Guild Wars 2

Here is the sweet spot between old leaderboards and current league division that everyone wants to see happen:

Bring back old individual leaderboards for ranked. Make the MMR algorithm create matches just like in unranked. Make division status icons represent leaderboard placement “which pretty much represents actual MMR and skill level”. Your division tag lowers and rises when you lower and rise on the leaderboards. It could easily look like this:

• 1000 – 750 = ambers
• 750 – 500 = emeralds
• 500 – 250 = sapphires
• 250 – 150 = rubies
• 150 – 50 = diamonds
• 50 – 1 = legendaries

Players vie for placement up until the end of a season.
When the season ends, final placement rewards are sent via in game emails.
When a season begins, don’t reset MMR, let players pick up where they left off.
Keep guild league ladder exactly the way it is now, it works perfectly.
Rinse and repeat.

Why is this a good idea? What will this fix?

• Less grind to win status and more do good to get status
• Division placement icons will much more accurately represent skill level
• Match making using unranked algorithm “where an average party MMR goes against an average party MMR” will encourage players to play together again. Right now, ranked creates segregation and complete avoidance of players who a player may deem as “less skillful”. Can you blame them? The current ranked system identifies the one player in the group with the highest pip gain and MMR and uses that to create a match up. This creates an effect where the elites in a guild do not want to play with the intermediates and the intermediates do not want to play with the casuals. Why? Because a team of 1 legend, 3 sapphires and an emerald, will still be against a team of 3 legends and 2 diamonds. Players cannot afford to do this if they want pip gain. This is no good for community bonding. When people can’t bond with a team scene, they don’t stick around. I’ve been viewing this effect as a Guild Leader since S1 and it needs to be changed.
• Not resetting the MMR will fundamentally help balance match making in every way possible.

I know Dal had given a very similar suggestion some time ago but for whatever reason it fell off the forum and didn’t get enough attention.

If you support this idea, please give feedback.
Arena-net needs to pay attention to this one.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

Here is the sweet spot between old leaderboards and current league division that everyone wants to see happen:

Bring back old individual leaderboards for ranked. Make the MMR algorithm create matches just like in unranked. Make division status icons represent leaderboard placement “which pretty much represents actual MMR and skill level”. Your division tag lowers and rises when you lower and rise on the leaderboards. It could easily look like this:

• 1000 – 750 = ambers
• 750 – 500 = emeralds
• 500 – 250 = sapphires
• 250 – 150 = rubies
• 150 – 50 = diamonds
• 50 – 1 = legendaries

Players vie for placement up until the end of a season.
When the season ends, final placement rewards are sent via in game emails.
When a season begins, don’t reset MMR, let players pick up where they left off.
Keep guild league ladder exactly the way it is now, it works perfectly.
Rinse and repeat.

Why is this a good idea? What will this fix?

• Less grind to win status and more do good to get status
• Division placement icons will much more accurately represent skill level
• Match making using unranked algorithm “where an average party MMR goes against an average party MMR” will encourage players to play together again. Right now, ranked creates segregation and complete avoidance of players who a player may deem as “less skillful”. Can you blame them? The current ranked system identifies the one player in the group with the highest pip gain and MMR and uses that to create a match up. This creates an effect where the elites in a guild do not want to play with the intermediates and the intermediates do not want to play with the casuals. Why? Because a team of 1 legend, 3 sapphires and an emerald, will still be against a team of 3 legends and 2 diamonds. Players cannot afford to do this if they want pip gain. This is no good for community bonding. When people can’t bond with a team scene, they don’t stick around. I’ve been viewing this effect as a Guild Leader since S1 and it needs to be changed.
• Not resetting the MMR will fundamentally help balance match making in every way possible.

I know Dal had given a very similar suggestion some time ago but for whatever reason it fell off the forum and didn’t get enough attention.

If you support this idea, please give feedback.
Arena-net needs to pay attention to this one.

