Guild Wars 2

Shouldnt you scale decay by the the current pvp population.
I estimate the current pvp population(for solo arena) right now is around 8.3k.
Why not make decay 1%(just an example) of pvp population everyday.
So For example if player X has not played pvp within 24 hours,
he’d go down leaderboard 83 places. Another 83 places if he
doesnt play again within 24 hours. This way the ones who would
be on top would be the deserving active pvp players.

Look at the leaderboard(solo arena) right now. Look at the top 3, all are afks
preserving their ranks. Whereas other players are more deserving
for that top 3 spot. If they want to preserve their spot they should at least play
1 game everyday. Current pvp leaderboards encourages players
to stop playing instead of playing more. :/ Why would you encourage
your players to stop playing???

strong

They dont care
/15 chars

Real question is…why is leaderboard decay…NOT PERMANENT? So ppl actually would have to keep playing instead of going for 1 match a month (Or even less) jumping up again (Even losing that match) like nothing happened?

You would think this can easily be solved by increasing just a variable, but who knows maybe it is rocket science and requires a whole team.

kirito.4138:

You would think this can easily be solved by increasing just a variable, but who knows maybe it is rocket science and requires a whole team.

Man you still get 2 rank chests popup on x9 rank like tiger+bear at 49 while obviously getting only tiger one…how can you even ask to increase a variable? U mad?

The question is more likely to think whether decay is needed or whether players with 20 matchs played really belong to the top20( or even 100).

I don’t think just adding more decay is the answer—if there’s a really harsh permanent decay, we’ll just have the opposite problem (the top of the leaderboard will just be everyone who never misses a day). If I go out of town for a weekend, I don’t want it to be the leaderboard equivalent of losing 5 matches in a row. For one thing, that would make matchmaking even worse.

I think the real problem is ancient wins/losses holding just as much weight as recent wins/losses. In august, there were a lot of people with ridiculously good ratings due to lucky win streaks or sync queueing. Now, everyone who beat those people once or twice has an inflated rank, because they “beat” someone with a higher “ranking” than anyone has anymore.

I think that there should either be 1) ladder resets or 2) weighted win/loss ratings to favor recent matches. If I play 100 games in august with a 90% win rate, and then 100 games in October with a 50% win rate, my ranking should look more like a 50% player than a 90% player. They could even make it so matches further back than a month or so have no bearing on your current leaderboard ranking, like they didn’t even exist.

The problem is that even with decay, you can simply win 1 match, and shoot all the way back up to your previous standing. It’s true because I’ve seen my teammates do this – not play for a month, play and win 1 game, shoot to rank 1.

The problem with leaderboards now is that it rewards people for not playing, but discourages people from playing. With decay it would take you a very long time to down-rank to the point where it matters.

If you lose a game, you can easily go down 20-50 ranks, but if you win, you could very well be staying at the same rank even if you win multiple times. It’s a flawed way of thinking and discourages players from wanting to commit to playing.

@Justin
Thanks for the reply/keeping us updated!
We want the leaderboards to be meaningful;
Any way to make you consider upping the amount of games played before getting in the top 100 or to ban trial accounts from LB ?

Forgive me if this was mentioned above, but why can’t the leaderboards be conducted on a season by season basis? I see you’re heading in that direction for WvW.. Why not implement it in tpvp too?

Unless you’re planning on making a team-based ranking system first.. of course.

I don’t know if this is almost out of the realms of possibility, but how about placement matches ( I don’t mean the 10 matches you do to get top 5 if you win all of them)? Or divisions, leagues, e.g Bronze, Silver, Gold, etc. It’s been done, by Blizzard and Riot, and its been shown to work, why wouldn’t it work here? Not enough resources? Technology? Genuinely curious, because something like this could be a huge incentive for players to WANT to get better at a competitive game.

Since this is a thread about decay I wont try to derail but, its still somewhat on topic of leaderboards. Decay just seems to be non-existent. You shoot up to top 100, and never fall back down. If you have a long strand of not playing, and go into percentile, you could play one game, and get your spot back. That is not decay.

In all honesty, if there was a more active leaderboard it would feel like people would “decay” downwards on rankings. There are people on this leaderboard who don’t play anymore and are top 50, and I am sure, there are some higher, and especially lower.

You actually shoot higher than your previous standing if you’re gone for a long period of time, even if you lose your returning match.

Justin ODell.9517:

We’ve actually increased the decay multiple times now, but have been purposely making small adjustments for at least two reasons.

1) So we don’t overshoot. The last thing we want to do is punish our players for not having the time to play every day.

2) The change is retroactive, so the changes are very visible to people tracking their ranking. We don’t want to give the wrong impression to a player when their rating changes for seemingly unknown or confusing reasons.

We’re looking into ways of improving the leaderboards, so please continue offering us your ideas. In the mean-time, I’ll bring up increasing the decay with the team.

Thanks, that’s a very reasonable answer. If I may, I’d suggest looking at other variables than just the severity of decay. For example, a way to weight recent wins/losses more heavily than those in the distant past?

Justin ODell.9517:

We’ve actually increased the decay multiple times now, but have been purposely making small adjustments for at least two reasons.

