Guild Wars 2

Ithilwen.1529:

No, I’m dreading it. Most of all, I am afraid ANET is going to say that matchmaking went well in S3 and just needs a few tweeks. The level of exploiting by teams was awful.

I have 3 divisions to cross for the kittening wings. Then I can leave “leagues” to the voice enabled teams and let them use someone else for a whipping girl.

How many players do you think actually queue up using any type of communication? You have such a distorted view of what actually is going on and make so outlandish claims without anything to support them.

Josh Davis.6015:

Tomiyou.3790:

Also, Josh, the way the current legendary backpiece is rewarded (people needing to cross divisions) should be changed if you make divisions more representative of skill, as most would get stuck in a division, unable to climb further = no more progressing divisions. Otherwise not all people could get them. I’m fine by that, but I don’t think majority will be-

Yep – this has been part of our discussions, and ties back to:

• Make leagues feel more rewarding after you’ve placed in your appropriate division

remember that twitter post saying id pm you? this is what i pmed you

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Some-suggested-changes-to-Spvp-Seasons/first#post6238006

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

It’s been a while since we’ve commented on leagues, so here’s a brief update.

There’s definitely room for improvement in the league system, and it’s safe to say that it’s the team’s highest priority now that we’ve signed off on everything going in for the July release. It’s still a bit early to talk about specifics, but I do think we can talk about some of the goals we have for the changes:

• Improve match quality
• Make divisions more reflective of player skill
• Make leagues feel more rewarding after you’ve placed in your appropriate division

We’re still determining the scope of the project, but I do want to be clear that it’s unlikely that these changes will be in for S4. Once we get a bit further in the dev process I’ll see if I can give an update on our thoughts/direction.

-Grouch

I think the whole “the division you should be in” idea is a bit weird.
The matches are won by the team and you climb divisions by match wins, not by your personal score.
So if you are in a bad division, you might get a bad team every second match and will make climbing divisions really hard unless you can carry your team more than someone on the other side…

I really think the division progress should be influenced by individual score somehow, otherwise the division you are in is not necessary the division you should be… just the division you cant bother to grind your way out of.

I like the PVP, I just have a problem with some players.

First, the ONLY reason why It took me so long to get started with PVP is a minority of players in the community itself, aka toxic players. You know… the kind that goes “OMFG you noobs you suck” not even a minute after the match starts cause your team lost the battle at mid … well yeah, a team usually loses it every match, does that mean there’s a noob team every match? No? Maybe you could just keep playing and give meaningful advices since you seem to win them all?

This doesn’t help making a team win, on the contrary, nobody wants to try harder when there’s a whiner in a team. I’ve been in teams that were doing bad and someone stood up and actually gave meaningful advices, that’s how you win, and that’s how you become better. Being toxic never made anyone win a single match, it just makes the experience (let’s remember, it’s a game) stressful for some and overall not fun.
You also gotta remember, not everyone plays at a “pro” level, nor want to. Like, I understand that some mistakes are not really acceptable in diamond/legendary divisions, but don’t blame people at lower divisions for not being perfect… It’s just stupid, and it’s even more true in unranked. If you want to get more people interested in pvp, it’s just unacceptable to insult them when they’re trying to learn, jeez.
And no, ignoring these people isnt always easy. I shouldnt have to completely turn off the chat whenever one guy in one team out of 5 decides he needs to be (or pretend to be) good at a game to shine in life.
I really, really wish there was a way to report this kind of behavior.

The second thing that is getting annoying is that with some players, whenever they’re losing (we’re talking 200 vs 300) just go afk, and pretend the team can’t win…
Well I don’t know what kind of pvp these people play, but usually you don’t just stop playing because you lose, it’s called fair play. Plus there’s a lot of situations where you can end up winning anyway. It’s actually very fulfilling to win against a team that gave you a hard time.
Again, no way to properly punish players who go AFK in the middle of a match. It shouldnt be hard to detect someone who doesnt move (or stay at the start)…

I’ll say this again, this is a game, a game is made to have fun. I know some of us (me included) only do pvp for the backpack, but that doesn’t mean it has to be an unpleasant experience. Anet has some work to do but the whole experience can be made a LOT better by the community itself.

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

It’s been a while since we’ve commented on leagues, so here’s a brief update.

There’s definitely room for improvement in the league system, and it’s safe to say that it’s the team’s highest priority now that we’ve signed off on everything going in for the July release. It’s still a bit early to talk about specifics, but I do think we can talk about some of the goals we have for the changes:

• Improve match quality
• Make divisions more reflective of player skill
• Make leagues feel more rewarding after you’ve placed in your appropriate division

We’re still determining the scope of the project, but I do want to be clear that it’s unlikely that these changes will be in for S4. Once we get a bit further in the dev process I’ll see if I can give an update on our thoughts/direction.

-Grouch

Making leagues feel more rewarding is actually pretty easy. Increase reward track gain per division cross.
Make a leaderboard with detailed statistics for first 100 legendary players, giving the first 10 on that leaderboard the opportunity to advertise themselves with a short text and image.
→ Prestige.

As to the other two points, I have to say that without separate mmr and placement for premades, theres simply no way. Its not as if most premades are of the same skill level. Mostly its one good player, and at least one really bad player that tags along. But because of how the system works, the mmr of the bad player gets up adjusted until the carrying “limit” of the good player(s) is reached. The bad player now has an inflated mmr, that will place him on better teams in the future, where he either drags other players down, or gets carried further up.
-> Premades distort mmr of their players
And the result is poor match quality for everybody but full fixed teams.

And this is why Im not the least bit even interested in a fourth season. Because anet will never fix this. So next season would be just a repeat of season before. I tried it for three seasons, Im fed up with it. There are enough other pvp games out now that I can enjoy… no need to frustrate myself with crappy matchmaking in gw2. So… no, not keen, not angry, just… not interested anymore.

Regon Phoenix.8215:

Lord Hammer Hand.4815:

looking forward for season 4? NOPE, but will i play during S4? YES till i reach legendary then stop. aslong as ANET doesnt give legendary players a reason why keep playing at that level with lack of reward. dont even start with long Q’s. and i think it will be worst these S4.

Not going to happen. I made a thread suggesting a reward system for playing in legendary, but bunch of people raged and said that there should be no rewards for playing in the top league.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Legendary-League-sPVP-reward-progression/first#post6234862

Funny how you distort what you dont like. Most that didnt agree with you said that there dont need to be even more shinies than there already are. That shinies are the wrong kind of incentive. Not that there should be no rewards at all. Please re-read your own thread.

if the system still make you stuck in ruby cause it team you up with low lvl ppl than ppl still gonna QQ about it. and by the way anet working the system design in a flaw matter as it score the player base on his group play.

the only solution is to add also self score by your class or build
like if i am ele support i will get point base on how good supportive i was . if i am thief than decap/cap and dmg etc…

when i see thief in group fight dying all the time or ele sit on close bunker the point while we need him on mid fight it give you no incentive to work harder

thus if i win i get 1 pip and if also i did good offense i get another pip
if i win and didnt do well i get only 1 pip
if i lose and still did good i wont lose pip
if i lose and did worse i lose pip

this way even when you see your team losing you will try harder to do good to not lose a pip. or even when you team winning you still push harder to gain another pip
and when the fight ends in like 500-0 probably the winning team get only 1 pip cause the system match them with such low lvl players or afk so the ele didnt need to support much and the dmg dealers didnt do much dmg so this win wont benefit those easy matches only the harder ones.
how you do it ?
put a score limit. like for every class put a dmg limit , support limit, and defense limit. so when you reach those you will get a pip for self score

like necro dmg should be like 700k – aoe
thief dmg should be 300k – solo
support for ele should be 500k but for ranger 300k
defense for guard should be 500k, warrior 600k
(just throwing numbers)
etc..

