Raider.IO Development Updates - Raids and Mythic Plus

[Lahis]

I'm sorry, I don't follow. If 15s are useless to you, how does m+ score effect you?

15 end chest is useless.

The weekly chest with 960+ loot has potential to be useful. Ergo, I need to do one 15+ run per week. The current climate with m+ score means I can never find a PUG to do it, if it ever comes to that.

Luckily big guild with two raid teams and bunch of socials on top of that has enough people to do the runs with.

[Cracked]

Have you ever though to ask yourself, why it's so widespread? If the addon was complete garbage and the score meant nothing then people wouldn't use it. In this case, the proof is in the pudding. People require the addon because they think that it improves the quality of their groups.

It's obviously a feature that looks super useful on surface, which is why people download it. What? I can see whether I'm inviting a good player or a scrub? SIGN ME UP.


Well, except too few people realize how the thing actually works (or rather doesn't). I'm pretty sure majority understands how the score is calculated, and they may even see the major flaw (more unique dungeons = purely more score), but what can you do? Heck, what can I do? Past posting in this thread, not much. Changing the state right now is too difficult, unless you invest heavily or are raider.io developer himself. I've given plenty of feedback on the last 2 pages, but I will refrain from posting for now, as it seems to be for naught.

[Emancptr]

Well, except too few people realize how the thing actually works (or rather doesn't). I'm pretty sure majority understands how the score is calculated, and they may even see the major flaw (more unique dungeons = purely more score),

And, it shows the highest dungeon completed and the highest completed for the dungeon they're queuing up for. The addon isn't all about the score.

Your problem lies with the players that make it about the score.

[GreenJesus]

Why does the addon only show previous season instead of this season when I hover over myself? The previous season I didn't do mythic+ besides just getting +10 done for lootbox, but it appears that my score for this patch 7.3.2 isn't showing? When will it change over?

[Protean]

Do tell, how often do you view people past scores / dungeons completed aside from when the current season is new? You don't have to answer though because the answer is never. I am not deciding what you care about or not.. it's just no one actually cares about past scores (except maybe a few nerds who care about the silly leaderboard)

You still don't get to speak for anybody but yourself.

You tried pulling "nobody ever" bullshit and got called on it. Just accept it and move on.

[Deleted]

The last few pages here prove just how toxic THE TOOLS are. The community is fine. Nothing wrong with people.

[TaurenNinja]

The last few pages here prove just how toxic THE TOOLS are. The community is fine. Nothing wrong with people.

It depends.
There is something wrong with people who queue up for a 15+ when their skill level is fitting for just a 0-5. As just one example.
And better players need some way of seeing whether the queued up player is up to the challenge or not.
All that the game does provide by default is displaying their itemlevel. Considering that itemlevel can (with luck) be extremely high even for complete newbies, it's not a useful metric anymore. *Usually* high ilvl means good player, but not in every single case.
So players who want successful groups need to resort to other metrics of evaluating player skill, such as recent achievements, hard raid boss kills, M+ dungeon run statistics and so on.
Which is perfectly reasonable, since it is the very first time since Legion that we have a difficult dungeon system. Before Legion, all dungeons were basically casual stuff for level phase and for pre-raid gearing. Then came the challenge modes, but it was a niche and didn't reward gear, and they also weren't that difficult. It is only now that we have truly difficult dungeon content, that also rewards gear, and is hugely popular. So now we have to be very careful about who we invite into our groups *if* we want the group to be successful.
For lower-level dungeons, none of this matters, but when we go into the regions where people want to go to get the best gear, then there is the issue that some players simply aren't skilled or geared or prepared enough to enter these dungeons. Yet they still queue up. All the time.

