Guild Wars 2

Might as well right?

Some general observations first:

- Going by the leaderboards between EU and NA, populations with ranked interest is pretty low. That’s a sugarcoat, when your ‘legend’ community between the both is maybe 100, on a Bell Curve if legends consisted of 1% or even 0.1% of the ranked playerbase, we aren’t talking tens of thousands of Ranked SPvPers across all timezones, we are talking in thousands. There’s no way we could afford to split ranked queues, even now we have some fairly weird matches with the Matchmaking trying to make balanced matches. Time will have to be spent developing what we got right now.
- Arenanet had confirmed some erroneous matchmaking from unusual circumstances, the ‘Substitutions’ issue is hopefully going to be resolved by Season 6, a small % of games were affected but you can’t brag about matchmaking being accurate when you have to throw in a disclaimer saying “Matchmaking is working 97% of the time” as a optimal.
- Decay and massive Rating gains after breaks were abused slightly, this was addressed but it’s fine to bring up.
- Arenanet cares enough about the Leaderboards to actually ban players who abused the system in the first season of its iteration near the very end of the season. Kudos.

Overall, I can’t say this season was perfect, it had flaws. It needs improvements still, but it is still a better system than before. I do not care for all the naysaying that legitimately happens every single Season. In fact observant folks might have noticed that we’ve been getting more responses from the devs about this season than previously before. People care enough about their position on the leaderboard to post, and inevitably folks point out where they kittened up during their complaint about the system.

Don’t get me wrong, Profession balance (although every profession is played) is an endless struggle as Flavor the Month builds seem to change every season. In order to foster a good balance one needs to identify builds that create a good competitive environment and remove ones that foster toxicity (MEMBER WHEN TURRET ENGI WAS A THING?).

I am also one of those people who thinks matchmaking needs to focus a touch more on stopping Profession Stacking in Ranked if it can. One thought I had about this was creating a checklist of professions you can play well, and select up to 3 for. This helps the matchmaking give you a better comp based on what you can play. Make it the same interface we used to select Conquest and Stronghold Preferences…oh hey I solved profession stacking, you are welcome.

Going forward, assuming more of the hiccups this season are resolved for Season 6, I wouldn’t mind seeing Duo Queuers have a slight handicap given the biggest advantage it brings ideally, is a synergy and ‘1 less bad player’ on your side. I would say make the Duo Queue gain less rating and lose more rating, OR ‘inflate’ their skill rating to face harder opponents without giving them more rating for the win. We can’t have it be too detrimental to duo-queue, but advantages must be balanced.

Lastly, given our population, I don’t want Team Queue to come back for a while until we get more numbers. Instead, I recommend automated tournaments on a daily or weekly basis for teams to get flat rewards and maybe Tournament Qualifier points. I am leaning towards weekly for now as daily tournaments would impact the current queue system. But it is a start.

Cheers, can’t wait for next season.