Guild Wars 2

Hi all, I hopefully have just a quick question here for ranked play.

I’m confused how the rating system works. I see that I get an increase in rating per win, and decrease per loss. For strings of wins, the increases go down (e.g., +13, +13, +12). Same for strings of losses, their magnitude goes down (-14, -12).

So in theory, those players who have very high ratings should have a lot higher win/loss ratio than those who have lower ratings, right?

And there are such people, e.g., top ten have tremendous win/loss ratios. However if I look at my friends and guilds list only, I see people who are (e.g.) ranked in the 250s but with 57 wins/53 losses. This person in particular has 1,583 rating. I have 49 wins/46 losses, which is a similar ratio, and yet my rating is an abysmal 1,151.

On the other hand, one person in my friends list has slightly higher rating than me (1,160) and yet has 32 wins/45 losses, a very poor win/loss ratio compared to mine (41% vs 51%). How is it even remotely possible that this person is higher ranked than I? I know from talking to them that they’re in bronze tier, whereas I’m sitting in silver with two pips. It’s frankly ludicrous.

How is it possible for the ratings for similar win/loss ratios to be so different? Does something else happen to the rating increases/decreases depending on what division you’re in?

I can’t seem to find info on this other than some pseudocode on MMR on the wiki that is not helpful with this specific question.

In any case, it seems to me that this system is not fair, or at least arcane enough that it makes no sense to the player who is not aware of whatever intricacies it operates on.

Thanks!

See below. It is related to place.ent matches, but it gets the point across.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/How-placement-matches-work/first#post6501962

Thanks, this is very helpful and explains how there can be a divergence at the beginning. But it seems that over time the system should learn enough to know that 51% win/loss should be higher ranked than 41% win/loss (using my example). Both players in this case have approx. 100 games each, so I am still very confused how we can have similar rankings.

Even if you look at the screenshot in that thread, the initial divergence starts getting smaller, and the x-axis only shows 10 games. I’d imagine after 20 or 30 if they both win/lose approx the same they’d have the same rating.

Maybe it’s an issue of the “soft” reset? I was in bronze last season, so perhaps my starting point was lower this season and it just takes more time to go up in ratings.

The TLDR for win% is if it is >50%, you moved up from where you placed. If it is <50% you dropped from where you placed.

You are correct. The reset and your first couple games will have a big impact. As the deviation goes down, you points per win/loss will settle so you aren’t changing more than 5 to 20 rank points per match.

I had another post that talked about win % vs an opponent with a fixed rating, and it also gave some insight into the rating of your opponents team based on the amount of points you win or lose. This season, I’ve lost as few a 5 points for a match and won as many as 18 after my rating stabilized. That was because the match maker set me up against higher rated teams.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Suggestion-for-ranking-next-season/first#post6502151

I think that still, some tweaks should be made with those numbers. In a full-blown match full of twists I get +12 for win but it’s so easy to get -13 in a situations when it is a one sided massacre. So tell me, that match that I lost 216/506 we had a guy DC’ed in our team for a about 2 minutes but he came back. The fight took those almost 9 minutes and we lost despite best efforts, losing -13 rating. Of course you can’t check it by yourself and you have the right to not believe me, but database does not lie and it knows what happened.
I wish that this could be looked at in a future balance patch.

Now something that I’d like to talk about as well. I still think that we can get out of this mess, but my thoughts are being gnawed upon on more and more as I find time to play and meet with such terrible quality of matches.
I won’t even move the matter of community. I understand that due to low population our games are very unstable. I know that Anet tries to introduce PvP to PvE players but if there is such an attempt, there should be some educational materials in the game in the first place. I am sure that a considerable bulk players is not fond of doing research by themselves so they have to get those tips shoved in their face somehow. At least make new players understand what is the meaning of “focus”, “rotation” etc.
Also I’d like to pinpoint that trying to create classes without boundaries (no trinity) is clearly not doing well. The best example is druid that has an unproportional damage output to healing and escape capabilities. Sadly I don’t know how to fix this is if you still want to keep amulets and the principle of no trinity.
Warrior appears to be okay, at least he is not pulsing a healing aura, although his survival capabilities are a tad bit over the bar. I am amazed that guardian is made for damage but there are no truly strong builds that offer grand healing or boonshare (except shouts which is used by… does anyone use it anymore? It’s more likely situational) I am amazed to this day that guardian does not fulfill the role that comes with his name. He is just a reskinned warrior with blue coloured spells. Everyone other supp build does a better role with sustaining the team than guard does with whatever he is able to give into a fight. If someone tells me otherwise, then I ask you this: Why is it not meta then, why is it not popular? A handful of exceptions is not a valid argument.
I could go on and on but we all know how it looks like, at least those who still bother with this game mode.

The only thing I can propose might seem brutal. Stop the power creep by turning off elite specializations for pvp and try to tone them down to the level of cores and if it is not what you want, then buff core traits so that elite is not mandatory to be efficient in any given situation.
The reason behind this is that before HoT I could not say a sinlge bad word about pvp at that time. Not only the PvP system, but elites are one of the factors that led us to this situation.

P.S.
I am really curious how would ranked season look like without elites, just one season.

Those higher rated players also face high rated players. If they were facing players like you, OP, they would have 100% win rate and you would have 100% lose rate.

There is indeed however issue with rating gain/losses: it considers only your MMR vs average enemy MMR, it does not take into account that you might have to carry teammates hundreds of ranks below you vs better opponents, which is really discouraging since MM aims for shorter queues (thus throwing everyone in one match regardless their ranks) instead of quality matches.