I couldn’t care. I got to diamond for max reward. I can’t care about reaching legend. There’s no prestige to it and seeing the same builds over and over and over again gets boring. I think I played 92 matches this season and won 66 of them. Seeing every ele, mesmer, necromancer, engi, guard and rev running the same builds got incredibly boring and easy to predict.

Unless they nerf elite specs this won’t stop. This goes for my rev too. They just make kitten too easy and tempest is the worst of the bunch (it’s not unbalanced but every game has one and it’s boring in every aspect). If there was a reason to not take elite specs it would add a lot more of the needed enjoyment. Why? Rotations would be more important without tempests holding point and perma swiftness heralds moving between two at Mach 5, you would have to size up your opponent before fighting the to figure out their build, people having to learn how to play their clas in PvP before playing ranked to do well. We cant get rid of the grind but we can make it harder to climb the ladder by making it harder to win.

There’s also loss steak breaking. That needs to go. It makes climbing the ladder too easy and dropping in it nearly impossible.

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

It’s been a while since we’ve commented on leagues, so here’s a brief update.

There’s definitely room for improvement in the league system, and it’s safe to say that it’s the team’s highest priority now that we’ve signed off on everything going in for the July release. It’s still a bit early to talk about specifics, but I do think we can talk about some of the goals we have for the changes:

• Improve match quality
• Make divisions more reflective of player skill
• Make leagues feel more rewarding after you’ve placed in your appropriate division

We’re still determining the scope of the project, but I do want to be clear that it’s unlikely that these changes will be in for S4. Once we get a bit further in the dev process I’ll see if I can give an update on our thoughts/direction.

-Grouch

Will there be any sort of soft-reset for MMR or should players that had big loss streaks at literally any point in season 3 just skip the trouble and not play from day one?

It’s great that you’re planning on changes in season 5, but you need to not allow your playerbase to become so jaded and discouraged that they quit before it gets here. Something needs to be done in the short-term.

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

It’s been a while since we’ve commented on leagues, so here’s a brief update.

There’s definitely room for improvement in the league system, and it’s safe to say that it’s the team’s highest priority now that we’ve signed off on everything going in for the July release. It’s still a bit early to talk about specifics, but I do think we can talk about some of the goals we have for the changes:

• Improve match quality
• Make divisions more reflective of player skill
• Make leagues feel more rewarding after you’ve placed in your appropriate division

We’re still determining the scope of the project, but I do want to be clear that it’s unlikely that these changes will be in for S4. Once we get a bit further in the dev process I’ll see if I can give an update on our thoughts/direction.

-Grouch

At the moment your class balance and how elite specs have more defence, offence and synergies better with the class than any of the other trait lines is making people leave in droves. This isn’t just in PvP but WvW and PvE too.

Is Arena Net planning to change their stance on only balancing between seasons unless necessary? At the moment a lot of my friend just don’t bother playing anymore as they are so fed up with this blunder of a decision to balance only once every few months and how silly strong elite specs are vs core specs.

I’ve only participated in one season and won’t be bothering with the next one either. It’s not the system that bothers me, it’s the quality of combat. The actual game play in PvP has simply not been enjoyable to me since HoT released.

I’m a big PvP fan and I often like to play some matches (mostly for my dailies), but I’ve lost interest in the leagues a while ago… partly because they had the tendency to start whenever I was occupied by other stuff (hinting also at the fact that they’re not doing their job in trying to lure me in)… partly because the rewards are highly unsatisfactory.. If you get 2 gold for your dailies, what would I care playing so much for only a slightly bigger reward (I don’t care at all about the backpiece, so there is almost all the incentive gone).

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

It’s been a while since we’ve commented on leagues, so here’s a brief update.

There’s definitely room for improvement in the league system, and it’s safe to say that it’s the team’s highest priority now that we’ve signed off on everything going in for the July release. It’s still a bit early to talk about specifics, but I do think we can talk about some of the goals we have for the changes:

• Improve match quality
• Make divisions more reflective of player skill
• Make leagues feel more rewarding after you’ve placed in your appropriate division

We’re still determining the scope of the project, but I do want to be clear that it’s unlikely that these changes will be in for S4. Once we get a bit further in the dev process I’ll see if I can give an update on our thoughts/direction.

-Grouch

Pls fix the AOE Healing and Passive CC problem in PVP. thx

Zynt.5769:

Malediktus.9250:

I prefer grindable seasons like season 1 over your plans wich usually make things worse than better. Season 1 was by far the best season so far.

I thought Season 1 was considered by many to be the worst, because of people exploiting it and the bunker meta?

Main exploit has been removed in the second half of that season (by a simple expedient of matchmaking according to not average, but the highest division in a queueing group). Skill/Class balance is a separate issue. As far as matchmaking go, yes, many players do consider season 1 (with the fix mentioned above) to be the best so far. Mostly only players favoured by unfair matchmakings of s2 and s3 seem to disagree.

Personally, seeing as Anet seems to start experimenting again (which, based on previous experience, is worrying), i’m glad i have my backpack already. If it turns out bad again, i’ll be able to move to unranked without feeling i’m missing out on something.

@Josh Davis

Is it possible to also decouple sPvP divisions from the AP system?

The last three seasons have created some of the only skill-gated time-limited APs in existence. At least with Liadra the APs were more achievable to the merely above average in a reasonable amount of time investment.

Getting legendary rank in every season simply isn’t reasonable for most AP hunters. Making the achievements worth 0 AP would be a wonderful change, making some way to make up the previous APs (combining them into a global achievement, etc) would be very accommodating.

It’s most likely an oversight because APs don’t seem to be a priority, but time-gated APs are really disheartening to people trying to compete on the leaderboards.

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

It’s been a while since we’ve commented on leagues, so here’s a brief update.

There’s definitely room for improvement in the league system, and it’s safe to say that it’s the team’s highest priority now that we’ve signed off on everything going in for the July release. It’s still a bit early to talk about specifics, but I do think we can talk about some of the goals we have for the changes:

• Improve match quality
• Make divisions more reflective of player skill
• Make leagues feel more rewarding after you’ve placed in your appropriate division

We’re still determining the scope of the project, but I do want to be clear that it’s unlikely that these changes will be in for S4. Once we get a bit further in the dev process I’ll see if I can give an update on our thoughts/direction.

-Grouch

Hi Josh;

Thanks for the comment. As a regular PvPer I wish to request that if the developers are trying to make PvPers feel rewarded and at the same time keep the PvE customers satisfied, they may kindly try to separate the two things. Removing PvE Dungeon reward track in Ranked system would be the first step towards this direction with the same being available only in Unranked games.

Also if they can separate soloQers in 1v1 mode of a system where premades will face premades and have higher rewards while soloQers will face soloQers and have similar rewards and difficulties of progress. This will eventually help towards most of the issues that we read in different threads. People who would opt for soloQ wont face premades and also won’t come and complain of losing streaks playing with randoms. On the other hand premades facing premades will sort themselves for tougher competition and be placed in divisions suitable to their skill sets.