I made a similar suggestion with replacing pips with a scoring system. But people QQed about people grinding out wins etc. In other words the people who do well with win streaks might have to fight people who are as good or better than them all the time. That way they would find out just how good they really are. It will be the season 1 QQ the so called “pro” players “I’ve spent 8 hours and got no where! I’m a Pro player! I deserve better than this QQ” I remember the youtube video.

i would go for this. But be prepared for more ranting on forum. So in perspective of ANET i wouldn’t do this as they have to keep the majority happy not the minority.

I think it should go by MMR but keep divisions roughly similar to Elo percentile:

Amber: lowest 32%
Emerald: 33%-64%
Sapphire: 64%-84%
Ruby:85%-98.5%
Diamond- 98.6%-top 501-1,000 players
Legendary: Top 500

Within Legendary have a Challenger league for the top 200. Their rank would be displayed alongside a reskinned Legendary icon. If someone holds their number 1 spot for a week of active playing they get a special title and the number 1 spot would be a temporary title called number one guy or champion of GW2.

RedZebra.2345:

i would go for this. But be prepared for more ranting on forum. So in perspective of ANET i wouldn’t do this as they have to keep the majority happy not the minority.

They changed the match making after season 1 because the “pro” players complained. I don’t see how that was keeping everyone happy. As far as PvP is concerned, ANet only wants the “pro” mentality group of players happy. Everyone else can hang. That’s the feeling I get from them as far as PvP is concerned.

and they reduced it in s3

I think this idea would be awesome, but it would have to be done after the 4th season, otherwise all of the pve players playing for the backpack would throw a fit

RedZebra.2345:

i would go for this. But be prepared for more ranting on forum. So in perspective of ANET i wouldn’t do this as they have to keep the majority happy not the minority.

Yes, they do aim at keeping the majority happy but at this point, most people are just kittened off about match making and how divisions work. For once, these aren’t idle annoyed complaints. They are the same complaints in-forum and in-game from like 9/10 players, saying the exact same things.

It’s gone beyond getting kittened off. I want to stress that the majority of the spvp community has given up complaining in the forum and is actually finally leaving the game to find other sources of interest.

I hear more and more players by the week, telling me how “their contact lists are decimated” after the end of S2 and beginning of S3. If anything was a big flashing warming light, it would be that.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

RedZebra.2345:

i would go for this. But be prepared for more ranting on forum. So in perspective of ANET i wouldn’t do this as they have to keep the majority happy not the minority.

Yes, they do aim at keeping the majority happy but at this point, most people are just kittened off about match making and how divisions work. For once, these aren’t idle annoyed complaints. They are the same complaints in-forum and in-game from like 9/10 players, saying the exact same things.

It’s gone beyond getting kittened off. I want to stress that the majority of the spvp community has given up complaining in the forum and is actually finally leaving the game to find other sources of interest.

I hear more and more players by the week, telling me how “their contact lists are decimated” after the end of S2 and beginning of S3. If anything was a big flashing warming light, it would be that.

I have had a look at.my contact list of people I’ve played with in the last 2 seasons. Not one of them have been online since the middle of season 2. I think I have about 3 people still playing on my contacts list, and I’m now in the same guild as 2 of them. So out of 50 people, 3 still play.

Yup, it’s a real problem.

Even with the small handful of people who are still active in-guild and from my contacts list, they rarely want to play together, due to how the pip system encourages segregation between differently skilled players.

I haven’t even played much lately to be honest.
Hell it’s been almost a week since I logged in.
All these compounded effects on the S3 community are getting to me as well.

Something needs to be done about machmaking. It being how it is made me lost ALL interest in pvp.

made a recent post with simple solutions but I support this ideia also!!

BrotherBelial.3094:

RedZebra.2345:

i would go for this. But be prepared for more ranting on forum. So in perspective of ANET i wouldn’t do this as they have to keep the majority happy not the minority.

They changed the match making after season 1 because the “pro” players complained. I don’t see how that was keeping everyone happy. As far as PvP is concerned, ANet only wants the “pro” mentality group of players happy. Everyone else can hang. That’s the feeling I get from them as far as PvP is concerned.

That’s a bit more complicated. Anet wants to satisfy their “pro” PvPers, but also, at the same time, introduce/entice more PvE players to that game mode.

