Guild Wars 2

First of all, bring back the old matchmaking system, and keep the tiers in place.

Each week the Servers in each tier will battle to gain the most points overall. At the end of 2 or 4 weeks the server with the lowest amount of points gets bumped down to a lower tier and has to battle to keep their place within their old tier.

For example:

Let’s say in 2 or 4 weeks of Tier one, out of the three servers JQ places last. Therefore JQ moves down to Tier 2 being number one in that tier, replacing FA who was lowest in Tier 2 and was moved down to Tier 3. After one or two weeks, If JQ remains in 1st place in Tier 2 they will move back up to their original, but if they don’t the Server in first place moves up to Tier 1.

Now the issue with this is you can’t successfully move everyone down a tier, and I am open to some suggestions. To be honest this idea randomly came to me, and I am looking to see if we can turn this into a community project and get Anet to incorporate a new WvW match up system that WE THE PLAYERS make.

These Matchmaking problems would all be solved if they would just implement1 up 1 down. Winner goes up Loser goes down and the middle stays in the same bracket. This way there are new matchups every week and

Kopipoki.3542:

These Matchmaking problems would all be solved if they would just implement1 up 1 down. Winner goes up Loser goes down and the middle stays in the same bracket. This way there are new matchups every week and

how many times do we have to tell you this is a bad idea before the people who keep suggesting this figure it out…if you wanna see how well t1 vs t2 vs t3 would work you can look at the forums and see how bad the blowout was…move a t2 down vs a t3 and t4 and you have another blowout and it just keeps going down to the lower tiers but i gess some of you are the type that has to see it fail b4 you will get it threw your head

1 up 1 down doesn’t solve anything. You could have two servers of equal strength that happen to be ranked 6 and 7, who would never get a chance to play each other because they would keep flipping. Each week one gets stomped, the other stomps, and each week they switch. Never fun and they never get to play each other.

1up 1down is still a lot better than what we have now with T1s fighting T4s and such or what we had before where the matchups were always the same.

so you would rather have a t2 server blow out a t3 and a t4 every week then have a t4 server maybe fight a t1 server every now and then(once the rating gap is closed this wont happen anymore)….sounds like your logic is broken

This would not happen every week! This would at least allow server evolution. Better than random matches.

I mean, ideally I’d do something like

Week 1: 123,456,789,…
Week 2: 1 (maybe they play Europe #1 this week), 234, 567,…
Week3: 12, 345,678,…

You’d have to have maps that could handle WvW instead of WvWvW.

Everyone would be playing everyone within 2 levels of themselves, but you would get different matches every week and get a chance to play everyone around you.

Since this isn’t an ideal world, I’d rather take a lower-than-current-random-variation than a 1up1down. Even with the current variation, with enough blowouts, theoretically the point gap would increase enough to restrict the variation on its own. It’s just a painful process getting there.

This is how 1 up 1 down plays out:

Weeks 1 (for example):
1v2v3, 3 loses
4v5v6, 5 comes 2nd
7v8v9, 8 wins

Therefore, tier 2 in week 2 will be 3v5v8.

A tier 1 vs a tier 3 server, almost certainly a blow-out and no fun for anybody. How is that better than the old system?

As for OP, sounds a bit too complicated and slow for my liking.

The match making system isn’t the problem, the problem is servers have wildly different numbers of players on them, and the population differences continue to become larger as more players and guilds transfer off lower tiers in order to stack higher tiers. It would be like if you have 4 teams, one with 15 players, one with 12 players, one with 8 players, and one with 3 players and you need to come up with a way to match these teams together in a way that will create balanced match ups. The short answer is you can’t. I will say it isn’t helping that every time the top tier servers become full, Anet goes ahead and increases server population limits allowing even more players to stack at the top.

Maybe there should be incentives for lower population WvW servers? Like increased Wxp to influence people to transfer and try to get some balance across the servers…

What about making Tier 1 servers fight 2v1 against low Tier servers. While that would change the dynamic of Wv3 it would balance out imo and make it more fun for everyone, like in the random mixer it is now if it ended up A B C. If A had 10 and BC were 3-5 they would be allies for the week and work on stomping the higher populated WvW server.

Or what if WvW was more like sPvP where you played on shared servers? Could change the names of the 3 teams, dunno just Blue Red Green for the week. Then make it so 5 of the low WvW pop servers joined in 1 team and some of the top end tier’s just pretty much still had their own team. If this steadied out to where it was the same server’s grouped together on a team eventually they would establish their own community again. I’m sure Anet knows how many different accounts play in WvW in each server, I don’t think it would be hard at all for them to balance which servers to group together.

