Guild Wars 2

Make it so you can have a unique Skill Rating per profession.

What this would mean is that each one of your professions could have a tailor-made experience for PvP, based on your skill level with that profession. This would mean if you play poorly on 8 of the professions, you won’t be burdened by your higher Skill Rating, which comes from the 1 profession (or however many) that you happen to be good at on. At the same time, you will no longer feel bound to only playing on professions which you are at your highest skill on, which you would likely do now, out of fear that playing on any other class will lower your skill rating.

However, I do recommend the option to opt-in to using your account’s skill-rating, as opposed to your profession’s skill rating; doing so will increase the difficulty of the matches, but also will put you at risk of reducing the skill rating of your highest profession(s) if you do end up losing the match.

(I would recommend making it so that the placement games determines the starting Skill Level for all of the professions, and then they can rise/fall accordingly, after that, on an individual basis. So, for example, if you win 9/10 of the placement matches (even if only played on 1 profession), you may get ~1400 Skill Rating, which will be copied to all of your professions. Any progress made after that initial starting of the placement rating will only affect the profession it is played on (or the rating of the highest profession, if you opt-in to use account rating). Decay may need to be slightly altered; I would recommend making it so there’s an account decay timer and removal system (identical to what there is now, applying to each of the account’s profession-based skill ratings, but all being “cleansed” from all professions simultaneously as well), and then also a simple profession-based one which simply cuts Skill Rating on a profession’s Skill Rating by ~5% per ~3 days of inactivity (up to 50%) on the profession; all of this profession-based skill rating decay can be completely removed simply by completing 1 match.)

The League Badge displayed would correspond to whichever Skill Rating you were using (your account’s or your profession’s).

It also could be per-character, which would let people have multiple characters of the same class, but each with different builds to play around with. But that is probably less important/needed. If this were added, I would say each character would need to do it’s own placement rounds in order to prevent exploits.

You must be new to the forums.

SlimChance.6593:

You must be new to the forums.

PvP forums yes. And I’m not a super big PvP’er, so don’t get mad that I’m not, and don’t assume things because I’m not.

I’m betting this is either in insanely popular idea that pretty much everyone agrees with, or the exact opposite. Or it’s something the devs have outright said they don’t want. Or something the forum users collectively know won’t happen, even though they generally want it, so they just don’t bother any more.

But please, feel free to just say it outright, you don’t have to prolong my ignorance.

Since the leagues started after HOT release, there’s been several posts about profession based MMR (skill rating). ANet even made posts that they do keep track of profession based MMR, it’s not accurate because players can change classes during matches.

Then about a month or so, Evan Lesh ran a poll stating that profession s would be locked in matches. But the poll was worded on “when” the profession lock would occur. If you voted ‘NO’ then the lock would occur at the 10 second countdown or ‘YES’. To have the lock occur when entering the queue.

It was very close and NO won. So players can still switch. And profession based MMR might be a little more accurate, but still useless.

And the poll was worded to imply that the profession lock was for preventing achievement hacking. So there’s was quite a debate during the poll.

EDIT: Sorry, I was posting on my phone.. so not very good summary.

Players who voted NO to the poll, reasoned that the MM is terrible and balance is terrible and the players need to be able to switch in order to counter the opposite team and prevent class stacking. (Season 6 is looking great so far. )

Players who voted YES to the poll, surmised that with professions locked at queue, ANet could modify the algorithim to improve class stacking. more accurate classed base MMR, and even have a whole slew of data to aid in the balancing. (They voted for a change ANY change would be better than nothing.)

But because the poll only mentioned the achievement hacking (no promises were made by ANet at ALL) , there was a whole lot of drama in the thread from both sides. It was something like NO – 54% to YES – 46%.

SlimChance.6593:

Since the leagues started after HOT release, there’s been several posts about profession based MMR (skill rating). ANet even made posts that they do keep track of profession based MMR, it’s not accurate because players can change classes during matches.

Then about a month or so, Evan Lesh ran a poll stating that profession s would be locked in matches. But the poll was worded on “when” the profession lock would occur. If you voted ‘NO’ then the lock would occur at the 10 second countdown or ‘YES’. To have the lock occur when entering the queue.