A system OP mentioned would make the first group satisfied (but look also below). The second group would likely mostly end up feeling they can’t get anywhere, and end up leaving. Which, for the most part, would, i think, be perfectly allright with the first group, except for one tiny problem. That problem is the size of the PvP population.

End up chasing away the second group, and suddenly the pro players will have far less opponents to play against. Which is likly going to significantly increase queues – and it’s not like they’re that good even now, at higher end of competitive scale. Also, quite a number of good players do in fact like to farm noobs. Not all of them, of course, perhaps not even a majority of them, but (as discussions in s2 have shown) the number of people like that is significant. With no noobs around some of them might painfully find out, that they are placed on the lower end of the pro community skill scale.

Which again, would likely be a good thing… in a game with high enough competitive population. Which GW2 is definitely not.

BrotherBelial.3094:

RedZebra.2345:

i would go for this. But be prepared for more ranting on forum. So in perspective of ANET i wouldn’t do this as they have to keep the majority happy not the minority.

They changed the match making after season 1 because the “pro” players complained. I don’t see how that was keeping everyone happy. As far as PvP is concerned, ANet only wants the “pro” mentality group of players happy. Everyone else can hang. That’s the feeling I get from them as far as PvP is concerned.

if ANet really only cared about “pro” players, we would have a balanced meta and proper ranked system, I can assure you. Thing is, Anet wants everyone to be able to get their wings, and so the system allows it.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

Yup, it’s a real problem.

Even with the small handful of people who are still active in-guild and from my contacts list, they rarely want to play together, due to how the pip system encourages segregation between differently skilled players.

I haven’t even played much lately to be honest.
Hell it’s been almost a week since I logged in.
All these compounded effects on the S3 community are getting to me as well.

@Anet, he isn’t kidding

Agemnon.4608:

I think it should go by MMR but keep divisions roughly similar to Elo percentile:

Amber: lowest 32%
Emerald: 33%-64%
Sapphire: 64%-84%
Ruby:85%-98.5%
Diamond- 98.6%-top 501-1,000 players
Legendary: Top 500

Within Legendary have a Challenger league for the top 200. Their rank would be displayed alongside a reskinned Legendary icon. If someone holds their number 1 spot for a week of active playing they get a special title and the number 1 spot would be a temporary title called number one guy or champion of GW2.

This idea and Trevor’s are good and should be seriously considered by ANet. As long as the pip system system is in place, people are going to be upset, whether wrongfully or not. It’s like dangling a carrot on a stick over people’s heads. The “need more pips” mentality isn’t a good system and it doesn’t work with gamer psychology, as evidenced by the numerous complaints on the forums.

Frankly it’s irrelevant whether these folks need to “git gud” or not; if a huge sample of the population is unhappy, there’s a problem. Getting rid of pips entirely and going based on MMR percentiles would solve this, because people would no longer feel entitled to progress through the leagues (because all they need is 5 more pips or something). It would definately boost morale.

That, and go back to something closer to S1/unranked matchmaking but with a lower spread in MMR within a given team.

Yes, I can get behind this. A true ladder based system like leaderboard is superior to a pip system.

I’ve realized that with the current league pip system, NOTHING will work. The pip system is, like players and I have said, A REWARD TRACK. That is all that the pip system is.

Look what they really need to do to boost #‘s in pvp is do what they did in gw1 and have more types of pvp, some hard core and some casual for pve’ers to get into it. It had RA, TA, FA,JQ, AB, HA, and guild wars… lol.

Bring in some more fun new maps like conquest, make it very casual friendly, like wvw but in a small scale say 10 or so. No big deal if you lose just enjoy the cool new maps. And keep enticing the hard core players more in the high end pvp. Oh and bring back guild wars to guild wars 2.

And give better rewards to keep people playing. More gold, more t6, or even better more unique weapons and armor besides just 1 back. Make a cool unique pvp only thief, mes, ele, warrior etc armor for each class that you can only get by doing well in pvp with that class, enough carrots on sticks should keep people playing more. 1 back piece is cool but its like ok now what afterwards. If they made unique weapons like fractal weapons that you had to earn over time (like the back piece but maybe easier, could be grinded) It would keep players playing much more.

