Guild Wars 2

Maps. Ready checks.

I am so looking forward to no more Skyhammer 4v5s. Cheers for finally getting these improvements sorted for PvP!

I read the new matchmaking rules but i have some questions:

Basically, your ladder positions would be the sum of every points (-3 – +3) you can gain in a match?

Team MMR would be the simply average about every single MMR player or other formula?

It’s an interesting new system, i think people who play a lot (if they’re decent/good) will have some advantages in this system at the higher tier.

And another thing…in the new leaderboard, can you show us our positions AND our total ladder points?

Sounds to me like these issues were a lot of work? Hopefully improving pvp infrastructure means its easier to launch new game modes with these issues taken care of beforehand. Plus, all this is off the to-do list.

Nothings changing with the rank points (the stuff that increases pvp reward tracks), correct?

If we don’t care about our ratings, then the dishonor will have nothing to stop us from leaving our matches and making it one sides, just like it is now.

cheese.4739:

Maps. Ready checks.

I am so looking forward to no more Skyhammer 4v5s. Cheers for finally getting these improvements sorted for PvP!

I don’t see anything in it that’ll stop that though. I’m sure they have to look at trying to fill a match before starting a new instance.

skullmount.1758:

Nothings changing with the rank points (the stuff that increases pvp reward tracks), correct?

If we don’t care about our ratings, then the dishonor will have nothing to stop us from leaving our matches and making it one sides, just like it is now.

cheese.4739:

Maps. Ready checks.

I am so looking forward to no more Skyhammer 4v5s. Cheers for finally getting these improvements sorted for PvP!

I don’t see anything in it that’ll stop that though. I’m sure they have to look at trying to fill a match before starting a new instance.

They’ll have ready checks for when you queue up. This means that when you get a match-up you don’t get auto-magically transferred into the map. You also have to vote for a map now so I’m guessing people who don’t vote will get kicked and you’ll be re-sorted.

Does this mean that if you end up facing players from the top of the leaderboards, you have a lot more to gain than to lose? Or vice versa; if you’re at the top, you can’t gain much but you can lose a lot?

It was always fun to see a GW1 match where the underdog won, boosting their potential, but really hurting the top team’s ladder rank.

Additionally, are you going to show ladder points on the leaderboard, or before/after games on a pop up? Similar to GW1, we could see the opposing guild’s name and rating. It would be nice to see the other team’s average rating before or after a game to know what we’re up against!

In regards to the different MMR based on profession,

I’m 100% in support of this in unranked area. I believe there will be much less of a barrier of entry to learning new professions if you’re not expected to play them at the mechanical skill of a main profession when you first start out.

My concerns are with ladder rank and the ranked area. Based on what I’ve read, I see the potential to abuse this system by initially climbing the ladder on your main profession. Then, when competition gets stiff, swap to a profession and build that you don’t have many games on that traditionally does well at lower ratings.

For example, what’s the incentive, besides integrity, for a someone who never plays engineer to climb to the top 300 of the new leaders boards with their main profession…and then play turret engi, have their MMR adjusted, and boost their ladder points with the wins at this MMR?

Publishing the algorithm on wiki is going to be wonderful, I can’t begin to tell you how frustrating it was to have MMR calculations completely hidden before (especially as as a GW1 player where ladder ranking was determined by a publicly known Elo algorithm)

This has only to do with solo and team arenas, correct? Hotjoin, at least manually choosing a server/match, isn’t going to be affected by these changes?

The changes sound interesting and if they work would be a improvement on the current system.

One question I have will the wait time for a game be increased by a lot? You can wait 10-20 mins+ now for a team/solo q game on occasions….

Justin ODell.9517:

Meglobob.8620:

One question I have will the wait time for a game be increased by a lot? You can wait 10-20 mins+ now for a team/solo q game on occasions….

It should actually be faster, but we’ll need to wait and see how it performs in the real world (and not just our internal testing and simulations.) We have several ways we can reduce queue time by sacrificing match quality, or vice versa.

Isn’t possible to give players a choice? Some box where they can tick to either choose a fast match, or a quality match that will take however possible.

Also, since queues can be a bit of issue right now, how goes the other quality of life changes. Did you guys implemented stuff like the gw2 icon flashing when there is a match found, for the people that alt tab? Ala league of legends.

will these new systems prevent players from purposely tanking their glicko score just to get easier matches?

this was an issue for league of legends a couple years ago, players from all ladder strata would leave a potential game during champ select to take the elo/mmr hit without taking a game loss, repeat about 100x while playing games on another account in between the queue time-outs.

i dont really know the ins and outs of matchmaking for gw2, but i just hope we wont be able to easily circumvent the spirit of the system to roflstomp noobs ad infinitum.