PS: I need to cross two divisions to finish the PvP achievement and I look forward to it. However I hope that after S4 the league system has more to offer to PvPers in true sense.

This game is literally the definition of zero skill. Honestly its just 100% spam and easy mode. It started that way in june 2015 and the HOT expansion killed it for good

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

It’s been a while since we’ve commented on leagues, so here’s a brief update.

There’s definitely room for improvement in the league system, and it’s safe to say that it’s the team’s highest priority now that we’ve signed off on everything going in for the July release. It’s still a bit early to talk about specifics, but I do think we can talk about some of the goals we have for the changes:

• Improve match quality
• Make divisions more reflective of player skill
• Make leagues feel more rewarding after you’ve placed in your appropriate division

We’re still determining the scope of the project, but I do want to be clear that it’s unlikely that these changes will be in for S4. Once we get a bit further in the dev process I’ll see if I can give an update on our thoughts/direction.

-Grouch

You guys can keep talking all you want..you’ve been doing that for 4 years now…the solution has always been the same and won’t change :" keep bad players out of pvp till they learn to play"

-You need far stricter requirements for pvp and better/alluring rewards to push people to try harder
-Finally add prestige to PvP like it was in Gw1

This “everybody wins” mentality of your will always hold Gw2 back..you can keep changing formulas from now till the end of time, bad players are not incentivized to get better and will always drag down the overall quality of the game

Will there be any sort of soft-reset for MMR or should players that had big loss streaks at literally any point in season 3 just skip the trouble and not play from day one?

It’s great that you’re planning on changes in season 5, but you need to not allow your playerbase to become so jaded and discouraged that they quit before it gets here. Something needs to be done in the short-term. [/quote]

As you see from the forums, the carzy queue times, and the lack of bodies in sPvP. Most of the old sPvP community already got jaded to point of simply not playing sPvP in GW2 perhaps forever. I think ANet is making the right call on this one to not do anything for Season 4. All of the players that are lefted in sPvP in GW2’s now are either the ones that are having fun being met with little resistance, or the players that simply have no place for them in any other like PvP Ranked systems ie. Smite and Paragon, because or whatever reasons. So all and all these players will continue to play GW2’s sPvP regardless of how broken and noncompetitive it is atm.

Honestly I don’t think ANet is really making much money off of it’s current system. Thus cares the least bit about patching it or saving it at this point, but rather is making a completely new system, atleast from what little I understand which is a big step forwards.

However if the new system is not amazing, then you can bet that the players that got alienated and lefted will not return at all. So putting all resources towards making Season 5 a all or nothing drive is the correct way to go. But ANet “Absolutely Has to Figure Out What it Wants to Accomplish, and Who They Want to Cater to” with it’s Ranked PvP matches.

All and all I don’t really see myself playing anymore GW2 Ranked sPvP ever again. I’m just beyond jaded and alienated by the last few Seasons as a solo queuer. I’ve also found greener pastures for myself as a solo queuer so for ANet to pull me and my kind back to the game, they would have to pull what we would called in Eve Online a “Jesus Patch”.

Reaper Alim.4176:

Will there be any sort of soft-reset for MMR or should players that had big loss streaks at literally any point in season 3 just skip the trouble and not play from day one?

It’s great that you’re planning on changes in season 5, but you need to not allow your playerbase to become so jaded and discouraged that they quit before it gets here. Something needs to be done in the short-term.

As you see from the forums, the carzy queue times, and the lack of bodies in sPvP. Most of the old sPvP community already got jaded to point of simply not playing sPvP in GW2 perhaps forever. I think ANet is making the right call on this one to not do anything for Season 4. All of the players that are lefted in sPvP in GW2’s now are either the ones that are having fun being met with little resistance, or the players that simply have no place for them in any other like PvP Ranked systems ie. Smite and Paragon, because or whatever reasons. So all and all these players will continue to play GW2’s sPvP regardless of how broken and noncompetitive it is atm.

Honestly I don’t think ANet is really making much money off of it’s current system. Thus cares the least bit about patching it or saving it at this point, but rather is making a completely new system, atleast from what little I understand which is a big step forwards.

However if the new system is not amazing, then you can bet that the players that got alienated and lefted will not return at all. So putting all resources towards making Season 5 a all or nothing drive is the correct way to go. But ANet “Absolutely Has to Figure Out What it Wants to Accomplish, and Who They Want to Cater to” with it’s Ranked PvP matches.

All and all I don’t really see myself playing anymore GW2 Ranked sPvP ever again. I’m just beyond jaded and alienated by the last few Seasons as a solo queuer. I’ve also found greener pastures for myself as a solo queuer so for ANet to pull me and my kind back to the game, they would have to pull what we would called in Eve Online a “Jesus Patch”.

Like I said in previous seasons, MMR or any metrics should not be used period in the match making algorithm. You win, you advance, you loose you do not (maybe even go back). Eventually you will find yourself with ppl of your level of success.

BTW, I find the argument it would take too long to reach your proper place in that fashion absolutely laughable considering how it simply never happened before anyway.

If you are really that good and it’s indeed significantly because of you that your team win you will more often than not advance. If not then you will plateau. No more self-fulfilling prophecies based on MMR or whatever else. You are rewarded on what you factually do under FAIR match-making, not what the system predict you do based on an ever changing team that is built to favor an expected result.

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

It’s been a while since we’ve commented on leagues, so here’s a brief update.

There’s definitely room for improvement in the league system, and it’s safe to say that it’s the team’s highest priority now that we’ve signed off on everything going in for the July release. It’s still a bit early to talk about specifics, but I do think we can talk about some of the goals we have for the changes:

• Improve match quality
• Make divisions more reflective of player skill
• Make leagues feel more rewarding after you’ve placed in your appropriate division

We’re still determining the scope of the project, but I do want to be clear that it’s unlikely that these changes will be in for S4. Once we get a bit further in the dev process I’ll see if I can give an update on our thoughts/direction.

-Grouch

This is good to know Grouch but I think We are in loop process here, that continues over and over.

I mean, there are always the same goals, anet usually starts to make the plan, and when the process is almost over, anet starts to show us details.

What happens after?
We test it and many time the final feedback is “it sux”

The idea is to share with us details and plans before is everything done, like you are doing with www, I think every discussions/poll can be really useful to you to not Make the same mistakes over and over again.

Dont care about anything else, just bring S1 matchmaking back. S3 matchmaking was a joke.

Not motivated. Theres zero reason for me to play ranked as long as higher mmr gets teamed vs lower mmr. Its not logical whatssoever when you claim its supposed to be about skill. Then mmr decides for you 70% of the time if youre gonna win or lose, with some matches you can win if you tryhard. Anet has to decide if its gonna be a mmr game or a skill league based game. People with old high/medium/low mmr got that from old ranked and it makes zero sense that the mmr is saved in the new ranked when old ranked hasnt been active for soon a year. Players improve over time and higher vs low mmr doesnt help them progress or they have to carry hard and burn themselves out while theyre at it. Zero sense i say, dont know who came up with that.

Make divisions more reflective of player skill
Make leagues feel more rewarding after you’ve placed in your appropriate division

The thing that worries me here is that I don’t see how the current mechanisms could determine what a player’s skill is. So far as I understand it, there are only two mechanisms to determine player worth, wins, and point score.

The point score is fairly worthless, since some things are rewarded that are not particularly useful (like kills that do not change the flow of game significantly), while others are not rewarded at all (like driving an enemy to flee a controlled point, but not killing him). The player with the highest personal score is often far from the most essential player to that game.

