Guild Wars 2

Early on in the Season played with an against the top NA players. Held my own me thinks, close games, learned a lot from them, super fun…but the grind is taking me away from this game. It’s demoralizing.

I dilly dallied in Plat for the longest time, then there was a point I went like 18-40 (from a total ~200 s5 games mind you, lost 60%WR). So, I took a break. Came back here and there and dilly dallied up Plat some more. It was a good time, but I never regained a near-60% WR. It was okay.

Then today, I was reminded why I should stop being optimistic about getting good games and stop trying to figuring out my strengths and weaknesses (getting better)…because no matter now much I improve, the game will keep me from really being able to show it. So many optimistic posts about PvP and I can understand why (when it is favorable), but for me… I’m not enjoying myself anymore. I’m still trying to WIN but the losses, the loss streaks like the following, is just too demoralizing for this game. I’m learning nothing from the losses to better myself. I’m not blaming my team, it’s just an impossible learning situation.

http://i.imgur.com/CyMZJRO.png

It was really fun versing top players here in NA when Season 5 started out. Ran into so many players from previous seasons. Good times were had.

I’m not enjoying the grind up, feeling good, then getting put into steaks like this. It’s quite frankly predictable and I can’t really avoid it even if I play a game a day or whatever…always results to a history like this. Makes me really doubt myself even when I put my all in every match and make sure I’m at doing my part (or if a good player compliments me).

I understand there are good things that came from this season. But there are many problems that are being ignored just because someone else didn’t have that experience or never will. No one, devs especially, want to talk about the problems.

Seems like everything is brushed off with an excuse. No easily accessible public roadmap for fixes post season. Just some players saying “stay optimistic”, “git gud”, “here’s the flawless algorithm” or other things that are not really what I’m trying to say is the “problem”.

This is the only game I have felt this way. I have no issue in other games…maybe because I’m blinded by being high rank in others that I don’t accurately see the faults in them. I don’t know. It may just be the GW2 NA scene.

Wish some famous top players could actually weigh in on stuff like this. Garbage like me have no voice. Evan Lesh will never understand.

Im in the same boat, although I dont care about division or ranks. What really bugs me is that for those loss streaks to happen the match maker is stacking all of the higher rated people on one side, consistently. And that isn’t fun at all, I know when a loss is inevitable after the first fight, and sadly it’s becoming predictable.

It certainly feels like stacking happens all the time. I had to play until I get 10 wins in ranger. My losses were 8 out of 10, and most were severe losses too, until it broke and became about even (2 losses, 2 wins). If you are playing about 3 hours after reset and later, the queue times become completely erratic — “average” is 1.4 minutes, but it’s either insta-match or 3-4 minute wait, which usually means it’ll be a blow-out one way or the other.

I presume it’s just a blind luck. You get into team that overall is weaker than other team, composition is complete trash, then you lose 500-100 and other team’s players chat in map chat on how garbage your team is. Question is, why the heck matchmaking puts you against them? Nobody knows.

I understand “get good” in case of 400-500 or closer (not making some mistakes or playing better here and there would mean a win) but for 100-500?

It doesn’t seem to get “better” with “playing more matches” either. It’s just random. So don’t despair, try to play closer to reset (odds of getting teams that are at least a bit closer are higher) and hope for better results and composition. Good luck!

Yep. My first 2 losses today were 501-34 and 500-169. Last night I had a 592-10. Evan can look this up if he wants.

Just ain’t fun and what’s the point?

I fully expected to get ~50% win rate once I hit my level with close games ~350+ either way but that doesn’t look like it’s gonna happen.

Same for me. Just that i don´t stop playing. Evan is trying and the balance patches showed a good direction but it is too slow. GW2 pvp will be outdated before reaching diversity (which i am sure is key for a game like GW2!) and a top state with the current speed.
I had two aweful loss streaks after working myself up. Result is i am at about 200 games and barely moved up. And there is not much learing in steamroll games. It feel like the MM system slows your progress and makes it grinding. I know i play a class that can´t carry as good as mesmer or thief but the game has nine classes and most players don´t play multiple to a high skill level.

Admitting and accepting of this fate seems to be the only way I can keep myself from quitting PvP. It’s pretty sad.

I want to be hopeful, some good players in the Top 50 have recently whispered me positive remarks and are sorry that this “loss streak” I’m currently still in “sucks big time and quite undeserving”.

I’m trying to keep my head up with other players remarks about how I play, but honestly I’m learning nothing from this loss streak. I focus on myself—what I could do better, how I can better support the team. It’s at the point that this streak just tempts me to do is question the meta build/pro tips and deviate away from them completely…but after 200+ S5 games, one shouldn’t succumb to “trolling” and I don’t want to go down that path.

For the first time in any season, I dropped under 50% Season Win Rate…my overall Ranked is sure to follow suite if I continue. That’s the problem, I want to continue because PvP is enjoyable…just not when “defeat” is all I see over 90% of the time nowadays.

