Guild Wars 2

Will the decay system work correctly , or will it reset people back the the rank they were as soon as they play a game win or lose?

Awesome, good to hear

Abjured and PZ can easily no life the top 10 spots. Is there any plan to prevent teams from intentionally pushing everyone else down the ladder by using multiple guild teams?

Are there any plans to change amber rank to not display an emblem? There is a lot of players who don’t really PvP and stuck with it for a whole season.

I honestly do not see a problem with the MMR, out of the 30+ matches I have done not a single one was against a full premade, which is amazing.

My biggest issue is how I have high MMR, and it takes so long to progress through the divisions. Is there any plans to make high MMR players progress through up to ruby at an accelarated pace? That would fix a lot of problems, including the match manipulation.

There is also a rumor that unranked shares MMR with rated, so they are purposely losing unranked and then queue ranked, but not sure if that is true.

Omg, this post is amazing!

It would be wonderful if we can get one post like this per week. Please make it happen.

I think I missed the part where you tell us why it is unlikely people are intentionally dumping their mmr to rank up faster.

But when do we address Pug vs Premade?

The Losing of pips wouldn’t be that bad if they were even matches.

StickerHappy.8052:

But when do we address Pug vs Premade?

The Losing of pips wouldn’t be that bad if they were even matches.

Effectively, the league system is the same as this:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/finding-the-perfect-match/

The irony is there is so many players that you rarely get more than +1, instead you get -2 games. But the point here is, even if you lose against a premade you can win league pips, in theory.

I think they meant MMR will weight less in determining the match, so it’s not worth it to tank MMR anymore.

Will the Pip Point UI include an indication to your team how the win will effect your pips?

So if you are the weaker team, will it tell you “This win will give you uber pips! Good luck!”

Here is the problem

Even in Emerald grinding is very hard, you HAVE to win 5 straight matches to ensure a safe tier spot. As a solo q player, How often will that happen?

The problem is worse when you get to ruby.

The Mtachmaking system and MMRs (Pugs vs Premades) and the whole leagues primarily cater to teams except AMBER Division

StickerHappy.8052:

Here is the problem

Even in Emerald grinding is very hard, you HAVE to win 5 straight matches to ensure a safe tier spot. As a solo q player, How often will that happen?

Or winning 2-3 and losing 1-2 a few times. 5 Wins in a row is not the only way to progress, that’s kind of silly to expect..

Honestly, before you care about the MMR and matchmaking, can you PLEASE add SOLO Q back so everyone can climb the ladder in a fair and justified way?

How on earth do you think anyone Solo Qing would win a top organized team like Abjured or anything of such? People try to lower MMR because of your bad system and unjustified/unfair matches against Org team.

Maybe keeping solo people (i.e. PUGs generally ineffective due to lack of voice comms and non-optimal team makeup) in the amber division was a side effect they intended.

Drennon.7190:

Abjured and PZ can easily no life the top 10 spots. Is there any plan to prevent teams from intentionally pushing everyone else down the ladder by using multiple guild teams?

Its in the message.

StickerHappy.8052:

Here is the problem

Even in Emerald grinding is very hard, you HAVE to win 5 straight matches to ensure a safe tier spot. As a solo q player, How often will that happen?

The problem is worse when you get to ruby.

The Mtachmaking system and MMRs (Pugs vs Premades) and the whole leagues primarily cater to teams except AMBER Division

This, how about anet address this issue.

Hey PvP team, can we get your thoughts on a hot-fix balance patch? Some builds are completely out of control and can use some much needed toning.

morrolan.9608:

StickerHappy.8052:

Here is the problem

Even in Emerald grinding is very hard, you HAVE to win 5 straight matches to ensure a safe tier spot. As a solo q player, How often will that happen?

The problem is worse when you get to ruby.

The Mtachmaking system and MMRs (Pugs vs Premades) and the whole leagues primarily cater to teams except AMBER Division

This, how about anet address this issue.

Because clearly Anet only wants the top 20~ players to get the goodies while everyone else suffer.

No wonder GW2 PVP base was so small. It has a spike now because of all the PVE newbies wanting the shiny loots atm :P

Typo there: Chris Cleary not Clearly

Gaile Gray.6029:

Guild Team MMR Workaround

Today we fixed an issue that allowed high-skilled players to constantly spin up new guild teams and have themselves matched with lower-skilled players because of how personal MMR and team MMR worked together. This gave them faster queue times, faster league progression, and allowed them to climb the Guild Challenger League more quickly than intended for each team created.

What really puzzles me is why top tournament players commit to doing this in the first place.