And then there’s wins, and expert players will tell you that wins and losses are reflective in some way of individual skill, but this is just not the case in solo queue. You’re only 10% of the total outcome of each map, and “where the game decides you should be” is more determinitive of success or failure than “what you bring to the table” ever will. They really need to figure out a way to better determine how good a player you are, even if several members of your team are far worse, or some members on the opposing team are just way better.

The community needs to take some responsibility for matchmaking as well. They can develop players and play in a way that aligns with the match making . Anet can provide a framework to help but at the end of the day the community reaps what they sow.

Anet can’t make players better. The community can. All sports teams do “camps” to attract players, teach them, and find future prospects. Most game guilds have no interest in teaching the game to the community. Unless they do that people will just leave for whatever is the latest new thing.

If the community wants good match making they need to understand how it works, not so they can exploit it, but so they can play within the system so they get placed properly. No matchmaking system can account for people that troll matches. One players actions affect 9 other people in the match. The same thing goes for people exploiting the system to get a higher ladder position than they deserve.

As for what anet can do, to me the biggest things are transparency on what your ladder rating/MMR is, and provide incentives to people/guilds to grow the community. Some specific things I’d like to see are:

• publish people’s ladder position through the API. If they don’t want to give exact numbers, at least create categories.
• some sort of feedback on the affect a match has on your ladder position as well as your rating relative to others in the match.
• give rewards to guilds that improve players ladder ranks.
• provide a mechanism to track a match or duel in the hot join servers. An option to have a validating observer would be useful.
• better communication on how the match making system works. There is a very detailed description on the wiki of the matchmaking algorithm, but a large segment of the community thinks that it is out of date. Specifically, people don’t think there is an incentive to keep playing a loss, but wiki article suggests otherwise.

Supreme.3164:

You guys can keep talking all you want..you’ve been doing that for 4 years now…the solution has always been the same and won’t change :" keep bad players out of pvp till they learn to play"

-You need far stricter requirements for pvp and better/alluring rewards to push people to try harder
-Finally add prestige to PvP like it was in Gw1

This “everybody wins” mentality of your will always hold Gw2 back..you can keep changing formulas from now till the end of time, bad players are not incentivized to get better and will always drag down the overall quality of the game

I cant w8 for thief buff

Ohoni.6057:

Make divisions more reflective of player skill
Make leagues feel more rewarding after you’ve placed in your appropriate division

The thing that worries me here is that I don’t see how the current mechanisms could determine what a player’s skill is. So far as I understand it, there are only two mechanisms to determine player worth, wins, and point score.

The point score is fairly worthless, since some things are rewarded that are not particularly useful (like kills that do not change the flow of game significantly), while others are not rewarded at all (like driving an enemy to flee a controlled point, but not killing him). The player with the highest personal score is often far from the most essential player to that game.

And then there’s wins, and expert players will tell you that wins and losses are reflective in some way of individual skill, but this is just not the case in solo queue. You’re only 10% of the total outcome of each map, and “where the game decides you should be” is more determinitive of success or failure than “what you bring to the table” ever will. They really need to figure out a way to better determine how good a player you are, even if several members of your team are far worse, or some members on the opposing team are just way better.

This is an interesting point, I Really believe the player skill shouldn’t be determined only by w/l but by some measure of performance in the game.

The problem is right that how to identify “something” wich can measure your performance.

in GW2 It’s almost impossible to translate with only 1 parameter your peformance, your performance is good if you do the right thing at the right time for the entire game, and measure this is really complicated.

Probably the best way could be put in the game an MVP system (only in a positive way) where people can give his vote (only in a positive way) to other players in the game to valorize their peformance. Doesn’t matter if you win or lose, everyone can vote (a simple +1) every other players not in their party.

2 players win, one for each side.

This MVP can contribute to modify you ELO in win or loss case.

For example you win and get +10 in a ELO leaderboard and you’re selected like MVP from the other players (MPP = +2 pts). You get 12 pts.

You lose the game and you should lose -10 in leaderboard but people noticed you playied well, voted for you and you lost only -8 pts (- 10 + 2 MVP).

This is only an example but personally I really like a system like this or similar. It’s really motivational.

To be honest, I liked the system in S1 there the general team score counted about how many pips you win or lose, they should reintroduce this system in a simpliefied version to promote good team performance (for example 400 score min)

Both systems can work together btw.

Why is all of the talk around matchmaking? Professions need to be adjusted. I swear, when my games lack Engies it feels way more “balanced”

Probably the best way could be put in the game an MVP system (only in a positive way) where people can give his vote (only in a positive way) to other players in the game to valorize their peformance. Doesn’t matter if you win or lose, everyone can vote (a simple +1) every other players not in their party.

This might really help. It could also help to reduce toxicity, since players that play well, but are real kittens on the mic would tend to get worse votes than players who are positive (although this would, in turn, throw off the MMR value a bit). I would like to see something of a “pick three” vote rather than a “pick 1” vote, so that the votes wouldn’t all flow towards one standout player and there’d be a more even distribution among the rest.

Why is all of the talk around matchmaking? Professions need to be adjusted. I swear, when my games lack Engies it feels way more “balanced”

That’s important too, but it’s sort of a given that they will be tweaking class balance, and plenty of discussion on how to do that. I think that it’s more important to the league specifically that they nail the connective elements of the system though, since worst case scenario players can always gravitate towards the classes that do work and still play, but if the core league mechanics are broken then it is terrible for everyone. Besides, the teams that would work on each of those factors are completely different, so solving each issue is not mutually exclusive.

Ithilwen.1529:

[…]

I’m yet to encounter a ‘superior team’.

There’s only players are inexperienced, players that are experienced, and players exploiting some bug or flaw in balance.

Against the inexperienced it’s suually a win unless my team mates practically lose on porpose. Against the experienced it goes 50/50. And the exploiters have to be pretty incompetent to lose.

Oh, one other note I’ll make on season 3 and how to improve remove the streak bonuses!!!!!

Seriously, I hate those things. The only practical way to advance is to get a winning streak, and since each match has a random roll of the dice for both your team and the opponent’s. You can win two matches in a row and fail the next entirely, and have no role to play in preventing that. Likewise with the losing streak, year you get a bonus pip if you lose two matches in a row and then win again, but if you lose one, win one, lose one, win one, lose, win, lose, win, you get no bonus pips, even though you’re clearly stuck in place. Bonus pips need to be useful for breaking stagnation and forcing movement. The first season’s method seemed much more effective for this.

One of the worst feelings in this league system was when I would keep gaining and losing the same pip over and over and over again and progress nowhere. I spent about a week in Emerald T1 never even getting to 4 pips. Then I had a couple of good days, with long winning streaks, and ended up in the last tier, where I spent the following week in the same situation, just gaining and losing pips within that tier and never getting close to the next tier, until a lucky streak knocked me over the edge into Sapph.

The whole “losing pips” element needs to go away. Players should never lose what they’ve earned. It’s not like you lose XP when you die, some games do this but Guild Wars 2 knows better. They need to apply that same philosophy to GW2.

MithranArkanere.8957:

Ithilwen.1529:

[…]

I’m yet to encounter a ‘superior team’.

There’s only players are inexperienced, players that are experienced, and players exploiting some bug or flaw in balance.

Against the inexperienced it’s suually a win unless my team mates practically lose on porpose. Against the experienced it goes 50/50. And the exploiters have to be pretty incompetent to lose.

