I have been in queue for over four days to find an RT games with no games found. Granted I have not lost in roughly 6-7 games but I am only level 26. My win/loss ration is good with a 58% win ratio in RT. But does that constitute no games to be found whatsoever for almost a week with roughly 4-5 hours of attempts to queue a day with no result. I need some help from a blizzard tech to actually force a game to open if at all possible so i can attempt to lose and drop my "mmr" in Warcraft 3 TFT. I am playing on US West and I'm getting annoyed of all these people in top 5 with sub 50% ratios getting queues in under 5 mins but it takes me days with no games found. Someone must have an answer to this, be it a blizzard employee or a fellow player. I just simply don't understand why it won't find me a single game.

P.S. to validate my issue. feel free to look at my player profile and then look at the ladder history and you'll see how for almost a week it has not been able to find a game. I have been on every day since the last queue popped trying to find a game.

Thank you.

Alright, gonna make a serious post. Being rank 1 RT twice, I will explain a few things:

1. Blizzard won't do anything, learn to accept. We've been complaining about search times for many years now.

2. Play on USEast. The population is bigger and thus the search times are a bit more managable, although of course we face the same problems here, but it is still a bit better. Northrend is actually the best when it comes to search times, but that is not feasible to many due to time zone/latency issues (They are 6-8 hours ahead and pings will usually be 200+, if you are only able to play during primetime U.S. then you won't find games over there). Also, hackers are much more rampant on Northrend.

3. If you plan on ranking for RT, be prepared to autolose often. Keep it at about 10 wins or so above losses. Eventually you will still hit the search time wall, but it will allow to find games quickly until you reach that level 30+ benchmark. At that point you will still have to get used to 15-30+ minute search times, but if you keep your ELL ("mmr", as you call it) somewhat manageable, you will still find games. Your account right now is at a point of no return, even if you somehow manage to start losing games, you won't be able to lower your ELL enough. You raised it to be too high already.

4. I would suggest playing 4s RT and doing an autoloss for each win (sometimes allow 2 wins, but don't let your win to loss ratio get too high). Try to autolose on 2s, so that you don't piss off potential 4s partners. Also, don't wait until you are 10-0 or whatever to start autolosing, else your ELL will be higher, and it's MUCH easier to raise an ELL than it is to lower it. Keeping it low from the start will help out in the long run. Start autolosing immediately after your first win.

Good luck to you.

It's unfortunate, but thank you. Ironically, I remember back in the day. An 85%+ account could still find games in under 5 mins top ranking. Why fix something that wasn't broken?

That was before the AMM change in patch 1.14, when matchmaking was based on level instead of hidden ELL.

They changed it because they wanted to combat smurfing and to make better matchmaking between players of similar skill level. Sadly, the system is antiquated and has not been updated for a game with a slowly dying population.

Lol I'm down 10 and still getting games within 30 minutes.

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Q u o t e:
That was before the AMM change in patch 1.14, when matchmaking was based on level instead of hidden ELL.

They changed it because they wanted to combat smurfing and to make better matchmaking between players of similar skill level. Sadly, the system is antiquated and has not been updated for a game with a slowly dying population.

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Actually you couldve been 100% win and still get 5min searchtimes in the new amm, it's just that blizzard listened to whiners and decided to "Thighten" the matchmaking in RT significantly, so people would have "allies of equal skill". Then i went from 5min searchtimes at lvl50 RT with 450-250 stats to 1h searchtimes at 45-15 stats the week after.. I was at the ELL cap too. Basically, Blizzard tweaked with the matching range numbers, screwed up RT massively, and never looked back, while agreeing with eachother that no matter what, they will never touch Wc3 again, becasue let's be honest, blizzard knows the problem exist, either they are being ignorant and they just attribute the long searchtimes to the low playerbase, or they actively don't give a crap about the searchtime problems and they don't want to spend 100-200$ on an employee that would fix all the problems in a day or two.

Actually yeah I recall that, I took a break from War3 when 1.14 hit but I remember search times weren't an issue until Season 2/3/4 (I forget which one they decided to tighten the search range, but I remember their announcement about it). That was also the time when FFA search times became impossibly long until you always maintained a less than 50% win/loss ratio.

Honestly all they have to do is revert back to that original state and we'll be fine. But they can't even move servers without fucking everything up, so even if they had the desire to do it, I doubt they would have the brain capacity to accomplish it.

starcraft 2's upcoming mega patch has been in the works for like a year now. They honestly don't give a crap about it anymore and I'm not sure they ever have. Nobody even plays that garbage game anymore.

I've been playing jrpg's lately on the playstation 2. I miss the days when game developers actually put effort into games and didn't streamline them.

