Guild Wars 2

Am I missing something or did Anet really implement a really weird system?

As far as I can tell, the rankings on the leaderboards are based on accumulated Qualifying Points instead of the more common relative ladder ranking in some sort of ELO manner or variant.

In my opinion this is stupid. Really stupid. It is like the now old and forgotten WoW PvP Warlord or whatever it was called 24/7, 7 days a week grind kind of stupid.

In essence this means that grind and time invested wins over relative skill.

Lets make an example of what I mean:

Say you have a team called “Top Dogs”. It is a perfect team, they always win, against anyone. They are clearly superior to any other team and would win any competition. It is a team of Michael Jordan’s. But. They only play three nights a week and 2 tournaments a night.

Say you have this other team that are called “The Realistic”. They are also a good team. The second best team actually. The can beat any team they face on a good day except for the “Top Dogs”. When they run a paid tournament they win the whole thing 1/2 times and always makes it to the finals. The play a decent amount. 4 times a week, 3 runs per night,

Then there is this third team. “College Drop-Outs”. The big thing about this team is that they play a lot. 5 nights a week. 4 runs per night. They are not as good tough (still decent). They get to the finals half of the time and wins half of the times they get there (so 1/4), the rest of the games they get 3th or 4th place. Btw, they always lose against both “Top Dogs” and “The Realistic”

So what happens?

Team Top Dogs gets 6×5 = 30 Qualifying Points per week.
Team The Realistic gets 6×5 + 6×3 = 48 Points per week.
Team College Drop-Outs gets 5×5 + 5×3 + 12×1 = 50 Points a week.

So…. …. … Is this how it works? Team “College Drop-Outs” would actually win the rankings?

If it is, anyone should be able to see it is a rather stupid system. If it only works on accumulated points real skill isn’t represented at all. Any gamer interested in competitive PvP (regardless if you just spectate or play yourself) should in this case be upset and questions this.

Edit:
Before anyone asks, a better solution in every way in my opinion would be a laddered based ranking system that uses any kind of ELO variant or a modern ranking system based on the same principles of relative skill. To avoid the in some systems theoretical scenario of “Quitting when on top” and becoming unreachable a simple decay of ranking can be implemented for inactivity and/or a minimum amount of games played before you’re eligible for an official ranking.

Edit2:
I still like the game and will continue to play it for sPvP. I will never compete in the rankings anyways so it doesn’t matter for me personally. But in the long run this hurts any decent PvP community and eventually will make the large portion of the kind of PvP gamers you want to have around in your game move on to other things. Taking away that solid base of players and “buz” any successful game needs.

So college drop outs qualifies for the monthly, gets their faces stomped in round 1, and goes back to getting farmed by good teams? Problem?

We need a real rank system not a QP ladder. We don’t fight with our equivalents, we can’t improve ourselves and its really annoying.

Mammoth.1975:

So college drop outs qualifies for the monthly, gets their faces stomped in round 1, and goes back to getting farmed by good teams? Problem?

The problem is that they shouldn’t be there in the first place if that’s the case. Rankings should be based on a players ability to play the game well and with his/her’s teams mates, not a game of who can no life the most.

Mammoth.1975:

So college drop outs qualifies for the monthly, gets their faces stomped in round 1, and goes back to getting farmed by good teams? Problem?

I honestly forgot about Monthlys when writing this But yes, it is still a problem.

You either have a ELO or similar based ranking system with a built in minimum matches played weekly or something to qualify that ranks all teams in a relative ladder and give Monthly spots to the top 32 or what-ever teams to duke it out in a tournament. With interesting matches starting of in round one as all teams there have a decent chance of going further.

Or you have a accumulated ranking system like this one (that in all honesty would probably have the same 100 players in the top currently in GW2 do to several reasons, but just in a different order) where teams around the cut-off point of 32 players would be shuffled around not based on relative skill and relative matched won and loss against each-other but based on “who played the most”. Where less skilled teams make it to the monthly and get eliminated right away as you say.

For me it is real clear which options is the better one.

The questions isn’t, for me, if this “works”. The questions is that this is a real weird way of doing it, no one else does it, and it only have drawbacks. So even if it “works” or “isn’t a big problem” why do it?

Rukh.1562:

We need a real rank system not a QP ladder. We don’t fight with our equivalents, we can’t improve ourselves and its really annoying.

This is a real big problem that comes with this implementation. Without ranking you can’t do match-making.

Everyone wins with match-making. It makes for better games for everyone.

Right now, no matter who you are I think. tPvP is either stomp or get stomped. Seldom do I play close matches.

The qualifying point was implemented because people need to accumulate points for when they start doing tournaments (probably monthly/yearly). But I still agree that they should not be used as any kind of a “ranking system”.

Is the people on the top good? Yes of course, they have won a bunch of paid tournaments. Can it also mean that they just play an immense amount of paid? Yes of course. Does one exclude the other one? Nope.

Give us a real, working ladder system please! After the custom arenas and observer mode of course