[Grindfactor]

It depends.
There is something wrong with people who queue up for a 15+ when their skill level is fitting for just a 0-5. As just one example.
And better players need some way of seeing whether the queued up player is up to the challenge or not.
All that the game does provide by default is displaying their itemlevel. Considering that itemlevel can (with luck) be extremely high even for complete newbies, it's not a useful metric anymore. *Usually* high ilvl means good player, but not in every single case.
So players who want successful groups need to resort to other metrics of evaluating player skill, such as recent achievements, hard raid boss kills, M+ dungeon run statistics and so on.
Which is perfectly reasonable, since it is the very first time since Legion that we have a difficult dungeon system. Before Legion, all dungeons were basically casual stuff for level phase and for pre-raid gearing. Then came the challenge modes, but it was a niche and didn't reward gear, and they also weren't that difficult. It is only now that we have truly difficult dungeon content, that also rewards gear, and is hugely popular. So now we have to be very careful about who we invite into our groups *if* we want the group to be successful.
For lower-level dungeons, none of this matters, but when we go into the regions where people want to go to get the best gear, then there is the issue that some players simply aren't skilled or geared or prepared enough to enter these dungeons. Yet they still queue up. All the time.

Understandable that its used to measure players BUT when the addon itself is based off the LEADERBOARDS not the addon itself... a lot of players don't get the scores they rightfully deserve let alone the people who work during the week get absolutely screwed when they get time on a weekend to do a run and cant 1) Join a group due to score 2) Get told "they just want a carry" when clearly if they have the gear they should be able to prove themselves.... This addon has done nothing but skew and put a bad taste in quite a few peoples mouth and honestly it should be broken by blizzard but I doubt it will due to it only pulling information from the leaderboards. If it went beyond that I'm absolutely sure blizzard would break it because its done nothing but cause a majority of players that are on high pop servers to get screwed completely out of runs or players who cant do anything till way later in the week or only do 1 run for their 15 weekly.... clearly that's not enough and people will always say stop bitching. If you want to judge a person by their performance then search them on Warcraft logs or check their raid progress.... LFR hero vs someone who has cleared some mythic antorus? That is if you desperately have to min max every detail yet clearly most aren't top end players but sure as fuck act like it.

I personally will take people with moderate ilvl I feel is appropriate for the mythic+ lvl... not these idiots asking 950 for normal antorus and crap but something that fits the difficulty. And 9/10 it works out fine. But people screwing over quite a few members of the community really isn't good for anyone ever...

[MrExcelion]

@Aspir Hey, love the website. Hope you guys get a bigger patreon following like raidbots has so we can continue to make this site bigger and better every week. Overall the way you've handled this thread here has been very professional and mostly just bumping it once in awhile for updates, so it doesn't feel like an advertisement

I just wanted to leave some feedback that I felt strongly enough to post about. Every time the m+ leaderboard has reset in the past, it's been because the dungeons themselves have changed, which required a need for a reset. However, with patch 7.3.2, this wasn't necessary at all, and I feel like the dungeons will stay as they are until the end of the xpac (late summer for 8.0/early fall BFA launch). I didn't see the need for my scores to get wiped. Obviously, we don't need to go back on this, it's not a huge deal, but basically what I'm saying is I'm hoping it doesn't get wiped for reasons like "a new patch" again. We'll be getting patch 7.3.5 to implement the new allied races for preordering and some scaling tech for leveling. It's a significant patch, but it's nothing to do with M+. 7.3.5 will likely hit on January 16th, the week before Call of Scarab, because there updates this year with new mounts (CoS is the weekend after). So basically, just hoping that the score I'm farming up again doesn't reset just one month from now, and I think it can stay as is for the rest of the xpac if they leave it as is. I don't want this to become like Diablo where I'm starting over all the time, it's a different system. Thanks, that's all I wanted to leave here. Keep it up guys, this site gets bigger every week.

Edit: This thought hadn't dawned on me until just now. I don't know the specifics, but I'm guessing the a potential reason there was a reset was because you might be using a different slightly different scoring algorithm now that the weekly jackpot chest is set at 15 instead of 10, like since players are going out of their way more to run the higher keys than before, so the scoring system can reflect that. That's cool and all, I'm just hoping it stays as is this time

- - - Updated - - -

We discusses this very thing, but there are complications due to how we treat the data for the seasons. We don't want to duplicate the data for consistency reasons, and this is exactly how we would need to implement something like you mention due to how we've structured our database.

General response to the above posters wondering about season change:

We think the season change is essential right now, because everyone's item level is going to take a sharp increase over the next couple of weeks, which will make the significance of a +24 completed before Antorus notably higher than a +24 completed after Antorus. We want to respect the previous accomplishments by players.