1) So we don’t overshoot. The last thing we want to do is punish our players for not having the time to play every day.

2) The change is retroactive, so the changes are very visible to people tracking their ranking. We don’t want to give the wrong impression to a player when their rating changes for seemingly unknown or confusing reasons.

We’re looking into ways of improving the leaderboards, so please continue offering us your ideas. In the mean-time, I’ll bring up increasing the decay with the team.

Azshene played 1 game since Solo Q release and hes #1 and your telling us you increased decay LOL COME ON

LBS are for people playing weekly.

You afk for 1 week you drop 500 ranks, you afk for 2 weeks you drop another 500 which is off the LB ranks. GG thanks Anet

Why i’m 90% in team leaderboards!! I haven’t played team queue for months!
I should not appear at the leaderboards at all…

Just do a 2 months season or something like that (reset the freaking leaderboards and give some nice cosmetic or even gems to the first 100 or whatever).

They probably did increase the decay in some form, but it’s affect on top 1000 players are negligible because the hidden rating spread is much wider than for players in the percentiles. Maybe the decay is working, but the formula used to calculate rating is flawed.

I think its time for more transparency and unhide the hidden rating values. The original excuse was because the devs wanted to let the leaderboard stabilize first while they make adjustments, but its been months now.

Justin ODell.9517:

Krayiss.4926:

Azshene played 1 game since Solo Q release and hes #1 and your telling us you increased decay LOL COME ON

Actually, the last time Azshene played was on the 3rd of October. You can view the last time a field changed on the leaderboard. Just hover over it and a tooltip will pop up.

It frustrates us as well when we see people that don’t play often at the top of the list. We’re definitely agree that needs to change, so now is a really good time to keep those ideas coming.

So why isnt the decay permanent? Why, if I play just one game i get right back to the place i was.

@Justin Odell

Thanks for showing up!

For the sake of improving Leaderboards competitivity, can you ask the Team what do they think about rewarding the top 50 (or 100?) Solo Queue players with 400 gems, every month? That may encourage people to play more often to climb to the top X, and the ones at the top fighting to stay in there.

Seems like a healthy competitive adition, and adds more meaning and impact to the Leaderboards.

Please let me know what do you or the team think.

Justin ODell.9517:

Krayiss.4926:

Azshene played 1 game since Solo Q release and hes #1 and your telling us you increased decay LOL COME ON

Actually, the last time Azshene played was on the 3rd of October. You can view the last time a field changed on the leaderboard. Just hover over it and a tooltip will pop up.

It frustrates us as well when we see people that don’t play often at the top of the list. We’re definitely agree that needs to change, so now is a really good time to keep those ideas coming.

Yes I know that, what I meant was he played his 14-0 games when SoloQ 1st released and since he has PLAYED 1 GAME over MONTHS and maintains #1 spot. You knew what I was saying And you tell us you increased decay Lol

Justin ODell.9517:

ahuba.6430:

So why isnt the decay permanent? Why, if I play just one game i get right back to the place i was.

For a few reasons, some of which are technical.

From a design perspective, and I’m not a designer so take this with a grain of salt, we want to encourage players to keep playing. If a player has to leave for a while, for whatever reason, we don’t want them to feel punished when they come back.

Making the rating decay permanent would also distort match making because the rating decay would be impossible to keep in sync with the player’s skill.

We’re trying hard to not give this issue a half measure, so we’re opting to do something more than patching this one issue. This is going to take time, but hopefully we’ll be able to give you more details soon.

Look, I appreciate you coming in here and communicating some things with us, but I’m going to ask a simple question: why do so many things, like this leaderboard, not work correctly in this game, but work fine in so many other games?

There are features in this game that work correctly in indie games, but have “technical limitations” in a game that sold 3+million copies.

I know you guys try really hard and do care about this game, but the amount of times we hear, “technical limitations” or “we can’t just do X because it would do Y” is really hard to take at this point.

Justin ODell.9517:

Krayiss.4926:

Azshene played 1 game since Solo Q release and hes #1 and your telling us you increased decay LOL COME ON

Actually, the last time Azshene played was on the 3rd of October. You can view the last time a field changed on the leaderboard. Just hover over it and a tooltip will pop up.

It frustrates us as well when we see people that don’t play often at the top of the list. We’re definitely agree that needs to change, so now is a really good time to keep those ideas coming.

Just use bonus pool like SC2. It encourages people to play weekly to get that the bonus points on top of rating.

frequent resets and larger minimum sample size

/thread.

Decay doesn’t matter if you reset often and make people earn the ranking they get. If you reset every 8 weeks and increase the match minimum to 24 (3 per week isn’t much) then this ceases to be a discussion.

Justin ODell.9517:

ahuba.6430:

So why isnt the decay permanent? Why, if I play just one game i get right back to the place i was.

From a design perspective, and I’m not a designer so take this with a grain of salt, we want to encourage players to keep playing. If a player has to leave for a while, for whatever reason, we don’t want them to feel punished when they come back.

Decay needs to be “permanent” to encourage people to play. The way it is right now just encourages sitting and not playing. Only time they might want to play 1 game is to counter all the little decay that did happen.

