Guild Wars 2

The purpose of this thread is to go over the long term goals Anet has for SPvP, how those are supposed to be met by the current League structure, and how we can help them achieve those goals in a manner that leaves the most people happy.

First, the main goal is E-sports (money is always a main goal, TF not being included). We all know it, no shocker here. So let’s get into how their current structure is supposed to promote the goal of becoming E-sports.

Ranked/Unranked:
The lack of SoloQ is designed to promote premades and give solos a chance. The more official teams there are, the more competitive the scene is supposed to get. The more competitive the scene gets, the more it leads towards E-sports. For those who don’t quite understand what I’m getting at… Anet wants teams!

Problems:
This makes solo people second class. Being second class leads to people quitting the game or not being compelled to play. This can be an extreme problem, if only the elite remain then the amount of new teams forming will become limited. You just can’t have elites picking on newcomers constantly, even if newcomer is considered 500 matches in this game.

Solutions: (everyone share solutions, please)
- I would like to suggest Team Comms. Communication is very important for a game like this. Builds can be compared and rotations coordinated. At the beginning of a match institute an “Activate Team Comms” button so we can talk without TeamSpeak or any third party solution. Team Comms would end after the match ends.

MMR + Pips:
The idea behind combining MMR and Pips is to create a progressive system for increasing your leaderboard rating while maintaining difficulty. Make elite fight elite and scrubs fight scrubs. Eventually you will even out at a Pip level, or division, that is reflective of your skill (or your team’s skill).

Problems:
- The way these two are designed is counterintuitive. MMR is designed to keep a person at or around a 50% win rate so the difficulty is constant. Pips require constant wins in order to increase. Ideally you will win until you are at the division befitting your skills and stay there, but that is plagued by the problem of teams and solos being combined.

- High MMR and High division players have stupidly high wait times. Possibly from a lack of population. Elites have high wait times and are fighting against solo players with much less skill. It’s a loss for the elites (high wait times) and a loss for the others (guaranteed loss in-game).

- Promotes tanking MMR.

Solutions: (everyone share solutions, please)
- More competitive teams. This shows that, “maybe the system will work itself out.”

- Increase profit for high MMR + High Division teams who fight each other while decreasing the rate at which they play lower MMR, lower Div players. Currently a two high MMR + Div teams gain the same amount of pips as low MMR + Ambers while waiting 10x-120x longer. Basically, make it a “profit per hour” formula.

- Reiterating, if you make it “profit per hour” then there would be no reason for someone to tank their MMR.

Balance Changes and League Reset:
Prevents stagnation (cough DD Ele cough), gives people a chance to climb up the Division ladder fresh, and more items to receive from ranking up.

Problems:
- Balance changes are infrequent and can thus lead to a lack of balance.

- Every League reset would be just as chaotic as we are seeing now. That’s just what happens when you combine everyone together in the same pool.

Solutions: (everyone share solutions, please)
Two balance changes every off-season. One right after League ends to shake things up, and one right before League starts to fine tune.
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tl;dr: Look at the bold to see if it interest you, if it does then read the short paragraph that follows.

This is my attempt at trying to make the community more constructive as a whole towards making the League system better for everyone. There are problems, and sometimes devs don’t have all the answers.

I appreciate the effort you put into writing this intelligent post. It shows that you care. If I were in the Anet management team, I’d listen to passionate customers like you that represent a big part of the community more than I would esports people.

Remember how fun PvP used to be back in 2012, 2013 and 2014 especially before April 14, 2014?

The lack of SoloQ is designed to promote premades and give solos a chance.

I don’t know if anyone has been paying attention during their games, but ANet’s matchmaking system has a very noticeable bias towards trying to match up opponents of the same party sizes. So if you have a duo on one side, it will try very hard to put a duo on the other side or something very similar (e.g. trio on one side, two duos on the other). For the vast majority of games I’ve played and cared to take note (most), this has been the case. I think it’s actually the best system you’re going to get, given the game and the playerbase involved. Unfortunately, the system can only match the people that are queueing up, so if you don’t have two suitable 5-man premades queued, you can’t match them, so that premade has to fight another group, which is where it seems a number of the criticisms are coming from.

That said, as is the recurring problem with the nature of complaints in PvP, some of those don’t strike me as justified. Take earlier, for example, I was queued with two guildmates under one of our guild groups. Upon winning a game, we received an amount of abuse from a member of the other team that could be summarised as “why am I playing an organised guild group?”. Now, in this instance, we weren’t on voice comms, we had two solo’s with us and the other team was two duo’s and a solo and in terms of the three of us going in together, we don’t actually normally play together at all anyway. In terms of the two sides, there were no significant differences in terms of cohesive groups/organisation. Not to put it too bluntly, but we won because, as a five, we were the better side. However, according to that individual, they lost solely because they’d been unfairly matched up against a guild group.

In terms of MMR/Pips:
I think it would be more realistic to switch to 3 pips per tier and, for Ruby, to make it so that you can’t lose more than, say, 3 tiers, so even if you do have a really bad run, there’s still a buffer (on that basis, the worst you’d lose is 9 games of progression, rather than up to 29 at the moment). That said, I’d still keep Diamond roughly the same – if Legendary is to have any meaning, it shouldn’t be easy to make it there. Overall though, that would allow people to more freely even out up to Diamond.

I’d also recommend loosening the Division restriction on matchmaking. There was a nice suggestion in another thread to have a checkbox for players to accept facing players from higher tiers for the potential of higher rewards or lower tier players but with reduced rewards if that’s the case as a method to reduce queue times and allow more flexibility in matchmaking.

Balance:
I’ll be honest, I was only 50-50 as to whether the intention was to have a full balance patch before this iteration of the PvP season. At the point where one did not emerge prior to the ESL season starting, it was basically certain that that was not going to happen and I’m not sure why, after that had started, anyone was surprised that a balance patch did not happen before the season started. As it stands, I am still behind and expect roughly quarterly balance patches prior to new seasons (both ESL and for the rest of us mere plebs as they seem to be trying to synchronise them).