Guild Wars 2

The developers have acknowledged the living Hell that the beginning of this season was for many players.

Like many others, I started the season 0-20 between my two accounts. this completely destroyed my MMR. This meant that I was teamed with many very very bad players, including afkers and quitters against some of the best players in the solo queue . It took a very long time to even climb out of amber. There are others who had 20+ game win streaks.

Needless to way, this was awful and undoubtedly cost Anet players, which is bad.

What if the MMR was reset at the beginning of the season?

It is reasonable to assume that the the there would be a much better balance in winning at the beginning of the season. It is also reasonable to assume that the the better players would regain their MMR quickly, because they would have a higher win percentage over time and that they would reach high divisions, but not as quickly as now.

There would be a fair amount of rage at the lesser talented players, but no worse than it is now. It is also possible that the less talented players might learn something.

The only disadvantages that I see is that the high MMR players would complain about the MMR reset and that it would take longer for them to reach diamond and above. I am very ok with that.

They had a matchmaking system in S1 that they have worked and iterated on for the life of the game. I know there were complaints about the 50/50 win rate and the pip system but right now those complaints look trivial compared to the mess S2 is. So restore S1 system and add in the ant smurfing measures and the win and lose streak bonuses. Good players still had win streaks in S1.

Just to add to this after suffering through 2 more losses. MMR should also be reset. Its based on team performance and therefore is highly suspect as a measure of individual performance. And it also takes no account of team composition. Add both of these together and after the anecdotal evidence of this season that players of similar mmr are not likely to be of the same skill level it should be reset each season so at least everybody starts on an even playing field.

For a very short answer, No..

The problem with this system is the extreme polarization it produces. The high MMR players all get teamed together. Their chances are above 75% to get a lower MMR opponent (due to the spread of teams and them getting the higher MMR rated ones as team).

What this means is the high MMR players will continue to grow, increasing their chances on getting better teams and easy wins. Which again further increases their chance on winning again and again.

On the other side are the ones with lower MMR, getting the bad end of the same stick.

What a reset of MMR would do is push people even harder into either direction. Get a lucky three wins, your MMR means you will be carried. Whether you are good or not. Same in the losing direction, three losses with LD’s or absolute beginners means you keep fighting against better teams.

Best thing to do is make sure that teams are in range brackets. Where the top players cannot meet the absolute bottom. With a slight overlap in brackets this would mean you could still go up and down, but the matches wouldn’t be so horrible tilted..

Resetting MMR completely is a bad idea. Make new players start in the low MMR bracket. If they are good enough they get wins vs ‘less good’ opponents, rise in MMR until they reach their 50/50 point.

tldr: Resetting MMR is a bad idea, for everyone. Split matchmaking into brackets to make gains and losses in MMR meaningful.

Ive nearly completed my experiment.

To test how much mmr influences your chances to get to legendary, I played on my main account to ruby… and then on my second (non hot) account.

My main account has a pretty set mmr that Ive probably kittened over once or twice playing with bad players in ranked to help them, testing out new professions a bit. Nothing too big though… Id guess I was about average on that account. After all, I learned how to pvp there.

My second account did have a few ranked games played and was about a bit over average. And even though that account has the handicap of not having access to hot professions, I had a way easier time to make it to ruby. I got matched with at least 1-2 good players nearly every match.

Whereas on my main account, I constantly get matched with 2-3 bad players. You know, those that dont even buff swiftness on start, stay on empty point for cap score, cant win 1v1, rush far five times to just die there etc.

But here’s the thing that really bothers me with season 2:
My main account gets pretty much always matched against teams with more good players.
My second account gets nearly always matched against worse players.
And it has gotten WORSE since season start because player pool got smaller and smaller and smaller.

So basically, if your mmr is kittened, your skills dont count anymore. You have uphill battles to get on good side of mmr that are just plain impossible to make through without teaming up with good players.
If your mmr isnt kittened, your skills do count a little bit, but you dont need to expand much effort to keep on the good side of matchmaking.

So yeah, we DEFINITELY need a mmr reset AND a pre-season.

Or we need a system that limits the mmr difference between teams.

Yasi.9065:

But here’s the thing that really bothers me with season 2:
My main account gets pretty much always matched against teams with more good players.
My second account gets nearly always matched against worse players.
And it has gotten WORSE since season start because player pool got smaller and smaller and smaller.

