Guild Wars 2

Evan Lesh.3295:

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I fully expect higher-skilled players to swap more, but that is a much smaller portion of the player-base.

An important question i: Would all high-skilled players be OK with profession locking if we could ensure no stacking?

For this you would need to adjust daily achievements.

Even with 4 possible professions, they tend to stack the same professions too much. Which results in longer matching times for those using the daily professions, whether they are interested in the daily or not.

Because of this, first you would need to develop account-based dailies that are not the same for all accounts. For example, the current profession dailies would be replaced by two profession dailies that are generated based on the account’s stats:

• Daily confident choice: requires a random profession between the 4 most player by the account.
• Daily road less traveled: requires a random profession between the 4 least played by the account.

Something like that should scatter the professions enough to reduce queuing that now causes things like 4 engineers at the same time in a random team, while still allowing 3 dailies for the AP with the professions a player likes more.

Then, if professions are locked, ratings should consider them.

It’ll be even better if there was a system allowing players to take turns picking professions.

A coin toss, and players start picking characters taking turns. They’ll be presented the characters the enemies pick, and a grid with their characters. Players can either pick a character or ‘pass’ giving the turn to a teammate. When one player picks a character of a profession, that profession gets disabled for the rest of their team.

But what if a player only has characters of a profession that has been already picked?

Then there would be temporary characters like those created for the Beta, that they would be given for the match, with a full set of armor using the standard model skin, and a full set of weapons of that profession, so they can make their build on the fly.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Soul.9280:

Evan, the last night of League play, I saw lots of people swapping classes during the 90 seconds wait period before the match started, and I was playing in the Legendary division against many of the top players. And I did see a surprising number of people who queued as thief or warrior and then switched to something meta.

I fully expect higher-skilled players to swap more, but that is a much smaller portion of the player-base.

An important question i: Would all high-skilled players be OK with profession locking if we could ensure no stacking?

Yes, I would be very happy with that!

Not sure where your marker is for “high skilled”, but I made diamond playing primarily thief in the league and have been playing since beta. The only times I profession swapped was in response to profession stacking (another thief on my team), so this would make it so that I didn’t have to play on a profession I didn’t want to play, which would be great!

Here is what reddit think about profession locking and profession MMR.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/439uq3/pvp_evan_lesh_would_all_highskilled_players_be_ok/?ref=search_posts

Evan Lesh.3295:

An important question i: Would all high-skilled players be OK with profession locking if we could ensure no stacking?

I would be totally okay with this.

currently matchmaking puts together crappy team comps a lot. the only way we can fix this currently is to change classes.

taking our ability to fix bad teams does nobody any good.
no class stacking isn’t great either, it ruins fun, queue times, & furthermore same class does not mean same build & same role. role and build have more comp impact imo.

Matchmaking seems like its not working to great, i was on the blue team what with this type of match-up and getting new players or afk’er/leavers its not really entertaining trying to carry your teams

Evan Lesh.3295:

I fully expect higher-skilled players to swap more, but that is a much smaller portion of the player-base.

Yes, higher skilled players will be able to play more classes, and will understand the game mechanics well enough to estimate when a class swap will give an advantage. The point where this becomes unfair is when higher skilled players understand the mechanics well enough to make a class swap which is extremely detrimental to the opposing team. This greatly puts less experienced players at a disadvantage. I think we greatly underestimate how often this occurs.

An important question i: Would all high-skilled players be OK with profession locking if we could ensure no stacking?

OK, that’s a trick question! :-) Of course you could find 1 high skilled player that would not be OK with it! I, and I think many others, would be more than OK with profession locking if we could ensure no staking.

Players that mastered their classes would know how to make adjustments, within their class, to counter the opposing team’s composition. Besides, it is very frustrating to see three thieves on the opposing team, change your build to counter direct damage, then have 2 of them switch to reaper 16s prior to match start. How is that fair? By the time you see what happened, it’s too late. GG.

