There's an interesting thread over on the official Paragon Reddit by a player called Layton. He's well thought of, highly skilled and one of the top Paragon players. The letter consists of him discussing the competitive scene of Paragon and what more could be done. Interestingly, the open letter wasn't just written by him but an array of the top players. He makes some valid points (especially around dumbing down mechanics and the current meta) and EPIC were quick to respond with an equally lengthy reply. Read it all below or head over to the Reddit page. 

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 about their 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, supporting or developing tournaments or a league for top players
• Investment into the future of Paragon as an eSport. (We can wait, we are patient. All we want is to feel your support)

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

Reflect, Team Reborn Solo (820 Hours Playtime)

Detroy, ESL Admin (900 Hours Playtime)

Clearcast, Team Synergy Carry (504 Hours Playtime)

Morterion, Team Synergy Solo (541 Hours Playtime)

Mhrac, Team Synergy Mid (620 Hours Playtime)

Oblepixa, Team Synergy Jungle

NickEagle, Team Synergy Support (632 Hours Playtime)

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

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 Poolhttp://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, LaytoN and the rest of us :)

EPIC Reply

Hey everyone - I'm Colin Fogle , Lead for our Competitive QA team on Paragon. As you noted in the post, my own background includes being a professional gamer across a series of titles - I totally get where you guys are coming from on this stuff and would like to take a stab at answering as much of this as I'm able to and to provide some context where I can. However, it's worth noting that I'm not on the matchmaking team and I'm not a designer, so keep that in mind.

...and brevity isn't a strong suit of mine, so this is gonna get lengthy. But I'd rather talk your ear off than feel like I cherry picked through your well thought out post.

RE: Matchmaking Queue Times (for high MMR players)

We hear you loud and clear and I had some discussions around it this morning in fact. We're still in the stages of analyzing the impact of the recent matchmaking changes to fully understand where we've seen improvements and regressions. While clearly the situation has gotten worse for very high MMR players, the re-seeding and adjustments to the matchmaking algorithm have had a positive effect overall for just about everyone else. We want to make sure any changes we make to fix the problem don't adversely affect the general population.

It's a really challenging issue because there simply aren't enough extremely high MMR players to fill a full match at all times - when I looked this morning we had exactly two players searching in our highest MMR range. This ultimately affects an incredible small amount of users, but for those people the game is nearly unplayable currently and we'd like to fix that. As you noted, these are some of our most dedicated players and in many cases they are also creating awesome content the rest of the community enjoys as well - it's not our desire to have those matchmaking times be that long.

Previously we'd been solving this high MMR population problem with a ceiling - everyone over 1600 MMR was set to a cap of 1600, meaning the 2200 MMR players were playing with the 1600 MMR players. That understandably led to players complaining about uneven matches, especially those that partied up with friends and as a result got bumped into the pool with the sharks.

Going forward, we may look at going back to the ceiling and just increasing it a bit, or might find some other solution. It's on the radar and is definitely an urgent focus for us to resolve, but we want to make sure we are responsible about how we fix it.

RE: Game Balance

Let me start off by saying that I strongly agree with the sentiment that the best multiplayer titles are balanced from the top down.

...and also note that I've played a lot of fantastic games that were balanced from the top down by people passionate about competitive gaming which failed to grow an audience that allowed for the best players to have a home to compete on. I've begrudgingly moved on from a few of those because all that was left was the small amount of teams that enjoyed all of the fantastic depth those games had to offer to those that invested the time and energy to learn them.

There's a balance to be struck between depth, complexity, and simply having understandable mechanics which players can pick up on straight away. One of the most common sentiments I've seen expressed in every MOBA is frustration around teammates not understanding how to play the game. That's entirely on us as developers to solve and improve - new players shouldn't have to read a thesis on how minions interact with towers to grasp the basic mechanics. It's also on us to make the new player learning experience (e.g. your first 100+ games in any MOBA) enjoyable so that people stick with the game long enough to reach the deep MOBA layer we believe we can maintain while improving those other areas.

Matches which last 45+ minutes fall under the latter category and are the reason we sought to improve match times. While long matches can be entertaining when you know all the nuances of the game, they can be a slog when you don't understand what you should be doing at certain periods of the match. Since we're in Beta - and a TRUE Beta, as I hope everyone realizes by now - that means we can try a lot of things really quickly and stick with what works. Match times in particular is really difficult for us to measure without pushing changes live because we need such large samples to get enough data to act on. Those tests gained us a lot of valuable information about what works, what doesn't, and what infringes on match quality negatively - we'll apply those learnings over the next couple months and onto the new map.

The new map represents a lot of our learnings about the game and the genre. It's the first real step towards addressing a lot of the concerns here in a healthy way which provides us a foundation to build upon. There's a lot of items which we've long had on our list to resolve which we're only just now able to start resolving now that we've got that foundation. That's the spirit of why we released in beta so early and have been so willing to drastically change the game over the past year - we are willing to fall, learn from our mistakes, and then apply those learnings to make the game even better.