The site and addon already show a user's Current and Previous season scores. So even if we had no "grace period" as Ulsoga mentioned, there would be a clear indicator of what a given character's previous score was. But, we know that this isn't as descriptive as seeing the current season data when you're talking about the addon, since the addon will not show a previous season's top M+ level.

Having a 1 week grace period is really just the simplest approach to help mitigate some of the season change blues. We agree that 1 week is likely a little too short, but I don't think it could be any longer than 2 weeks. This "grace period" really only applies to the addon as well.

Here's where we want to take things: We think it would be cool to have a real "end of season" experience... something along the lines of what Hearthstone does, where players are awarded some little perks for attaining a certain rank, and that players actually carry over some amount of their previous season rank as they start a new season. We hope to explore some of these things in upcoming seasons, but we didn't have the development bandwidth to develop it this time around.

Edit 2: Sorry I missed this post earlier in the thread. Sorry about that. I just feel like the other posters that replied to this. It's just a hassle and I hope I can feel like there's more meaning by keeping the scores as is. If they reset every 3 months or so, I'm just not going to bother farming up scores each time and pray that groups will take me based on my ilvl. If the scores are persistent, I will definitely make an effort to improve my score over time. It's a terrible feeling when there's a reset.

I think you can do what you're suggesting while keeping the scores persistent. Like an alternative site-based ranking on a quarterly basis, but I don't want it to affect the global m+ system unless theres a dungeon change. Doing it by patches isn't going to give you the consistency you're looking for either, as I mentioned patch 7.3.5 is January and we might not see another patch until May or later

To put it another way, I do think there's people interested in what you're suggesting (Hearthstone-like), but there's also a lot of people (and maybe the majority of people) want to just have a score that they can farm up and get them into their weekly +15 because its base 960 loot that can trump mythic Antorus with warforges. I don't have a term for it, but you know what I mean, the "weekly" crowd that don't spam it a whole lot but still do it a couple times a week on their main or alt for the chest. I can definitely say that crowd would like to see persistent scores unless theres a real need like dungeon changes. I think its possible to appeal to both groups as long as the global score remains intact.

[Aspir]

@Aspir Hey, love the website. Hope you guys get a bigger patreon following like raidbots has so we can continue to make this site bigger and better every week. Overall the way you've handled this thread here has been very professional and mostly just bumping it once in awhile for updates, so it doesn't feel like an advertisement

Thank you, I appreciate that.

I just wanted to leave some feedback that I felt strongly enough to post about. Every time the m+ leaderboard has reset in the past, it's been because the dungeons themselves have changed, which required a need for a reset. However, with patch 7.3.2, this wasn't necessary at all, and I feel like the dungeons will stay as they are until the end of the xpac (late summer for 8.0/early fall BFA launch). I didn't see the need for my scores to get wiped. Obviously, we don't need to go back on this, it's not a huge deal, but basically what I'm saying is I'm hoping it doesn't get wiped for reasons like "a new patch" again. We'll be getting patch 7.3.5 to implement the new allied races for preordering and some scaling tech for leveling. It's a significant patch, but it's nothing to do with M+. 7.3.5 will likely hit on January 16th, the week before Call of Scarab, because there updates this year with new mounts (CoS is the weekend after). So basically, just hoping that the score I'm farming up again doesn't reset just one month from now, and I think it can stay as is for the rest of the xpac if they leave it as is. I don't want this to become like Diablo where I'm starting over all the time, it's a different system. Thanks, that's all I wanted to leave here. Keep it up guys, this site gets bigger every week.

Thanks for providing feedback in a clear and constructive manner.

I want to be clear that the reason for the season change was not simply because there was a new patch. The reason had to do with the large change in player power that comes with the release of a new raid tier. How different is the end effect of a patch increasing dungeon difficulty vs. a patch significantly increasing player item level? While certainly not exactly the same, my argument was that it is very close, enough so to warrant the change.

To help illustrate this I went back through our data and graphed the average item level of players completing M+ dungeons between levels 10 and 15 from 7.3 through now. This is a sample size of 2.5 million Mythic+ runs (300k of which are from 7.3.2):



The sharp incline is the opening of Antorus.