Either you are lying or you were always the “superior” team. Far too many players this past season got matched in far too many games where the final score was 500 – 100ish. That is a blowout, and its because the matchmaking system put a team of bad/mediocre players up against a team full of good players. A good matchmaking system would have mixed them up so that both teams would have an equal number of good and bad players instead of lumping all the better players on the same team. Hell there were multiple posts here, and I as well as several people I know in game, had matches in champions dusk where we lost by over 600 points. I know that the points don’t determine who wins in that map, but the simple fact that the other team was so much better than the one you are assigned that they can just lock you out of gaining points like that is a big indication of broken matchmaking.

I’ve said it every season but I’ll say it again; separate the rewards from the league system.

You could come up with this PvP exclusive currency, let’s call it Glory. As you complete matches in the PvP season, you would earn Glory based on the outcome of the match (with the participation checks and such and blah blah you get the point).

Then there would be a vendor where you could spend this currency on rewards.

Once you do that, you can then remove all of the safety nets and division/tier locks, and have a glicko system that actually places people where they should be placed.

jcbroe.4329:

I’ve said it every season but I’ll say it again; separate the rewards from the league system.

You could come up with this PvP exclusive currency, let’s call it Glory. As you complete matches in the PvP season, you would earn Glory based on the outcome of the match (with the participation checks and such and blah blah you get the point).

Then there would be a vendor where you could spend this currency on rewards.

Once you do that, you can then remove all of the safety nets and division/tier locks, and have a glicko system that actually places people where they should be placed.

I can’t tell if you’re being funny, or if you happened to walk into that. Glory being the old system of things XD

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/phasing-out-pvp-glory/

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

It’s been a while since we’ve commented on leagues, so here’s a brief update.

There’s definitely room for improvement in the league system, and it’s safe to say that it’s the team’s highest priority now that we’ve signed off on everything going in for the July release. It’s still a bit early to talk about specifics, but I do think we can talk about some of the goals we have for the changes:

• Improve match quality
• Make divisions more reflective of player skill
• Make leagues feel more rewarding after you’ve placed in your appropriate division

We’re still determining the scope of the project, but I do want to be clear that it’s unlikely that these changes will be in for S4. Once we get a bit further in the dev process I’ll see if I can give an update on our thoughts/direction.

-Grouch

I think last season was philosophically a step in the right direction. The idea being teams of rougly equally MMR’d folks faced off against an immediately higher or lower MMR group of folks.

The advantages of this being

1) Playing with the equally skilled – You are paired with folks at your skill level. (vs. season 1 where they’d throw bad folks on your team to make it a more “fair” 50/50 win probability.)

2) Closer Matches – While one team is slightly advantaged, they are playing against the next closest 6, so in a large enough pool this difference is relatively negligible. (vs. Season 2, where you’d be on a team with equal skill level, but possibly facing a team of equally skilled people who were nowhere near your level, entirely random games).

3) Scaling with performance over time – Those who are on teams that tend to do better face tougher opponents, if you do worse you’ll face worse opponents. So it scales with performance.

So I’m interested to know two things Josh, is the above what you thought the strengths of season 3 were? And where do you think the opportunities for improvement are with this philosophy and where things fell through the cracks. I have my own opinions about the flaws in logic, but I’d like to see where you come at it from. What are the crunchy bits that are wrong with your setup?

(all in all I thought it was a good philosophical effort and have more or less argued that its an improvement over previous seasons).

shion.2084:

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

It’s been a while since we’ve commented on leagues, so here’s a brief update.

There’s definitely room for improvement in the league system, and it’s safe to say that it’s the team’s highest priority now that we’ve signed off on everything going in for the July release. It’s still a bit early to talk about specifics, but I do think we can talk about some of the goals we have for the changes:

• Improve match quality
• Make divisions more reflective of player skill
• Make leagues feel more rewarding after you’ve placed in your appropriate division

We’re still determining the scope of the project, but I do want to be clear that it’s unlikely that these changes will be in for S4. Once we get a bit further in the dev process I’ll see if I can give an update on our thoughts/direction.

-Grouch

I think last season was philosophically a step in the right direction. The idea being teams of rougly equally MMR’d folks faced off against an immediately higher or lower MMR group of folks.

The advantages of this being

1) Playing with the equally skilled – You are paired with folks at your skill level. (vs. season 1 where they’d throw bad folks on your team to make it a more “fair” 50/50 win probability.)

2) Closer Matches – While one team is slightly advantaged, they are playing against the next closest 6, so in a large enough pool this difference is relatively negligible. (vs. Season 2, where you’d be on a team with equal skill level, but possibly facing a team of equally skilled people who were nowhere near your level, entirely random games).

3) Scaling with performance over time – Those who are on teams that tend to do better face tougher opponents, if you do worse you’ll face worse opponents. So it scales with performance.

So I’m interested to know two things Josh, is the above what you thought the strengths of season 3 were? And where do you think the opportunities for improvement are with this philosophy and where things fell through the cracks. I have my own opinions about the flaws in logic, but I’d like to see where you come at it from. What are the crunchy bits that are wrong with your setup?

(all in all I thought it was a good philosophical effort and have more or less argued that its an improvement over previous seasons).

Except the teams weren’t balanced in any way last season. Not at all. Out of 10 people picked for matchmaking, the 5 with the best MMR would be matched against the 5 with the lowest MMR. How else can you explain the ridiculous blowouts that happened on such a regular basis last season?

Unless the next patch is a miracle that allows me to play more than one build per profession without the viability gap between builds being size of Colorado Canyon I can’t see myself or anyone I know being interested in S4 if it continues to be the same system. The matchmaking is not an issue, lack of PvP players that would give a kitten and play is.

See you in Season 5 then, maybe. Take a look at new Heroes of the Storm ranking system and just copy it.

OriOri.8724:

shion.2084:

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

-Grouch

I think last season was philosophically a step in the right direction. The idea being teams of rougly equally MMR’d folks faced off against an immediately higher or lower MMR group of folks.

The advantages of this being

1) Playing with the equally skilled – You are paired with folks at your skill level. (vs. season 1 where they’d throw bad folks on your team to make it a more “fair” 50/50 win probability.)

2) Closer Matches – While one team is slightly advantaged, they are playing against the next closest 6, so in a large enough pool this difference is relatively negligible. (vs. Season 2, where you’d be on a team with equal skill level, but possibly facing a team of equally skilled people who were nowhere near your level, entirely random games).

3) Scaling with performance over time – Those who are on teams that tend to do better face tougher opponents, if you do worse you’ll face worse opponents. So it scales with performance.

So I’m interested to know two things Josh, is the above what you thought the strengths of season 3 were? And where do you think the opportunities for improvement are with this philosophy and where things fell through the cracks. I have my own opinions about the flaws in logic, but I’d like to see where you come at it from. What are the crunchy bits that are wrong with your setup?

(all in all I thought it was a good philosophical effort and have more or less argued that its an improvement over previous seasons).

Except the teams weren’t balanced in any way last season. Not at all. Out of 10 people picked for matchmaking, the 5 with the best MMR would be matched against the 5 with the lowest MMR. How else can you explain the ridiculous blowouts that happened on such a regular basis last season?

I think you are still thinking of season 2 where this could sometimes happen. In season 3 you were meant to play the next higher 5 MMR group or the next lower 5 MMR if all the eligible players were ordered by MMR.

