Guild Wars 2

The title is somewhat incorrect, but I wanted to call it ‘No SoloQ’ anyway, because there is somewhat truth lying beneath it.

In this topic I wanted to adress one of the biggest flaws in the gw2 sPvP match making system and by that the misleading advertisment about casual player friendliness.

Often arenanet describes guild wars 2 as made to be casual friendly and you can really see the changes made to PvE in the last couple of months to become more and more of what it has been called so often.

The exception still unadressed is sPvP for casuals. By that I mean casuals who

- have to work in general
- students who have to work to pay their study bills ie. temporarly casuals.
- are doing various stuff besides gw2.

Casuals often can’t rely on mates being online at the time when they are getting home from work and finding mates in the lobby IS the same as getting queued with randoms. You just don’t know them and their playstyle. The option preferably to casuals is to queue themselfs solo, because they need to make the most of the time they have until they have to go to sleep and prepare for the next days schedule.

BUT the soloQ is not casual friendly, every so often I get queued with totaly unfair match ups where the enemy has up to 4 premades, not rarely even from the same guild.
Technicaly, it is a soloQ, because I queued myself solo, but in all fairness it must be said that it is not. It is just disguised as one.

I know that it could be a thing happening with the low amount of players queueing. Can’t you adjust the algoithms?

I want to notify you that if guild wars 2 shall become casual friendly in every area, don’t forget the sPvP part. Please.

It IS “casual friendly” you probably get some unlucky matches, if you enjoy math you can see exactly how the match making is made: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm

EDIT: If you are facing a group with premades it is very likely that the other 4 members of your team is in a party.

Anyway, as a casual getting between 4 to 4 premades is not fun. Cause you know who’s gonna get the blame when something doesn’t go the way the premades want it?

if soloQ, it should be soloQ for everyone or up to DuoQ. The system in league of legends is a great way to adress this.

EDIT: Also the algorithm does care about indivudual skill, but not how a team plays together.

The matchmaking try to match solo player with other solo players, if none are found they try to match small parties until all requirements are filled.
I prefer to get ~2 mins queue and sometimes face a premade team instead of wait way longer to guarantee that I’ll face other single players, also it would make team queues much much longer, and besides all that if I have a 4 players party and I want to PvP how they will get a 5th player? You’ll be required to join as solo or as a full team, no in between?
It is easy to complain but it is hard to find solutions.

the solution is add back soloq, where solo players play solo players, and/or gw1 RA. no mmr, no queue (30 secs back when i used to play gw1), and short matches so the crap ones don’t make u feel like u lost your entire night

The current system is quite good imo.
There is the Practice where you expect nothing from it, there you just make builds and go nuts, or go to complete your dailies.
We have the Unranked where you can play a real match but if you win or lose have pretty much no difference besides a few rank points.
We have the Ranked where if you are playing there solo you are doing it wrong in the first place.

With the previous system I only played the equivalent of Practice because I’m also quite casual and I didn’t want to mess with the rank point of others in the leaderboard in the SoloQ so I had no where else to go, now the unranked is perfect for casual players that want to join real matches instead of people forcing autobalance to join the winning team.

hmm yes this is all true in theory, but I get 4 premades way too often. It’s also true that it’s easy to complain and hard to find a solution, but it is also easy to give up on finding one.
I think… no… what I experienced in my years of playing was when I was temporarly casual gamer that it’s way too often not a solo Q, but rather a pseudo soloQ as described above with actual 4 man premades. It gets worse when they are competing while using teamspeak or another voice program with you being left alone in the team chat.
More worse when they are bad in english and don’t speak your language . True, that last one applies more to the european servers, but still.

I can’t find the link in the PvP sub forum but a dev was explaining exactly how and why the match making end doing what you are describing, seems like you would really enjoy the read (at least I did) .
Yeah, it feels frustrating to join a match with people that doesn’t speak your language against a TS organised team, with enough feedback a middle ground will be reached for sure.

Especially on the european servers with many different languages and cultures not teaching english from elementary school on this is a huge fun blocker as a casual. I am european.

Belzebu.3912:

I prefer to get ~2 mins queue and sometimes face a premade team instead of wait way longer to guarantee that I’ll face other single players

This is an outright lie. SoloQ was MUCH faster than teamQ, and only reason why soloQ was deleted was constantly growing queue times for teamQ.
“Nobody wants to play with premades, we have to do something. Oh, right, lets delete anything but premade queue! Brilliant!”