Decay should start off small and accelerate the longer they are inactive.

Justin ODell.9517:

Making the rating decay permanent would also distort match making because the rating decay would be impossible to keep in sync with the player’s skill.

Actually, not making it permanent will distort other player’s matching. If the leaderboard is filled with inactive players or multiple account holders it makes it harder to match. You get people who are in the top 200 complaining about being matched with low ranked team-mates because all those inactive in the top200 isn’t really playing.

Those decay players can easily climb the ladder again in a short period, its no different than them getting a new account. If you actually encourage playing via feasible decay, their rating would actually be in sync to their skill and match making more accurate.

Justin, u can see the real situation like every people can see.

The actual system doesn’t work. Period.

So when something is wrong, u need to change it. The actual decay system doesn’t promote people to play, and it’s a fact.

So change it please. Use bonus pool, use decay permanent, use everything u want but it’s a shame that #1 of EU leaderboard has only 14 match played.

Seriously.

Justin ODell.9517:

ahuba.6430:

So why isnt the decay permanent? Why, if I play just one game i get right back to the place i was.

For a few reasons, some of which are technical.

From a design perspective, and I’m not a designer so take this with a grain of salt, we want to encourage players to keep playing. If a player has to leave for a while, for whatever reason, we don’t want them to feel punished when they come back.

Making the rating decay permanent would also distort match making because the rating decay would be impossible to keep in sync with the player’s skill.

Why shouldn’t the player feel punished if they leave for a while? At the moment the formula is punishing active players and rewarding players that don’t play much…it just makes absolutely no sense if you want leaderboards to ultimately feel rewarding.

Decay that isn’t permanent is nothing but a visage, because the second you play a game, you shoot right back up…I just don’t see how that’s fair to players who do commit to reach to the top by actually playing.

Justin ODell.9517:

We’ve actually increased the decay multiple times now, but have been purposely making small adjustments for at least two reasons.

1) So we don’t overshoot. The last thing we want to do is punish our players for not having the time to play every day.

2) The change is retroactive, so the changes are very visible to people tracking their ranking. We don’t want to give the wrong impression to a player when their rating changes for seemingly unknown or confusing reasons.

We’re looking into ways of improving the leaderboards, so please continue offering us your ideas. In the mean-time, I’ll bring up increasing the decay with the team.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Dishonorable_Combatant_System

Start out with learning from your previous game. Add a feature to report people AFK/grieving on pvp. Ramp up the dishonorable penalty. Add a check that automatically ends the match if it only starts with 4. Or at very least don’t make it count as a lose.

We will continue with afkers,quitters etc because the way the system is, there absolutely little to no consequences to them.

I think in order to do this properly I believe a dual numerical system has to be used. By this I mean you implement MMR to make that matches closer in skill level, and then you make their numerical ranking independent of MMR to give the actual player rating in relation to other people.

The problem right now is that we are using a full blown chess system where the rating itself is the achievement, since we have no access to such things we quantify by our ranking based off of other players, which Glicko/Elo isn’t always the best model to use for actual rankings. I think it is probably one of the best to find a team to play of similar ranking (given a sufficiently large sample size), but like was mentioned previously, when you throw the decay up too high you start getting very bad matchmaking.

My suggestion is to keep the Glicko rating where it is, alongside it however should be added in a numerical system that takes your current “2nd rating” into account versus your opponents MMR. The reason you use 2nd rating vs MMR is twofold, one is to counteract a team that leaves the game for a long period and decays their MMR ranking from “bombing” the rating of a team on their arrival back, and the second is that if they win they gain bonus points (but not immediately vaulted back to their previous proficiency). I will call in “Shown Rating” for the examples below.
Team AFK vs Team 4Life

Victory for Team AFK:
Team AFK rating adjustment: Uses AFK Shown Rating vs 4Life MMR
Team 4Life rating adjustment:Uses 4Life Shown Rating vs AFK MMR
after this is taken into account it recalculates each teams MMR as it does currently. The key point would be to show that Team AFK does not vault back into their former glory, it does increase in rank but will be required to catch back up in points rather than just coming back from a break session, it requires some work. In the same way the 4Lifer’s since it is using team AFK’s MMR (which is still significantly high) they do not lose that much rating. This keeps both teams happy with their situation.

Now consider the reverse:
Victory for Team 4Life:
Team AFK rating adjustment: Uses AFK Shown Rating vs 4Life MMR
Team 4Life rating adjustment:Uses 4Life Shown Rating vs AFK MMR
after this is taken into account it recalculates each teams MMR as it does currently.
In this case 4Life would gain ranking for someone on par with their MMR, not their current standing in the leaderboards, they are rewarded due to a suspected difficult fight (if it was not the MMR will sort it out eventually). Team AFK will lose next to no rating as their ranking is much less than what the MMR matched them for. This as well makes both teams happy.

Anyway might just be my rambling but I think it might be worth a look through. This way you can be harsh on rating decay and probably tier it so that the top 5% lose X amount per day, playing will cover these losses (on the shown rating) and then when you get out of the top 10-20% you can start being much more lenient (or removing entirely) the decay.