The only time you would have the top 5 eligible players in a pip range would play the bottom 5 eligible players would be if there were only 10 players. If you had 100 players eligible to play in a pip range, the top 5 players would play the 5 immediately below them (their closest competition).

I think their is a misconception about how season 3 was meant to have work, and it might be mine but I’m pretty sure I understood the gist of the algorithm correctly.

How are you sure that the algorithm always puts the top 5 in a pip range against the worst 5? That would be…. hard to see from a programming perspective, and yet many people have this concept that this is how they are losing all the time. As I said if you play when lots of elligible players are waiting for a match, this should never happen. So I find this insistence on the idea…odd and entirely unsubstantiated. Do you have proof?

shion.2084:

OriOri.8724:

shion.2084:

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

-Grouch

I think last season was philosophically a step in the right direction. The idea being teams of rougly equally MMR’d folks faced off against an immediately higher or lower MMR group of folks.

The advantages of this being

1) Playing with the equally skilled – You are paired with folks at your skill level. (vs. season 1 where they’d throw bad folks on your team to make it a more “fair” 50/50 win probability.)

2) Closer Matches – While one team is slightly advantaged, they are playing against the next closest 6, so in a large enough pool this difference is relatively negligible. (vs. Season 2, where you’d be on a team with equal skill level, but possibly facing a team of equally skilled people who were nowhere near your level, entirely random games).

3) Scaling with performance over time – Those who are on teams that tend to do better face tougher opponents, if you do worse you’ll face worse opponents. So it scales with performance.

So I’m interested to know two things Josh, is the above what you thought the strengths of season 3 were? And where do you think the opportunities for improvement are with this philosophy and where things fell through the cracks. I have my own opinions about the flaws in logic, but I’d like to see where you come at it from. What are the crunchy bits that are wrong with your setup?

(all in all I thought it was a good philosophical effort and have more or less argued that its an improvement over previous seasons).

Except the teams weren’t balanced in any way last season. Not at all. Out of 10 people picked for matchmaking, the 5 with the best MMR would be matched against the 5 with the lowest MMR. How else can you explain the ridiculous blowouts that happened on such a regular basis last season?

I think you are still thinking of season 2 where this could sometimes happen. In season 3 you were meant to play the next higher 5 MMR group or the next lower 5 MMR if all the eligible players were ordered by MMR.

The only time you would have the top 5 eligible players in a pip range would play the bottom 5 eligible players would be if there were only 10 players. If you had 100 players eligible to play in a pip range, the top 5 players would play the 5 immediately below them (their closest competition).

I think their is a misconception about how season 3 was meant to have work, and it might be mine but I’m pretty sure I understood the gist of the algorithm correctly.

How are you sure that the algorithm always puts the top 5 in a pip range against the worst 5? That would be…. hard to see from a programming perspective, and yet many people have this concept that this is how they are losing all the time. As I said if you play when lots of elligible players are waiting for a match, this should never happen. So I find this insistence on the idea…odd and entirely unsubstantiated. Do you have proof?

I didn’t play in season 2 or in season 1. So when I talk about matchmaking I am always talking about s3. I’m not getting confused.

Saw the Original Post said “Final Season” is S4. if you guys go to the Guild Decoration Tab and look at the Guild Challenger cup Decor there is Six seasons planned

OriOri.8724:

shion.2084:

OriOri.8724:

shion.2084:

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

-Grouch

I think last season was philosophically a step in the right direction. The idea being teams of rougly equally MMR’d folks faced off against an immediately higher or lower MMR group of folks.

The advantages of this being

1) Playing with the equally skilled – You are paired with folks at your skill level. (vs. season 1 where they’d throw bad folks on your team to make it a more “fair” 50/50 win probability.)

2) Closer Matches – While one team is slightly advantaged, they are playing against the next closest 6, so in a large enough pool this difference is relatively negligible. (vs. Season 2, where you’d be on a team with equal skill level, but possibly facing a team of equally skilled people who were nowhere near your level, entirely random games).

3) Scaling with performance over time – Those who are on teams that tend to do better face tougher opponents, if you do worse you’ll face worse opponents. So it scales with performance.

So I’m interested to know two things Josh, is the above what you thought the strengths of season 3 were? And where do you think the opportunities for improvement are with this philosophy and where things fell through the cracks. I have my own opinions about the flaws in logic, but I’d like to see where you come at it from. What are the crunchy bits that are wrong with your setup?

(all in all I thought it was a good philosophical effort and have more or less argued that its an improvement over previous seasons).

Except the teams weren’t balanced in any way last season. Not at all. Out of 10 people picked for matchmaking, the 5 with the best MMR would be matched against the 5 with the lowest MMR. How else can you explain the ridiculous blowouts that happened on such a regular basis last season?

I think you are still thinking of season 2 where this could sometimes happen. In season 3 you were meant to play the next higher 5 MMR group or the next lower 5 MMR if all the eligible players were ordered by MMR.

The only time you would have the top 5 eligible players in a pip range would play the bottom 5 eligible players would be if there were only 10 players. If you had 100 players eligible to play in a pip range, the top 5 players would play the 5 immediately below them (their closest competition).

I think their is a misconception about how season 3 was meant to have work, and it might be mine but I’m pretty sure I understood the gist of the algorithm correctly.

How are you sure that the algorithm always puts the top 5 in a pip range against the worst 5? That would be…. hard to see from a programming perspective, and yet many people have this concept that this is how they are losing all the time. As I said if you play when lots of elligible players are waiting for a match, this should never happen. So I find this insistence on the idea…odd and entirely unsubstantiated. Do you have proof?

I didn’t play in season 2 or in season 1. So when I talk about matchmaking I am always talking about s3. I’m not getting confused.

Well then, if you have a hundread eligible players and players 50 through 55 face 56 through 60, it shouldn’t be a blow out. Also it would turn out that roughly half the time someone would be facing the 5 players immediaely better than them and half the time roughly the immediate lower. Since the game only requires a less than 50% win ratio to progress, you should in this environment grind your way up.

Now you ask me how I explain ridiculous blow outs… well if you have low player population and it had to expand pip ranges to make matches then you could have a blow out. Did you play a lot when their were a low amount of players in your pip range? But I’m giving away what I wanted Josh to answer to. What the flaws to his algorithm were. So you can tell me though, what else can account for it?

I didn’t mean to imply that the matchmaking system didn’t allow for players to grind their way up. It definitely did (even though its a separate topic of whether such grinding through the leagues like that should be allowed or not). What else can account for the huge blowouts? Nothing really.

I understand the thing about the expanding pip range. But if you have to start expanding the pip range, then the “next 5” eligible players in MMR could be way above your current group. That is what I mean. It shouldn’t be a flat lets make a team of 5 and try to find another team of 5 with the closest MMR and gradually increase the MMR gap until we find a team. It should be, lets find 10 players at about the same place (whether you use MMR, pips, or some other statistic doesn’t really matter for this demonstration) and then once we have all 10 dynamically assign them to teams so that each team has the same amount of players with good and bad MMR.

Honestly there isn’t much you can do to explain a 600+ point blowout on battle of champions dusk if the winning team wasn’t a full premade. The simple fact in such matches is that the average skill on the winning team was so far ahead of the losing team that they managed to shut them out of everything, including more than a couple player kills teamwide. What balanced matchmaking system would put together two teams like that?

shion.2084:

The idea being teams of roughly equally MMR’d folks faced off against an immediately higher or lower MMR group of folks.

So you’re saying that deliberately forcing non-competitive matches was a good thing?

