Guild Wars 2

~Character-Bound Ranking~

Yes, that sounds pretty dramatic and cool, but how will that fix Matchmaking? First, lets take a look at some benefits to it.

Class Pride: We can have a little pride in saying “Hey, I got Legend on Thief in Season 1” vs “I got Legend on Bunker Mesmer in Season 1, but I wear Primordial Legend on my Thief”.

Alts!: I have an alt account that I queue on when I play with friends, seeing as a lot of them are usually way below Legend ranking. Would it not be awesome to just jump on that play-around class so you could queue some fun matches with friends without your Rank being a Factor?

Better Queues: Going to go over this in another section below, but you will actually be ranked with players that belong in their bracket. You won’t get that one guy who played Revenant to Legendary, then decided to queue Thief without having played it before.

~Now, the reasoning~

A lot of players, like myself, hold a grudge towards those who jump from class to class based on the “Flavor of the Metabattle”. They’ll watch PvP Seasons with baited breath, then as soon as Metabattle is updated they’ll jump right onto the top rated build and play that.

While I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing, as pointed out by another player – “You can handicap yourself by playing a weak class, or you can pick up the strongest one and make the ‘smart’ choice.” – Which I agree with, your class and build don’t mean a whole lot. The issue I have is how easy it is to just reroll, throw up that Legendary Title with a class you didn’t earn it on, then queue right back up at a Rank you didn’t earn with that class. Why not start at the bottom?

This change, if it is made, will hopefully adjust the issues with both Matchmaking and Flavor of the Month swapping – that’s just a speculation though.

~ Current Matchmaking Issues ~

Now, these are issues that I personally have. They may not be the same as others, but they are issues that I have seen. Let’s say someone jumps into Season 3 of Gw2 on a Power Revenant. They are playing the Metabattle Build, don’t really know what they are doing, but they are climbing ranking so they don’t really care. They hit Legendary within a few months or so and decide “Hey, I think Warrior would be a fun class to play”. They make a new Warrior, do the starting zone, then jump into the Mists. Change their build to the one on Metabattle, then queue back up for Ranked.

I have no problem with this, I actually encourage people to play more than one class. However, most of you have already seen the major issue with this. He’s never played Warrior before, but he’s queueing at Legendary with it.

Major Issue, he’s most likely going to kitten his team right off the bat. Players around him are going to get mad because he clearly does not belong at that ranking, he’ll be called out, and he will have no fun. I don’t want anyone to have to feel that, especially when they want to play a new class.

~The Fix~

With the fix, our Warrior friend above will be able to queue back at Amber (or even Sapphire/Ruby, one or two tiers below his current ranking) and get the chance to grow in his new class, rather than be pitted against those who have a lot more experience.

This will help players get better queues, so you won’t have that one guy who has no clue what’s going on because he just wants his Mesmer Daily.

Let me know what you guys think!! I’d love to see some of the feedback you guys have, try to keep it constructive!

EDIT

So after browsing some of the threads, I have to add this.

Rank Decay

This is literally the biggest thing for keeping Ranked queues actually progressing. I noticed the length of queue times, and I actually haven’t queued because of it, but think about it.. If you don’t queue a match for a few days, you will begin to lose pips. Let’s say it’s 1 week, or 5 days or whatever. You can’t just sit at a ranking, you’ll slowly decay back down into Diamond or Ruby (from Diamond). The Decay itself should start in Diamond, or even just in Legendary, and stop once you fall out of that League. That way people don’t burst down Legendary then go find something else to do. It’ll keep the queues up, and it will keep people active. Super simple fix.

u had alrdy got me with “class pride”