Guild Wars 2

With the new matchup system, uneven matchups are much more likely. It can be pretty demoralising to lose a matchup because the other server is way out of your league, and it’s confusing when that server loses ranking and your server moves up because they didn’t beat the spread.

So why don’t we factor that into the scoring?

When a matchup is created, each team will have all their scores handicapped by a factor that reflects what Glicko thinks each server should score if their rating is accurate. A server that’s expected to stomp the other servers earns far less points from objectives than teams that are expected to lose in a landslide.

Internally, the scoring stays the same (and the raw scores might be available via API or via hover in game) but what players see is that whoever has the highest score goes up in ratings, and whoever has the lowest score goes down. It’ll also mean that servers who rally against a mightier force and beat Glicko’s prediction get to see themselves actually win, instead of get kerbstomped but go up in the ratings.

However, this also means that one week towers might be worth 23 points while another week they’re worth 4, and that servers who field a massive force might see themselves actually lose because they didn’t win enough to impress Glicko, even though they held much more territory.