I for one would love trying to fight 1v2 against some lower pop WvW servers. Like for instance this week TC is against CD and SoS, already without going out of the weekend we own almost all of the maps 24/7.(not trying to brag or anything, I think you guys are doing great work in WvW been some great fights, reset night in EB was crazy fun on TC side If CD and SoS were allies this wouldn’t happen, especially if they shared Team chat and could plan strikes against us.

And on the flip side I would love taking another shot against SoR if we were allied with another server and could muster enough 2v1 to make it a fair fight. SoR trashed us last week the same way we’re kind of doing right now.

Both of my above comments would apply to either of my idea’s on ways to balance the matches, shared servers or 2v1 sets.

I think the random color’s every week should always stay part of the system regardless of what else changes.

Some good ideas there Shadow, increasing incentives for being on low pop servers. If the incentives were worth while it could actually make low pop the servers people were moving to rather than high pop.

I also agree that increasing the cap is about the worst thing Anet can do at this point, when T1 servers are hitting 3-4 hour ques and then you add more players it’s just ridiculous. If you want us all on 6 servers just merge them already and be done with it.

The 2v1 idea has some complications as far as implementation but I really like the concept. It would really even out some of these match ups are are killing the WvW game and bring back some balance. A T1 server might actually stand a chance of losing in some match ups.

I think that we shouldn’t be lumping sever population in with WvW population. Clearly some of the low pop servers have more WvW players than some of the high pop servers.

If we can seperate WvW as a different game, because it is we’ll be a lot further towards balancing.

I agree with a lot that has been said. Increasing the population isn’t a good thing to do when those servers are already facing maps that are full non stop, even to the point that a base % of the WvW players can’t even play without waiting for 3 hours.

Man I am right there with you, that’s a great idea making the servers balanced by doing 2v1 fights. I mean it’s already imbalnced how much worse could it get?

Kopipoki.3542:

1up 1down is still a lot better than what we have now with T1s fighting T4s and such or what we had before where the matchups were always the same.

Answer quote with quote. Any system that involves winner automatically moving up and loser moving down is not a viable solution. We already have those matches in RNG and people complained about it too:

Snowreap.5174:

clearly you haven’t thought this through.

let’s go back to week 21, just before the new matchup system went into place.

JQ lost in tier 1, and TC won in tier 2, so JQ would go down and TC would go up. likewise, swap DB/Mag, YB/SoS, SBI/EB, AR/DH, IoJ/GoM and NSP/HoD. so we’d have these matches:
SoR / BG / TC
JQ / FA / Mag
DB / Kain / SoS
YB / CD / EB
SBI / BP / DH
AR / SF / GoM
IoJ / DR / HoD
NSP / FC / ET

what do you think the outcomes would have been? let’s look at T1. SoR is beating TC by a ton this week. you’re actually complaining that SoR vs TC is a bad matchup, yet that is exactly what Winner Up Loser Down would have given you last week. do you really think that taking SoS out of the match and putting BG in their place would have helped TC do better? no, they’d be doing even worse because they’d be up against 2 tough opponents instead of 1 easy and 1 hard.

how about T2? FA is beating Mag this week by a ton. yet WULD would have put them together. even worse, it would have thrown JQ in there to pile on Mag as well.

the other tiers would mostly be similar (except YB/CD/EB would probably have been a good matchup).

so, what would happen the following week? TC would lose against SoR and BG and drop down. JQ would win against FA and Mag and come up. you would end up with SoR BG and JQ again, which is exactly the same matchup you started with. likewise with the other tiers — servers would mostly settle in the same positions they had the week before.

and the matches you consider “good” this week? not a single one of them would have happened under WULD (except maybe CD/YB/Kain, but only after several weeks and only if exactly the right wins and losses happened in exactly the right order).

-ken

Honestly, the only viable alternative to RNG would be manual matchmaking. Someone with access to population by BL by time type data, looking at the point spread and having their finger on the pulse of the gossip column of each server to be informed of guild movements and fractures. Unless the populations of the top 6 servers move on and allow WvW populations to be more evenly spread down the chain, that’s the only thing that is going to work.

Even then, there still has to be blowouts, probably 2-3 every week, because not everyone has suitable opponents.

Old matchmaking but with ratings reacting/adjusting faster is my best bet.

Current one trows in RGN to make matches, which is plain kittened.
WULD creates every week a Tier(X-1 )vs.TierX vs. Tier(X+1) in every match except T1 and T9.

