Guild Wars 2

First of all I would like to say that I am not an sPvP god… and I don’t expect to win every single match.

…but what I do expect is to participate in matches with an even number of players to at least give a fair chance for a win.

Why even keep track of your win/loss ratio when half of the matches are almost guaranteed to lose if you are down one or more players?

Some days are worse than others, but I find that the matchmaking system in this game is horrendous.

If its not someone swapping at the start to hold hands with their friend…. its the leavers.

Autobalance rarely kicks in before a huge impact has been made on the score…. and often times a player will get autobalanced off of a team only to create a deficit on that team, since players are constantly joining.

I would suggest a points system, where players accumulate negative points for leaving mid-battle…. and if they acquire too many negative points, they are locked out of sPvP for the rest of the month.

I’d also like to see changes like…

Remove the teamswap/choose team feature (except from custom arenas.)
Force new/joining players to spectate until there are 2 waiting so 1 can join each team simultaneously.
Punish players for leaving a team abruptly
Don’t let a match begin if there are uneven teams
If a player does leave, increase the respawn timer on the team with an extra player to help balance the match until another player joins

I hate starting a Solo Queue game with only 4v5. It’s just a struggle. They should just disband the game after the timer goes down, give a penalty to the person who doesn’t join, and start again. Or just queue people based on ‘elo’ and make it first come first server if possible. Like clicking to exit overflow servers to get into the main flow.

I’ve opened a suggestion thread for another aspect of this(team balance) in spvp forum today. Please look at my suggestions too. Wanted to be constructive about problems with new ideas.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Some-suggestions-to-improve-solo-arena/first#post3513343

I think you are talking about hotjoin in all this and I’ve noticed the same trend. Hotjoin matches are rarely 5v5 and NvN, it’s usually NvN-1 and the outnumbered team hardly ever has a chance of winning. I guess the developers should evaluate whether or not they think this is disruptive to the spirit of hotjoin. A lot of people say that hotjoin is casual so people should be able to leave anytime. I don’t disagree with this, but I do think the autobalance and the ability to swap teams can be improved. People usually swap teams only when their team is losing, then they wait for autobalance to kick in. They should do something to stop the 5v4 matches and to stop people from only jockeying to get easy wins on the winning team.

I was referencing solo queue. Though hot join is just a mess, solo queue should have been planned better. It’s currently all too similar to hotjoin.

XacTactX.6709:

I think you are talking about hotjoin

I was in 12 4v5s in soloqueue games this weekend out of 40ish games played. 2 x on the opposing team, 9 losses and 1 win with 4 on my team. 3 of those losses where actuallly due to the same player (who probably has the debuff now) who kept queueing despite the issues he had with his PC or internet connection.

I dont really care about ranks (yet) but i literally dropped from top 200 to the %s due to an unlucky streak that had a lot of these 4v5s in them. (If grouch or any CM reads this, please feel free to verify).

I added and had friendly conversations with pretty much every single one of them. None of them cared about the debuff if they would get it.

I dont understand why random teammates have to suffer due to something that is out of their control. A loss in a 4v5 is almost entirely caused by the guy who left or DCed.

So what i would do is give the winning team the win rewards accordingly. And the 4 guys who “lost” dont get affected at all. Instead they should add up the cumulated rank losses and deduct it from the guy who left or DCed.

So lets say all 4 wouldve lost 50 ranks (which isnt weird during the weekend) the DCed guy would end up losing 5 × 50 (incl his own loss ofc).

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Autobalance rarely kicks in before a huge impact has been made on the score…. and often times a player will get autobalanced off of a team only to create a deficit on that team, since players are constantly joining.

Hotjoin is srs bsns

The problem is deciding which way to balance. . . . competitive v casual.

For a casual player, the last thing they want is to wait to play. So the idea of being in queue until there were two is bad policy unless the time in queue is almost always short. OR, if the wait was an up to 1 minute wait then we allow them in solo.

But, on the other hand, no one wants their team to get clobbered. A penalty in pvp makes sense for leaving. In other words, your account shouldn’t be able to enter a new pvp game until the old one is done.

You have to balance that there can be a lot of reasons for quitting (real life to I screwed up a spec to I finished my daily). You just don’t want the same person doing it again and again.

PvP needs more people playing so you almost need to skew all decisions to the most casual of players right now for hotjoins.

Also…. I saw this the other day:

Any ideas how he got into a match?

Bombsaway.7198:

The problem is deciding which way to balance. . . . competitive v casual.

It’s not that hard to do both.

Anet just doesn’t seem to have the manpower to code much of anything into the game. And when they do, no offense, but the quality… well the quality is low enough that the addition tends to cause a whole ’nother set of issues.

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Also…. I saw this the other day:

Any ideas how he got into a match?

Dishonorable is only for rated games.

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Remove the teamswap/choose team feature (except from custom arenas.)
Force new/joining players to spectate until there are 2 waiting so 1 can join each team simultaneously.
Punish players for leaving a team abruptly
Don’t let a match begin if there are uneven teams
If a player does leave, increase the respawn timer on the team with an extra player to help balance the match until another player joins

From reading your list it seems you mostly play hotjoin – have you thought about switching to tournament? You get the occasional 4v5 there when someone leaves, and you occasionally get people of mismatched skill levels in the same match, but it;’s not anywhere near as often as hotjoin!

The thing is, hotjoin is designed to be casual, jump-in/jump-out fun. You want to play for a few minutes while your tournament queue pops? Go hotjoin! You expecting guests and know you’ll need to leave suddenly when the doorbell rings? Go hotjoin! The consequences of you leaving are minimal because another player is bound to take your place soon, and games are unranked so even if your team loses unfairly by being outnumbered most of the game it doesn’t really matter.

Your suggestions (except for the last one, which I think is pretty good and might work!) would really put a dent on how casual the game mode is. They’d stop you from being able to jump in instantly (cause you’d have to wait for someone else to join the other team too), and they’d penalise you for leaving. It would turn hotjoin into something more fair and formalised. But that sort of gametype is already available in tournaments, so there really is no need to do so – you would only penalise the people who NEED the more casual gamemode cause they don’t have the time or a reliable enough connection to play seriously.