I think no one actually cares about people in our situation. I go to top streamers asking everything I can, trying to figure out my wrongs, learn from them…maybe the tier I’m now in doesn’t work like that at all…everything causes me to doubt the state of the game.

I’m just going to burn myself out and quit PvP all over again…instead of being part of this unnecessary demoralization. This season is the only season I really felt this way (despite all the improvements).

You aren’t doing anything wrong, pvp is not a solo experience. One of the issues this season has been the influx of first time players into ranked pursuing the ascended gear. Thats great, I love expanding the playerbase, the problem is that they often get lumped together against the more experienced players and get absolutely slaughtered, and if youre unlucky enough to find yourself on the receiving end of that often enough it becomes demoralising, for the new players as well im sure. I have no solutions to offer Im afraid, im a glutton for punishment and when I get into a losing streak i just keep charging through until i reverse it, just to start losing again after 2 wins. I’d love fair and honest matches at all levels, I just dont think it’s possible in this game, if it were it wouldnt be taking this long. So we either suck it up and deal with it or walk away and find something else to do.

god this is depressing. if pvp really is in such a sorry state you would think someone in charge would scrap the current matchmaking algorithm and try something else. I’m definitely no mathematician, but I would think a starting point for a fair matchmaking system would start at balancing out kdr ratio, win loss streak, some sort of combined alternate match stat (heals, mitigated, etc), and basic stuff like that. what I would do is look at fps games and figure out how they do it.

Is your title a reference to a Series of Unfortunate Events?

I was also told that platinum has “tons of guardians”. I wonder maybe you could try to give it a shot and see if that at least breaks up monotony of loss streaks a bit? Porting around with judges intervention or sword 2 is kinda of fun Plus, a few more bugfixes for matchmaking are incoming!

This is exactly what has killed my motivation to play at all this season. I sensed it in previous seasons but it feels much more definite and impacts you more now.

I love PvP in mmos and I have played many games. Gw2 is the first where I go into the game not thinking how well I play will affect if we win. I know that if I maintain a 60% win rate and start climbing the ladder I will soon hit a losing streak and drop right back to where i started.

They need to give more power to the individual to have an impact on matches. Maybe removing down state would do this.

Kind of in the same boat here. Can win games vs top 10 but still not good enough. Majority of matches are stupidly one sided. Double duoq of top 10 players vs my team consisting of gold, afk and me is a thing…. and it costs me a lot of points.

I like the path they chose for pvp system however matchmaking really needs some fixing.
Lopsided matches are still too frequent, higher rated players are forced to carry lower rated players vs better team (this happens A LOT) and even if you win such matches, they are extremely unrewarding point wise.
Same goes for winning/losing matches vs teams that are 400-500 ranks above you. Idk why but current system assumes that 1600-1800 equals 2200 and calculates rank gains/losses based on it. I don’t even know how it mathematically makes any sense.

Thanks to broken matchmaking, alt accounts of top players, people getting placed really high right away anf afking for whole season (which leads to uneven matches due to lack of players in higher tiers) etc. people are scared of losing their ranks (for good reason, system is simple not balanced, it is worse than poker gambling). Nobody wants to play and those who play wouldn’t team with you if you are not at exact same rank.

I actually ended up playing less with friends because of it :/

I hoped to pvp a lot this season but due to all issues mentioned above and just pure luck based MM i just play a game or 2 till i lose and then stop pvping :/ PvPing a lot at begin of the season led me to dropping from 1900 to 1600 due to never ending loses (hello 100-500 matches with my teammates being hudreds of ranks below the enemy team) for whole week. It took me ages to climb back and i don’t want such experience again. Why does the system have to force me into ratings where i can pretty much solo everything (yes, scrappers, DHs and wars included) and win 1v2 fights on my thief is beyond me.

LUST.7241:

I’m learning nothing from the losses to better myself. I’m not blaming my team, it’s just an impossible learning situation.

Part of this isn’t your fault given that ArenaNet doesn’t give us much in the way of information to help us improve, especially when it comes to reviewing past matches. But I’ll be frank: if you’re losing literally 10 games in a row, there is absolutely something you’re doing wrong. Either it’s your mechanics, your map awareness, or your build. We all have bad games, and losing streaks do happen. I personally had a very bad run lately and dropped from Plat 2 to Gold 2 in the span of about a week. A few of the losses were certainly unwinnable, but I was also being incredibly stubborn by not changing my build or my approach. I kept hitting queue thinking things would just naturally turn around, and obviously that never happened.

By the time I hit Gold 2 I threw my arms up and said to heck with it and ran a Marauder+Adaptive Armor build with Elixir S and Blast Gyro. I had no intentions of it being successful; I just felt a radical change-up in my build was necessary to reset my outlook. It worked, and I’ve since managed to get back into Platinum. I’m still not satisfied where I’m at, and I’m not sure how much longer this build will be successful, but I think it’s incredibly unhealthy to just continue playing the game with the belief that you can’t learn anything from your losses.