It was very close and NO won. So players can still switch. And profession based MMR might be a little more accurate, but still useless.

And the poll was worded to imply that the profession lock was for preventing achievement hacking. So there’s was quite a debate during the poll.

EDIT: Sorry, I was posting on my phone.. so not very good summary.

Players who voted NO to the poll, reasoned that the MM is terrible and balance is terrible and the players need to be able to switch in order to counter the opposite team and prevent class stacking. (Season 6 is looking great so far. )

Players who voted YES to the poll, surmised that with professions locked at queue, ANet could modify the algorithim to improve class stacking. more accurate classed base MMR, and even have a whole slew of data to aid in the balancing. (They voted for a change ANY change would be better than nothing.)

But because the poll only mentioned the achievement hacking (no promises were made by ANet at ALL) , there was a whole lot of drama in the thread from both sides. It was something like NO – 54% to YES – 46%.

Thanks for getting me up to speed. I can definitely see the dilemma. If they did go ahead with profession-based Skill Rating though, they could make it so players would only have the option to profession-swap if they were using the account’s Skill Rating (meaning it wouldn’t be different per character). The people who would make that “sacrifice” are probably the ones who would be at least good enough at more than the 1 profession they are playing on that they would be able to swap professions and still be competitive about it (if I’m not on my main, I personally can promise you I will not be as strong as I would be regarding situational awareness and reactions, so me changing to another class, even if I should based on the enemy/my own team’s comp is likely not going to end up as a net positive anyway).

This could still be up for debate, as I’m sure people can find reasons to dispute it. But 1 bit of control ANet could gain by doing this is they can profession-lock those who opt to use profession-based MM, and enable profession-swapping for those who opt to use account-based MM. They can then make sure each team’s comp is balanced around the players who can’t swap, and then they can also make it so there’s an equal amount of people who have swapping enabled on each team (give or take 1). Not sure how everything would work out in terms of reality of the percentages of how many players would queue in either way, but if they made a general rule of filling teams with 3-4 profession-locked players and 1-2 profession-swap players (or 5 profession-locked players if there’s enough of them in queue at the time); that should give a similar effect to how things tend to work now, at least regarding relatively low leagues.

But what do I know? That may be a terrible idea. Either way, I do appreciate the changes that are coming in to improve the experience; I have noticed a general improvement over past seasons, being the relatively casual player I am. It’s just especially frustrating trying to work on the Year of the Ascension achievements on classes that I’m terribad on (and I know it), which is dragging my rating account’s rating down (as well as other players I’m playing with). But I made another thread for that specific issue. I just thought this idea itself would be deserving of its own thread.

The problem with your suggestion is it wouldn’t prevent someone from queueing on a class they have a low rating with to get an easy matchup, and then swapping to their main class. Before class stacking restrictions and class-specific ratings can exist, class swapping has to be locked from the moment you queue for a match. But since the majority voted no on this, I’m not sure we’ll ever see these changes.

Shaogin.2679:

The problem with your suggestion is it wouldn’t prevent someone from queueing on a class they have a low rating with to get an easy matchup, and then swapping to their main class. Before class stacking restrictions and class-specific ratings can exist, class swapping has to be locked from the moment you queue for a match. But since the majority voted no on this, I’m not sure we’ll ever see these changes.

As I said in my reply before your comment, they could make it so if you use your account’s rating (which is the highest of your professions), that will allow you to class-swap. But if you use your profession’s rating (if it isn’t equal to your account’s rating), then you would be class-locked. That would prevent this from being an issue.

Pittcrew.6592:

Shaogin.2679:

The problem with your suggestion is it wouldn’t prevent someone from queueing on a class they have a low rating with to get an easy matchup, and then swapping to their main class. Before class stacking restrictions and class-specific ratings can exist, class swapping has to be locked from the moment you queue for a match. But since the majority voted no on this, I’m not sure we’ll ever see these changes.

As I said in my reply before your comment, they could make it so if you use your account’s rating (which is the highest of your professions), that will allow you to class-swap. But if you use your profession’s rating (if it isn’t equal to your account’s rating), then you would be class-locked. That would prevent this from being an issue.

Ah, I took it as you would use class-specific rating unless you swapped classes, which then you would be forced to use your account rating. But yeah, that could work actually.