The problem with Pantheon and Skirmish and what to do

By woca on July 19, 2009 1:27:07 PM from

Right now, having both Pantheon and Skirmish is a major waste. It detracts from the game and hurts everyone. Here are reasons why I believe that it's bad.

1) People who want matches like that can do Skirmish or Pantheon. So the player base is split between them. That means less people in each one. This game doesn't have enough people in each section then to actually properly match people if the stats were working. Right now there are 13ish Pantheon matches, and 5 Skirmish matches(http://www.demigodthegame.com/opengames.asp). You might think damn, that's not bad. It is. This is a pretty peek play time, a weekend. And those matches were all spread out in the link, my guess means that means they started at fairly equal intervals, so in theory 6 people are in q, then gone, then build up to 6, then start. You can't have proper ranked matches if you have t pull the first 6 people.

2) Not being able to join as a team. People who care about rank so much play with teammates(this is a logical deduction, clearly premades have a better chance of success to their increased communication and the nature of having played together). They can only do that in Custom games. So Skirmish and Pantheon fail to create a proper ranked component.

3) Awful game types and map selection. I don't play much online, only LAN, but when I did, I didn't want to play fortress. I didn't want to play Cataract 100 times. So I quit and played custom games.

4) Pantheon is a TOTAL FAILURE. Pantheon is essentially skirmish. Only differences - well you can pick 4 demigods, and there is an ultimate goal to achieve. OH YAY a persistent mechanism in this game. It fails miserably imo. Who cares if you win the tournament? You don't get anything(from what I know, even if you did get favor who cares, by time you play for a bit you have all you really want). And you shouldn't get anything. Good players shouldn't be punished for being on losing side but they had a bunch of noobs. Bad players shouldn't get rewarded for being carried to victory. This wouldn't be as much of a problem if you weren't MATCHED WITH RANDOMS. But you are, so hey, why reward or punish them for that? You shouldn't. But then why have this gametype......

Now how to fix it

Remove Pantheon. Tournaments are nice and all, but really, I don't think it's a good setup. If you really want it because you like having the ability to get to the top of the broken leaderboards, then have a leaderboard that keeps track of a week of skirmish matches to show whose at top, and have that for every week.

That fixes the lack of people to a degree and gets rid of Pantheon with a worthwhile replacement imo.

Now, add a team join option. And if people bitch well teams should only play teams, too bad, go play custom games, skirmish is for more serious ranked matches. Don't remove custom rankings though, no reason to(see other thread, I suggest keeping custom rankings and adding a gametype called sandbox that won't effect stats).

If you try and say skirmish isn't for more serious matches, why is it even here?

Ok, well last, something needs to be done about game modes and maps. I don't know, it'd be nice if you could adjust them weekly. You can't allow players to setup options for matches they'd join, not enough people playing. So maybe if you suggested a playlist for the week on these forums then we gave our opinions. Then we'd have the majority happy hopefully, and overtime I think we'd get the best playlist and having to do it weekly would end. Of course you could change it now and then to spice it up.

What do you guys think? Of course this is my opinion. I want to hear community suggestions to this to see what to do. Overall my aim was to allow ranks to work better and get people in the matches faster

PS - I understand pantheon is more popular currently, but why? Think about it. It doesn't create a good persistent component imo. Most players I have talked to don't feel they really help or hurt the team when it takes so much to win. So move them over to skirmish and add those leaderboards is what I think is overall best

PS - another rerason why pantheon fails is that you can't start when 7 players are on one side and 1 on other, which just happened(i looked at stats)

+21 Karma | 4 Replies

quoting post

2) Not being able to join as a team. People who care about rank so much play with teammates(this is a logical deduction, clearly premades have a better chance of success to their increased communication and the nature of having played together). They can only do that in Custom games. So Skirmish and Pantheon fail to create a proper ranked component.

QFT

2) I kind of care about my win/lose ratio, and looking up the ratio of other players is a decent way of assessing how well they might play. (It's not end-all-be-all assessment, just a lose guess. If a player has a 10/50 win/lose ratio, his skill probably has something to do with it. I only use this assessment if there is a significant difference in the average team ratio.)

That said, I still agree there should be a join as team option for both Pantheon/Skirmish and Custom.

3) I completely agree.

4) Again, I agree. Only reason I ever did Pantheon instead of Skirmish (I don't do either very often at all) is because there weren't enough people in Skirmish queue.

If Skirmish games yielded a ladder, I think it should be archived for every ~2 weeks. I like the idea of establishing a "this session, we'll do XX game type" or "this session, we'll do YY map." There could even be a little story behind it (considering the intro and the fantastic character backstories, there is a pointed and disappointing lack of any story elements in actual gameplay). This can even be extended to possibly changing a few of the other settings for a given session, such as gold rates, to keep things a little fresh. If establishing a session of Fortress skirmishes yields significantly fewer players in Skirmish, then you know to not use that as the established mode. If it results in Skirmish being solely Conquest matches, then so be it. The other modes are still available in Custom Games if people really want to play them.

edit: With the story that is given, I never understood why there is a Light/Dark division. I thought the point (story wise) was that only one Demigod will become the new god? If that is so, why the rigid teams? In the simple "last DG standing is the new god" story, there really is no moral difference between Light and Dark demigods, so no real reason for them to want to ally with some rather than others (unless it yields some strategic advantage).

if you care about win lose ratio that is fine. you can play custom matches. if you don't want the match to count, say, you are trying a new build(a lot of people wanted to remove custom rankings and someone noted this), then it won't count

With the story that is given, I never understood why there is a Light/Dark division.

Heh, I've always wondered about that too. The whole backstory for this game more or less goes out the window as soon as the player loads his/her first game.

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The problem with Pantheon and Skirmish and what to do