Dear Epic Games,
I am writing to you on behalf of some of your most passionate fans. We are your competitive gamers. We are the 1% who have spent months of combined playtime in Agora. Paragon is a game we all love, and want to succeed. For us the game is a huge part of our lives - which is why a post like this is necessary.
For you, as a business that must make profit, it makes perfect sense to cater to the 99%. You want to make match lengths shorter so the console crowd won’t get turned off as quickly, you want to push skins and cosmetics so you can keep developing the game, and we get it. If the game becomes more popular as a result of changes you make then that’s a win for everyone.
As competitive gamers at the top of the game, we carry some degree of influence over a growing subset of the playerbase. It makes perfect sense that we generate some of the highest viewer counts on Twitch for Paragon; players will look to us for advice on strategy and game mechanics. Recently however, we’ve been feeling a bit neglected. On a number of occasions, we've tried to reach out to Epic for change, or even confirmation that there are indeed problems with the general direction of the game. Often, we won’t receive a response - and when we do it’s a general comment that things are being looked into - yet change never happens.
In this post, we would like to address some of the core issues we feel are negatively affecting Paragon, the competitive side of the game, and ultimately it’s future as a successful title. I want to preface the post with the fact that yes, we know we are in the minority, but believe that our opinions should still be valued as some of your most passionate customers.
Matchmaking queue times
Queue times at the highest level are impossible. A lot of the time they will extend well over 2 hours, and it’s not uncommon to be queuing for hours only to have a queue dodge put us back to the menu screen to search again. This is unacceptable.
For a lot of your playerbase, the recent matchmaking changes have made little impact, and players can find games within reasonable timeframes. As a business catering to the majority that makes you money directly, this might seem like an acceptable scenario - but it is something that over a prolonged period will negatively affect your product. As some of the most watched channels on Twitch, as players who are followed on social media, and as the main competitors in the only tournaments being run for your competitive multiplayer title - this affects you as well.
People (generally those who belong to your main demographic) do not want to watch a player sit in queue for 2 hours, playing potential rival titles (e.g. Battlerite) while they wait for another queue dodge. People do not want to listen to players talk about how Epic is spoiling a game with massive potential by open neglect of their competitive players. People who are just learning about Paragon for the first time after scrolling through the Twitch games directory want to see that it’s a fun game, with instant action and a competitive nature.
As a result of having to queue for over 2 hours, most of us - as fans of the game - are forced to play on secondary... tertiary... even quaternary smurf accounts just so we can play the game we love so much. “See? You can play. Just make a smurf!”, some might suggest - but this is even more damaging to your title. Instead of being matched against people who are a little under our internal rating, we’re now effectively ruining the experience of your main demographic. The games aren’t particularly fun for anyone at that point, new players are going to be instantly turned off by being steamrolled by much more experienced players, and veterans are going to find the game boring. Both demographics will in turn, quit.
There is definitely a huge problem here, but what are the solutions? The only official comments we’ve received on matchmaking at higher MMR is that analysis is still ongoing, but “the averages for high MMR is approximately 15-18 minutes” [1] (Arctyc, Epic Games). This data is wrong, which would explain perhaps why this isn’t being treated as a more urgent issue, but I would like to argue that it is. Every player who has signed this letter has experienced queue times over 2 hours, with the majority being at least over 1 hour. We have collected screenshots of these times, which can be found in [3] Paragon Competitive Thoughts and Opinions below.
A further flaw in the current matchmaking system is the expanding search bands the after players have been in queue for long periods of time. This means that when - after hours in queue - we finally find a game, we tend to win in a convincing fashion in under 20 minutes, because our MMR has expanded so much that we’re playing average rated players anyway.
Epic’s ElleWray seems to be the main person responsible for handling what is - no doubt - a mammoth task, and the problem could be that there just aren’t enough resources at Epic’s disposal to handle matchmaking in a timely manner. Further to this, the phrase “monolithic matchmaking server” has been thrown around a lot in the past few months from streams and blog posts, but we are yet to see the fruits of this labour, or a hint that it might solve our problems soon.
We urge Epic to take an immediate look at matchmaking before it hurts the game too much. Some suggestions we have are listed below by multiple players and community influencers.