GW2 does not currently have an MMR system in place to make team-stacking balanced. Winning or losing is guaranteed to give 1 pip or lose 1 pip. TCG could theoretically face 5 random pugs that don’t have HoT and the reward/loss would remain constant.

Given the system that we have, deliberately making one team stronger than the other is absolutely the wrong direction to take. If the pip-range for winning or losing were larger, say 1-5 pips for winning or losing depending on the MMR spread between teams, then it would be more reasonable, but this is not the system we have, and this is exactly what has contributed to an absolutely great deal of frustration for many people in the game.

As it stands, low MMR players are absolutely being punished for simply being low MMR, while high MMR players are being rewarded for having high MMR (which is beyond stupid when a matter of a few games can artificially inflate or deflate your MMR to extreme points on a new account.) Evidence of this exists with the numerous players that struggled to get out of Sapphire or Ruby on their main account with potentially thousands of games played, but steamrolled to Diamond or Leg with 75% win ratios on f2p accounts.

I reiterate: the current system cannot support or sustain a playerase when winning or losing awards the same change in pips, regardless of any potentially existing skillgap between the two teams (and in this previous season, the skillgaps between each team were often significant.)

shion.2084:

Well then, if you have a hundread eligible players and players 50 through 55 face 56 through 60, it shouldn’t be a blow out. Also it would turn out that roughly half the time someone would be facing the 5 players immediaely better than them and half the time roughly the immediate lower. Since the game only requires a less than 50% win ratio to progress, you should in this environment grind your way up.

Now you ask me how I explain ridiculous blow outs… well if you have low player population and it had to expand pip ranges to make matches then you could have a blow out. Did you play a lot when their were a low amount of players in your pip range? But I’m giving away what I wanted Josh to answer to. What the flaws to his algorithm were. So you can tell me though, what else can account for it?

We don’t know exactly how close the initial search range was. Given the experience of many people it was still wide enough that it resulted in many blowouts and unfair matchmaking for those no the lower end of the scale. And of course low population would exacerbate it.

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

It’s been a while since we’ve commented on leagues, so here’s a brief update.

There’s definitely room for improvement in the league system, and it’s safe to say that it’s the team’s highest priority now that we’ve signed off on everything going in for the July release. It’s still a bit early to talk about specifics, but I do think we can talk about some of the goals we have for the changes:

• Improve match quality
• Make divisions more reflective of player skill
• Make leagues feel more rewarding after you’ve placed in your appropriate division

We’re still determining the scope of the project, but I do want to be clear that it’s unlikely that these changes will be in for S4. Once we get a bit further in the dev process I’ll see if I can give an update on our thoughts/direction.

-Grouch

Please tell me you are aware of how the matchmaking works right now:

Stack all “lose streaks/low MMR” on one team against “all win streaks/high mmr” on another.

This creates unwinnable/unlosable matches a vast majority of the time. In games you win, you could be afk and still win, in games you lost you couldn’t do anything to help win. This is a common occurrence by players of ALL skill levels(yes, even legendary) a vast majority of the time. Your contribution to winning or losing basically never matters, which isn’t fun.

A major reasoning for this is your division/pip system. It simply cannot exist in it’s current state. You could be the worst player in the world but still make it to ruby, eventually, by grinding games. Once you get there you’re never going to make any progress at all(as the worst player in the world) as this is when a proper ladder/division system starts. This makes bad/new players unable to progress, while also making good/veteran players angry and unmotivated to continue to “carry” lesser skilled players. Newbies/bad players are placed against people nowhere near their skill level, and veterans are placed with people waaaay below their skill level. Both the veterans and new/bad players end up disliking the system. Both the new and veteran players are put into matches that are not balanced for either of them. A matchmaking system is supposed to create proper matches – the way the division system currently works CANNOT. The only way to fix it would be to make it so you lose pips and tiers even at amber.

Please try to create a ranked pvp system for one type of player – those seeking a competitive PvP environment, and stop trying to create a ranked pvp system for EVERYONE, this includes people who probably shouldn’t even be doing ranked PvP. You are trying to make a ranked system that lets new/bad players feel “happy” about progressing while also trying to create a competitive matchmaking environment. You cannot create a good system while also trying to make sure new/bad players are capable of playing it while also trying to create good matches for veterans. Create the system for a single type of player, not all of them at once. The people the amber-ruby division systems are designed for(as in, you basically can just grind out progress) should be playing unranked, not ranked.

What you end up with by trying to create a system that caters to everyone at once is a non-functional system that doesn’t make anyone happy.

Unpopular opinion: Despite the numerous issues, I am still looking forward to the new season.
Maybe it disappoints me (and I end up quitting), maybe it turns me on. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Boot.7368:

Unpopular opinion: Despite the numerous issues, I am still looking forward to the new season.
Maybe it disappoints me (and I end up quitting), maybe it turns me on. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Wait and see what? They confirmed changes won’t come at least until season 5, and it’s not like they know how to fix it, otherwise they would’ve done that years ago.

Shiyo.3578:

Josh Davis.6015:

Hey folks,

It’s been a while since we’ve commented on leagues, so here’s a brief update.

There’s definitely room for improvement in the league system, and it’s safe to say that it’s the team’s highest priority now that we’ve signed off on everything going in for the July release. It’s still a bit early to talk about specifics, but I do think we can talk about some of the goals we have for the changes:

• Improve match quality
• Make divisions more reflective of player skill
• Make leagues feel more rewarding after you’ve placed in your appropriate division

We’re still determining the scope of the project, but I do want to be clear that it’s unlikely that these changes will be in for S4. Once we get a bit further in the dev process I’ll see if I can give an update on our thoughts/direction.

-Grouch

Please tell me you are aware of how the matchmaking works right now:

Stack all “lose streaks/low MMR” on one team against “all win streaks/high mmr” on another.

This creates unwinnable/unlosable matches a vast majority of the time. In games you win, you could be afk and still win, in games you lost you couldn’t do anything to help win. This is a common occurrence by players of ALL skill levels(yes, even legendary) a vast majority of the time. Your contribution to winning or losing basically never matters, which isn’t fun.

A major reasoning for this is your division/pip system. It simply cannot exist in it’s current state. You could be the worst player in the world but still make it to ruby, eventually, by grinding games. Once you get there you’re never going to make any progress at all(as the worst player in the world) as this is when a proper ladder/division system starts. This makes bad/new players unable to progress, while also making good/veteran players angry and unmotivated to continue to “carry” lesser skilled players. Newbies/bad players are placed against people nowhere near their skill level, and veterans are placed with people waaaay below their skill level. Both the veterans and new/bad players end up disliking the system. Both the new and veteran players are put into matches that are not balanced for either of them. A matchmaking system is supposed to create proper matches – the way the division system currently works CANNOT. The only way to fix it would be to make it so you lose pips and tiers even at amber.

Please try to create a ranked pvp system for one type of player – those seeking a competitive PvP environment, and stop trying to create a ranked pvp system for EVERYONE, this includes people who probably shouldn’t even be doing ranked PvP. You are trying to make a ranked system that lets new/bad players feel “happy” about progressing while also trying to create a competitive matchmaking environment. You cannot create a good system while also trying to make sure new/bad players are capable of playing it while also trying to create good matches for veterans. Create the system for a single type of player, not all of them at once. The people the amber-ruby division systems are designed for(as in, you basically can just grind out progress) should be playing unranked, not ranked.