Drayen, I thought you said balders gate 2 was your favorite rpg of all-time? I cannot get into that game. I don't know what it it is about that first dungeon but it just totally irks me the wrong way. I want to get into it but I'm having trouble playing more than an hour before quitting it.

when you say you've complained about search times for years, I think it's only partly true. I don't think the blue posters like Martyt & Jond have any clue about anything at all, so complaining to them is completely useless. their job is to answer to simple questions, usually with copy paste, and keep people in average somewhat satisfied

what I would see as complaining about search times is something that would actually involve people who (on the receiving end)
1) know something about how it works,
2) who can do something about it or at least contact those who can and
3) hopefully listen and respond in some relevant way.

with a response I mean that they could even just tell you that you're wrong if they wanted to, if they had a reason to think that way. if you give feedback, it's supposed to be dialog. here we don't have dialog

another thing is that we don't actually know much about how it works. it's not completely our fault, blizzard's methods of communicating with the community outright suck. but it's also the community's fault:

if you read http://classic.battle.net/war3/files/amm.shtml I don't think you can honestly say ELL affects AMM in any way. it does seem to work the other way around: you have AMM and you have games and based on that your ELL changes, but ELL is only your hidden estimated ladder level. the AMM uses your "battle.net's internal skill rating", which is made of your win% and your opponent quality - and everyone has a starting value of an average skill. so if you have skill ratings from 0 to 5, average is 2,5. and it seems most plausible to me, that your "opponent quality" is based on their win%s.

there's 3 ratings sort of living their own lives. example:
if a new account plays against a new account, you have the imaginary 2,5 against 2,5 and one rating goes up because of the win and one rating goes a bit down. if they keep matching against each other, playing 50-50, the rating should stay 2,5 and the more you play, the less each win or loss affects it. at the same time their level will go closer and closer to 30, but that's not where ELL starts. "Players who have not played many ladder games will have their ELLs capped at a low level". that means that ultimately an average player has an ELL of 30, but a starting average player has something lower. I think I saw an announcement saying some of these caps have been removed, but that doesn't change that there's 3 ratings, and only 1 of them - the one no one ever talks about - affects match making.

so how many threads have you seen where people mix ELL and AMM? I've seen many. well if you're a blizzard employee, and you stop by once every 6 months & you read people mixing ELL & AMM, I don't think you're going to give much value to their opinions. you're just going to ignore them, thinking they don't know what they're talking about. that doesn't mean that the complaint "search times are unnecessarily long" is wrong. it probably isn't, but the at the same time the blizz employee (who frankly has probably never seen your complaints), he has no reason to think it's the AMM's fault. he has the freedom to think it's because of declining player numbers.

so the way I see this whole situation
1) you're talking to the wrong people
2) no one is listening
3) you don't have a good argument

1 & 2 you can fix by simply emailing the people who actually work on these games. you can find them in game credits for example

and you can fix 3) by actually studying the AMM and finding out how it works, so you can tell exactly what's wrong with it. even if it's unlikely that they'd ever fix it if there's something wrong, it's even more unlikely that they would start to figure out what's wrong themselves.
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=195273
that's an example of what I mean with studying the AMM and knowing what it does.

you're supposed to have arguments so educated that when the blizz employee hears it, they know there's no other explanation and that your argument is correct. when we know next to nothing, we won't have any of that, and currently we know next to nothing.

I don't think you really understand how the AMM works...

When you start out, you're considered average, which is ELL 30.

The way it works, the AMM matches you based on your ELL, youll only be able to face ennemies in a certain range of your ELL, such as +-6 ilevel.. so if you're ilevel 30, you can only match players between 24 and 36. A problem right there is that if your ELL is 50, the maximum. you'll only be able to match against a range of 44-50... which is half what an average player has, This is major, but can be fixed with a larger range, at the detriment of game quality for lower skilled players (Who gives a crap, people just want to play now.)

Your ELL changes depending how often you win, and against who you win. For exemple if you do a 1v1 and both of you are at a ELL of 30, if you win, your ELL will prob go to 31 and your opponent to 29, making you face better opponents, and changing the way you gain/lose XP.

The way you gain and lose xp, is basically, if you're not at your ELL, you gain a boost of xp gain per win and you dont lose much per loss until you reach your ELL. That boost slows down as you get near it, and if you surpass it, you lose more xp per loss than you gain per win. The system is also made for fair matches, so you should be at 50% win... unless you are a 50 ELL player, which means you win more than you lose. By that point, you win percentage dictates how far you can go in terms of levels: The higher level you are, the harder it is to level, the more punishing a loss is.

That is how the system works, all blizzard has to do is change the number next to a line that looks like this in their code:

ELL matching range : 6

They just need to change it to 10, 15, 20, whatever allows people to play while having a non-ridiculous difference, then they can gather feedback about it once every 6-12months..

At any rate, i don't think it's our fault at all, our knowledge of the AMM doesn't matter, what matters is that blizzard is just not listening. We don't need to give them a scientific report of the AMM for them to realize the searchtimes suck. My guess is that blizzard doesn't want to put money in Wc3, or that they believe the game is too dead to have decent searchtimes anyways.

oh and for the AMM changes that happened awhile back.. even though they did change the matching ranges awhile back, before they changed the ranges there were still problems. Team games searchtimes would be extremely long at higher levels, 2v2/3v3RT searchtimes were pretty long i hear, in the 30min range at lvl50 (5min search for me at lvl50 for 4v4 rt :D), and FFA sucked balls.

It is truly my most sincere belief that blizzard screwed their game over because they made changes and did not listen to people about searchtimes. Just killing AT with the impossible searchtimes made several of my friends and high-level AT players leave the game.

<<<IMPORTANT POST>>> [Please Read]

Okay first of all, do not listen to Darknesscalled-, as roughly 84.53% of the stuff he's saying, he's simply pulling it out of his a.ss without sheer factual information nor statistics to back up his ridiculous claims.
He is also reknowned for being an egotisitical bas.tard who tries to tell everyone that he is the number 1 RT player "twice" to talk condescendingly at the general poulace.

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Q u o t e:

2. Play on USEast. The population is bigger and thus the search times are a bit more managable, although of course we face the same problems here, but it is still a bit better.

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Okay so I actually have the statistics % for the break down of games searched for each realm.
Depending on what you search for 2's, 3's, or 4's RT (The majority of the casual RT-er would most
likely play 3's over 4's due to backstabs and whatnot)

Here we have Lordaeron aka U.S. West:
http://classic.battle.net/war3/ladder/reports/last-week/Lordaeron/w3xp-reports-game-type-usage.shtml

Azeroth aka U.S. East: http://classic.battle.net/war3/ladder/reports/last-week/Azeroth/w3xp-reports-game-type-usage.shtml

Notice the superior realm for 3's RT and the one most played with 190,533 games up to today, 23.83 % of the games (the most) goes to U.S. West or LORDAERON.

He is just trying to pull you into Azeroth (3's RT is 186,385 games, 17.69 %), or the land of backstabbers and abusers who lace 4's RT with frequent autoloss machines that instantly quit the second the game starts. I mean who in their right minds would want to play with that chaotic element involved??

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Q u o t e:

Northrend is actually the best when it comes to search times

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Bit.ch are you retarded?
Northrend is nonethless "the best" when searching for solo or to be against a stacked/abused set of partners in AT 2v2..

Notice how 3v3 and 4v4 RT are the FOURTH and the FIFTH most searched. Compared to 3v3 RT being the first most searched in Lordaeron (U.S. West realm).
This makes Northrend absolutely the worst realm to search RT, right above Kalimdor aka Asia.

Northrend aka Europe: http://classic.battle.net/war3/ladder/reports/last-week/northrend/w3xp-reports-game-type-usage.shtml

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Q u o t e:
but that is not feasible to many due to time zone/latency issues (They are 6-8 hours ahead and pings will usually be 200+

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Uh, no..
This only applies to you, if you have a shi.tty a.ss Salvation Army desktop/modem like Darknesscalled-

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Q u o t e:
3. If you plan on ranking for RT, be prepared to autolose often.

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Ya, that's only if you play on your inferior realm, Azeroth (heavily infested with the likes of backstabbers, griefers, and account abusers).. Guys come to Lordaeron, you hardly experience this horrible outset.

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Q u o t e:
Your account right now is at a point of no return, even if you somehow manage to start losing games, you won't be able to lower your ELL enough. You raised it to be too high already.

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Okay, so this is the only part of his deceitful post that I would have to agree with. And this is how I built/managed my account to maintain a fast search time at all times.

You have to keep reminding yourself:
Hey, this game is all about having fun and finding games.. ISN'T IT?? Not like the 55%+ win matters anyway.. Just have fun. And you really don't need to ruin games by autolossing like that heretic Darknesscalled- posted.

PROTIP: Keep your total account win % around 45-55% (doesn't matter is you abuse a race or not), and you should be golden in the 3v3 RT search time (usually 1-7min for me) in Lordaeron U.S. West Realm.

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Q u o t e:

then whining when I surround and kill each of their heroes.

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The perverted mind of a sadistic backstabbist.


Guys, please try to ignore this lunatic "Professional griefer & 4v4 RT stabber*."
*Quoted from his battle.net Homepage description

Drayen,
feel free to show me where blizzard says the AMM is based on ELL. what I wrote was based on blizzard's article on their match-making and it contradicts what you say.

Bromeister,
you're quoting statistics from 2005

Bromeister, the "game usage" statistic are incredibly out of date. Those numbers are the numbers from like 6 years ago.

