(Apologies if this is already known – I took a quick skim of GD and Events and didn’t see anything.)
So you know how MMR feels different these last two tournaments? You know how scores were way higher for Smash Hit than they were in previous tournaments, with someone reaching the mythical 1400 plateau for the first time in maybe ever?
There is definitely a change: people who are shielded can now be found in regular matchmaking. They don’t have to be retaliations, and they don’t have to be queued already in your node. I don’t know if this is the entire reason for the matchmaking being different, but if you want to get yourself a nice shiny IW cover, now’s the time.
The game queues about 8 players ahead of time, and this can happen before someone is shielded, so someone who is already queued up in your matchup list will still be in your matchup list even after they’re shielded, even if you can’t see them ahead of time. I have no idea when the game decides to queue up more people, but it definitely queues some of them up (see LR seed teams when you go away for half an hour, for example, and you still get seed teams after beating the ones you already see).
In practical terms this means you should always just take whoever shows up because after you skip them, they’re not coming back if they’re shielded and a shielded opponent is almost always the best guy to attack.
Unless he’s in your bracket, there’s no way to tell. But I’m pretty sure someone who is shielded do not appear again if you skip them if they’re still shielded.
Not sure, and I’m out of town in Phoenix for a mini vacation this weekend. I’ll toss through an email, but I wouldn’t expect any kind of answer in time for the end of Hot Shot.
I believe this change is true too! I didn’t want to ask because I know people would just argue that I was just queued up already in other people’s buckets. I’ve considered that possibility but since mishiefmaker brought it up… I found it peculiar during Smash Hit that I was hit a couple of times two or three hours into an 8hr shield. I put up another shield 2 hours before the event ended, and an hour into that I was still getting hit. I’m fairly sure those weren’t retaliations. In the past, I stopped seeing hits after an hour into the shield. What really upsets me though is that I unshielded 5 minutes before the event ended to sneak in one last fight and ensure my spot in the top 10. I finished with 1 minute to spare and found out I got hit 3 times. Obviously I didn’t make the top 10. That was the first time that ever happened. I’ve been doing that for the past month in PvPs and usually, after unshielding, it takes about 15 minutes before somebody attacks me.
It’d be great if someone could confirm this change. Because I don’t want to mess up Hotshot by unshielding at the last minute again. I’ve already used an 8hr shield. I’ll monitor if what happened to me was just an isolated case. If it is, then it was just bad luck for me.
I don’t think it’s a strict change, but there are certainly some peculiar things going on. I tried doing some testing and threw out a really squishy team (OBW/M Storm) at 1100 points and shielded. It’s been out there for about 14 hours, and only got 4 attacks (I won 3 of those, though!), all of which came shortly after throwing up the shield. I’d expect a whole lot more attacks if I was actually being queued up often.
Yeah what happened with knock the other day seems like an anomaly. And now the points seemed to have dried up completely at the top. Just skipped 15 times and didn’t see one match over 5 points.
I got hit twice by the same person (locked) while shielded but haven’t been hit by anyone new so I still think it’s just a matter of people are able to queue up opponents before they’re shielded (even multiple times).
The wider selection of opponents increases your tendency to play and since extra points are still generated even at the 900 range, more playing = more points overall. That is, before you’re seeing the same 5 guys worth 15 so you’re not going to be encouraged to play at all. Now that you can see a relatively larger variety of opponents you’d have reason to play, and even at 900 it’d be like you lose 27 while someone gains 29 and that’s still 2 more point created in the system, so if you played enough you’ll still eventually get somewhere.
