Hello,
It is obvious Anet is trying to implement things to measure skill, so I wanted to make this thread to describe few things that I think needed to be addressed.
First of all, I wanted to say that overall I am happy with Season 5. Rewards are great and playing PvP finally feels rewarding. Queues are very short, it feels that many people are playing this season, visible MMR was great thing to implement…so really I am not trying to complain, I am just trying to give my two cents on things that need to be improved/changed.
I wanted to start with something that many people have already mentioned. Number of wins/losses does not represent your skill (or to be more precise, it does not represent your skill accuratelly). While I agree that number of wins/losses is the only objective thing that can show how good you are, I think that the way it affects your MMR (or ranking points, however you want to call it) needs some serious improvements.
Why am I saying this? Well, I will tell you just few examples:
1. We all know that MM system is not perfect and many threads here have proven that. Even one of the devs confirmed there are things that needed to be changed in one of those threads. Since dev already confirmed they will look into it, I will discuss this no more. The only reason I am mentioning this is because unfair/unbalanced matches should not have same impact (or even remotely close impact) on your MMR as the ones which are (considered to be) fair. I understand that GW2 still doesn’t have enough people for MMR to be really effective and bad matchmakings happen, but don’t punish players who do play for the faults of the system.
2. This situation actually happened to me. I know it is extremely rare, but there is larger point to be made:
We were playing Temple of the Silent Storm. Entire match was extremely even (GG matchmaking for that) so fastforward to the last seconds of the match. My team has advantage in points and holds 1 node and enemy team holds 1 node, while there is fight for 3rd node. Enemy team wins third node and mid buff. So, what happens next? My team has 499 and enemy team has 496. Next tick brings us to exactly 500:500 and BOOM! They win and I lose 13 ranking points.
Maybe someone will convince me that this is fair (I am honestly ready to listen explanation), but I find it extremely unfair that defeat over technicality (honestly I have no idea how winner was decided) carries same weight as when you lose 500:0 and this brings us to a bigger picture. How many of you consider fair that loss with 500 difference is same as losing 500:499, or 500:490? I agree that 500:500 situation is rare, but last two I mentioned are really not that rare. If you have such a small margine, then there is no real difference in skill between those two teams, That one point can mean that at the beggining their thief got 1 second faster to the close than our thief (just a random example), but you will make entire team lose 10-15 ranking points each because of that.
I think that margine should make the difference. It will also motivate people to play till the end and not ragequit and go AFK. If you know that losing with 50 points difference and 500 points difference actually makes huge impact on how many ranking points you will lose, you will be less likely to just give up (especially after 1 fight in mid).
3. Another thing that should have impact on how many points you win/lose is your contribution. Now, I am not saying that Top Stat means anything, but you have already implemented measuring percentage of everything comparing to rest of the team. Maybe those values should give you insight how well someone played. Top Stat is bad because you can deal 1000 dmg and someone else can deal 1001 and they will get Top Damage. However, if you make some way to account % of dmg, % of healing, attack/defense time, number of kills/deaths I think you can measure real contribution for each player. Now, someone will say this is bad for thieves, for example, since they spend a lot of time just running around. Well, why not implement upvote (and maybe downvote) at the end of the matches? That way, some thief who did their job properly can be upvoted, even though his stats don’t show his actual contribution. I really cannot see down side of this. It is chance to reward players who excelled according to their teammates.
So, anyway, these are things that in my opinion are currently not fair and don’t affect MMR properly. Maybe you have different opinion and I am asking you to tell me where I am wrong, since I am open for learning.