Evan Lesh.3295:

It is correct that allowing profession swapping works against matchmaking. While I don’t have hard metrics readily available, my gut tells me a relatively small percentage of the player base does this. I don’t think it would be worth while to rip out the profession scoring entirely, though we did lower its effectiveness in relation to other scoring factors.

Locking professions upon queuing gets us a couple things: Profession stacking can be completely controlled via the matchmaker, and we can start using profession MMR again which should make much more accurate matches than just using account-wide MMR.

For those now asking for non-class stacking I thought it was time to bring up the discussion that Evan was asking is about this.

Evan Lesh.3295:

It is correct that allowing profession swapping works against matchmaking. While I don’t have hard metrics readily available, my gut tells me a relatively small percentage of the player base does this. I don’t think it would be worth while to rip out the profession scoring entirely, though we did lower its effectiveness in relation to other scoring factors.

Locking professions upon queuing gets us a couple things: Profession stacking can be completely controlled via the matchmaker, and we can start using profession MMR again which should make much more accurate matches than just using account-wide MMR.

Actually people are using professions swapping even in low tier ques. Also allowing people to play with a team that has multiple professions creates the illusion of being good and getting in pro league by stacking classes in ranked. If you really want more players to pro league you should make the same rules in ranked as you have in pro league. Otherwise the same teams will rule the pro league scene forever.

I think a large portion of the players would agree with me if I said that we would be fine with class lock in matches if it meant we got no prof stacking and a prof based mmr to allow people to experiment with playing different chars without having to fight pro players using a brand new class.

The optimal thing it would be locking Builds (is better than general prof) with a build template system and balancing matchamking with meta builds (considering builds like parameter in matchmaking)

Without a build template you can have different professions but for example all very tanky or super squishy or with very bad builds without any control.

So without a build template system and the chance to lock builds is better to not lock professions and let players to swap if They want.

For pro league is different, there is organization, practice and theorycrafting, They can handle this rule.

What I can’t understand is how matchmaking can put me into pretty much the same team multiple times (four times in a row as of now) when the team always loses; how or why does the matchmaking not notice that this team simply doesn’t work and instead mixes them differently? Knowing you’ll lose the second you see your team isn’t fun at all, even less so if they’re unwilling to listen to any kind of strategy you try to develop and whatnot despite being in sapphire.

The Ace.9105:

Actually people are using professions swapping even in low tier ques.

I’m one of those people that switches in low tiers… I do it for the following reasons:
1. The match making system has linked me up with multiple of the same class and a bit more diversity helps (e.g. I was on my thief and ended up with 2 others thieves so I switched)

2. I’ll do it to counter heavily stacked other teams e.g. where I’m facing 3+ necros I tend to switch to a profession that can handle the conditions better and isn’t just feeding them more conditions to return to me.

3. To counter the other team or because I’ve come up with Stronghold versus conquest I’ll also switch between my two engineers – one is a condition build, the other a power build… and changing your build is a PITA so it is quicker and easier to switch characters.

(4. Because I queued while sorting out my bags on one character but I actually wanted to play on the other one).

But that said, I’m not opposed to having profession based MMR and lock-out of characters particularly. Regardless of build, I like to think I know and play better on my engineer than I do on other professions and that should be reflected.

But, particularly in this case, it would be nice if there was a way to quickly and easily change between pre configured builds on a character.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Soul.9280:

Evan, the last night of League play, I saw lots of people swapping classes during the 90 seconds wait period before the match started, and I was playing in the Legendary division against many of the top players. And I did see a surprising number of people who queued as thief or warrior and then switched to something meta.

I fully expect higher-skilled players to swap more, but that is a much smaller portion of the player-base.

An important question i: Would all high-skilled players be OK with profession locking if we could ensure no stacking?

Yes. Why wouldent they? Enemy team will have rules, and it will bring class diversity.
And better more interesting matches. And honestly it would be much easier to ballance the game mode with no class stacking .

Doesn’t work at all.