You’d expect shady, unscrupulous hacker types to do this sorta thing. But seeing WTS winners that your company support, shamelessly exploit in front of our faces reflects poorly on the image of your company.

When your colleagues communicate with these “top” teams behind closed doors it rubs off as being extremely unprofessional to us. Even more so than ever after seeing that they lack maturity and integrity for not resisting the exploits.

I’m sure your colleagues will continue their private, intimate discussions with these teams. But when doing so, please don’t make it look so obvert. Your colleagues even use their guild tags. That to us, screams conflict of interest and lacking in business ethics.

Not all tournament level teams have sunk to the level of the exploiters.

So what you’re saying is that in order to have fair and balanced games with people of equal skill level you need to find your appropriate rank? What if your rank is at diamond or ruby? You need to play hundreds of games full of people with variable skill level just for the games to become the way they were before ranked was introduced?

Chaith.8256:

StickerHappy.8052:

Here is the problem

Even in Emerald grinding is very hard, you HAVE to win 5 straight matches to ensure a safe tier spot. As a solo q player, How often will that happen?

Or winning 2-3 and losing 1-2 a few times. 5 Wins in a row is not the only way to progress, that’s kind of silly to expect..

If you didn’t lose 2 pips, your suggestion is good, but sometimes you do lose 2 pips.

So losing a few times would not cut it. For one simple fact, if you go solo q, you can’t control other 4 people on your team.

which ties in into the point solo puggers should only be matched against solo puggers, If they ever lose on that setup, it wouldn’t bad since they can still put up a fight.

SteepledHat.1345:

I think I missed the part where you tell us why it is unlikely people are intentionally dumping their mmr to rank up faster.

they never said that it was unlikely people were doing it, only that it was unlikely to work

Any chance you (pvp team) would be willing to discuss with us what you are plans are for each class? Both at core, and for specific elites? Where you want them to be? After all, 2k15 is almost gone and it seems like everything is outta whack. At least an idea of your plans going forward would be wonderful. I do know that people will more than likely be toxic, but after all calm discussions I expect they’d relax.

Here’s to hoping for a response on my comment. First time for everything?

Edit: No response. I am sad panda.

Yes, please, we really needed this fixed. Thank you for the rapid response as well. I think PvP leagues invigorated interest in the game.

Wwwwwwwaait….. Am i getting this correctly?

Matchmaking = 50% MMR (pure skill value) + 50% division placement (farmpoint value) ?

Example.
I have same high MMR as helseth.
He just became t3 blue.
I am still t2 yellow.
Reason is unluck, class preference, whatever….

Matchmaking will therefore keep giving me easier t2 enemies, so i win more, more pips, untill i catch up with my same high mmr and also high division buddies.

please tell me its like this grouch, THAT WOULB BE FANTASTIC AND I WOULD TAKE ALL CRITCISM BACK.
its also exactly same i and others suggested a year ago when we changed to farmpoint system, only i mentioned 90:10 ratio

Flumek.9043:

Wwwwwwwaait….. Am i getting this correctly?

Matchmaking = 50% MMR (pure skill value) + 50% division placement (farmpoint value) ?

Example.
I have same high MMR as helseth.
He just became t3 blue.
I am still t2 yellow.
Reason is unluck, class preference, whatever….

Matchmaking will therefore keep giving me easier t2 enemies, so i win more, more pips, untill i catch up with my same high mmr and also high division buddies.

please tell me its like this grouch, THAT WOULB BE FANTASTIC AND I WOULD TAKE ALL CRITCISM BACK.
its also exactly same i and others suggested a year ago when we changed to farmpoint system, only i mentioned 90:10 ratio

Okay of this is true, then its good.

So how bout when you reached Ruby Division? This is harder to play as a solo quer because you can go down a tier, even two if you get those lose streaks.

Please Anet does not facilitate the system alloys because some players are complaining, I’m having fun the way the system is.
If you facilitate will get boring PVP, those who are complaining are those who really want to get everything easily and it will not be good.
I thank the creator of the alloy system did a good job, make a system that is really hard and with a good reward for what they’ve seen so far, an example is the legendary back.
Adjust only what is necessary, people need to learn how to play it solo or group, those who are claiming to fight against premade, learn that even a Solo team q can defeat a premade team to think of a strategy before, I won more points with Solo q team than Premade most of the time, so please players stop crying … thanks

StickerHappy.8052:

Flumek.9043:

Wwwwwwwaait….. Am i getting this correctly?

Matchmaking = 50% MMR (pure skill value) + 50% division placement (farmpoint value) ?

Example.
I have same high MMR as helseth.
He just became t3 blue.
I am still t2 yellow.
Reason is unluck, class preference, whatever….