Justin ODell.9517:

skullmount.1758:

This has only to do with solo and team arenas, correct? Hotjoin, at least manually choosing a server/match, isn’t going to be affected by these changes?

Correct. Custom arenas and play now are unaffected.

If I could make a suggestion, it would be to remove the “Play Now” button from hotjoin. I think that new players would be honestly, better off in Unrated Queue vs other newbies than getting farmed in hotjoin by players that already know how to win and also how to manipulate team swap.

So, in order to play hotjoin you would need to manually join a hotjoin server from the list. Yeah, I realize that it would be less convenient to find a hotjoin game if Play Now was removed, but for every player that you can get to move from Hotjoin to Unrated queue, the queue times become faster, and the match making becomes better.

In its current form, hotjoin PvP is extremely imbalanced. Most games end 4v5, and being able to choose sides allows players to always stack the side with the higher score from the beginning of the game. It’s really poorly designed and overall its going to be a bad experience for the majority of new players. The play now button also tends to try and put people into matches where one side already has 400+ score, sometimes the game has even ended. If anything, this has gotta be more confusing for new players than Unranked Queue would be.

I really think Arenanet should push Unranked Queue as the ideal mode for new players, and try to phase out hotjoin, by reducing rewards and removing the play now button, but still allowing players to manually join a game instantly if they want to.

And what about the leaderboard decay?

Any change on that?

we temporarily lose ladder points when we don’t play and we’ll re-get the same amount when we play 1 game? Or do you have changed something?

Aerveor.9617:

My concerns are with ladder rank and the ranked area. Based on what I’ve read, I see the potential to abuse this system by initially climbing the ladder on your main profession. Then, when competition gets stiff, swap to a profession and build that you don’t have many games on that traditionally does well at lower ratings.

We’ll need to wait and see. If it becomes an issue we can definitely change the rules.

Aerveor.9617:

For example, what’s the incentive, besides integrity, for a someone who never plays engineer to climb to the top 300 of the new leaders boards with their main profession…and then play turret engi, have their MMR adjusted, and boost their ladder points with the wins at this MMR?

If they don’t play a profession often then they should have a high RD, causing their rating to adapt quickly. We’ll keep an eye on it to see if its fast enough to prevent this sort of thing.

Thank you for your responses and the willingness to change the rules should people start abusing the system. Based on your responses it seems like you anticipate potential abuse of the system this way to wash out over the course of a chunk of games, which based on my experience with other games tends to be the case and I agree with you.

Over the course of a season I expect the integrity of the ladders will be fine. My last concern is during end-of-the-season crunch time, specifically near end-of-season reward thresholds (eg. top 20, top 200, top 1000 etc) where, in the last 24 hours or so, people could potentially exploit this for that last few points to move up a few ranks.

I think you’ve done a great job with these changes. The reason I’m being so critical is because I’d be crushed to see all the hard work you’ve done be forgotten because of a bitter taste in the community’s mouth due to a season’s worth of meaningful ladders being undone by 48 hours of abuse at the end of a season.

oo nice buttocks.

Nebilim.5127:

Also, since queues can be a bit of issue right now, how goes the other quality of life changes. Did you guys implemented stuff like the gw2 icon flashing when there is a match found, for the people that alt tab? Ala league of legends.

Oh, this is a very important one.

While I’ve been hoping that players would have to play as the character they queued with (allowing us to get profession-based MMR) for a while – you say that we have to stay in the PvP lobby while queueing? There’s pretty much nothing to do in HotM right now, and I doubt that this is going to change anytime soon.

Since a fair number of players alt-tab while queueing already, and this is only likely to increase if we can’t faff about in PvE doing world bosses or whatever… we need some way to find out if our queue has popped without player-side workaround (like running gw2 in windowed mode and resizing other application windows to keep an eye on the game).

Justin ODell.9517:

MarkPhilips.5169:

Basically, your ladder positions would be the sum of every points (-3 – +3) you can gain in a match?

Correct.

Just to clarify, that counts for each individual person instead of that team as a whole? For example, GuardianBob’s odds of victory could be 0-19% while his partner MesmerJoe could be 20-39%. Or are both player’s odds of victory the same?

Any chance we’ll get a reduction in the start or match wait duration or some incentive for people to actually use the Ready button? The additional 120 seconds between the queue and the beginning of the match seems a bit excessive. 60 or even 90 seconds would be a huge improvement.

EnemyCrusher.7324:

Any chance we’ll get a reduction in the start or match wait duration or some incentive for people to actually use the Ready button? The additional 120 seconds between the queue and the beginning of the match seems a bit excessive. 60 or even 90 seconds would be a huge improvement.

Or the timer get’s set to a lower number if all players are in the map like it’s in csgo or so

Unranked Arena also takes advantage of all the new matchmaking changes, so you will tend to be grouped together with players of your skill level and group size.

How is the ‘skill level’ in ‘Unranked Arena’ calculated?
1.) Is it also an individual Glicko2-Rating Algorithm per profession?
2.) Do I have the same MMR in ‘unranked’ as I have in ‘ranked’? F.e. if I have a high MMR on my mesmer in ranked, will I automatically have a high MMR in unranked? Are both values exact the same?

justin!

rewards!

are the rewards in the new ranked arena (combination of current solo and solo arena) better?

do the rewards get better or worse with the -3 / +3 rating change?

for example, in terms of gold rewards,

rating / gold
-3 = 10 silvers (equivalent to hotjoin lose)
-2 = 12.5 silvers (equivalent to solo arena lose)
-1 = 15 silvers (equivalent to team arena lose)
0 = 25 silvers (equivalent to solo arena win)
+1 = 30 silvers (equivalent to team arena win)
+2 = 60 silvers
+3 = 1 gold

how would it be oooo justin?

thanks!

Are the winning odds adjusted for the remaining players after someone deserts the game? If you are outmanned the whole match it can be quite hard to get at least 200 or even 300 points, probably resulting in a loss of 1-3 rank points even when you fought well for the rest of the match.

Justin ODell.9517:

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

do the rewards get better or worse with the -3 / +3 rating change?

for example, in terms of gold rewards,

rating / gold
-3 = 10 silvers (equivalent to hotjoin lose)
-2 = 12.5 silvers (equivalent to solo arena lose)
-1 = 15 silvers (equivalent to team arena lose)
0 = 25 silvers (equivalent to solo arena win)
+1 = 30 silvers (equivalent to team arena win)
+2 = 60 silvers
+3 = 1 gold

how would it be oooo justin?

thanks!

I honestly don’t know. Those rewards are part of content and not handled by my servers. Not a bad idea though, I’ll pass it along.

aaaah okies!
thanks justin!

Justin, can you answer pls ?

And what about the leaderboard decay?

Any change on that?

we temporarily lose ladder points when we don’t play and we’ll re-get the same amount when we play 1 game? Or do you have changed something?

MarkPhilips.5169:

Justin, can you answer pls ?

And what about the leaderboard decay?

Any change on that?

we temporarily lose ladder points when we don’t play and we’ll re-get the same amount when we play 1 game? Or do you have changed something?

i’m guessing decay will cause position in the leader board / ladder to drop, but the actual ratings will remain unchanged.

does that sound reasonable?

that’s my guess though.

Justin ODell.9517:

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

MarkPhilips.5169:

Justin, can you answer pls ?

And what about the leaderboard decay?

Any change on that?

we temporarily lose ladder points when we don’t play and we’ll re-get the same amount when we play 1 game? Or do you have changed something?

i’m guessing decay will cause position in the leader board / ladder to drop, but the actual ratings will remain unchanged.

does that sound reasonable?

that’s my guess though.

The beta ladder will not include any decay, and may not need any. We want to wait and see before making a decision for future ladders.

oooo. eh, is the beta ladder based on ratings?
as in, players with higher rating will be near the top etc.

so if someone stops actively gaining rating, they will eventually be pushed downwards by other players climbing up the ladder with their increasing rating due to more active winnings.

did i get that right?

Josh Davis.6015:

cheese.4739:

Nebilim.5127:

Also, since queues can be a bit of issue right now, how goes the other quality of life changes. Did you guys implemented stuff like the gw2 icon flashing when there is a match found, for the people that alt tab? Ala league of legends.

Oh, this is a very important one.

While I’ve been hoping that players would have to play as the character they queued with (allowing us to get profession-based MMR) for a while – you say that we have to stay in the PvP lobby while queueing? There’s pretty much nothing to do in HotM right now, and I doubt that this is going to change anytime soon.