What would make me play more is actually having enjoyable matches. Stomp or be stomped isn’t fun. Even when I’m winning I don’t have fun in spvp anymore because I could actually afk the entire match and win because the game is putting me into unlosable games.

Click my profile, click the link saying:
“View highly rated posts by Jourdelune.7456”

First on top:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Skill-based-or-Grind-based-rank-system/first#post6098296

Trevor, as I said to you earlier, from my experiences in 2013-2014, most people play around 80% and 95%. I don’t have exact numbers, but I could say it feel like 5000 players are around 80% and 95%.

And so, being into top 1000 is something great and should be reward accordingly.

To really make a MMR divisions system, we need to know the number of players and use somekind of math function to balance divisions with the player bases.

Being top 300 was a PITA with PUG groups and I did that often, it was harder to keep it into that positions, because we were constantly pit versus good premade (aka PZ, OP, VvV, Jedi… ).

Anyway, I agree with your idea (or more directly the community idea about a skill based ranked system, it’s not because I write it down before you, that it’s mine) but not with your “scale”.

For me Amber would be less than 50%, Sapphire would be below 95% and rubies + would be top 1000 or something like it.

You forgot to speak about the REWARDS that need to be separated from SKILL so serious players could concentrated on RANK while casuals would GRIND their Rewards.

All in all, thank you for coming again with the idea and I link your old post here as well:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Division-Representing-MMR-Directly/

I see 3 big issues:

1) mmr pump. In a mixed solo – team queue you can pump a lot your mmr with a team. So If leaderboard position depends on mmr, this is not a fair competition. In a soloqueue or full team queue make sense but not in a mixed.

2) number of games played. In a elo LB you need to handle the number of games played to avoid situation 12-0, first spot + AFK for ages. Balancing the decay is really important.

3) We had a mmr leaderboard soloqueue and anet decided to move away from this design. Instead of fix some stuff, the decided to change totally everything. 2 season test with a grind LB and the now season convertion to a pips system. So this won’t gonna happen.

Move to OW and hope blizzard will Make a good ranked and season system.
Ofc with 7m players is a bit easier.

Krysard.1364:

BrotherBelial.3094:

RedZebra.2345:

i would go for this. But be prepared for more ranting on forum. So in perspective of ANET i wouldn’t do this as they have to keep the majority happy not the minority.

They changed the match making after season 1 because the “pro” players complained. I don’t see how that was keeping everyone happy. As far as PvP is concerned, ANet only wants the “pro” mentality group of players happy. Everyone else can hang. That’s the feeling I get from them as far as PvP is concerned.

if ANet really only cared about “pro” players, we would have a balanced meta and proper ranked system, I can assure you. Thing is, Anet wants everyone to be able to get their wings, and so the system allows it.

Not quite, if the system where to allow anyone to get there wings, there would be no division crossing achievement needed for them. I thought I was going to be done this season with the wings, but nope, I’ll have to play next season and get to ruby if I want my wings.

In all honesty I feel that one achievement causes the most salt.

They do care about there “pro” players, there wouldn’t be a prize fund if they didn’t. The only time they change anything to do with PvP is when the “pros” complain, see season 1. “pro” makes a QQ you tube video about after 8 hours he’s only in emerald. ANet change it to the way it is now. Even though a lot of people think the pip system is a joke.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Krysard.1364:

BrotherBelial.3094:

RedZebra.2345:

i would go for this. But be prepared for more ranting on forum. So in perspective of ANET i wouldn’t do this as they have to keep the majority happy not the minority.

They changed the match making after season 1 because the “pro” players complained. I don’t see how that was keeping everyone happy. As far as PvP is concerned, ANet only wants the “pro” mentality group of players happy. Everyone else can hang. That’s the feeling I get from them as far as PvP is concerned.

if ANet really only cared about “pro” players, we would have a balanced meta and proper ranked system, I can assure you. Thing is, Anet wants everyone to be able to get their wings, and so the system allows it.

Not quite, if the system where to allow anyone to get there wings, there would be no division crossing achievement needed for them. I thought I was going to be done this season with the wings, but nope, I’ll have to play next season and get to ruby if I want my wings.