Rednik.3809:

Belzebu.3912:

I prefer to get ~2 mins queue and sometimes face a premade team instead of wait way longer to guarantee that I’ll face other single players

This is an outright lie. SoloQ was MUCH faster than teamQ, and only reason why soloQ was deleted was constantly growing queue times for teamQ.
“Nobody wants to play with premades, we have to do something. Oh, right, lets delete anything but premade queue! Brilliant!”

I’ll tell you that SoloQ having less queue time than TeamQ is a lie as well. I had faster queue times AND better matches on TeamQ than I had on SoloQ. In my experience, I had to wait an average of maybe 4-5 minutes on SoloQ while I just had to wait barely 2 minutes on TeamQ.

So, let’s not call anything a lie, let’s not make such statements because those are based on your experience! In your experience, SoloQ was faster and better; in mine, TeamQ was faster and better.

Rednik.3809:

Belzebu.3912:

I prefer to get ~2 mins queue and sometimes face a premade team instead of wait way longer to guarantee that I’ll face other single players

This is an outright lie. SoloQ was MUCH faster than teamQ, and only reason why soloQ was deleted was constantly growing queue times for teamQ.
“Nobody wants to play with premades, we have to do something. Oh, right, lets delete anything but premade queue! Brilliant!”

Yep, that could be it. SoloQ has to suffer, because TeamQ has longer queue times?
Shouldn’t be surprising that teamQ has longer queue times in every game.

Rednik.3809:

Belzebu.3912:

I prefer to get ~2 mins queue and sometimes face a premade team instead of wait way longer to guarantee that I’ll face other single players

This is an outright lie. SoloQ was MUCH faster than teamQ, and only reason why soloQ was deleted was constantly growing queue times for teamQ.
“Nobody wants to play with premades, we have to do something. Oh, right, lets delete anything but premade queue! Brilliant!”

I meant if we get a separated queue for solo and team in the new system, like a solo/team unranked and solo/team unranked. The time would increase for sure.
In the previous system I agree completely, the few times I did soloQ was faster than the current unranked.

This thread really falls under two different threads that are on the main page as well….
Unfair matches are a result of bad matchmaking & no punishment
Both of which have been addressed on page one of the PvP section…..

When it comes to bad matchmaking it’s been reported numerous times and I’m in the same boat as everyone else… just waiting on an answer.

When it comes to punishment, the community is split on how they want this addressed, both ways have been reported and again, stuck on waiting on an answer. Part of the community doesn’t want this addressed or bothered to be fixed until match making is fixed. They feel it’s there right to screw their team over if the game isn’t to their liking. The other half the community feels the punishment system should be addressed and fixed now and worry about match making down the road.

With regards to Solo Queue, the current system treats solo queue as a supplemental role. The current pvp options are as followed with a GENERAL explanation of each.

-Custom Arena, a sand box play around area.
-Practice, Newbie Starting Area / Refine your build area
-Unranked, Casual structured play
-Ranked, Uber Serious Structured Play

Before it was:
Hot Join, Quick match without waiting
Solo Arena, No premades allowed
Team Arena, meant for teams but you can join as a solo player.

Personally, I’d rather see the old system returned but then you have a couple of issues, both of which are easy fixes but still need to be addressed.

1) Will both solo and team be ranked or unranked or mixed?
2) If both are Ranked, how do you fix the game mode issue of Conquest, Team Death Match and Stronghold.
3) If we do separate queues for those game modes, how does one address the queue issue for those who want to play Team Death Match?
4) If both are ranked, how does one fix the new issue of people complaining that people are leaving and switching teams in practice? After all, some people take their leaderboard positions very very seriously and would prefer to play unranked until they feel confident enough to go on a winning streak in solo or team.
5) For the team arena portion, to prevent 1 person from rage quitting, should a rule be implemented that no one can solo queue for team arena? if they do that then you can not enter a queue with just 4 people. You would have to enter the queue as a full party of 5, or a party of 3 or a party of 2. If you enter as a party of 3, you’d have to wait for a party of 2 to be matched with you. And vice versa for party of 2… Then you run into an issue with Hybrid parties complaining about facing a fully premade team of 5….

As nice as the old system was, it did have a lot of issues as well.