Matchmaking will therefore keep giving me easier t2 enemies, so i win more, more pips, untill i catch up with my same high mmr and also high division buddies.

please tell me its like this grouch, THAT WOULB BE FANTASTIC AND I WOULD TAKE ALL CRITCISM BACK.
its also exactly same i and others suggested a year ago when we changed to farmpoint system, only i mentioned 90:10 ratio

Okay of this is true, then its good.

So how bout when you reached Ruby Division? This is harder to play as a solo quer because you can go down a tier, even two if you get those lose streaks.

If it works like i think, in the 2 months of time, every average joe will reach ruby, as it clearly is reachable with farming.
That means that if you youre good and have high mmr, you will be beating those average guys and steadily climb

Its good system:
- if youre good, you reach high division early with less games
-normal placement with normal bonus for playing normal ammount (aka somewhere in middle where most will be at end)
-if youre late, but good, you will catch up faster (only risk is league ending too soon)

The only thing idk is do tiers also matter and does legendary 1x 2x 3x also count as you said you can drop from leg3 back into leg2 ?

I know this would be considered exploiting but would it be possible to coordinate with the other team to “farm” points and make a very close game where the losing team gains a pip as well as the winning team? I’ve had close games where I lost but gained a pip but I don’t know if this has a lot more to do with the other team having higher MMR.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Queue Times and Division Matchmaking
As Evan Lesh mentioned on reddit matchmaking rating and division standing are both used equally for matchmaking. This is currently affecting both queue times and matchmaking, especially in higher divisions. The season has only been active for three days, so there are fewer players in the higher tiers, meaning less people for matchmaking in those divisions. This will correct itself as the season progresses and players begin spreading through the divisions more evenly. Related to the point above, tanking MMR for the purposes of easier matches isn’t feasible considering division still plays a large part in the matches you get.

Basically – You can’t play Ranked until people catch up to you.

Thank you for the update!

Or you could, you know….. make guild’s and pvp teams two different things entirely so you wouldn’t run into this type of problem. So for example if you are on more than 1 team not guild, the progress you make on that team would not carry over if you were to join a different team.

Not only would this work, but it would actually have some type of incentive to stick it out with the team your with.

Countless

Q: will you be adding SoloQ and TeamQ ? that my only concern about the current league since most of my loss is due having complete pug VS 3man, 4man or even full team. i tried 3 manning but i ended up against a full team from PZ. pls hear us soloQers, since most if not all your casual pvpers and upcoming pvper will most likely be playing solo and we dont want to feeling helpless against premade team rolling on us. or atleast dont make soloQ lose a PIP if against a premade team.

Glad to hear these fixes. When will soloq and balance be features?

Will you consider having this seasons standing affect the next seasons starting point to alleviate the population spread issue in the beginning? (a la hearthstone)

For example: if you end the season in legendary div, you start the next season from sapphire or ruby.

In addition, will you consider placement matches? This could also alleviate the issue.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Hi all,

We’ve been closely monitoring PvP Leagues since their release this last Tuesday and we’d like to provide an update on where things currently stand. Some of this information is available in other locations, but it’s always good to have everything in one place.

Match Manipulation

There have been reports of players intentionally losing games in an effort to lower their overall matchmaking rating. The idea is that if they lower their rating, their subsequent games will become easier, and they will gain pips more reliably in future win streaks. Regardless of how unlikely this is to actually happen (read on for why), we’re still not cool with players intentionally losing as this is in direct violation of our Code of Conduct.

In the short-term, our customer support team will be investigating reports of this and punishing the behavior accordingly. Please use the “Botting” reporting option to bring these instances to the attention of our team. For a longer-term solution, we’ll be working on improving the in-game reporting system to better handle these types of situations. Chris Clearly has been posting on the topic here.

Queue Times and Division Matchmaking

As Evan Lesh mentioned on reddit matchmaking rating and division standing are both used equally for matchmaking. This is currently affecting both queue times and matchmaking, especially in higher divisions. The season has only been active for three days, so there are fewer players in the higher tiers, meaning less people for matchmaking in those divisions. This will correct itself as the season progresses and players begin spreading through the divisions more evenly. Related to the point above, tanking MMR for the purposes of easier matches isn’t feasible considering division still plays a large part in the matches you get.

Forfeit wins and pip loss

We will be correcting a bug where players can lose pips after a win if someone in their party had disconnected for longer than 2 minutes, causing a forfeit. This fix should be in our next release.