Old matchmaking was taking n accout ratings for a somewhat balanced matches, issues were
-it didn’t take accout of a lot of important things, like population spread across day
-it was too slow to adjust for kicking up or down of a tier servers (Desolation has been in T1 for more than one month while being outmanned 5:1 at any given time of week and losing matches of 100-200k, instead of dropping off T1 after 1st or 2nd blowout)

Bring back old matchmaking, fix those things, done.

TheOneToWatch.6238:

If we can seperate WvW as a different game, because it is we’ll be a lot further towards balancing.

Really good points, and a great suggestion.

For Pve, server really doesn’t and shouldn’t matter, free transfers (not just guesting) should be the norm, so people can play all the content with whoever they want. This isn’t a balance issue in PvE, and so should not be tied to the balance issues in wvw.

For WvW, incentivizing lower ranked servers would be great. I think the other thing that could help is some sort of system so that guilds could easily do all-or-nothing transfers to lower tiered servers. Having recently transferred servers with my guild (sorry, I’m part of the problem), I noticed it was a real hassle. Especially getting the last few guildies over.

I think this process should still be difficult/impossible when going up to high tier/ranked servers, but they should make it really easy to move to low ranked servers. For example, free transfers that can occur as a guild. A guild can set up a sign up sheet in the guild dialogue, showing who is up for the transfer in a given week, then they can queue up for the transfer. There can even be an option for “always transfer with the guild” allowing for hero guilds that go around “rescuing” underperforming servers. There should be a soft limit to the number of free transfers to any specific server in a week, so as to prevent a roaming massive zerg that just gets on the lowest server each week and then dominates. Because of the limits, if there is not enough space in the server, due to all the incoming guilds, they can give the remaining guilds the option to try a different server, or stay and not transfer. You could even have the number of free transfers tied to the amount by which a given server was outnumbered on average in its prior matchup. A system like this combined with a better matchmaking system and incentives for playing on underperforming servers would go a long way toward solving the population deficit problem.

If anything, these past couple weeks have shown server wvw participants from T1 to T2 is huge.

Leave T1 matchups alone and let T2 and below be the guinea pigs for Anet’s new matchmaking system.

T1 and T2 will get tired of only fighting each other, then eventually people will quit playing and they will not longer be those servers. Not to mention the tier’s are irrelevant with the new system they have going as far as what I read from what they had explained about how they were going to do things.

wow your last sentence is a killer lol – but i really have no idea how I could have said it any better. I think more people would benefit by posting their idea’s here, or if there is already a main thread going for how to fix the WvW matchup’s maybe we could get them merged.

Really if we came together as a community and tried to help spitball idea’s that would make it better I believe that they would listen if they thought what we said would work, or was feasible to implement.

I’ve seen a lot of people just saying “Rage quit – this is so blah blah blah” If everyone turned all that time they took to write the negative messages and turned it towards thinking of a better way to run the WvW matchups we’d probably already have found the best solution.
:)

I wish more people would jump in with you guys. I think combining some of the low WvW population servers into one team would work amazingly.

But even just giving incentives for playing in low pop WvW ranks would be great. Like how about adding to the unmanned buff?
- make siege cost 33% less supply
- give 3,300 more HP
- give a damage bonus of 1% / person near you (in most cases it would end up with like +15% damage)

Giving the under dogs more HP and Dmg would be fair in my opinion. Because there’s no way they can compete 10ppl vs 60 without some serious hardcore tactics.

FWIW:

1) Keep/revert to the Glicko ranking system as it was before the random roll was added. As far as I’m concerned, Glicko did exactly what it was supposed to – it matched the servers that were most similar in their ability to accumulate points. Without true dynamic balancing based on minute-to-minute population, that’s the best balance that can be hoped for.

2) The previous system tended too strongly towards ossification as the tiers separated from one another, and it was too difficult in many cases to move between tiers. However, the pure one-up, one-down system many propose would be even worse – so a compromise.

If a server places first in their tier three weeks straight, on the 4th reset that server is immediately placed in the bottom of the next highest tier. Their rank remains the same so that they have the possibility of scoring the rank they need to remain in that tier. This provides mobility between tiers and should keep the ranks relatively close. It also gives servers the opportunity to earn their place, and if it’s a blowout they know it was their rank that got them there and not a random chance number.

Similarily, to limit the pain of blowout matches, if a given server wins their matchup by X amount (say more than 50% of the available points for the week for instance), they are immediately promoted to the next highest rank position at the next reset. I see no reason the above point and this can’t combine, jumping a dominant server up two ranks if the timing is right.

3) Provide unique incentive bonuses to each team in the match. I.E. +100% WXP to the third place team, +50% to the second place, and +Magic Find / +Gold Find for the top team in each tier.