In all honesty I feel that one achievement causes the most salt.

They do care about there “pro” players, there wouldn’t be a prize fund if they didn’t. The only time they change anything to do with PvP is when the “pros” complain, see season 1. “pro” makes a QQ you tube video about after 8 hours he’s only in emerald. ANet change it to the way it is now. Even though a lot of people think the pip system is a joke.

Unfortunately, that “pro” player should NOT have been listened to. The problem IS the pip system. The pip system creates all the matchmaking and progression problems BY DESIGN.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Krysard.1364:

BrotherBelial.3094:

RedZebra.2345:

i would go for this. But be prepared for more ranting on forum. So in perspective of ANET i wouldn’t do this as they have to keep the majority happy not the minority.

They changed the match making after season 1 because the “pro” players complained. I don’t see how that was keeping everyone happy. As far as PvP is concerned, ANet only wants the “pro” mentality group of players happy. Everyone else can hang. That’s the feeling I get from them as far as PvP is concerned.

if ANet really only cared about “pro” players, we would have a balanced meta and proper ranked system, I can assure you. Thing is, Anet wants everyone to be able to get their wings, and so the system allows it.

Not quite, if the system where to allow anyone to get there wings, there would be no division crossing achievement needed for them. I thought I was going to be done this season with the wings, but nope, I’ll have to play next season and get to ruby if I want my wings.

In all honesty I feel that one achievement causes the most salt.

They do care about there “pro” players, there wouldn’t be a prize fund if they didn’t. The only time they change anything to do with PvP is when the “pros” complain, see season 1. “pro” makes a QQ you tube video about after 8 hours he’s only in emerald. ANet change it to the way it is now. Even though a lot of people think the pip system is a joke.

So? The wings are the problem, like usual, Anet can’t make everyone happy, but this season and previous season, even below average players can get legendary easy.

System mostly insults people who knows hot to play this game, because it’s casual league, build up for people to grind. But nowadays everyone feels cheated if they have to grind for something they wouldn’t get normally, or to improve if they are bad, which leads to whine and whine and whine.

The only thing Anet can do is relocate legendary reward to reward track, which will remove incentive for people to even do ranked. Which will lead to dead pvp.

Funny, but Anet doesn’t care about only one group of players, about people who are doing pvp just for pvp.

Let’s not convolute the goal of this thread.

Let me point out a few facts:

• #1 – Player base was at it’s peak pre 6/23/2015, with the old leaderboard system and three years of work towards balancing a fun to play meta that offered two to three viable specs on each class. Let’s all refrain from arguing that “player base was at peak during week one release” because that’s something that happens to any game during it’s initial release. I’m talking about the realistic peak of players who chose to stick around and play.
• #2 – The player base began to seriously question the direction of the game post the 6/23/2015 patch, HoT release and the identification that leaderboards were not coming back. Three years of balance, tossed out the window.
• #3 – After the arrival of the new league pip system and by the end of season 1, there was a significant portion of the spvp player base that began to lose interest in GW2 spvp. By the end of season 2, that significant portion of the spvp player base began logging in only casually and/or leaving the game. Now during season 3, even the hardcore spvp community is leaving. We have officially hit the point where player base is so small right now, that que times are often impractical or unplayable all together. When que times take this long, no one wants to que, which = even more people giving up on spvp.

So we can see that the biggest drop in population occurs after pips were introduced.
It was simple to identify the problems and it’s simple to identify the solutions:

• Fix the way in which you rank player skill/progression
• Fix the completely broken match making
• Provide more viability in build structures

Not sure what Arena-net is doing
This can’t be “a lack of funding”
I know people who own/run private game servers
People who update and change their games weekly, monthly, for free

Raek.8504:

BrotherBelial.3094:

Krysard.1364:

BrotherBelial.3094:

RedZebra.2345:

i would go for this. But be prepared for more ranting on forum. So in perspective of ANET i wouldn’t do this as they have to keep the majority happy not the minority.