RE: Competitive QA and Meta

Hey - this is an area I can speak towards really well!

Our Competitive QA team exists because Epic Games values having skilled players in the building who can play the game in development and keep us informed of how the game will be played when it's in your hands. We have 13 people total on the team and play about 6-8 matches per day on development builds which are just a day behind the development team. Those matches are converted into feedback and data which is provided to the team to help inform decisions and provide an outline of the issues we believe are most important as representatives of the community.

I've heard the 'CompQA doesn't understand the live meta and is playing something else entirely' comments for awhile now and want to address that. We currently have several players in the Top 200 for MMR (and a couple more coming soon) who play on Live regularly. Those are guys who log at least 40 hours a week working on the game and then still go home and grind out matches with the rest of the community in their free time - we're aware of how the game plays on Live. The Deathball/Jungle Farming example is a really poor one - I wrote a blog specifically noting that the math suggests other strategies are similarly CXP efficient and encouraging the community to play it some more before passing judgment (private matches had just gone live for the first time). We played with the community a bunch to help encourage more private match use, lost just one map to the best team in the game at the time (they were undefeated!) - and then get razzed for not knowing what we're talking about on the matter. After a brief time, we did ultimately move forward with a change that removed the jungle CP sharing and shifted the game forward.

Due to being on a build which is ahead of the public, we'll pretty frequently be saying the same things you are around 2 months before we see the Reddit thread about it. This is encouraging to me because it means we're doing a pretty good job of representing the competitive community, but here's reality of game development - time sucks:

• [Week 0] CompQA (or anyone really) notes that a mechanic isn't working well for the game, outlining some of the issues.
• [Week 1] Discussions are had around the mechanic and how we might be able to address the issues.
• [Week 2] Action items are determined and scheduled. The people who would work on it have several other things from the last thing brought up by QA/Community so it gets slotted for a week later.
• [Week 4] Developers spend a few days working on fixing the issues - sometimes this involves multiple deparments.
• [Week 5] QA and Design provide feedback on the change, has more discussions about action items.
• [Week 6] Iteration and testing!
• [Week 7] Cool, we're ready to push it live. It gets placed in the next major release so there's enough time for QA to test for bugs.
• [Week 8/9] Change goes live.

That's two months - and in this case the approach worked on the first attempt and we had people available to work on the change. With a more complex and layered issue like Travel Mode, we might go through the cycle several times before landing on something everyone is happy with.

As a development team, we'd like to be more agile on items that don't require the whole process above. That's when you get cases like the match length iteration - we test a lot of changes really quickly on the live product and eat some of the pains of doing so in terms of player reaction while we sort things out. Not many live games move at the pace we do and getting the feedback right away is great, but it can still be difficult to react to it fast enough for the sake of the community at times. It's an area we'd like to improve in for the future.

This one really hits home for me. Nearly every title I've ever competed on has had problems with developers not supporting the game competitively. Not just financially, but also just generally not listening to the community at all after the game has been released. I know how much that sucks, and I really hope we haven't had a radio silence problem - I personally feel like Epic has done more communicating for Paragon than most live multiplayer titles although it may not have been aimed specifically at the competitive audience. Even the fact that our Competitive QA team exists should hopefully be encouraging in this area.

We've got a lot of people on the Paragon team who love esports and spend dozens of hours every month watching events for just about every title. I feel that a multiplayer game being played competitively and sustaining itself in that way is one of the best signs in the industry that you did something right. That said, in the same way that I've seen titles focused heavily on competitive play and top-down balance fail to pick up a player base, I've also seen just as many come out of the gates with a heavy esports focus and flounder after a paying to sponsor a couple massive events. For awhile, I actually hopped from game to game playing in those tournaments and making some side cash, but it would never fail that after the tournament almost all the teams would disappear.

This usually happens because a title isn't ready to support competitive play and is instead forcing it on the community in the form of a big tournament. The fact this post exists at all is indicative of the fact that we're not quite there yet - it's a beta title which is undergoing heavy iteration to work through the problems that being a beta title entails. Once we've done that, I hope we have a game which feels great to compete on and we can establish a sustainable platform so that the community can keep growing to bigger and better things.

In Closing - *Thank You.*

This thread got passed around the office really quickly, and I want to make sure that you all know how appreciated it is to see this sort of stuff. It's obvious to us that the community cares a lot about the game and wants to see it improve - hell, some of you have 3000+ matches played and that's freaking awesome. The fact that you care is what has me sitting here at midnight typing up a response that I feel you all deserve and it's the reason the team works so hard on improving the game every week.

We totally understand the frustrations when things go slower than expected - we're dealing with the same thing on our end, constantly asking 'What can we do to improve this and get it in front of players as soon as possible?' and then moving things around to make that happen. I hope whenever we're straying from that path the community will continue to call it out and we can have these conversations. That's at the foundation of what we're trying to do and it only works if both sides can hear and understand each other.

Seriously, thank you for your passion. Love this stuff.