Edit 2: Sorry I missed this post earlier in the thread. Sorry about that. I just feel like the other posters that replied to this. It's just a hassle and I hope I can feel like there's more meaning by keeping the scores as is. If they reset every 3 months or so, I'm just not going to bother farming up scores each time and pray that groups will take me based on my ilvl. If the scores are persistent, I will definitely make an effort to improve my score over time. It's a terrible feeling when there's a reset.

I think you can do what you're suggesting while keeping the scores persistent. Like an alternative site-based ranking on a quarterly basis, but I don't want it to affect the global m+ system unless theres a dungeon change. Doing it by patches isn't going to give you the consistency you're looking for either, as I mentioned patch 7.3.5 is January and we might not see another patch until May or later

To put it another way, I do think there's people interested in what you're suggesting (Hearthstone-like), but there's also a lot of people (and maybe the majority of people) want to just have a score that they can farm up and get them into their weekly +15 because its base 960 loot that can trump mythic Antorus with warforges. I don't have a term for it, but you know what I mean, the "weekly" crowd that don't spam it a whole lot but still do it a couple times a week on their main or alt for the chest. I can definitely say that crowd would like to see persistent scores unless theres a real need like dungeon changes. I think its possible to appeal to both groups as long as the global score remains intact.

We're working on some changes in the addon that we hope to get into alpha testing later this weekend. We hope this will help address some of the concerns you raise above:

• We'll be looking back through each character's entire M+ history and using that to choose their best score from any season. If that season happens to not be the current season, it will still display as the player's main M+ Score in the addon, but it will have an asterisk next to it. This will then let us get rid of the "Previous Season Score" line entirely. For their top dungeons we will pick the highest valued run to show, no matter what season it occurred in.
• We're hoping to include a character snapshot for all active characters that have completed a +15, and if they don't have enough score to typically rank we will show something along the lines of "Unknown" for their score value rather than "0". This then becomes a way that even those on high pop realms who might be struggling to build up a score, can at least have some representation inside the addon that shows they can complete a +15 on time.
• We'll be making changes to how alts are linked to mains, so as long as you've registered on the site and chosen to link characters to your main then ALL your active alts will show in the data set, rather than just the alts that also meet the minimum score threshold. We'll be tweaking how the alt's main score i shown, because we do still want to make it clear that the main score was NOT earned on this character.

[MrExcelion]

I want to be clear that the reason for the season change was not simply because there was a new patch. The reason had to do with the large change in player power that comes with the release of a new raid tier. How different is the end effect of a patch increasing dungeon difficulty vs. a patch significantly increasing player item level? While certainly not exactly the same, my argument was that it is very close, enough so to warrant the change.

Hey thanks for taking the time to make a fast and super detailed response. I understand where you're coming from, in that you're thinking the increase in player power is making the previous efforts made in patch 7.3 seem irrelevant, whereas I've only been forward looking, and that the efforts made in that timeframe would be wiped out. To that end, somebody else in the thread suggested duplicating old scores, and doing that might give you the flexibility to do more seasonal features, saving the full resets for dungeon difficulty increases. There's pros and cons to the approach and could have issues with the tracking though. I'm not going to say there's a definitive right or wrong here and I know where you're coming from this for sure

We'll be looking back through each character's entire M+ history and using that to choose their best score from any season. If that season happens to not be the current season, it will still display as the player's main M+ Score in the addon, but it will have an asterisk next to it. This will then let us get rid of the "Previous Season Score" line entirely

I really do think the addon is starting to embody the heart and soul of the raider.io interactive experience. It's a great addon and I hope everybody starts using it. There's lots of knobs you can turn and approaches you can take with this to appease all groups of players (weekly players/casual score farmers that get decent scores on everything/elite level pushing). Like the once a week players you're showing the highest done, but also more direct features with the score too.

