DUST Search - Sticky:What's going on with the Battle Academy?

CCP Greyscale wrote:

Reav Hannari wrote:

You are changing multiple variables at once but basing your decision to reduce graduation requirements on the older setup. I would have changed the academy mode and then checked the WP average for that.

I also vote for opening the opportunity to move out of the academy battles but leaving the option there for some time.

I also suggest giving faster SP accrual during some initial period.

Yes, we are. For a number of reasons we're running tests on a weekly cadence right now, so we don't really have time to explore the entire possibility space variable-by-variable. Instead we're jumping between reasonably optimized implementations of various different plausible models of new player behavior, to try and establish as quickly as possible which model gets us in the right ballpark. We have a number of likely-looking mountains that we want to do a rough height-check on; once we've established some baselines for those, we'll be in a position to consider doing hill-climbing to find local maxima.


Author	Thread Statistics \| Show CCP posts - 7 post(s)
Absolute Idiom II Greatness Achieved Through Training EoN. 302	Posted - 2013.08.06 12:32:00 - [1] - Quote I'd like to suggest a lower and upper WP limit to graduating from the Battle Academy. when you hit the lower limit (say 400 WP) you are also allowed to freely choose the other game modes - but, crucially, the Battle Academy will remain as an option until you hit the upper limit (say 2000 WP). This allows players to 'graduate' at their own pace, whilst giving them a walled garden for the first sets of matches they complete.
Absolute Idiom II Greatness Achieved Through Training EoN. 302	Posted - 2013.08.06 12:42:00 - [2] - Quote One 'problem' with Domination matches for newbies is that they'll all have to spawn a mile away from the Control Point since there is no education that uplinks should be used for spawning (other games (CoD, BF3) use squad spawning). Are you able to introduce newbie focused splash screens for players not yet out of the battle academy? Or maybe allow any player to browse/peruse all the possible splash screens at their leisure?
Absolute Idiom II Greatness Achieved Through Training EoN. 302	Posted - 2013.08.06 12:54:00 - [3] - Quote Would your currents tools allow you to have a lower/upper limit for the BA, as per my suggestion?
Absolute Idiom II Greatness Achieved Through Training EoN. 302	Posted - 2013.08.06 13:10:00 - [4] - Quote Sorry, you can't both advocate the learning cliff and then tell us that you used 3rd party resources to help you climb it. I certainly see a role for 3rd party guides in helping players with the decision on the WHAT (how to play better or improve their skill/equipment choices) but not for how to understand the core concepts of HOW. HOW should definitely be handled by the in game client, through tutorials, better UI, etc.
Absolute Idiom II Greatness Achieved Through Training EoN. 311	Posted - 2013.08.06 14:39:00 - [5] - Quote Parson Atreides wrote: Players are averaging 100 WP a game against people in equivalent gear? Ignoring the part where this is so low I can almost guarantee you're wrong (despite whatever your metrics say), what are they supposed to do when they get to the regular queues and everyone has better gear? 25 WP per game? They get one assist and that's it? I don't understand your logic. Until you get a much better matchmaking system this is all irrelevant anyway. You should also completely remove the SP cap until players hit like 5 million SP. He did say median [average], not mean [average]. This means that if you ranked all the new players, the ones half way up/down score 100 per match. The mean [average] could indeed be much higher as it will pulled up by the players who are right at the top. To put it another way, the '1%' at the top hog many more WP than you might expect. I'd tempted to agree with you on the 'no SP cap until 5 mil SP' point but I have a concern about the creation of highly specialised alts.
Absolute Idiom II Greatness Achieved Through Training EoN. 317	Posted - 2013.08.06 15:52:00 - [6] - Quote CCP Greyscale wrote: Reav Hannari wrote: You are changing multiple variables at once but basing your decision to reduce graduation requirements on the older setup. I would have changed the academy mode and then checked the WP average for that. I also vote for opening the opportunity to move out of the academy battles but leaving the option there for some time. I also suggest giving faster SP accrual during some initial period. Yes, we are. For a number of reasons we're running tests on a weekly cadence right now, so we don't really have time to explore the entire possibility space variable-by-variable. Instead we're jumping between reasonably optimized implementations of various different plausible models of new player behavior, to try and establish as quickly as possible which model gets us in the right ballpark. We have a number of likely-looking mountains that we want to do a rough height-check on; once we've established some baselines for those, we'll be in a position to consider doing hill-climbing to find local maxima. I love this analogy; it's my favourite from my time an a biologist - protein folding energy landscape.
Absolute Idiom II No Free Pass 428	Posted - 2013.08.15 08:42:00 - [7] - Quote more tiers before more tears, tbh.
Absolute Idiom II No Free Pass 463	Posted - 2013.08.22 09:27:00 - [8] - Quote steadyhand amarr wrote: War points are not at useless at seeing how well a player has developet I would at diffrent metric tbh I think you accidentally the whole sentence.
Absolute Idiom II No Free Pass 576	Posted - 2013.08.30 11:59:00 - [9] - Quote CCP Greyscale wrote: Today's update: Quote: UPDATE 30-08-13: At downtime today we'll be lowering the Academy WP cap from 2000 to 1200, for the usual metrics-impact reasons. We'll also be changing from Skirmish back to Domination. Because the cap is going down, any player with a WP total above 1200 will find themselves no longer in the Academy after this change. :ChemistryDog: