Guild Wars 2

So I made this graphic of a “GW2 slot machine”. It illustrates that the matchmaker will quickly throw together a match between two teams who have wildly different playing skill.

As expected, the higher skill team usually wins, and the lower skill team typically loses.

Why a slot machine? Because it is RANDOM as to how close the teams will match, on skill. The matchmaker does not try to make the match close in skill; it mainly wants to just move all the better players up and out of the division.

Yet Helseth presents my slot machine picture, “Now I want you to look at this. Look at this! This is the noobiest thing ever. This is the noobiest thing I have ever seen!”, he shouts.

Because to him, it’s fine to have unequal matchups, you just have to carry your team. And if you cannot carry then you are trash.

Really?

I watched his video and I did learn some things, and I did implement them using my scrapper. And it helped some, but not enough to make my teammates rotate better or win their fights when I was not there with my Scrapper.

I would stare at the score 2 minutes into the game and other than myself and one other person, my team would have 0 points, while the other team was a list of 80 and 100 points for every player.

There is a limit to how much you can carry.

I really want to watch his next, expanded video he promised, to learn more about carrying.

But there seems to be a limit to what you can carry.

I like it, thanks for the graphic, it’s apt.

He says he can carry a team of 5 people all by himself which is not always true even with stuff like Shatter Mes, Bunker Tempest or Scrapper, because some people will always find a way to screw it up, or the matchmaking by throwing 4 guys +1 at you with TS by having DuoQers of lower rank in your team.

He should just admit that he got lucky with a good MMR at start, because otherwise he wouldn’t have reached Diamond until late March (he’s good but there’s a limit to nonsense).

Amineo.8951:

He says he can carry a team of 5 people all by himself which is not always true even with stuff like Shatter Mes, Bunker Tempest or Scrapper, because some people will always find a way to screw it up, or the matchmaking by throwing 4 guys +1 at you with TS by having DuoQers of lower rank in your team.

He should just admit that he got lucky with a good MMR at start, because otherwise he wouldn’t have reached Diamond until late March (he’s good but there’s a limit to nonsense).

It also ask for opponents who won’t be able to identify the problem (the carrier) and reformulate accordingly. A Moa is a good carrier ender and the opponent might also have them.

Let’s be fair and admit he is really good, he would have gotten fast to a high division even with the last seasons mmr matching. Yet he is also an arrogant s’hole and overestimates himself. To the topic, the image doesn’t look like a high quality edit, still I think it does reflect the current matchmaking system.

Sirbeaumerdier,

Good point. Is it also possible that people seeing him on the opposing team start to focus on him, thus creating favorable numeric matchups for his team in other fights across the map?

Your image is definitely funny and got a laugh out of me. However, you should thank him for making it viewed by far more people then without his comments about it! (No such thing as bad publicity!) Don’t take it personal, I think he is just sick of all the whining and saw your image as a culmination of all that he disagrees with on the subject.

Secondly, on carrying. Of course there are limits! He admits as much, but those limits are not nearly as obvious as poor/average players like to make them out to be. The point of his post is to show that we all have to deal with poor match-ups, and that you can drastically improve both your experience and your ranking by keeping a positive and constructive mindset and improving on your own skill, rather then giving up and blaming the system. (The same system everyone else is playing in too!)

For now at least, AI will never produce accurate match-ups! Even when/if it did, many people are way too subjective to ever agree with it, and would still always pee and moan about all other factors except for the one closest to home. It gets worse when these players then get together on a public forum and spread their negativity, ending in a feedback loop of a defeatist attitude. These empowers the whiner to demand fixes to the system, despite having very little evidence and experience to base their claims on. (Hunches and hyperbole do not make good evidence!)

We’ve all seen this happen countless times in profession balance, where “mob rule” has caused our favorite build/profession to be nerfed into the ground. We all get mad about this when it happens to us, but we all have a hard time admitting that we may have played a similar part in a nerf of another class.

All I know is that when I was watching Helseth’s comments on carrying, that I saw a lot of myself in some of the poor play examples he pointed out. How many times our ego has us staying in a 1v1 fight that hurts our team, or how simply “bad habits” have us doing silly things that we never bothered to analyze and think fully through. In soloQ you often just kinda play mindlessly. You expect the worst of your team, and should, but then turn around and also do some pretty stupid/selfish things, and still blame your bad team for losing in the end.

No one is saying you will turn around one of those ridiculous blow-outs, but look at your losing streaks again —objectively-- and see how many of those games did end up with 300+ points on your team. Helseth is right in saying you quite probably could have won those games if YOU played to your fullest potential. You will find that at least 2-4 games will not have been blow-outs, and if you could improve enough to turn some/all of those into wins you will then greatly improve the odds that you’ll never see a long streak of losses.

I dunno, I think he’s usually spot on. Yeah he’s rough around the edges and arrogant, but that’s part of becoming a semi-celeb in a testosterone driven environment that competitive PvP generally is. I don’t take that seriously, and I doubt he does as well. Instead I look at what I can learn from him, and quite frankly that’s a whole lot despite having played >6000 matches on my Mesmer and having mained him since beta. (Proving that time played has absolutely no relation to skill level! )

antichecker.1675:

To the topic, the image doesn’t look like a high quality edit, still I think it does reflect the current matchmaking system.

No problem. I did it in Photoshop in about 30 minutes, just as a powerful illustration of the idea. If I was more knowledgeable in Photoshop techniques and shortcuts, I could have done it in 10 minutes.

Windwalker,

Yes, I DID see myself in some of the things he called out in his video. And I, too, have a lot of matches, 4700+, and yet I realize I played most of those the same way, with the same lack of deeper understanding.

So I will watch his next video to learn more.

I think ANet has the right idea in moving people up and out of division faster; they just urgently need a way to identify decent players caught with an artificially low MMR and up their MMR as well and move them further up the divisions as well.

people still take Helseth seriously?

Laserbolt.6731:

I think ANet has the right idea in moving people up and out of division faster; they just urgently need a way to identify decent players caught with an artificially low MMR and up their MMR as well and move them further up the divisions as well.

It might help to match low MMR teams against low MMR teams. This doesn’t affect high MMR teams or how fast they will leave the division. By matching low vs low, you’ll eventually get to see which players had low MMR artificially, and which didn’t. Those who are actually decent players will prevail against someone of their own skill and they will move on. It’s been ten days of Season 2 and we still get absolute slaughters as “matches,” despite people saying things will smooth out. When?

The issue with these slaughters (500-100 matches) is that they are exceptionally common in Season 2 and they are the reason so many people had their MMR drop drastically. I mean, it happened sometimes before as well, but the rate at which it happens in this Season is staggering.

Oh no a stranger has a negative opinion about something I drew, MOM MOM! MOM! better post about it on the internet MOM! someone said they didn’t like me!

Mightybird.6034:

Oh no a stranger has a negative opinion about something I drew, MOM MOM! MOM! better post about it on the internet MOM! someone said they didn’t like me!

Nah. It’s not about me. It’s about the idea the slot machine represents and his rejection of that idea.

Malediktus.9250:

people still take Helseth seriously?

Not everyone has played the game for 3 years, so newer players can learn a lot from a streamer.

There’s a simple way to discredit Helseth’s argument. If it is as possible to carry as he says, why did he have his tantrum last season when the system tried to make the MMR of both team even? He didn’t have to carry a bad team against a good team. He had to carry mediocre teams against mediocre teams and couldn’t kittening do it. Then made the noobiest youtube tantrum ever.

Laserbolt.6731:

they just urgently need a way to identify decent players caught with an artificially low MMR and up their MMR as well and move them further up the divisions as well.

They could, but I fear the number of players that are actually in that case if by far inferior to the number of the players convinced that they are. Egos could be bruised.

Beliyal.7085:

Laserbolt.6731:

I think ANet has the right idea in moving people up and out of division faster; they just urgently need a way to identify decent players caught with an artificially low MMR and up their MMR as well and move them further up the divisions as well.

It might help to match low MMR teams against low MMR teams. This doesn’t affect high MMR teams or how fast they will leave the division. By matching low vs low, you’ll eventually get to see which players had low MMR artificially, and which didn’t. Those who are actually decent players will prevail against someone of their own skill and they will move on. It’s been ten days of Season 2 and we still get absolute slaughters as “matches,” despite people saying things will smooth out. When?

The issue with these slaughters (500-100 matches) is that they are exceptionally common in Season 2 and they are the reason so many people had their MMR drop drastically. I mean, it happened sometimes before as well, but the rate at which it happens in this Season is staggering.

This is what happened last season though. People with low mmr played people with low mmr and high mmr people played high mmr people. and the truly good people would be in legendary along with the not so good people.

You are right though. Slaughters should not happen, that should be the goal of the system. Get someone to the position in the league they belong so they can play matches with equally skilled players. This system actually does it better than last seasons. There are just alot of players that will be disappointed because they won’t get as high as they did last season and because this system actually has a highly unbalanced system for the first 2 weeks. They did already admit to this and are looking into it for season 3. (personally I think they should introduce an idea of placement matches, during those you are matched with people of your own mmr range (15/10 games?). after that, you get put into either amber or emerald and from that point onwards its anyone of your division in your team and in the opponents

Pvt Frosty.6973:

This is what happened last season though. People with low mmr played people with low mmr and high mmr people played high mmr people. and the truly good people would be in legendary along with the not so good people.

I guess they need a system that will reconcile these issues. Right now it looks like they swapped one problem for the other.

You are right though. Slaughters should not happen, that should be the goal of the system. Get someone to the position in the league they belong so they can play matches with equally skilled players. This system actually does it better than last seasons. There are just alot of players that will be disappointed because they won’t get as high as they did last season and because this system actually has a highly unbalanced system for the first 2 weeks. They did already admit to this and are looking into it for season 3. (personally I think they should introduce an idea of placement matches, during those you are matched with people of your own mmr range (15/10 games?). after that, you get put into either amber or emerald and from that point onwards its anyone of your division in your team and in the opponents

Placement matches, a pre-season or something similar would be good. I also really think people who end a season in Legendary don’t have to start out in Amber and stomp average players into MMR hell.

Also, yeah, the fact that things are unbalanced for 2 weeks is too much. Your options are to risk and see if you can make it on luck or simply to not play for the first 2 (maybe even 3) weeks, but that doesn’t seem like a really good solution or advice. I mean, “don’t play the game” is not really beneficial to anyone. They should come up with something that will solve this in future Seasons.

Amineo.8951:

He says he can carry a team of 5 people all by himself

That’s exactly opposite of what he was saying (and complaining about) last season. Since i don’t think he improved that much in that time, i can only guess that either he’s getting much better teammates now, or that he’s talking kitten.

Astralporing.1957:

Amineo.8951:

He says he can carry a team of 5 people all by himself

That’s exactly opposite of what he was saying (and complaining about) last season. Since i don’t think he improved that much in that time, i can only guess that either he’s getting much better teammates now, or that he’s talking kitten.

He got legend last season too. Last season had many other problems outside of matchmaking, stop taking things out of context, the fact is he already tried multiple times to carry with low mmr account, if one person truly can’t carry then how do you explain that?

You are taking things out of context. The legendary players have all moved on due to the fast tracking this season did for them. So he wouldn’t be playing anyone remotely near his skill level. So having the so-called “greatest player in the universe” on your team helps. So what?

And what were these other issues last season that caused his blowup other than he was not able to carry teams in an equal game? Would that be a full of kitten statement?

warbignime.4610:

Astralporing.1957:

Amineo.8951:

He says he can carry a team of 5 people all by himself

That’s exactly opposite of what he was saying (and complaining about) last season. Since i don’t think he improved that much in that time, i can only guess that either he’s getting much better teammates now, or that he’s talking kitten.

He got legend last season too.

Sure, he did, eventually. So? He still was raging at the system then, and one of the reasons he was citing for being angry with was that a single person cannot carry a whole team.

warbignime.4610:

Last season had many other problems outside of matchmaking, stop taking things out of context, the fact is he already tried multiple times to carry with low mmr account, if one person truly can’t carry then how do you explain that?

Haven’t seen those “carries” but my guess is that the accounts either weren’t that low mmr as you think, or he just got lucky (and getting carried/kittened by luck is one of the major problems this season have) when the system assigned him enemies.

jessiestiles.9437:

There’s a simple way to discredit Helseth’s argument. If it is as possible to carry as he says, why did he have his tantrum last season when the system tried to make the MMR of both team even? He didn’t have to carry a bad team against a good team. He had to carry mediocre teams against mediocre teams and couldn’t kittening do it. Then made the noobiest youtube tantrum ever.

Exactly. This is why I don’t buy denier’s nonsense. This system is NOT legit.

Yeah funny picture. Helseth can be funny in a duckish way, trollish in a duckish way, but at the end of the day hes just a plain duck.

Dunno, when I enter a fighting game tournament, its completely random who my opponents are. If its double elimination format, then maybe my second match will be easier. But I could get the tournament winner on my first match. Most tournaments are like this.

Whereas in my amateur basketball league, we have to play every other team in the league. Since we’re pretty casual, 3/4 of the other teams are stronger than us, and we end up near the bottom of the ladder with 25% winrate or so. Most sports leagues are like this.

These two formats are standard in most competitive activities, outside of online videogames. The notion that you should only ever get close matches, that the system should protect you from tough conditions, is a pretty recent and scrubby one.

(As for elo hell, I guess there usually aren’t any team sports in RL that even allow you to participate without a full team, so “solo queue” only exists in a small group of videogames.)

You have to wake up to the fact this is a game a lot of people play solo. And no matter how much anyone wants them to join a team they aren’t going to. So there’s zero choice but to cater to them. That doesn’t mean don’t cater to pro teams.

So … someone who is usually being carried by whole team, cause his personal skill is trash, is telling others to carry their team? Best thing I ever heard.

I love when some people bandwagon without actually watching the video. Helseth absolutely did not say that he or anybody else could carry every single individual game. If you lose 150 to 500 it means you were at a comp and skill disadvantage, your team never won a single team fight and you got farmed all game. No single player can carry those games, it can’t be done in a 5v5 conquest format. Those landslide games happen to ESL pros and casual nubs alike. What Helseth was talking about is the mentality of carrying games, and what that mentality entails in terms of strategy and match-level execution. If you’re unclear on that, feel free to watch the VOD again.

As for the complaint regarding season one, the gist of the criticism is that season one was not a ladder in any sense of the word. There was no skill progression and tiers did not represent player skill in any way. You played with and against your own rating in every bracket, and climbing was simply a matter of spamming games. We had legends with 1200 MMR and legends with 3000 MMR. Season one was just a PvP reward track, nothing more. Season two features only marginal improvement, by the way, but that’s a topic for another thread.

Aereniel.7356:

As for the complaint regarding season one, the gist of the criticism is that season one was not a ladder in any sense of the word. There was no skill progression and tiers did not represent player skill in any way. You played with and against your own rating in every bracket, and climbing was simply a matter of spamming games. We had legends with 1200 MMR and legends with 3000 MMR. Season one was just a PvP reward track, nothing more. Season two features only marginal improvement, by the way, but that’s a topic for another thread.

More importantly, the meta during season 1 was a tank meta, which is the reason behind his complaint. Killing tanks takes ages, snowballing your team was much harder to do back then than it is in the current meta

He is saying if we are stuck and can’t carry a team it’s our own fault. And neither of those^ is a reason why he couldn’t do it last season. The bunker meta didn’t start till at least week 3.

“..I played on a viewers account who had a 17 loss streak and had an incredibly easy time winning 8 games in a row.

People seem to really exaggerate their chances in these games. Losing isnt fun, some of these games may be really unfair, but this whole ‘’low mmr players are put in impossible games even though they deserve better’’ is just silly to me. I’m 100% sure that I can play on anyones account and produce identical scores to what I have on this account"

Haha that ranger (asuming that’s a gs at a funny angle) drinking booze maDe me chuckle xD

Helseth is actually one of the few really good streamers of competitive GWII. I hope they will get him to do some actual commentary on pro league matches in the future since his knowledge about rotations and such is much more in depth and less boring than the current casters.

Let me see if i get this right….

Last season, when matchmaking would try to put teams equaly skilled against each other Helseth could not carry.

This season, when matchmaking put goods against bads, Helseth with his high MMR, so he is placed in the good team, he can carry against bads….

Seems legit…

silentnight warrior.2714:

Let me see if i get this right….

Last season, when matchmaking would try to put teams equaly skilled against each other Helseth could not carry.

This season, when matchmaking put goods against bads, Helseth with his high MMR, so he is placed in the good team, he can carry against bads….

Seems legit…

Not quite, though there may be some truth to what you’re saying.

Last season carrying was hard because of the meta and how it played. It was extremely “noob-friendly” (slow paced, low overall damage etc.)

Carrying this season is easier, because mistakes are more fatal which you can capitalise on.