With that said, there's still a lot of people that just look up on the website and focus on the top header. Basically what I'm saying is we don't want the top header to get too crowded, but some of this information that you're putting in the addon could definitely go up there too, such as best score in any season, and it's very important it receives the same level of attention. Unless I'm misunderstanding it, you can only see 7.3.2 and 7.3 in the top header, and you have to click a drop down 1/3 down the page to select an old season like 7.2.5 and then it updates the top header with the old scores. Most people aren't going to bother to do that. I feel like there's always going to be a large contingent of organizers that will still prefer to just go to the website, maybe because they might prefer that full page experience. Give it another year or so though and we might have some super high number like 90% of raider.io-using people converted over to the addon, hope that's the case because of the upcoming features you've listed, though the website needs traffic too. For now at least, appealing to the website players can be done by treating that top header like the in-game tooltip. They'll definitely scroll down and look at the current seasons runs but they probably won't mess with the dropdown menus that let you switch to an earlier season

Overall I think the addon does a fantastic job at molding leaders towards a more healthy perspective on group formation. It gives them several different "reasons"/approaches to include a player rather than exclude them. Old season carryover, single highest, highest season, all that's great.

[ID811717]

some of this information that you're putting in the addon could definitely go up there too, such as best score in any season

Four of the current dungeons were not available in the first season (and one dungeon was not available prior to 7.3.0). Besides, I'm not sure how to compare the scores from completing +X dungeons in first season to +X dungeons in this season.

There are straightforward solutions for normalizing the scores, but doing that would be a hard choice to make, since we would end up with a semi-complicated design (e.g. the perfect goal is that everyone can intuitively understand how the scores were calculated without having to read lengthy description with math).

[BiggestNoob]

We discusses this very thing, but there are complications due to how we treat the data for the seasons. We don't want to duplicate the data for consistency reasons, and this is exactly how we would need to implement something like you mention due to how we've structured our database.

Perhaps you could introduce another field that would let you include runs from previous tiers.

How about a M+ version, let's say every time they substantially change M+ you increment the current M+ version so new reports are in this version (and introduce a new season).

You could query on (version, season <= current) to get the list of runs that people would think are relevant following a gear expansion.

[Cracked]

Four of the current dungeons were not available in the first season (and one dungeon was not available prior to 7.3.0). Besides, I'm not sure how to compare the scores from completing +X dungeons in first season to +X dungeons in this season.

There are straightforward solutions for normalizing the scores, but doing that would be a hard choice to make, since we would end up with a semi-complicated design (e.g. the perfect goal is that everyone can intuitively understand how the scores were calculated without having to read lengthy description with math).

Should that be the goal? All people need to know that bigger (or smaller, depending on impl) is better. The banks don't tell you how your credit is calculated, but everyone understands that lower is worse. You can come up with increadibly smart and representative ways to calculate the score, if you don't limit yourself to "Joe Shmoe needs to understand this calculation".

[Achilles55]

This addon is amazing! It allows players the best chance to create a successful and well balanced group comp with players of similar skill and experience to themselves. This will lead to more successful runs and less toxicity/negativity since your runs will go a lot smoother. I have only had this addon a week and it's saved so much time manually looking people up. Keep up the amazing work!

[HuxNeva]

I don't understand people that compare Raider.io to gearscore.
Ilvl basically is gearscore. It is a very poor signal when it comes to estimating a persons ability to complete a higher level M+ instance.
Because it is so poor, we have Raider.io, which as it is based on actual performance history is a decent (not perfect, but decent and certainly better than ilvl) signal.
If you know of a better signal for a pug environment, please share.
If you want to argue there should be no signals, I don't know what to say besides good luck.

[Aspir]

Hey thanks for taking the time to make a fast and super detailed response. I understand where you're coming from, in that you're thinking the increase in player power is making the previous efforts made in patch 7.3 seem irrelevant, whereas I've only been forward looking, and that the efforts made in that timeframe would be wiped out. To that end, somebody else in the thread suggested duplicating old scores, and doing that might give you the flexibility to do more seasonal features, saving the full resets for dungeon difficulty increases. There's pros and cons to the approach and could have issues with the tracking though. I'm not going to say there's a definitive right or wrong here and I know where you're coming from this for sure



I really do think the addon is starting to embody the heart and soul of the raider.io interactive experience. It's a great addon and I hope everybody starts using it. There's lots of knobs you can turn and approaches you can take with this to appease all groups of players (weekly players/casual score farmers that get decent scores on everything/elite level pushing). Like the once a week players you're showing the highest done, but also more direct features with the score too.

