Guild Wars 2

define what is “better quality” match?

i am personally fine with waiting 5 min for decent match tho, that is how LoL match making is, while not perfect at least you don’t have as many afkers and get queued with/against ppl of similar skill level

Personally, if I have a game ending somewhere around 400-500 or closer that’s generally a good quality match.

I don’t mind waiting for 5-10 minutes for a match like that, but not much more than 10.

In addition, I think giving the option to 1 team to resign if they are more than 200 points behind is completely reasonable.

infantrydiv.1620:

In addition, I think giving the option to 1 team to resign if they are more than 200 points behind is completely reasonable.

Been in many matches where the game difference was more than 200, and a comeback win was achieved.

Justin ODell.9517:

Better quality can mean what ever you want. E.g. only one or two warriors at most.

If you have an opinion on what a good match should look like, please share it.

I play on both NA and EU. EU queue is a bit faster than NA. However, I am already waiting 5+ minutes for a match now. During offpeak or non-prime hours it will be 10-20min wait or longer.

The higher up on the leaderboard you are the more likely you will sit this long for a match. The system seems to try it’s best to find a matchup but eventually gives up and gives you much lower ranked players after a set amount of time or whatever people are available.

I’ve watch twitch stream of people queuing and see them getting into matches before I do even though I queued before them while watching their previous match.

Don’t think you can improve the wait time unless leaderboard is fixed. The top 1000 is filled with inactive players or people just sitting on their positions with occasional games to reset any decay.

I voted “5+” because I really would rather wait 6-8 minutes for a 500-450 match than get an instant pop and go 500-100 (defining better match as closer combined MMRs).

However, I know the opposite is often true. Under most matchmaking systems, being in queue for a long time means no one near your rank is online. I don’t mind waiting ten minutes for a queue, but I’ve come to expect that the match will probably not be close. So in a way, causing the matchmaker to hurry a bit could actually produce better matches.

In other words, team A with an average rating of 2150 could face team B with an average rating of 2050, or team A could wait in queue for 8 more minutes until the matchmaker finally gives up and throws them in with team C of average rating 1950.

kirito.4138:

infantrydiv.1620:

In addition, I think giving the option to 1 team to resign if they are more than 200 points behind is completely reasonable.

Been in many matches where the game difference was more than 200, and a comeback win was achieved.

Justin ODell.9517:

Better quality can mean what ever you want. E.g. only one or two warriors at most.

If you have an opinion on what a good match should look like, please share it.

I play on both NA and EU. EU queue is a bit faster than NA. However, I am already waiting 5+ minutes for a match now. During offpeak or non-prime hours it will be 10-20min wait or longer.

The higher up on the leaderboard you are the more likely you will sit this long for a match. The system seems to try it’s best to find a matchup but eventually gives up and gives you much lower ranked players after a set amount of time or whatever people are available.

I’ve watch twitch stream of people queuing and see them getting into matches before I do even though I queued before them while watching their previous match.

Don’t think you can improve the wait time unless leaderboard is fixed. The top 1000 is filled with inactive players or people just sitting on their positions with occasional games to reset any decay.

Unfortunately, if you are behind by 200 points you will usually lose. A resign option could be implemented where a majority of 4 would have to accept the resign for it to go through.

Justin ODell.9517:

Better quality can mean what ever you want. E.g. only one or two warriors at most.

If you have an opinion on what a good match should look like, please share it.

Oh dear, that’s a lovely definition of ‘better quality’. :P

I would presume the logical request would be fairly equal rank, equal (active) numbers on both teams with some sort of class split (max of 2 of a class on each team if possible, take total pool of participants and allocate to create balance if possible). Of course that is a lot of conditionals, especially for higher rank players, but we are talking about ideals right?

infantrydiv.1620:

kirito.4138:

infantrydiv.1620:

In addition, I think giving the option to 1 team to resign if they are more than 200 points behind is completely reasonable.

Been in many matches where the game difference was more than 200, and a comeback win was achieved.

Justin ODell.9517:

Better quality can mean what ever you want. E.g. only one or two warriors at most.

If you have an opinion on what a good match should look like, please share it.

Unfortunately, if you are behind by 200 points you will usually lose. A resign option could be implemented where a majority of 4 would have to accept the resign for it to go through.

I rather not encourage the community that mentality to throw in the towel prematurely. Soon it will be “oh, we wiped on our first initial team fight, guess its a loss”. Also rather not have people start voting mid match lowering the team morale.

kirito.4138:

I play on both NA and EU. EU queue is a bit faster than NA. However, I am already waiting 5+ minutes for a match now. During offpeak or non-prime hours it will be 10-20min wait or longer.