Since a fair number of players alt-tab while queueing already, and this is only likely to increase if we can’t faff about in PvE doing world bosses or whatever… we need some way to find out if our queue has popped without player-side workaround (like running gw2 in windowed mode and resizing other application windows to keep an eye on the game).

Check back tomorrow.

:OO Are we getting a quality of life blog today? If we get templates as well along with that, i will finally be sold on this pvp patch, even though it isn’t new modes/maps.

One of the biggest issue I see with the information we have so far is that this system can continue to be gamed with multiple accounts.

Players with multiple accounts can continue to throw games by logging onto their alt account and leaving the match. This means players with these falsely tanking accounts can boost their rating by playing together and appearing weaker than they are through mixing play on their alts and main accounts with other players doing the same thing.

Rank 1 with 0% win rate incoming!

Joke aside, I am really excited for the incoming changes.

Nebilim.5127:

Josh Davis.6015:

cheese.4739:

Nebilim.5127:

Also, since queues can be a bit of issue right now, how goes the other quality of life changes. Did you guys implemented stuff like the gw2 icon flashing when there is a match found, for the people that alt tab? Ala league of legends.

Oh, this is a very important one.

While I’ve been hoping that players would have to play as the character they queued with (allowing us to get profession-based MMR) for a while – you say that we have to stay in the PvP lobby while queueing? There’s pretty much nothing to do in HotM right now, and I doubt that this is going to change anytime soon.

Since a fair number of players alt-tab while queueing already, and this is only likely to increase if we can’t faff about in PvE doing world bosses or whatever… we need some way to find out if our queue has popped without player-side workaround (like running gw2 in windowed mode and resizing other application windows to keep an eye on the game).

Check back tomorrow.

:OO Are we getting a quality of life blog today? If we get templates as well along with that, i will finally be sold on this pvp patch, even though it isn’t new modes/maps.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/go-with-the-flow/
Excellent! ^_^

Plz Be sure to send notifications to players after a lose that they can still get better MMR even if they lose. If they dont know how it works they will still give up in the middle of the fight thinking its either win or lose when its not since the points u have at the end of the match matters even if u lose

reset=“2014-02-01”

1.) I thought the rating is not going to get reset?

Profession max=“2”

2.) Maximum of two players of the same profession per team?

<Dishonor distance="-100" stack="-50"/>

3.) How should we read this pseudo-code? Is the dishonor distance the distance you may still play together? Can a player without any dishonor stacks play with a player with 104 stacks?

Kicker.8203:

Plz Be sure to send notifications to players after a lose that they can still get better MMR even if they lose. If they dont know how it works they will still give up in the middle of the fight thinking its either win or lose when its not since the points u have at the end of the match matters even if u lose

We can also help by just informing players via map chat when we are in Hotm.

Here is a factor that I do not think you have taken into consideration. If I as a player take on 2 to 3 players solo kill one (knock them inactive) do the same to another player and then die, because unless I get help I have never beat 3 players solo, I get no credit for the knockdowns in a situation that I can’t possibly win, this should be a factor, if its possible to calculate.

I hope that you might see that a person that kills (knocks others inactive) in an impossible situation does help the team dynamic, as this person ties up 40% to 60% of the players so others may capture points. If others show up while I am lying and finish the job I get kill credits of 5 to 5+10 points, but if I re-spawn its not shown as a kill credit. The facts are that I did all the work and the game gives me no recognition, because I cannot finish the job against any of the 3 players, the 1 to 2 players I’ve knocked inactive is not worth points? If so why not? Shouldn’t the points be 10 for the knockdown and 5 for finishing the job, so this type of skilled fighter to do this against many players and get a knockdown kill without finishing the job and not get any recognition is kind of disheartening, and in my opinion does not reflect skill fully.

I know this is a team game but if your determining skill based on points captured and not the fighting it takes to capture the point, then your missing the skill factor completely. Anyone can run around avoiding conflict capping for points, but to take over a point against almost impossible odds (2 or 3 v 1) should get you 2X to 3X point rating factor per knockdown (if you die or your team mops up after you die) and 3×3 kills in points (that determine rating or skill factor) if you live, even if you get help after most of the work is done.

Maybe I am off, I do not fully know how you determine points that we receive during play, in relation to how you determine rating based off skill, from these points. Or if your points you receive during matches, are ever a factored in determining skill based ratings. All I can say if capping points as opposed to taking points is what you base your rating off of as skill then removing points for capturing map points might be a better way to access skill and giving score for a knockdown enhances your ability yo better access skill.