- Re-introduce the MMR cap, but raise it a nominal amount (1600 to 1800 as an example)
- Make search expansion much faster
Balance the game from the top down
For the most part, competitive games become popular out of the necessity to learn and improve. Some players will happily play games, buy skins, and be content whether they win or lose - but I’d argue that most people want to get better, and want to win games. It’s no surprise then that Riot, Valve, Hi-Rez place a huge focus on balancing their games from the top down, competitive to casual. Champions and heroes in League, Valve and Smite can at times have a really high skill ceiling, indicating that the companies recognise competitive players are valuable to their games. When a player at the peak of their game (for example Faker from League of Legends) pulls off an incredible play with LeBlanc - lesser experienced players can appreciate the skill and knowledge that went into it.
With Paragon however, a huge focus seems to be making the game as simplistic as possible in order to cater for the largest possible demographic. On its surface, this seems like a reasonable business decision, but a simple game that’s easy to master doesn’t trigger the main requirement that competitive games thrive on, the need to constantly improve. As a result, player retention will be damaged, and people won’t invest time in a game that’s too easy to master, or too simple to play.
An example of this is the recent changes to towers, inhibitors, and the core. Over a number of patches these have been progressively nerfed, to the point where they no longer hold much value in a game which is meant to have as much strategic depth as it does mechanical. This is one of the reasons why MOBAs are such an interesting genre, there are multiple levels of gameplay happening throughout a match, and this innately makes it exciting to play and at times spectate. The changes were in an effort to reduce match length, but by damaging the strategy - the games became too simplistic and boring. In fact, it wasn’t just competitive players that were hurt by the change, as the public outcry on the forums and Reddit was so large that you were forced to revert your design decisions.
A lot of your current game balance is decided by the competitive QA team at Epic, a concept which is fantastic for a game trying to hit the right balance between fun and competitive. However, there’s a growing worry that the meta the competitive QA team is playing is not representative of the live environment. Competitive QA play the game in the way that Paragon’s game designers want the game to be played, but not necessarily how it is.
A prime example of this is during Early Access, in which Epic repeatedly stated that the legendary 1-3-1 (jungle + mid clear comp) was not the most effective strategy, and would go away when people learned how to play the “right” way (a more traditional, 1-1-1-2 model). Competitive QA played some teams and lost convincingly to strategies they hadn’t really considered as being legitimate.
Players at the top of the competitive scene have a solid grasp on the current meta, and are consistently playing in teams on a nightly basis in order to become the best of the best. We feel as though our opinions on game balance should have more weight than they currently do. Some players were brought into the private community events channel and asked about upcoming changes a few months ago (prior to the defensive dunk mechanic), stating that Dekker would become overpowered with the changes, and cautioned the release. These comments went unheard and surely enough Dekker became the most banned hero in competitive play (90% ban rate). The players who raised their concerns felt ignored, and the game suffered as a result.
We ask that you balance your game as competitive first. The game should have a high skill ceiling and encourage players to improve, rather than giving them a simple game and hoping they’ll buy into your “vision” of the game. Competitive players outside of Epic should have an insight into changes, and suggestions should be considered with competitive gaming in mind.
Some thoughts and changes we have collectively suggested include:
- Game feels very binary. Once a team is “winning”, they are almost guaranteed to win. Implement more comeback mechanics. Game length should be secondary to fun.
- Bring inhibitor respawn back
- Passives for Orb Prime activation provide too much power
- Remove 100% damage bonus from Orb Prime cards, keep 10 points of additional damage/health and unique passives
- Lifesteal and Crit cards aren’t really viable. All stats should be viable or not in the game. Nobody builds crit anymore but it’s a valuable stat in every other MOBA. It’s OK if heroes deal a lot of damage at the expense of defence - these are “carries”
- Fighters are the “carries” right now, and can build lots of health resulting in long drawn out team fights
- Fights become so long that any “strategy” becomes irrelevant Example: A 3v1 gank according to strategy is a good play and good strategy should be rewarded. Players do little damage, and have so much health, that fights are drawn out allowing opposition team to join and negate any strategic choice made by the aggressor
- Consider bringing back passives. They add depth of gameplay to heroes, and potentially interesting mechanics that don’t have to be game breaking but can make a difference between skill levels
Invest In Your Competitive Scene
Esports as an industry is expected to break $1 billion in revenue by 2019 [2]. One billion. This single figure alone represents how much the industry has grown in the past decade alone, and how much potential it has moving forward. In the LCS we have team spots being sold for millions, viewership in the hundreds of thousands eclipsing baseball figures, and professional gamers with hundreds of thousands of fans.
