Guild Wars 2

Changes are needed to the autobalance system in hotjoin. It is not even coming close to giving fair or balanced matches. It hasn’t been changed as far as I can remember since launch, and it hasn’t kept up with the changes to tournaments/arenas and rewards.

Why doesn’t it work well? Because of the current reward system. Under the old system, the autobalance we have now was fine: skilled player could still feel like they were accomplishing something by getting their own kills/caps/etc, because it directly increased their rank/glory. Now there is no incentive to joining or staying on a losing team, leading to failure cascades. The best way to get rewards are for fast one-sided matches (the decreased rewards for short matches doesn’t seem to help any), so teams get stacked right from the beginning, and the team that is outmatched goes elsewhere.

Why is this bad? Aside from the obvious “this isn’t fun” aspect, hotjoin is usually the first introduction someone has to pvp, and badly lopsided teams game after game turns many away.

We need a far more aggressive autobalance to insure better teams.

Proposed changes:
-When joining a match in progress and the teams are even, players should be put on the losing side.
-When one side has more players and is 100+ points ahead, autobalance should force someone onto the other team.
-Much faster activation. Right now it takes 10-20 seconds between the point a team is 2 members short and when autobalance activates. It then takes an additional 10 seconds to find a person to switch. This shouldn’t be any longer than 5 seconds each.

Risks:
-Longer matches. I don’t really see this as an issue, but rewards may need to be adjusted upwards (which is already happening soon).
-More people feeling like they are getting bounced around. It can’t be any worse than what we’ve got now, and if it leads to more balanced matches, I’ll take that risk. And anyway, this is for hotjoin – we have arenas for stable teams (and arenas are much more accessible now than tournaments were when the current autobalance was created).