With that said, there's still a lot of people that just look up on the website and focus on the top header. Basically what I'm saying is we don't want the top header to get too crowded, but some of this information that you're putting in the addon could definitely go up there too, such as best score in any season, and it's very important it receives the same level of attention. Unless I'm misunderstanding it, you can only see 7.3.2 and 7.3 in the top header, and you have to click a drop down 1/3 down the page to select an old season like 7.2.5 and then it updates the top header with the old scores. Most people aren't going to bother to do that. I feel like there's always going to be a large contingent of organizers that will still prefer to just go to the website, maybe because they might prefer that full page experience. Give it another year or so though and we might have some super high number like 90% of raider.io-using people converted over to the addon, hope that's the case because of the upcoming features you've listed, though the website needs traffic too. For now at least, appealing to the website players can be done by treating that top header like the in-game tooltip. They'll definitely scroll down and look at the current seasons runs but they probably won't mess with the dropdown menus that let you switch to an earlier season

Overall I think the addon does a fantastic job at molding leaders towards a more healthy perspective on group formation. It gives them several different "reasons"/approaches to include a player rather than exclude them. Old season carryover, single highest, highest season, all that's great.

I agree that we'll need to make some similar changes to the profile header once we settle on the exact approach here. The idea is certainly to make that provide a succinct but informative summary of each player. I also think we will likely need to make some adjustments to the way that runs in the runs table are shown, or perhaps just adding a new option to the "Seasons" dropdown called "All Seasons" that shows you your best data across everything.

In general, I agree that it seems like what we need here is a decoupling of the concept of the seasons from the concept of M+ experience. I definitely wouldn't want to lose the seasons - because I know many people enjoy that. But I can understand how it negatively affects those who really just want to get their weekly +15 done and move on.

--

I also wanted to let people here know that we put up an Alpha version of the addon with some of the changes I mentioned above: The addon will now look through every user's entire Mythic+ history across each season and show the highest score that they've earned in any one season, as well as show the highest dungeons they've completed for any season. This drastically lessens the effect of "losing" anything with the season transition; though it is still "season" bound, so your score is just the BEST score you had in any season and not a merging of all your season scores.

Because of these changes, the concept of "Previous Season Score" has been removed from the addon, and instead if the score you are viewing is not from one of the seasons designated as "current" (7.3 and 7.3.2) then it will have a "(*)" appended to it.

This also means that as long as a player has earned a minimum of 500 points in any season, that they will qualify to be part of the data set (as long as they are still actively playing). From my experience with this version when running around, I do feel like it helped shine a better light on more players - which is good. We WANT the addon to be as inclusive as possible.

The version with this is v201712102328-alpha. You should be able to download it either from the Twitch client, or from the Addon page on Curse: https://wow.curseforge.com/projects/raiderio/files.

[Shivaree]

All the hate in this thread is just further confirmation that this system is great at filtering out toxic and bad people. Anyone who has any kind of skill at the game and a minimum of online social skills can effortlessly rack up enough points to get into the groups they desire.

Been using the addon and the site for two weeks and getting good groups together has never been easier.. a much better alternative to wowprogress.
Keep up the good work!

[Caprix]

All the hate in this thread is just further confirmation that this system is great at filtering out toxic and bad people. Anyone who has any kind of skill at the game and a minimum of online social skills can effortlessly rack up enough points to get into the groups they desire.

If i do about any dungeon +16 today it won't be recorded in this "great system". Depending on the dungeon, a +17 may need a good timer to be recorded, at least a 2 chests on EOA for instance.
This week a +14 in time on reset day was not recorded

[Dracodraco]

If i do about any dungeon +16 today it won't be recorded in this "great system". Depending on the dungeon, a +17 may need a good timer to be recorded, at least a 2 chests on EOA for instance.
This week a +14 in time on reset day was not recorded

Right. So what's your solution, then? It's not the add-on makers fault that the only way to get this data is through the leaderboards which happens to have that specific limitation - that's blizzard for not giving us access to all the data.

Would you seriously argue that we shouldn't have a tool like this just because of those relatively few people that are "unlucky" enough to be on a realm that's so active that a medium level key might not be picked up by the leaderboards? That's selfish as fuck. They can do a dungeon with someone on a low pop realm and get on their leaderboard to circumvent this anyway.