Guild Wars 2

It doesn’t take a player long to find out that the current MMR PvP system is not working for hardcore players or the casual user yet tries to mesh everything together and ultimately fails at providing a balanced system on both behalf’s of those respective players. You simply cannot argue that the players are happy, see links below. These are just recent responses but there has been a continuous flow of unhappy criticism about the current system dating back to 11 months ago.

11 month old post
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Premades-vs-soloers/first

Recent Posts
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/From-someone-who-s-never-tried-sPVP-before/first#post5785567

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Matchmaking-20

See the image at the bottom of the post for a visual representation of the modified solo queue MMR distribution.

The problem with these one sided games is not so much because of premade vs. soloers but the vast difference in skill between novice and veteran players. The current MMR treats everyone in a normal distribution according to only one set of MMR (1,2,3,4,5). When it should be considering two sets of MMR pools, Novice and Veteran players. This would effectively limit the amount of one sided games because it is clearly evident that a team of 5 with 3 queue can dominate the game versus 5 solo queues even though their MMR’s are seemingly matched up.

The MMR at this point, with the new influx of novice players due to HOT is NOT taking into account this current imbalance of players on the learning curve.

If we assign the two pools Novice and Veteran a respective variable, let’s say N and V.
Where the pool of N is 1,2,3,4,5 consisting of the skill level of novices within the pool.
And the veteran pool V 1,2,3,4,5 consisting of veteran skill.
And we clearly know that N(1) does not equal V(1). The MMR of these two different pools would need to be weighted for more balanced games.

The overlap of these two curves would consist of novice and veteran pools in between each of the curves and are not novice but they are not quite veterans yet. Their MMR will change according to which pool they are selected to play with. If a player in this area of the curve has a Novice MMR of 4, their Veteran MMR would be 1. a Novice MMR of 5 would be Veteran 2.

A Novice playing with the Veteran pool has a chance to increase but not decrease their MMR (depending on Win or Lose) and playing with a Novice pool will allow them to sustain or decrease their MMR (win or lose).

This ideally would work perfectly for a solo queue only type of game mode. The problem arises in this system when you have a team of 5 veterans trying to queue and the wait time would be very long because of their high weighted MMR and not enough players in the entire pool to choose from to match their combined MMR.

Which is why we need to bring back a solo queue and team queue type of PvP queue.

The team queue can still use the current MMR system since it will always be a full premade vs a full premade. This would consist of taking the solo queue MMR and adjusting it back to the current scale of 1,2,3,4,5 which would disregard the novice and veteran pools for two reasons.
1) Their wouldn’t be a big enough pool of players to use the solo que mmr system which would increase waiting times which we don’t want.
2) The players are more likely to be organized and be aware of the map, gameplay etc, and would full well know the competitive nature of team play.

This system would allow for casual players and veteran players to enjoy solo queue and gain their dailies etc while still allowing competitive play for more experienced players in team queue.

And it fell on Anets deaf ears

Supcutie already had a great thread discussing how to address the matchmaking needs. Did a single Anet dev reply to even say “Thanks, we’ll consider it.” ? Nope. They obviously don’t care and this is why it will never be esports.

So at what point does a player convert from N to V? Is it a natural progression from N5 to V3?

What determines a Veteran player at the beginning of a system? # of matches? # of wins?

Cogbyrn.7283:

What determines a Veteran player at the beginning of a system? # of matches? # of wins?

Exactly…

Here’s the issue with matchmaking OP. Matchmaking can place equal skilled opponents on both teams but what it doesn’t account for is how the team composition is formed. A Rev + Dh + Scrapper composition is going to perform differently than a Thief + Warrior + Druid team comp. The game doesn’t take into account build variances and class professions into the skill-factor equation.

It’s not like matchmaking doesn’t place players of equal skill in the same game… it does, more often than not. Snowballs happen when one team wins nodes more frequently than the other – the tuggle-war factor. Once they win a particular team fight, that team is already out rotated and susceptible to a downward spiral snowball effect.

No matter how close these players skill levels are amongst themselves, there can and will always be a snowball effect in the game. Anet currently don’t have the “technology” (their words) to develope a smarter matchmaking system that takes build variants and class compositions into the matchmaking factor.