At the core of this industry are the competitive games themselves. League of Legends, Dota 2, Counter-Strike are some of the giants, but titles like Overwatch, Paladins, and more recently Battlerite are growing quickly in popularity. All of these titles, have 2 significant things in common:
- They are hugely competitive titles with a strong competitive core, yet also have massive casual demographics
- Their developers are pushing their profiles as eSports
To the former, it’s clear from these overwhelming success stories that competitive games with high skill ceilings can also be successful to a more casual demographic. In fact, it could be argued that the reason they are so successful is because of their top-tier competitive scenes. With the latter, players want to be like the eSports professionals being paid to play their games. They will put in hundreds of hours to improve their gameplay. This is player retention.
A game which was announced and went into Beta almost a year after Paragon was announced is Battlerite - a competitive game with a competitive focus. The developers are pushing the game towards eSports from the start, and players understand that it’s a high skill cap game - yet it’s incredibly popular. The first ESL Cup on October 1st had 221 teams participating, and had fantastic viewership for a game less than a month old.
Epic’s stance thus far has been a hands-off approach in regards to eSports, hoping that it will grow organically on its own, but this approach can come across as a developers disinterest in esports. As the community manager is a former pro gamer along with other competitive QA testers who have been in a similar boat as many of us are currently in, we know this is not the case. Ironically, our QA team experienced the same hands off approach with Gears of War, also a previous Epic title which now has a pro circuit with a $1M prize pool [4] (Announcing the Gears eSports Pro Circuit for Gears of War 4 with $1,000,000 Prize Pool). The Coalition (who now develop Gears of War) is fully and visibly committed to supporting their niche but very passionate competitive scene and this has resulted in increased player retention.
Epic we feel you need to nurture the budding scene ensuring that Paragon can exist as an esports amongst its peers. We feel as though you need to consider:
- Moves towards funding or developing tournaments or a league for top players
- Investment into the future of Paragon as an esport
- An imminent implementation of a ranked mode?
In Closing
We love Paragon, and we want to see it do well, but feel it has been moving in the wrong direction recently in an effort to satisfy arbitrary numbers and not the competitive player base (from low to high MMR). Please consider our statements and propositions, as many of us are now at a point where we’re reconsidering how we spend our personal time. We’d love to spend it in Agora, but some changes have to happen to make Paragon a positive experience again. For a full listing of thoughts from competitive players and influencers, please see the attached document [3].
Signed
LaytoN., Team Oxygen Jungle (720 Hours Playtime)
MartyRivia, Team Oxygen Support (840 Hours Playtime)
iCameron, Team Oxygen Carry, (884 Hours Playtime)
Tokflyt, Team Oxygen Mid (800 Hours Playtime)
BeCertified, Team Oxygen Solo (1440 Hour Playtime)
itsAraY, Influential Community Member (659 Hours Playtime)
Yo Im Mikey, Team Carbon Mid
Rustrus, Team Carbon Solo
Bloodmordius, Team Carbon Owner
Undeadpilot, Team Carbon Carry
Narendur, Team Carbon Support
JLeogrande, Team Reborn Jungle (940 Hours Playtime)
Solo Nazgul, Team Reborn Mid (1077 Hours Playtime)
imsKo, Team Reborn Carry
Detroy, ESL Admin (900 Hours Playtime)
Clearcast, Team Synergy Carry
Morterion, Team Synergy Solo
Mhrac, Team Synergy Mid
Oblepixa, Team Synergy Jungle
NickEagle, Team Synergy Support
TrixR4Kids, Team Supreme Meme Solo
NadoSik, Team Supreme Meme Carry
Gemms, Paragon Community Caster
Baylix, Team Oxygen Owner
Walkinrazor, Team Oxygen Community Manager
JShredz, Reddit Moderator (360 Hours Playtime)
Sources
[1] Arctyc on MMR. Available at: http://i.imgur.com/ar0SrRW.png
[2] Esports: Global revenue expected to smash $1 billion by 2019. Available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/29/sport/esports-revolution-revenue-audience-growth/
[3] Paragon Competitive Thoughts https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iZDzaFSIFXQLArrxc_e6Ot6J-bMZQUcUQTL_YtgIf6g/edit?usp=sharing
[4] Announcing the Gears eSports Pro Circuit for Gears of War 4 with $1,000,000 Prize Pool http://news.xbox.com/2016/08/01/gears-esports-pro-circuit-announcement/#lDL2fjx4VdpZJw3g.99
Thanks to everybody who helped me create this post. Walkinrazer, Baylix, MartyRivia, iCameron, Tokflyt, Certified and to all of the other teams and players who contributed. You know who you are!
Kind Regards, All of us :)
Submitted by Lay7oN | #Specialdealer Special Offer Online Shopping Store 2016
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