Change city queue system; group of 6 as bare minimum to enter queue

[Aurandilaz]

what title says

Too often one side spends 10-30mins advance in Discord, assigning spots, signing up people, ensuring a 8-8-8 roster with people speccing for rights specs, deciding in advance who is bomb MA, who is ST train MA, who is calling challenge/bellows rotations, who is initial rezzer, which tank is assigned on healer protection duty, who is running which auras... only to realize that by the time you enter city, the enemy has given zero fücks about even trying to form any kind of group that might offer a fight, but have only queued to get their loot from endgame PVP content with zero efforts given to any kind of organization, then expecting to still get their daily pity loot of 1-2 royals for showing up at the right time to lose.
(there is a systematic and now less funny joke of getting into city instance 1 with fast queueing, and having the other side filled with 20 dps, 3 heals and 1 tank combo)

Think about it, after the campaign has been through the woodlands of Ostland where your comrades gave hell to the enemy boxrunners, bleeding dry with your allies on the slopes of High Pass and watch the white snow turn blood red, organizing gorilla warfare ambushes in the backalleys of the ruined city of Praag and doing your best to hinder enemy process, then fighting again and again with your allies through half a dozen zones and suffering the braindamage that you get from joining and surviving through forts - you finally get to fight at the city.

Do you;
A) walk in alone, YOLO, Sigmar take the wheel
B) remain grouped with your comrades, make calls in /5 to organize, join guild warbands, join alliance warbands, make ad-hoc new warband and invite people to your Discord so you have somewhat decent chances of winning and gaining access to loot (giving loot to losing side was a mistake from the start)

No more solo queueing for the epic endgame content from which players are granted access to the best gear available in the game.

Players can now only queue for the city siege if they are in a group of 6, or higher. Hopefully as 12man or 18man or preferrebly as full 24man wb who should take queue priority over any other group trying to get in. The remaining 12+6mans will get mixed in eventually, and if some group is running 7 or 15 or 21 people, then that would mean some spots will be left open.
To prevent these open spots, would recommend increasing city start timer from 10 to 15 mins so people have time to plot their 24man compositions and prepare their bladders and specs for the city siege.
Then, further increase city time to queue from 30 to 40 min, to ensure there is some extra time to organize just in case it is needed, 15-20mins is enough to form a group of 6 (doesnt have to be perfect), or even better groups of 12 or 18.

To encourage grouping further and ensure that winning does matter, would maybe even recommend enabling Stage 3 goldbags to contain pieces of Sov/Warlord gears again. Atm losing side gets less royals (ok) and less bags (ok) - but to ensure that everyone has the incentive to group up in a Massive Multiplayer Online Game and not try to be "im too cool for groups"-guy, there should be extra carrot to have players remain competitive in the final phase of the city siege.
This change should have been done months ago, to have both sides get their shaite together and form somewhat coherent groups for city fights to ensure actual PVP happens to ensure loot happens.

[Zappers]

400 Destro VS 250 Order for City ..
find the mistake...

[Asderas27]

+1 to this. Pls stop making changes to support solo/pug players who dont even want to try to get a bit organized for the endgame content and BiS gear. Just like ranked it needs to be a 2-2-2 party to be qualified for city . If you wanna be a solo hero you can go do orvr as it gives royals anyway. Not encouraging grouping up in a massive orvr pvp mmo makes no sense .

[Jeliel80]

Funny thing is that they are about to go completely in the opposite direction, punish organized wb and listen to cries of solo q heroes, that can't be bothered to group up in an mmorpg.
The irony...

[Banjomissen]

This would only hurt the losing side even more.

It doesn’t matter if you Are forced group up or not if you play an unwanted class or spec. You won’t get an invite to anything that resembles something that could win. Why not make all classes viable in city sieges in stead? Or is that too reasonably?

Also the 400destro vs 250order is spot on. The other day there were 10-15% more Order online until the city siege start.... then all a sudden Destro has 10-15% more players.

[Banjomissen]

It’s not about bothering to group up, it’s about too many classes being punished because they are subpar in the city siege scenario. Forcing those players to group up would result in the same situation as we have now. Small amount of instances, Order losing most, lots of Destro not getting in.

Let the premades fight premades and solo players fight solo players.

[Xergon]

It’s not about bothering to group up, it’s about too many classes being punished because they are subpar in the city siege scenario. Forcing those players to group up would result in the same situation as we have now. Small amount of instances, Order losing most, lots of Destro not getting in.

Let the premades fight premades and solo players fight solo players.

The only TRUE BALANCED solo instance would be Solo's vs PvE, anything else will be always one of the side with unbalanced setup.