What you end up with by trying to create a system that caters to everyone at once is a non-functional system that doesn’t make anyone happy.

This. So much this.

Deihnyx.6318:

I like the PVP, I just have a problem with some players.

First, the ONLY reason why It took me so long to get started with PVP is a minority of players in the community itself, aka toxic players. You know… the kind that goes “OMFG you noobs you suck” not even a minute after the match starts cause your team lost the battle at mid … well yeah, a team usually loses it every match, does that mean there’s a noob team every match? No? Maybe you could just keep playing and give meaningful advices since you seem to win them all?

This doesn’t help making a team win, on the contrary, nobody wants to try harder when there’s a whiner in a team. I’ve been in teams that were doing bad and someone stood up and actually gave meaningful advices, that’s how you win, and that’s how you become better. Being toxic never made anyone win a single match, it just makes the experience (let’s remember, it’s a game) stressful for some and overall not fun.
You also gotta remember, not everyone plays at a “pro” level, nor want to. Like, I understand that some mistakes are not really acceptable in diamond/legendary divisions, but don’t blame people at lower divisions for not being perfect… It’s just stupid, and it’s even more true in unranked. If you want to get more people interested in pvp, it’s just unacceptable to insult them when they’re trying to learn, jeez.
And no, ignoring these people isnt always easy. I shouldnt have to completely turn off the chat whenever one guy in one team out of 5 decides he needs to be (or pretend to be) good at a game to shine in life.
I really, really wish there was a way to report this kind of behavior.

The second thing that is getting annoying is that with some players, whenever they’re losing (we’re talking 200 vs 300) just go afk, and pretend the team can’t win…
Well I don’t know what kind of pvp these people play, but usually you don’t just stop playing because you lose, it’s called fair play. Plus there’s a lot of situations where you can end up winning anyway. It’s actually very fulfilling to win against a team that gave you a hard time.
Again, no way to properly punish players who go AFK in the middle of a match. It shouldnt be hard to detect someone who doesnt move (or stay at the start)…

I’ll say this again, this is a game, a game is made to have fun. I know some of us (me included) only do pvp for the backpack, but that doesn’t mean it has to be an unpleasant experience. Anet has some work to do but the whole experience can be made a LOT better by the community itself.

Season 1 was great to adresse all your points.

MMR first. You could queue versus 1 amber, 1 saphire, 1 ruby, 1 diamond and 1 legendary versus your own team 5 rubies. Since it was MMR based, you have people around your skill level.

So, toxic players were less toxic because they were paired with people of their skill level.

Why? When you play 100 games a week and on those games, you have noobs in 80 of them… it become frustrating. Not your fault, but I understand them.

Since MMR first in season 1. Toxicity was not about Match-Making, but more about bunker meta.

AFK and leaver —→¨the pips system give you pips even if you lost games… when you lost in the 400+ range versus a “better team” or you don’t lost pips versus “average team” at 400+. This keep people going on, because they know they will not get punished by lost.

But they change the system because some top TEAMS (PZ and sPvP) didn’t like to get paired with other team of their MMR. (yeah pro-leaguer that want easy win) So, they where smurfing with one or two bad MMR but skillful players.

So, to adress smurfing they put PIP range first, then MMR without considering PIP range of the lowest of the team, but the highest.

This is where it goes badly…. Easy wins for TOP 20% MMR (kinda boring waiting queue 8 minutes for easy stomping noob) and MMR hell for bottom 20% MMR.

PIP range should not count. Season 1 was great. Solution to smurfing should have not given PIPS to highest divisions players. So, they would stop smurfing.

The old ranked leaderboard system was better, because you could play with who ever you like and the system tried to give your MMR team a challenge, so you could raise your MMR. No pips ranges means, it was able to find teams at your skill level.

The ranked means something. 1 was the best player, 1000 was the 1000th. It was awesome to work on your rank at that time.

lLobo.7960:

I think the whole “the division you should be in” idea is a bit weird.
The matches are won by the team and you climb divisions by match wins, not by your personal score.
So if you are in a bad division, you might get a bad team every second match and will make climbing divisions really hard unless you can carry your team more than someone on the other side…

The common factor in all of your games is you, and you represent 20% of your team.

That’s enough to influence whether you win more or lose more on average if matchmaking is arranged purely by pips. Sure, you may have some games where you get a bad team and the best you could do only changed it from a 200-500 loss to a 300-500 loss. But on average, if you’re a better player than most in your tier, you should win more games than you lose and rise over time.

The problem is that the current system means that if you have enough bad teams in a row, you’ll never stop having bad teams and every game you play is just digging yourself deeper into a MMR hole.

If and when that gets fixed, I may look forward to the season that follows. Until that happens… shrugs …as far as I’m concerned, there is no such thing as ‘ranked’.

(I didn’t play Season 1, but that system is also flawed because your opponents are determined by MMR, so you could easily be playing tough matches early in amber and be unable to progress even if you really should be in diamond or higher. I really think the best option is to matchmake purely on the player’s rank in the current season.)

Deihnyx.6318:

First, the ONLY reason why It took me so long to get started with PVP is a minority of players in the community itself, aka toxic players. You know… the kind that goes “OMFG you noobs you suck” not even a minute after the match starts cause your team lost the battle at mid … well yeah, a team usually loses it every match, does that mean there’s a noob team every match? No? Maybe you could just keep playing and give meaningful advices since you seem to win them all?

This. While winning the first engagement helps, the correlation between winning mid at the start and winning the match is actually fairly low in my experience.

The second thing that is getting annoying is that with some players, whenever they’re losing (we’re talking 200 vs 300) just go afk, and pretend the team can’t win…
Well I don’t know what kind of pvp these people play, but usually you don’t just stop playing because you lose, it’s called fair play. Plus there’s a lot of situations where you can end up winning anyway. It’s actually very fulfilling to win against a team that gave you a hard time.
Again, no way to properly punish players who go AFK in the middle of a match. It shouldnt be hard to detect someone who doesnt move (or stay at the start)…

Have to admit, I’ve done it – but my threshold is something like 100:400 or 200:450, not when it’s still reasonably close (and yes, a 100 point lead is still reasonably close: I’ve seen bigger gaps closed). There are times when you’re just being kerbstomped so hard it stopped being fun minutes ago and it really won’t help your team if you stick around, and in the meantime you can switch windows and do something productive with the time.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for all concerned really is to stop delaying the inevitable.

However, it does need to be a pretty big gap. At the very least, the gap has to be bigger than the amount the other team needs to win. At the very least.

What I think would REALLY help, though, is being able to report a player for unsportsmanlike behaviour (which can include going AFK early in the game). That way, if a particular player gets a lot of reports, ArenaNet can investigate and see if action needs to be taken. I had one game (in unranked, but even so) where a player took the team’s trebuchet early in the game, and then spent the game firing it into a random wall nowhere near where anyone was fighting, while bragging about how he was single-handedly winning the game. It was quite frustrating when the best I could do was reporting him for “verbal abuse” (the aforementioned bragging) and hoping that ArenaNet would investigate and find what he was actually doing.

Ohoni.6057:

The whole “losing pips” element needs to go away. Players should never lose what they’ve earned. It’s not like you lose XP when you die, some games do this but Guild Wars 2 knows better. They need to apply that same philosophy to GW2.

This isn’t PvE (where, incidentally, you do lose some money if you die and have to waypoint). There needs to be some mechanic whereby you stall if you’re not doing well, otherwise getting to legendary would purely be a matter of being able to grind enough.