Guild Wars 2

Hello

I am a fairly new player to the PvP community and I want to earn a greater understanding of MMR and sPvP as an entity.

- My last 10 games, I have won 6 and lost 4. Yet my rating went lower than before these 10 games. How does MMR works and how is it able to contribute to dunk me lower than I was before given the fact I won more games than I lost?

- Is it publicly available how the MMR is been calculated? If so, what is the maths/algorythm behind it?

- I am dunked in the Bronze, the last 8 days I have a Win/Loss ratio of 6:4 and yet I seem to remain my 950 score. Is there any advice to get out of Bronze? Besides winning more games than losing.

- How does one coop with a team that is not communicating at start. Questions such as ‘Hi Team, who takes close’ remain unanswered.

- How does one coop with players just grinding the Ascended Gear? The quality of these players is often far beyond any kind off imagination.

- Will Bronze – eventually – get rid of PvE Players, so Bronze becomes a real bracket?

- How come we cannot queue with 5 people? It’s a team-oriented game, one cannot do much without a team, team communication etcetera. If there would be a PvP mode where your skills – no matter the win or loss – would give you rating, then it would make sense that one is solo queue’ing. If I end up with 4 (or 3, if I would duo-queue) players who are not willing/able to cooperate as a team, their skills basically have impact on my score. On my rating. That doesn’t make quite sense to me. Is there somebody able to explain this quite ‘odd’ decision?

Thanks in advance and with most kind regards
Dofty

1) The matches you lost were likely against a team you weren’t meant to lose to, hence the larger rating reduction. The wins were likely against a team closer to your rating, so the gains weren’t high.

There’s an expected outcome from each match which, in a perfect world, is 50-50. In an imperfect world though, it could be 55-60% in one team’s favour. If that team loses though, they suffer from that loss.

2) https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm
Also, overview of Glicko: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system

3) Play a profession that can easily carry team fights, or 1v1/2/3. Something easy like DH or Warrior has a lot more carry potential in lower tiers.

4) Don’t rely on teammates if they don’t communicate. It’s not always easy taking charge when the only way of communication you have is text.

5) Wait it out, they’ll eventually leave.

6) See 5. PvE players only in it for the Ascended gear will leave just as soon as they’re done farming the first Byzantium chest.

7) Players voted for solo and duo only. ANet is testing it out to see how well it works. They may revert it for future seasons, but that remains to be seen. There’s the possibility for solo only (only matched up against other solo players) and team only (of 2, 3, or 5) separated queues, but the PvP population may not be able to sustain it.

Dofty.9814:

- My last 10 games, I have won 6 and lost 4. Yet my rating went lower than before these 10 games. How does MMR works and how is it able to contribute to dunk me lower than I was before given the fact I won more games than I lost?

Your MMR goes down when you lose a game that you were expected to win, and goes up when you win a game you were expected to lose. What that result says is that you are winning games you were expected to win, but also losing games you were expected to win.

Which means that your current MMR is higher than your actual skill level, and you are seeing the correction to have it more accurately reflect your real skill.

Dofty.9814:

- Is it publicly available how the MMR is been calculated? If so, what is the maths/algorythm behind it?

Short version is that it is Gliko-2; long version is that the wiki has an extremely detailed explanation, including pseudocode and numbers

Notably: this is similar to the TrueSkill algorithm used in XBox matching, extensively studied, standard, and an improvement over ELO as it accounts for how confident the game can be about your MMR being accurate.

Dofty.9814:

- I am dunked in the Bronze, the last 8 days I have a Win/Loss ratio of 6:4 and yet I seem to remain my 950 score. Is there any advice to get out of Bronze? Besides winning more games than losing.

There are two things that influence your “reward” MMR: decay, if you don’t play for a while, and your skill. Of those, only the second influences your “real” MMR, which is used to select who you play with.

So, no, there is nothing other than “improve your skill” that will move you out of Bronze.

Dofty.9814:

- How does one coop with a team that is not communicating at start. Questions such as ‘Hi Team, who takes close’ remain unanswered.

Observe behaviour, and fill in gaps. Also, give direction, which may be followed despite a lack of response. Beyond that, you can’t.

(uh, don’t mean to be rude, but if you are down in bronze, also consider that perhaps the other players think your advice is bad, or question is silly, and ignore it rather than saying something rude, or something that may invite rudeness in response.)

Dofty.9814:

- How does one coop with players just grinding the Ascended Gear? The quality of these players is often far beyond any kind off imagination.

The ones that are just cheating their way in by being AFK, report them. The ones who are trying … shrug, and accept that if your MMR places you with them, your skill level is similar to theirs.

Dofty.9814:

- Will Bronze – eventually – get rid of PvE Players, so Bronze becomes a real bracket?

If you are a better player than those PvE players doing PvP for rewards you will move above them. That may still be in bronze, or it may be in a higher tier, but either way your MMR will be above theirs because, hey, you play better.

Dofty.9814:

- How come we cannot queue with 5 people? It’s a team-oriented game, one cannot do much without a team, team communication etcetera. If there would be a PvP mode where your skills – no matter the win or loss – would give you rating, then it would make sense that one is solo queue’ing. If I end up with 4 (or 3, if I would duo-queue) players who are not willing/able to cooperate as a team, their skills basically have impact on my score. On my rating. That doesn’t make quite sense to me. Is there somebody able to explain this quite ‘odd’ decision?

Players desired it. There was a question about what to try, and this season this is the result of the community and developers figuring out what to experiment with.

Ultimately, a premade team is stronger – I think a dev said about 30-40 percent more likely to win – than a random team, all else including individual player skill on both sides being identical.

This is a hard, hard problem to solve. You could factor in an adjustment to MMR like that, so premade 5s with an MMR of 1000 play against random players with MMR 1350, or that 5v5 is always premades, but … neither is great, for various reasons including queue times, especially as you get to the top end.

Anyway, all that aside, the team you are placed with doesn’t make that much of a difference. Remember that your team has 4 slots for players of random skill, including the AFKers or PvE baddies, while the other team has 5 slots.

That gives you a five percent better chance of the other team being the one punished by having a bad player on it than your team. (If, of course, we assume you are unfairly being placed below your actual MMR due to other players on your team. If not, the odds are even, or even favor the other team if you are over-ranked in MMR )