Also, I do not think Helseths statement is based on the initial games you play, more on the games from the recent days (where he would be playing with but also against really good players)

Not at the start of the season when he was having difficulty. It was much more like this season. At about week 3 everyone turned to using celestial bunker builds.

jessiestiles.9437:

Not at the start of the season when he was having difficulty. It was much more like this season. At about week 3 everyone turned to using celestial bunker builds.

IIRC he was complaining after week 3

Before week 3 was another issue that had nothing to do with carrying, so if he complained before that it would have been related to the fact that he and the other pros played together from amber all the way to legendary, because of the matchmaking

Yes he complained later also.

But we are talking about an actual video he posted at the start of the season in tier 2 emerald and he couldn’t go up a single tier after hours of playing. Everyone was in the same boat struggling and teams were not all pros. That’s part of what they complained about. Low and average skill players advanced along side pros “because of the matchmaking”. It wasn’t designed to sort people into divisions.

This season they are happy because they didn’t have to struggle. Their games were stacked so the lower division player took all the grind. And they use bs arguments like this to blame the lower division players for their grind.

It’s like the old royalty arguments. I can prove God wants me to be king because I am king. You are not king therefore you are a peasant.

Aereniel.7356:

As for the complaint regarding season one, the gist of the criticism is that season one was not a ladder in any sense of the word. There was no skill progression and tiers did not represent player skill in any way. You played with and against your own rating in every bracket, and climbing was simply a matter of spamming games. We had legends with 1200 MMR and legends with 3000 MMR. Season one was just a PvP reward track, nothing more. Season two features only marginal improvement, by the way, but that’s a topic for another thread.

in a system that reward points for victory there is no way to limit this, every player that have 51% win rate can have more points of 99% winrate player. so in the s2 we will have the same,probably is more easy than s1.
so the result is the same. but at least matches of s1 are fun and fair.

Carry is objective, if your enemy team is not that much better then your team, but slightly better, then sure you can carry, which is most of the cases
since most people with high MMR already moved up ranks..so it’s basically your problem now

Your comment is not objective. Are you talking about amber or are you talking about saphire or ruby? I can only speak of the division I am currently in (saphire) and the skill of the players varies greatly. A person on the forum posted a comment today about the variation of skill in ruby and diamond.

So i’d guess you are just talking out the side of your kitten right?

This is supposed to be news? This was explained 1000 times. You can use all the pejorative analogies you want. People that paid attention from day one knew that was how its supposed to work. You are going to be fighting people within 15 pips of you in the league that’s it. MMR is ued for YOUR teammates. It has to work like this for leagues to be a reflection of skill. If you match lower mmr people with lower mmr people you have people getting to diamond and legendary that do not belong there. Also, the quality of play doesn’t really rise along the way either. Are we really prosecuting this again? This is the way it has to be if they want league placement to equal skill. Sure change it then but leagues will not mean anything again. There is nothing random (meaning not planned by A-net) about any of this.

Laserbolt.6731:

So I made this graphic of a “GW2 slot machine”. It illustrates that the matchmaker will quickly throw together a match between two teams who have wildly different playing skill.

As expected, the higher skill team usually wins, and the lower skill team typically loses.

Why a slot machine? Because it is RANDOM as to how close the teams will match, on skill. The matchmaker does not try to make the match close in skill; it mainly wants to just move all the better players up and out of the division.

Yet Helseth presents my slot machine picture, “Now I want you to look at this. Look at this! This is the noobiest thing ever. This is the noobiest thing I have ever seen!”, he shouts.

Because to him, it’s fine to have unequal matchups, you just have to carry your team. And if you cannot carry then you are trash.

Really?

I watched his video and I did learn some things, and I did implement them using my scrapper. And it helped some, but not enough to make my teammates rotate better or win their fights when I was not there with my Scrapper.

I would stare at the score 2 minutes into the game and other than myself and one other person, my team would have 0 points, while the other team was a list of 80 and 100 points for every player.

There is a limit to how much you can carry.

I really want to watch his next, expanded video he promised, to learn more about carrying.

But there seems to be a limit to what you can carry.

I am sorry, this is not enough.

You should put nude toon pick on it and call it the s_ l_ u_ t_ machine where supposed to be skilled players prefer to get easy GRINDS to skill based matchup.

Honestly why do people actually make posts about this
Hes just a dude with an opinion or additude. All you are doing is evading an actual constructive thread and giving this person the attention he wants.
(not ment to be offensive but I just dont see the use of this thread)