And Lawl, all i see you talk about is the "skill rating" thing.. yet skill rating is the same thing as ELL. The line that speaks about skill rating in your link pretty much only means that they want players to be ranked off an actual level they work for rather than rank everybody by their ELL. Kinda like Sc2 where everybody has a hidden rating and a rating that shows.

The rest of your link is just exactly as i describe it, and i use some common sense...

One thing i could say that we are responsible though, is when people whine about searchtimes, others people just say "lol lossbot and stfu", but that creates a vicious infinite backstab environement which is terrible. And i dont understand why a new 4v4 rt mappool is more important than acceptable searchtimes... both would be preferable, but why do i see people talk about one specific gametype's mappool and never talks about the searchtimes?

Bromeister, your sub 50% RT record does not give you much credit to your cause on knowing how the AMM/ELL system works, neither does quoting random statistics from 7 years ago.

First off, learn how to properly fucking bypass the profanity filter if you are going to try and bypass at it all, your cuss words look like a giant mess.

Now, I will try and be constructive in this thread (for the final time), this is not something you will see often from me, so pay close attention and you may learn something.

Yes I was rank 1 RT twice. Once when the latest “official” ladder reset a couple years back, I was both rank 1 RT + FFA at same time for several months, and again once before that. I also was rank 1 FFA on Northrend and did a decent amount of RT there as well. Also did some Lordaeron RT (but left that realm pretty quickly due to the laughable skillset of all players). I would say all of this combined provides myself with a bit of a better perspective on each of the realms and their respective search times than yours.

It doesn’t matter what realm you are on, if you are a decent player that will win the majority of your games (something you will not experience), you will need to autolose to find games. I can easily go 20-0+, but it would not take very long for me to hit the ELL cap and not be able to find games. I’ve had to remake many many accounts because I could no longer find games. That’s the way it is with ALL gametypes now, even solo players now are starting to suffer and have to lose on purpose from the effects of a diminishing player base.

Regarding Northrend – Yes the search times are the lowest, but again, only if you have the opportunity to play during its primetime (roughly 10-2 PM EST). Northrend realm has the highest population. It has also has the highest hacker count, so be prepared for a challenge if you really want to rank up there.

Ping has nothing to do with a good computer, the server is located in Europe, you are going to have slightly higher delay regardless of where you live in the states.

As a final note, when I do autolose, I don’t backstab my opponents. I leave immediately and give them the opportunity to control me and win the game. It’s a necessary evil but I try to make it as painless as possible, because in the end if I don’t do it, I’ll just end up continually making new accounts over and over again when I hit the ELL cap and experience 30-60+ minute search times. And if you are attempting to rank up, that is not feasible.

~fin

skimmed in 5 sec, cool story bro

hahahaha he thinks ping is related to hardware

I'll highlight some of the bits that do a good job highlighting how the AMM&skill rating are separate from the ELL&ladder system

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Q u o t e:
While Battle.net's internal player skill ratings provide better matching of players, the skill rating is not suitable as the lone means of determining the "best" players on a realm's ladder."

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-> skill rating for match-making. not ELL. ELL comes later. ELL comes when the ladder system is explained. skill rating is not enough as the lone means of determining the best on a ladder, because in the ladder system they use other things. they use ELL

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Q u o t e:
To try and better distribute the wide range of players and skills on the ladder, Battle.net also translates your current skill level to an expected ladder level (ELL)."

---

-> a skill rating first, then an ELL. skill rating for matchmaking. ELL for ladder. there's so much talk based on skill rating. you got matchmaking based on skill rating, you get XP rewards partly based on skill rating. then they "also translate" that skill rating to an ELL, so they could tamper with the distribution of player levels better.

you should also read the QA part...
Q1:

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Q u o t e:
"Battle.net gave each player an initial skill rating based upon that player's previous ladder rank. Thus, high-level players initially had a very high ELL based on skill, but they didn't necessarily have as many games played as Battle.net expected them to have played. The lack of expected games played therefore reduced the ELL of some high-level players below their current levels"

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-> again, first the skill rating, then ELL based on that. lack of games lowered the ELL, but it DID NOT lower the skill rating.

Q4:

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Q u o t e:
"We are going to immediately tighten the matching of players into games, especially when one of the players is highly skilled. Skilled players should then begin facing fewer trivial opponents. We will also be revising the XP and ladder systems in the future and making additional adjustments to those systems"

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-> AMM and ladder systems are separate. they first change the matchmaking, and as a separate project revise the other systems

and I wanna remind you what ELL is short for, it's short for "Expected Ladder Level". it's not your "skill level", it's not your "skill rating", and everything about that article points toward the fact that they both exist and they're separate.

you said "the line that speaks about skill rating". no. there's line after line after line about skill rating.