4) Provide big bonuses to WXP for the two overall lowest rank servers in NA and EU until their matchups become more competitive. I’d also recommend instituting free transfers to these same servers for the same period.

What not to do (IMO):

- avoid trying to balance population by using NPC strength. It doesn’t seem to work well when I’ve seen it tried in other games, and the players fighting against overpowered NPCs resent it more.

- avoid straight stat buffs to balance population. Too much metagaming.

The main problem with the ranking system as it exists is that the player base regards it as a scoreboard (X rank server beats Y and Z rank server) rather than the design intent of a rough population balance. I’d suggest hiding the raw rank stat but you need something else in its place because WvW is a competitive pursuit.

Similarly, long-time WvW players are stretching for an overall goal. The point of a war is usually to win the thing. Eventually, all competitions have to end in some kind of definitive state (otherwise there’d be no Super Bowl / Stanley Cup / etc, teams would just play each other round and round forever). I would suggest that figuring this point out should be high on the list of things-to-do.

Finally, start putting content into WvW – very soon.

Not just balance changes, mechanic changes, ranking system changes – actual new stuff to do / experience. New maps would be high on this list.

I’d suggest an underground tunnels-and-chambers-type map (easiest to design thus fastest to implement) with capture and hold points which have an effect on one or more of the existing WvW maps (off the top of my head – dragon themed capture points that transforms players and NPCs on a designated borderland into dragon minions? Reskinning that borderland to match? Additional bonuses / penalties from environmental effects on transformed borderlands?)

Just shuffle EU/NA servers in the same tier. Problem solved.

Calvin.5380:

Just shuffle EU/NA servers in the same tier. Problem solved.

If you mean match the EU vs NA servers, I’m pretty sure that’s impossible. The server clusters are physically separate and there’s no passage of information between them (e.g. you can’t guest to EU servers from NA)

not to mention, the time zone issues would make those matchups not very fun either.

Before the change, servers their fighting each other depending on their rating.
Now servers fight each other with a higher range but still dependent on rating.
The pro about the current system is that if another server is good against another server relative to their previous points, they might increase their rating and thus their place.

This wasn’t possible before. (also people e.g. Vabbi complained about having the same enemy over and over again).

Ragnar.4257:

This is how 1 up 1 down plays out:

Weeks 1 (for example):
1v2v3, 3 loses
4v5v6, 5 comes 2nd
7v8v9, 8 wins

Therefore, tier 2 in week 2 will be 3v5v8.

A tier 1 vs a tier 3 server, almost certainly a blow-out and no fun for anybody. How is that better than the old system?

As for OP, sounds a bit too complicated and slow for my liking.

what would happen during next 4 weeks pls?

on other note… we need a system that would react fast to population changes. everything else is pouring oil on fire…

How about a handicap system?

A minion army helping with every objective based on relative population size on a map

Or, a few passive abilities that adjust based on relative population on the map (like additional damage, or armor)

I like Rezna’s suggestion with the change to the Outmanned buff. To me that seems the least amount of work for the most amount of gain. Already have the Outmanned buff in the game adding some extra stats to it I don’t think would be very difficult vs some of the other suggestions.

ShadowX.4639:

I like Rezna’s suggestion with the change to the Outmanned buff. To me that seems the least amount of work for the most amount of gain. Already have the Outmanned buff in the game adding some extra stats to it I don’t think would be very difficult vs some of the other suggestions.

The problem with straight buffs to players in response to moment-by-moment population (i.e. the outmanned buff) is that it’s extremely difficult to get right.

The general concept would be that if you’re outnumbered you get stat buffs enough to make a small group competitive with a larger one. Fine. The most logical thing to do as a larger server would be to hop the zerg from map to map, leaving small, organized guild groups behind to take advantage of the outmanned buff to defend and crush 3, 4 or 5 times their number while the zerg takes everything on the other maps.

The end result would be small groups that you can’t overwhelm on most maps, and a large group bouncing from map to map taking everything – which you can’t stand against either.

Like I said above, too much potential for meta-gaming.

Buffs to encourage play on lower rank worlds would be workable, but honestly the best buff would simply be free transfers. You’d see a lot of WvW focused guilds transfer to a lower rank server if they could all go free I think.

Combining servers would be weird. The PvE side of all the servers is relatively healthy as far as I can tell from guesting around (remembering that some people like to play on lightly populated servers over the wall-to-wall ones) so there’s no call to merge servers completely. That means there would have to be 3 servers designated as “no WvW” and the players on those servers either moved or allowed to transfer to different worlds that have WvW access. That seems like a last-ditch resort to me.