So basically, if your mmr is kittened, your skills dont count anymore. You have uphill battles to get on good side of mmr that are just plain impossible to make through without teaming up with good players.
If your mmr isnt kittened, your skills do count a little bit, but you dont need to expand much effort to keep on the good side of matchmaking.

So yeah, we DEFINITELY need a mmr reset AND a pre-season.

Or we need a system that limits the mmr difference between teams.

Quoted for truth and emphasis. This is exactly the situation my main account finds itself in.

It’s quite simple really, currently GW2 is in no place to be a truly competitive game. Not while the system stacks the odds against another side. ESport game are made from the ground up to be as such. Not a 3 year old game pushing to become it. Really the PvP team need to hit an effective reset on PvP. Start again from scratch.

The only, and I mean only, reason we have this mess is because some pro players threw there toys out of there prams. Sure season one was hard going, I my self have done better this season. Close to two divisions better. But the only way I’ve advanced is by stringing 3 wins together after braking a losing streak. This is what ranked has become about. It’s got very little to do with skill for the most of us, and far more to do with luck.

“luck” is always a factor. In any game/sport. You need the “luck” to be in the right place at the right time, but then be able to capitalize on that. But what we have is, you have to be “lucky” to get players who want to go for the win, know how to play PvP, know how to play there class, not afk or DC, not face a stacked team, have a team that just has a bad composition vs the other team e.g. 2 warriors, 2 thieves and a guard, vs 2 necros, 2 engi’s and an ele.

Untill thing’s like this are addressed, PvP will never be “fair” or about skill.

… as I heard about the new matchmaking ideas for season 2, I was initially relieved a little.

The phrase “and then match you with players similar to your skill” sounded like I finally wouldn’t have to carry sad players out of spawn towards a win…

But then I got a reality check, stopping me hard: how on earth is the algorithm A-net uses for long now able to determine my “skill”.
It failed for months to determine personal skill of many players in a game for teams. How is that algorithm able to factor in team compositions correctly to calculate “my personal skill”?

Answer is simple: IT. CAN’T.FOR.KITTENS.SAKE!

Evidence: lots of posts on this forum and examples of matches ingame.

It’s almost like those “luck accounts” lootwise in PvE. If your MMR is fresh by playing on a new account or you haven’t killed your MMR by playing for three years, learning the game and then teaching others to play, playing against invincible odds on offtime or just generally keep on playing after loosing many matches in a row – it is mostly unrelated to your personal skill, if you win or loose in season 2 then.

Otherwise the experience for the same person playing on different accounts would be the same and not literally the opposite, if it actually were skill-related.

I rest my case and GW2-PvP in season 2 altogether… I doubt I will come back in season 3, my hope for other games with proper PvP being released till then exceeds my hope for A-nets devs being able to properly design a PvP-environment by far now… :/

IMO they should have done they opposite of what they did. Make team with ppl of your competition rank (not MMR) and put you vs team of overall equivalent MMR.

This way you maximize probability of having fun matches and avoid making snowball effect in a way or the other.

As it is, having a good MMR pre-season made you a VIP player getting all you needed to have an easy and comfortable seat to glory while having average or lower MMR makes you persona non grata. And that, regardless of your actual skill.

The people who had it easy this time around might not like to see their MMR reset but it would be fairer. The burden of carrying should be better distributed otherwise you only engineer self fulfilling prophecies.

You don’t want to reset MMR…. The algorithm is attempting to estimate the relative skill of all the players, by resetting it you put every single player in the same pool for games. Kind of like, I don’t know, everyone starting at amber and complaining they get matched with players of a higher skill level.

Instead why not have ranked arenas open between seasons with a small amount of decay where players can demonstrate their skill to the algorithm, then have it seed the players between amber(0 pips) and ruby(0 pips) with all rewards given for any tiers/divisions you are placed above. That way having a MM system that matches players based on similar MMR won’t also prevent players from getting stuck in low divisions.

Could also allow players to drop out of legendary/diamond/ruby divisions to sort out players better.

SlyDevil.3952:

You don’t want to reset MMR…. The algorithm is attempting to estimate the relative skill of all the players, by resetting it you put every single player in the same pool for games. Kind of like, I don’t know, everyone starting at amber and complaining they get matched with players of a higher skill level.