Blame yourself for every death, and ask yourself how it could’ve been avoided. Examine your build and make sure you’re countercomping, as the meta build is a solid starting point, but it isn’t ideal vs. everything. You should arguably be changing utilities and traits prior to every match, doing everything you can to provide an edge.

It’s hard to be that edge this season as engineer is in a pretty precarious position. A lot of builds have the advantage against us 1v1 whereas we hard-counter pretty much no one. It’s painful, but I’ve also resigned to accept that sometimes playing my druid or warrior is far more impactful to the team.

Just never allow yourself to think there’s nothing to be learned from any death/loss. There’s always room for improvement.

Wolfric.9380:

I had two aweful loss streaks after working myself up. Result is i am at about 200 games and barely moved up. And there is not much learing in steamroll games. It feel like the MM system slows your progress and makes it grinding.

Delivering rewards based on skill (of which MMR is an algorithmically maintained approximation) rather than time spent (which is what the previous seasons gave) …

…well, it leads to exactly what you describe: you reach the MMR that matches your skill level, compared to all the other PvP players, and you more or less stay there.

The only way to change it is to improve your skills, which is hard work, and takes time and practice.

The matchmaking system, and the MMR which drives it, will lead to what feels like a grind to get higher “categories” than the old system, in which you gained them by winning, and never went backwards, so that one lucky win or carry could push you way above your actual skill level.

Phineas Poe.3018:

Part of this isn’t your fault given that ArenaNet doesn’t give us much in the way of information to help us improve, especially when it comes to reviewing past matches.

I definitely agree with this and I think that the game mode could do with a lot more explanation in general. Nothing is explained in game so I’m not at all surprised when I encounter players that don’t know what they’re doing at all. On the surface it’s ridiculously simple, you just have to capture the points and hold them, piece of cake.

But when you take into account the complex interrelationships between your builds/roles, the who can kill who relationship, secondary map mechanics, rotations, and so on it quickly becomes overwhelming. Some people just want to play a game, they don’t want to have to learn a new “language” to do that, especially when the game itself doesn’t help with that “language”.

The best games are those that are easy to learn but difficult to master. It needs to be simple to start so everyone can get involved but difficult to master so there can be a clear skill difference between a first timer and a seasoned vet. This is not one. It’s difficult to learn (largely due to build complexity and uncertain roles/relationships) and difficult to master. ArenaNet need to tackle that problem, I think.

I’m literally garbage in the figurative sense.

The problem itself can stem from multiple sources.

1. There isn’t enough punishment/incentive to not use alt accounts at the high end
FIX – Make leader board require a high level of min games played. I think 100 is a decent number. If you play over 100 games on multiple accounts, then sure you can have 2 accounts on the leaderboard.

2. There still is no where near enough penalty for DCing. If someone DCs for longer than twice the respawn time of a dead player, the team with the DC should no longer be penalized. The player who DC’d should also not be allowed back in the match to try and “salvage” it and make the teammates lose progress. The winning team (assuming the 5 man won), should get reward, but lesser.

3. There is no penalty for AFKing. The AFKing algorithm needs far more information to it, such as the current score, the players location, etc.
a. For example, if there is a blowout and the score is 450-50, if the player doesn’t want to move for 10s at base, that’s likely not something you should penalize.
b. The players on the losing team should never be allowed to stay still outside of a node that you are capping for more than a few seconds.
c. If the players on the losing team are moving, the algorithm should detect if they are doing something productive, such as attacking something, capping/decapping, etc.
d. The higher the ranked match is, the more strict these should be. For example, if someones internet is so bad that they end up in Bronze, maybe we let them continue to play. In platinum/legendary, there needs to be penalty/incentive in the game for this to never happen.

Once the algorithm is adjusted and proven to be accurate, the penalties need to increase. If you login to a game and just sit AFK, you shouldn’t be allowed to play ranked for a week. Period. If you do it twice, a month. Three times, the whole season. Four times, permanently.

Aye, it is really strange and because of this system I can’t really say if I am a bad player or not.
Firstly I got placed in the first tier of gold, fell to silver a bunch of times and then I climbed to platinum all that solo as a guardian with a non meta build (I don’t like playing traps).
I play pvp for about 7 years, over 1 year in GW2. I know my drill, how to do stuff… but today is a bizzare day.
I am freshly after some exams so I didn’t play for a few days so I could study. After those examinations (which I passed, yay!) I came back to play some because decay made me fall to gold. And so it began, now I feel like a bottom casual who should belong to bronze. All my actions, rotations, everything I did was in vain, I ended up in 1v2 situations most of the time. I couldn’t do much no matter how hard I tried.
I am confused, am I really inefficient? Is it just that the system forces me to feel like I am a skilless bag of failure?
I can’t even win a decent deal of unranked ; _ ;