Guild Team MMR Workaround

Today we fixed an issue that allowed high-skilled players to constantly spin up new guild teams and have themselves matched with lower-skilled players because of how personal MMR and team MMR worked together. This gave them faster queue times, faster league progression, and allowed them to climb the Guild Challenger League more quickly than intended for each team created. As mentioned above, we’re aware of the longer queue times for high-rated teams, but this is mostly attributed to how divisions are factored into matchmaking and should be less of an issue as the season progresses. Additionally, we will also be enabling rating decay on the Guild Team Leaderboard after we have enough data to determine the correct values to decay by. This will cause inactive teams to fall down the leaderboard.

Pip/Point behavior is difficult to understand

You gain a variable number of pips depending on the difficulty your match-up (from -3 to +3). The majority of games (even matches) are +1/-1 for winning/losing. The odds of winning a match is based off of division standing between the two teams involved and roster sizes. If you’re heavily disfavored in a match-up (the system predicts that you should lose), you could potentially gain up to 3 points for winning. You also gain partial points as you cross point thresholds, so there’s always a reason to keep trying even if you don’t win. The system also works the other way around. If you’re favored to win, but lose, you’ll lose more pips than you would in an even match.

Now to the crux of the issue – it’s not entirely clear why you’re winning or losing X amount of pips after a match, as the odds are not displayed to the player. We’re looking at making changes to the in-game UI to communicate this more clearly, but this won’t be in for season one.

Vial of Salt

This amulet will be updated to correctly have ascended stats with our next release.

In closing…

We’d like to thank everyone for their feedback so far. Leagues are a complicated system and we’ll be iterating on it until we get it right.

All of this is well and good, but I still get put against 5 man premades. Use your noodle Anet, we appreciate you addressing our concerns but you didn’t address the one we warned and begged you about in a 3000 reply long post about putting in a gokitten ed solo queue. It is not skill if you have a HUGE advantage…

Thanks for that Gaile

Ok, now i know it will even out and catch up later, but i think you guys might need a laugh so heres my fresh first soloq of today

1) a thief who still plays thief
2) he has power signet
3) he pushes 1v1 far
….
4) against….. Dragonhunter….
…..
5) 1.43 seconds

I aint even mad

Who cares – It’ll never work without a seperate Solo & Team queue anyway.

This just happened. Can you defend this balance anet?

PR started. Now here is the thing. In that long post, where is…ya know.. THE MOST MISSING FEATURE CALLED SOLOQ and poor matchmaking forcing us to be at 50% winrate making it quite hard to progress in leagues? We should gain more pips for winning as solo honestly.

Hi,

First of all, I would like to thank you for taking your time in yesterday’s twitch stream, to not only explain every detail of the league system, but to also acknowledge the current problems.

I’d love to talk more about the interaction between the match making system and the league system.

Both systems fulfill important roles in providing the best pvp experience.

1. The match making system:
GW2 used a glicko2-based elo system to provide us with the single best match-experience possible. The goal is to let you fight with teammates against opponents of about your own skill. If I look over my game history, most of the time you are already doing a great job here.

On the personal, subjective side of the match making, there are still some matches, where you don’t even see the slightest chance of winning. While these matches might be rare, they still exist. (Maybe those are the games, where the odds are highly against you.)

The biggest problem I see here is, that you are sacrificing the match making quality due to the division cut off (more to that later).

2. The league system:
From my POV the league system fulfills two goal: long term motivation to play & at the end of the season the best players should be on the top.

Personally I think you did a great job to improve the motivation to play. Every evening I’m either playing to advance to the next tier to finish one of those achievements. Long term I really want to get that backpack so bad and get a cute little Mini Lavish Llama. Ofc it will take a lot of time to get those, I might not even be able to get enough Llamas for the Lavish Llama, but that’s perfectly fine.

The problem is that the other goal is not fulfilled. Once the season has ended, you will not be able to tell if the player in the Diamond Division has a higher MMR than a player in the Sapphire Division.

The first ladder we had in gw2 was purely based on MMR. It fluctuated a lot and new players with a lucky 10 games win streak could end up on the top.

The second ladder used basically the same point system we have now. You play, you get points. You play a lot more games, you get a lot more points. At the end of the day the players who played the most games (or abused the system as good as possible) ended up on top of the ladder. The current league system is more prone to be abused since it has safe spots compared to the purely point based ladder.

3. The interaction between those two systems:
During my personal playing experience with other games, I have encounter two existing systems (there might be more tho).

Heartstone
The match making in Heartstone is not elo based. It is matching you with players with about your tier. It is basically saying if you have beaten enough players in the bronze tier than you are worthy for the silver tier. At the end of the season they are resetting the whole league and putting you back at the start (with a little bonus).
This is basically a reset of the mmr and means that at the start of the season good players will fight mediocre players. This impacts the quality of each game and therefore I would not recommend that system but build on your existing strength: the glicko2 based mmr system.

