!"
Sat in the queue for over an hour one night this week with join in progress and any Itrial and guess what? I got nothing. I quit the queue and finally got a group before I had to go to bed. It still not working right.