ProvenGrounds bad luck or WTLF?

Communications Center General Discussion
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Hey all
I went in there for 6 matches. 4 of those were vs top 10 players, the other 2 against top 15 players. I look at the Top Player list, they got an average of 1 or tops 2 games vs also Top 15 leaderboard.

It is obvious they play competitive and use all means in-game available to them which is fine with me and I agree with it, since it is easier for them to get their hands on the best drugs, implants and even ammo type, but what bothers me a bit is why the algorithms match up casual players against the very best, is it not possible to allow the more casual guys to also fight among similar skilled (SP and overall statistically similar) players?

Basically, you cannot even learn in these games which I tried to do in the last matches because those top players are smart enough to get you Out of Bounds etc.

Again, I admire their dedication to this but throwing in casual players as cannon fodder for them can hopefully be fixed for next time?

o7

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Sadly there aren’t enough people taking part in the proving grounds to allow more ‘fair’ matchmaking.

Also this event is reasonably expensive, so there are less casual players involved and a higher chance of matching against the more competitive players.

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Ok that makes sense! I saw a lot of online videos before to prepare, checked the fits people used to make sense of it and did a lot of mental preparation and even made notes.
Oh well, I wish whoever is left competing the best of luck and hope that CCP make it more even. It is ok to fight and lose against the best but in every single matchmaking it is a bit frustrating. I know exactly who they were because I have been following them on zkill also to learn about their fits so I can make adjustments to mine but my heart sank each time I saw them. I also greeted them and said I am new to this to maybe get some tips but they just bulldozed me over lol.

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You learn BEFORE doing those matches, you applied what you learned and gain experience DURING those matches.

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I haven’t done the proving grounds at all, so can’t speak to it specifically.

The problem is likely the one that a lot of MMOs which aren’t really PVP MMO’s face - the proportion of actual PvP players is quite small.

What happens when your mostly-PvE game has an arena, is the small core of people who do well in PvP are the ones who use it the most. Therefore they’re available for a lot of matches. People who dabble and get crushed, do it comparatively little, and often soon give up.

So you end up with a cycle of PvP crushers bulldozing the trickling stream of experimental animals, and the stream slowly trickles out because few people enjoy getting bulldozed repeatedly. From my experience in other games, this isn’t particularly enjoyable for the bulldozers either. It’s a bit nice to rack up a high kill score but bulldozing plebs isn’t really that entertaining, long-term.

Options are to up your PvP skills elsewhere in (and out of) the game, until you can contend, or move along and find something else to do.

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To be honest, I’d love to see the Proving Ground Events split up into two parts.

Lets say the event is 10 days, so in the first 7 days everyone can participate, but implants and drugs are forbidden. That is important because beginners are already at a disadvantage of experience and sometimes SP, and often simply the available cash matters. the ability of the vets to pump millions over millions in boosting implants and drugs each round make it even more onesided and a pretty frustrating experience for those who can’t afford that. These 7 days can be used to test fits, train strats and learn to read the competition. Or just to have some fun for beginners, but the vets can of course still grind points.

In the last 3 days of the event implants and boosters become allowed, so those who think they have a good chance for a final placement can go all in with their wallet if they really want.

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proving grounds is a theorycraft heaven analog to alliance tournament
the crowd is very good and hard

there is no equivalence to the OLD FW (mostly noobs learning and old vets that dislike null sec and moved to a sub optimal area to have good fights)

but CCP and the players LOOOOOOOOOOVE N+1 gameplay and transformed low sec into the new farmvile null sec yayyyyyyyyyyyy

enjoy swimming with the sharks because its all that is left in terms of solo pew pew

edit:
btw i did 2 and CCP said that i would get 100 milion isk for doing 10k damage , i got ■■■■ , so besides all its also bugged

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Look man, you gotta understand that there’s like 70 people doing these things, and I mean like total, out of the game’s entire population.

I’ve done some, and it’s basically just rolling the dice with one of a couple of meme fits. You either get lucky because you’re the counter to what the other player is using, or the other player is lucky because they’re the counter to you. And it’s just so, so boring. It’s basically like playing “high card.” There’s no skill involved in the actual combat, and all of the “skill” is in terms of picking the right time to play, when the other good players aren’t on, so that you can farm your wins.

This was basically CCP’s attempt to get into the e-sports business, after they heard there was a lot of money to be made on Twitch because all the cool kids were into PUBG and Overwatch three years ago. EVE’s “arenas” are basically how a bunch of 60-year-old game designers who have never actually played a competitive video game imagine competitive multiplayer PvP to be like.

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baby D loooves to call me old

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No there are much more, there’s over 200 doing it easily, I know because I m like rank 173 and I did another match just to see and was top vs a top 5. They have the means to make matchmaking better, this is actually not hard at all, especially with few players. Why do I not see the top 10 battling against each other now? At this point they should battle each other constantly and not farm the guys that can’t afford 100million drugs and 300 million implants.

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yeah but if you take a 100 mil drug and 300 million implant + the 400 million ship you may happen to lose all that money

you know , if the other guy had the same idea …

i did no implants no drugs ,the capsules i killed were in the 50 million range
the loot + the trig ■■■■ they put there sold for aprox 40 million on insta sell , not good

btw there is no skill the only skill is to wait for the people that have skill to log off. appears to be a contradiction

you guys are to easily bamboozled

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Welcome to an EVE arena where other players uphold EVE’s basic game principle “ruin other players’ days” after all. All these weak wannabe PVPers should just feed to Jaruselka and other top tier arena farmers.

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I am watching the kill reports of the top players, it would be way nicer to see the top 10 guys fighting each other now way more often and have the lower tier guys battle amongst themselves, but no, those top players still farming like rank 200 players.

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Because if the top 10 had to fight each other over and over, it would be like having a sports league with only two teams in it, playing against each other over and over again. Their win rates and KDRs would normalize to 50%, and these people would just stop doing these arenas entirely.

Asmongold talked about this phenomenon in his Diablo Immortal videos. These top players are likely “whales” because they drop lots of money on PLEX to fund the arena grind. I know that I’d certainly have to be, because I can’t stomach the idea of doing any PvE at all, and arenas are a net loss even if you’re winning considerably more than you’re losing.

Well, the developers understand that the whales need to be kept happy for the good of revenue maximization, so they create a system in which they get fed the “dolphins” or whatever for content. And it’s kind of a “turtles all the way down” system where the dolphins get fed the minnows, and then the minnows get fed the plankton, etc. So we have a system where maybe a few hundred, or even a few thousand, try the arena system every season, but all but 100 or so people are one-pump chumps who get bent over a table once or twice, and then never drop again and go back to running level 4 missions.

If CCP were to add proper Elo-based matchmaking, this fragile system would collapse entirely, and we wouldn’t have any “elites” anymore, because you can’t have elites who are 50% win rate players, since as mentioned before there’s no personal skill involved in the actual arena combat, and all the skill is in terms of fitting your ships and timing your drops.

Real-life sports are similarly flawed, but at least there’s some element of entropy even in those where the competition is in terms of elite-versus-elite, like tennis. Individual sports players still have individual skills and proficiencies, but in video games with gear and items and loadouts it always comes down to the “meta” of what’s the best at any given time, and all of the best players play the exact same way.

This is why battle royale games became so popular. They broke the status quo by adding a lot of dynamic factors and entropy into the element of competition, allowing even average players (like me—I don’t have particularly good aim or “twitch” reflexes) to rise to the top by utilizing unconventional skills and specialties like stealth and psychological warfare. I’ve won so many BR games by throwing some grenades to distract the last guy with the noise, and then came around the back while they pointed their guns in that direction and shot them in the ass. Can I do that in an EVE arena? No, because it’s just a rock-paper-scissors staredown between DPS/kitey/tanky setups where the winner is decided the moment the match is formed.

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This simply isn’t true. I make enough in most arenas to continue taking part and I only really engage in PvE during events. And I’m only near the top of the board in the quieter events.

This is also totally false. There’s an absolute ton of skill required - as proved by the many people who fit the same ship as the leaders and then die repeatably.

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Is WTLF French for WTF?

What the le frick?

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C’est quoi ce bordel.

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That’s not “skill,” that’s just getting acclimated to the environment. Obviously if you take a player who’s never done PvP before and drop them into an arena with the most optimal setup, they’ll still lose. But when a player is used to going through the motions, and is familiar with all of the related game mechanics, there’s little if any room for further growth in EVE arenas because the gameplay comes down to rock-paper-scissors counters to everything. The skill ceiling is very low.

As far as the money thing is concerned, maybe they adjusted the rates recently, I don’t know, but for “top” players to make it sound like they’re just breaking even still isn’t a very enticing prospect. Either way, top arena players are likely to positively correlate with PvP-focused PLEX buyers.

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Nope. That is an incorrect statement. Having the knowledge, having practice, having the fit, having the specific strategy practiced, and having the specific fit practiced are all very different aspects of player skill, and all have their own logistic curves of progress associated with them.

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I understand the psychological imperative to defend the thing that you like, but if you’re going to be objective about it, the low skill ceiling argument still stands. What you’re describing as “skill” are indeed elements of skill, but only those dealing with rote repetition and environmental acclimation. If you take a player who’s been doing EVE arenas for 100 hours, and a player who’s been doing them for 5,000 hours, there’s going to be very little variance in the way they play, what they use, how they act, et cetera. But if you make the same comparison between players in an environment that supports a high degree of freedom and emergent behavior (for example, open-world EVE PvP), there’s going to be a vast difference between two players with a 50:1 experience differential.