League of Legends
League of legends is using a elo based system to match players together. The league system basically was put on top of it. They took the whole mmr-range and divided it up into divisions and tiers. “Top 10% of the mmr-spectrum should be Diamond.” Now if you are currently in the league system not Diamond, but you are still one of the top 10% players and therefore you should be diamond, the amount of points you gain per win is significantly increased. The same is true in the other direction. If you are currently in Diamond, but your ‘skill’ has suffered, you are playing like a Silver-Player, then your MMR adjusted and you are losing far more points per loss.

Personally I think this is the best system I have encountered yet.
It takes some time to get up in the league system, because you still have to farm points. At the end of the season the best players are on top of the league. It has the perfect motivation to improve your skill, because otherwise you can’t climb up any further.

4. Conclusion:

• The match making should be purely based on the match making rating. The division cut off only negatively impacts the individual match quality.
• The amount of pips you gain should be affected by your current league position and your mmr. At the end of the season the top players should be on top and not the players who played more games.

Thank you for taking this post into consideration.

Best wishes!
Teutos

Flumek.9043:

Ok, now i know it will even out and catch up later, but i think you guys might need a laugh so heres my fresh first soloq of today

1) a thief who still plays thief
2) he has power signet
3) he pushes 1v1 far
….
4) against….. Dragonhunter….
…..
5) 1.43 seconds

I aint even mad

Hahaha this made my laugh. i normaly main thief and stopped after 3 rounds ranked & now im one of those brand new dh guarding Close & sometimes i even shed a tear for those poor one-shoted-thiefs. i know something is broken…

SteepledHat.1345:

I think I missed the part where you tell us why it is unlikely people are intentionally dumping their mmr to rank up faster.

The unlikely part is it actually benefiting the player. They discussed it on “Guild Chat”. Their statistics don’t back up the theory. It’s basically a waste of time.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Match Manipulation

There have been reports of players intentionally losing games in an effort to lower their overall matchmaking rating. The idea is that if they lower their rating, their subsequent games will become easier, and they will gain pips more reliably in future win streaks. Regardless of how unlikely this is to actually happen (read on for why), we’re still not cool with players intentionally losing as this is in direct violation of our Code of Conduct.

I wonder how you are going to decide if a person is ’’tanking’’ games to gain a lower MMR.

I could just go on a thief for example and use a terrible build on which I die instandly.
This way no one would report me because I just use a bad class with a bad build and can’t fight against the meta builds that are being used these days.

Do you have any other ways to determine if people are misleading the system this way?

Coltaine.7094:

Flumek.9043:

Ok, now i know it will even out and catch up later, but i think you guys might need a laugh so heres my fresh first soloq of today

1) a thief who still plays thief
2) he has power signet
3) he pushes 1v1 far
….
4) against….. Dragonhunter….
…..
5) 1.43 seconds

I aint even mad

Hahaha this made my laugh. i normaly main thief and stopped after 3 rounds ranked & now im one of those brand new dh guarding Close & sometimes i even shed a tear for those poor one-shoted-thiefs. i know something is broken…

I had a thief yesterday that when asked if he would decap/backcap he responded with “condi” and then spent almost the entire game trying to 1v1 a DH at home node. He must have fed the other team at least 100 points on all his 1-2 seconds deaths.

The system is so broken..
With MMR trying to get you a 50% win/loss ratio – you go up a pip/down a pip.
[I have a MMR so every match is only ever going to be a +1 or -1 pip win/loss: Basically the worst it can be.]

Low MMR Players (often match manipulated) will have up to +3 pip win – they will progress much more easily on the leaderboard.

There is no loss of PIPs in a close match – which seems to be wrong.
Its either all out win or all out loss.

The lack of class MMR is something that badly needs to be factored into the equation – if that means locking the profession you que with – it needs to happen. Some players will have a high account MMR, but a very low class MMR (as they are new to a particular class: no fault of there own). They are punished from deviating from there main classes which they can play with a reasonable MMR.

The PR Excercise has started – it is a shame not a lot was learnt from the last test season where ALL these problems were highlighted at length to the developers.

Now we see all the BAD things being implemented from that league – where close matches (<50 points) you lose a pip : even if you’re not predicted to ‘win’ the match.

The system is so broken right now – it’s honestly flawed to the core. The system is designed to show players most improved (SO New PLAYERS !!) and not players who have a stable account MMR – and wont improve much over a season are being punished by the MMR System giving them a 50% win/loss ratio.