[Rapzel]

So apparently a lot of people are unhappy with the end game content that is City Siege and the state in which teams are selected to face each other, some people have suggested MMR based brackets, some have suggested to separate premades and pugs.
It seems that the potential coming changes (leaked on several streams and confirmed by someone) in the next patch caters to fix this "issue", though several people see flaws in this new potential system of city sieges and how it may be abused to up your chances of success in city.
As long as the rewards are the same for both this premade WB and Solo queue what are the incentive to actually play in a group? The only possible change would be to implement Warlord medallions for solo and Royal crests for premades or give a bigger amount of royals to those who "dare" queue solo, but it's too late for the implementation of Warlord medallions as people have been able to farm Royals for a year.

Another potential flaw is that premade WBs may not even get a city at all, as there might not be anyone left to face leading to more "city starvation" on the zerging side, which in the long run leads to punishing guilds and warbands that "tryhard".
This is where the MMR system suffers even more, is the MMR going to be applied to a character? An account?
Will the MMR match the mean MMR or max/min values? Having people with low MMR characters will allow for good groups to carry against worse opposition than "they deserve".

My background:
I started playing in 2015, and mainly played solo until 2017-2018 when population rose and I had to do the choice of rerolling to a more solo friendly career or play in groups, I chose the latter. I've got 8 rank 40s spread over both of the factions mainly melee and tanks (2 80's on destro, 1 80+ and 1 77 on order, so I would say I play both sides equally even though I started on destro and that's the main reason for this discrepancy in renown ranks).

So what are the differences? On any career it seems near impossible to find city groups on order if you're not in the Order WB discords, while you get bombarded of invites on destro if you play healers or tanks. Now I should be honest and say that I do not enjoy large scale fights as much as I enjoy small scale fights and there for have not put as much effort into finding a warband guild that may need extra tanks for their city warbands, but this applies to both sides, I.E Order seems more content with the solo queue than Destro is, this may be because of several reasons, such as "unwanted" (I myself think this is a self-fullfilling prophecy, as I've seen talented players perform well on "none meta careers" and how the top tier Order WBs utilize these careers with great success) careers in Order WBs.

The new system will allow for terrible cities, where it will be engi, WH and DPS AM vs. WE and DPS Shaman cities. Will you really have more fun there?

All current proposals to solve the issue has been to create different types of sub categories, such as solo queue vs. solo queue, wb vs. wb and MMR based pops.
With the current amount of population there is, solo vs. solo is not possible, this caters more to the solo players than people who actually puts effort in grouping up and do proper setups and wants to play city as it "was intended to be played" are punished for "tryharding", which makes no sense at all in any MMORPG.

Can it be that we've looked at the problem from the wrong angle?
This proposals of needing to have a group to queue would solve the problem in the simplest and easiest way for both devs and the players. To get some of the best gear (Sent jewel, bloodlord weapons and such) you need to group up, does it make sense it only applies some gear, or should we promote social aspect of the game?

[Aurandilaz]

It’s not about bothering to group up, it’s about too many classes being punished because they are subpar in the city siege scenario. Forcing those players to group up would result in the same situation as we have now. Small amount of instances, Order losing most, lots of Destro not getting in.

Let the premades fight premades and solo players fight solo players.

Which classes are subpar? You have room for 1-2 WE/WH for per city in the ST group that trains over healers, and you can fill even 1-2 Engi/Magus to add AoE pressure to the bomb. Sure, when there are maybe 10-15 instances the spots become scarce, but that cannot be helped much when it comes down to population. SW/SH are just fine, both deliver considerable AoE pressure.
When cities are currently an unorganized mess with people soloing and just trying to leech, having them form the bare minimum of a group (even if its 5dps 1heal or 1tank 4 dps 1 heal), will start making the fights more balanced. After that, it will be easier to draw realistic conclusions about "balance issues". (Order is actually OP, but most of them really have no intention of getting organized and showing their true potential)

Getting access to the real "endgame" and actual BIS gear should not be in the category of "lol ill just walk in solo - oh crap enemy is organized - devs pls nerf" - but rather its the final stage of a large open RVR campaign, where warbands have pushed their path through a dozen zones and forts, with COORDINATION and ORGANIZATION to achieve their aims of sieging enemy city. When you get to the cookier jar, you are not supposed to solo it, nor are you expected to gain fair rewards if you choose to throw in the towel before even trying.
This is still not a solo game, not a single player roleplaying game, but a MMORPG.

[TreefAM]

A great suggestion. Honestly I don't understand why solo players are pandered to this much, their presence and contribution is close to none in every single aspect of the game.