They changed the match making after season 1 because the “pro” players complained. I don’t see how that was keeping everyone happy. As far as PvP is concerned, ANet only wants the “pro” mentality group of players happy. Everyone else can hang. That’s the feeling I get from them as far as PvP is concerned.

if ANet really only cared about “pro” players, we would have a balanced meta and proper ranked system, I can assure you. Thing is, Anet wants everyone to be able to get their wings, and so the system allows it.

Not quite, if the system where to allow anyone to get there wings, there would be no division crossing achievement needed for them. I thought I was going to be done this season with the wings, but nope, I’ll have to play next season and get to ruby if I want my wings.

In all honesty I feel that one achievement causes the most salt.

They do care about there “pro” players, there wouldn’t be a prize fund if they didn’t. The only time they change anything to do with PvP is when the “pros” complain, see season 1. “pro” makes a QQ you tube video about after 8 hours he’s only in emerald. ANet change it to the way it is now. Even though a lot of people think the pip system is a joke.

So? The wings are the problem, like usual, Anet can’t make everyone happy, but this season and previous season, even below average players can get legendary easy.

System mostly insults people who knows hot to play this game, because it’s casual league, build up for people to grind. But nowadays everyone feels cheated if they have to grind for something they wouldn’t get normally, or to improve if they are bad, which leads to whine and whine and whine.

The only thing Anet can do is relocate legendary reward to reward track, which will remove incentive for people to even do ranked. Which will lead to dead pvp.

Funny, but Anet doesn’t care about only one group of players, about people who are doing pvp just for pvp.

You say that, but you will find you can get an unranked pvp match faster than a ranked one.

People like pvp, they enjoy it, most seem to not like the league. When I was playing last night I was waiting between 5-10 minutes for a match at T4 sapphire, where as I could get an unranked match in the sub 2 minutes mark.

BrotherBelial.3094:

People like pvp, they enjoy it, most seem to not like the league. When I was playing last night I was waiting between 5-10 minutes for a match at T4 sapphire, where as I could get an unranked match in the sub 2 minutes mark.

I’d like to highlight that statement.

BrotherBelial.3094:

Raek.8504:

BrotherBelial.3094:

Krysard.1364:

BrotherBelial.3094:

RedZebra.2345:

i would go for this. But be prepared for more ranting on forum. So in perspective of ANET i wouldn’t do this as they have to keep the majority happy not the minority.

They changed the match making after season 1 because the “pro” players complained. I don’t see how that was keeping everyone happy. As far as PvP is concerned, ANet only wants the “pro” mentality group of players happy. Everyone else can hang. That’s the feeling I get from them as far as PvP is concerned.

if ANet really only cared about “pro” players, we would have a balanced meta and proper ranked system, I can assure you. Thing is, Anet wants everyone to be able to get their wings, and so the system allows it.

Not quite, if the system where to allow anyone to get there wings, there would be no division crossing achievement needed for them. I thought I was going to be done this season with the wings, but nope, I’ll have to play next season and get to ruby if I want my wings.

In all honesty I feel that one achievement causes the most salt.

They do care about there “pro” players, there wouldn’t be a prize fund if they didn’t. The only time they change anything to do with PvP is when the “pros” complain, see season 1. “pro” makes a QQ you tube video about after 8 hours he’s only in emerald. ANet change it to the way it is now. Even though a lot of people think the pip system is a joke.

So? The wings are the problem, like usual, Anet can’t make everyone happy, but this season and previous season, even below average players can get legendary easy.

System mostly insults people who knows hot to play this game, because it’s casual league, build up for people to grind. But nowadays everyone feels cheated if they have to grind for something they wouldn’t get normally, or to improve if they are bad, which leads to whine and whine and whine.

The only thing Anet can do is relocate legendary reward to reward track, which will remove incentive for people to even do ranked. Which will lead to dead pvp.

Funny, but Anet doesn’t care about only one group of players, about people who are doing pvp just for pvp.

You say that, but you will find you can get an unranked pvp match faster than a ranked one.

People like pvp, they enjoy it, most seem to not like the league. When I was playing last night I was waiting between 5-10 minutes for a match at T4 sapphire, where as I could get an unranked match in the sub 2 minutes mark.

Then there are those of us in that pip range who are ducking the current batch of competition and waiting for inactive volatility to kick in.