Instead why not have ranked arenas open between seasons with a small amount of decay where players can demonstrate their skill to the algorithm, then have it seed the players between amber(0 pips) and ruby(0 pips) with all rewards given for any tiers/divisions you are placed above. That way having a MM system that matches players based on similar MMR won’t also prevent players from getting stuck in low divisions.

Could also allow players to drop out of legendary/diamond/ruby divisions to sort out players better.

Well my problem atm is that I really think MMR is a bad metric for ppl like me and a bad metric for soloquers period. It inherently make little sense to extract the individual scores of people based on a self fulfilling prophecy algorithm to make it say something it can’t.

To avoid the match making snowballing one way or the other you should not use MMR to put teams together. Let pip range do the job randomly and the good players will slowly go away but not be guaranteed to always have good draws on teammates and vice-versa.

As it is, ofc a team of high MMR (legit or not) will more often than not steamroll a team of average/low MMR (legit or not) since the good players in the low MMR team, have to carry a lot more than anybody in the opposing team despite possibly being equal or better than anyone on the opposing team. He is 1/5 that might need to carry 4/5 while the other team can all carry themselves. I mean what are people expecting of such a gimmick?

On the other side, using MMR to pair opponents can lead to fair matches but at the cost of not being a good indicator of skill since it is vulnerable to grind. So the question is what do you do?

Again, using pip range, and not MMR, to decide who you will fight might be a better idea as it would put you vs people who are were you are in your process without guaranteeing the match being a self-fulfilling gimmick because you only have players who need to carry others or no players in need to be carried. If you are good enough in the same conditions your opponent has to fight you, you advance otherwise you do not. This way we can start to compare apples to something looking more like apples.

People are trying way too hard to make pvp MMR awork as it does a chess game when it clearly isn’t close to be viable for the game if only because it’s a team and almost never the same. Add to it that you now have an algorithm that will nudge you one way or the other before you even start playing so what do you thing it do to MMR? It merely polarize what was already the case instead of testing it.

SlyDevil.3952:

You don’t want to reset MMR…. The algorithm is attempting to estimate the relative skill of all the players, by resetting it you put every single player in the same pool for games.

And so what? Good players will still rise, mmr will change, perhaps if it is reset narrow the mmr range for groups because the range across all players will be more narrow. The fact is mmr currently does not properly reflect the skill level of probably most players.

ya well MMR sits and mocks me, and in sapphire giving me games with 4 bad players, and a mediocre team too fight, that’s not fix anything it makes me have too carry that team, if i do one thing wrong its GG

they’er build is trash i can see it, they’re play-style, the fact they cant kill anything or focus or stomp, GG anet your a joke too me now, so done

Anet after 3 years i expected more, this is your last chance i will drop this game,
going too Star Citizen anyways, but if you want too keep players like me around you need too rethink this fast and hard

i only PVP, and WVW, PVE is boring and useless too me only reson i play GW2 is for the PVP, and that and WVW are a joke now GJ

Thing is, if you reset mmr in pre-season or start of season, you have to have a way to get it to correct value fast.

So thats a LOT of games that have to be played, and all should be soloqueue.

What’s the point of resetting MMR? If everyone starts at the same MMR the matchmaking would be the same as if ANET ONLY used pips to determine matchmaking. That would be a lot easier, but also would give a lot of bad matches.

style.6173:

What’s the point of resetting MMR? If everyone starts at the same MMR the matchmaking would be the same as if ANET ONLY used pips to determine matchmaking. That would be a lot easier, but also would give a lot of bad matches.

Worse than it is now? Nope, not likely at all. At least randomization would maximize no one player would get special treatment leading to more manufactured MMR. You want to have a true skill ladder? Stop manufacturing it.

Removing division safe guards is what would greatly help discriminate stronger players from weaker ones as they would continue to progress to up where they belong while weaker players would remain behind.

It would be fairer and more skill based.

I don’t understand peoples needs to say omg I quit, and never returnnnnn. Like spvp ruined the whole thing for you? What are you losing really, so you don’t get some pretty pixels on your back big deal. For the shiney gem next to your name? Unranked can be fun to pvp in to ya know. Just saying