The higher up on the leaderboard you are the more likely you will sit this long for a match. The system seems to try it’s best to find a matchup but eventually gives up and gives you much lower ranked players after a set amount of time or whatever people are available.

That’s kind of the kicker.
If matches were already quick, it would be a poll that makes a lil more sense, but I commonly wait 3-5 mins in prime time for off-balanced and/or 3-4v5, so it seems longer que times for ‘better ques’ could reach ridiculous proportions.

kirito.4138:

infantrydiv.1620:

In addition, I think giving the option to 1 team to resign if they are more than 200 points behind is completely reasonable.

Been in many matches where the game difference was more than 200, and a comeback win was achieved.

Justin ODell.9517:

Better quality can mean what ever you want. E.g. only one or two warriors at most.

If you have an opinion on what a good match should look like, please share it.

I play on both NA and EU. EU queue is a bit faster than NA. However, I am already waiting 5+ minutes for a match now. During offpeak or non-prime hours it will be 10-20min wait or longer.

The higher up on the leaderboard you are the more likely you will sit this long for a match. The system seems to try it’s best to find a matchup but eventually gives up and gives you much lower ranked players after a set amount of time or whatever people are available.

I’ve watch twitch stream of people queuing and see them getting into matches before I do even though I queued before them while watching their previous match.

Don’t think you can improve the wait time unless leaderboard is fixed. The top 1000 is filled with inactive players or people just sitting on their positions with occasional games to reset any decay.

Agreed.

Justin ODell.9517:

For more context, I’m interested in improving matches beyond just finding players near your MMR. This includes doing things like preferring a better spread of professions and builds, matching people with dishonor with other people with dishonor, grouping people by rank or play style, etc…

These things can sound like a good idea, but can also cause you to wait in the queue longer. I want to know much longer than typical MMR pairing you’d be willing to wait. We can compensate for that wait by doing things like shutting off extra filters if you’ve been waiting, or adjusting the scoring weight by wait time.

If you can do pixy dust magic to have balance spread of profession, build, play-style, rank, dishonor etc and keep it with in 5-10minute or less then YES! DO IT. (looking at the poll results seems 5-10min is the sweet spot)

But, from the playerbase now, pretty sure the wait will be much much longer than 5-10minute. Probably fall asleep forgetting I queued. (nooo dont give me afk dishonor…)

Not sure how you will balance professions since people can switch their character/build around before match. I often switch to different profession depending on the map and current team composition.

How will you categorize or even record people’s play-style?

Justin ODell.9517:

For more context, I’m interested in improving matches beyond just finding players near your MMR. This includes doing things like preferring a better spread of professions and builds, matching people with dishonor with other people with dishonor, grouping people by rank or play style, etc…

These things can sound like a good idea, but can also cause you to wait in the queue longer. I want to know much longer than typical MMR pairing you’d be willing to wait. We can compensate for that wait by doing things like shutting off extra filters if you’ve been waiting, or adjusting the scoring weight by wait time.

Solo queue will always be disorganized due to lack of voip or a better communication system (something like Smite’s voice hotkeys). In its current state I don’t think it’s worth sacrificing queue times to provide superior team comps that will still run around like chickens with their heads cut off.

Of course if this can be implemented without adding more than a few minutes to current queue times that would be amazing and please do it. One issue is that some people will change classes/builds depending on the enemy team comp and it could end up just as random as it is already.

I think the most important thing to me is solidifying good matchmaking based on MMR because that doesn’t seem to be ideal yet. Of course this is hurt by flaws with low population/leaderboards/MMR.

Justin ODell.9517:

For more context, I’m interested in improving matches beyond just finding players near your MMR. This includes doing things like preferring a better spread of professions and builds, matching people with dishonor with other people with dishonor, grouping people by rank or play style, etc…

These things can sound like a good idea, but can also cause you to wait in the queue longer. I want to know much longer than typical MMR pairing you’d be willing to wait. We can compensate for that wait by doing things like shutting off extra filters if you’ve been waiting, or adjusting the scoring weight by wait time.

Could you just have two options:

- Put me into the next match (assuming common sense requirements, no rank 5 in a rank 60 match) (You Only Queue Once button :P)
- I’ll wait, put me into a suitable match

Zero to five minutes is kind of broad for a single category, that’s going to skew the vote. I for example would happily wait two or so minutes but probably not as much as five.

Justin ODell.9517:

For more context, I’m interested in improving matches beyond just finding players near your MMR. This includes doing things like preferring a better spread of professions and builds, matching people with dishonor with other people with dishonor, grouping people by rank or play style, etc…

These things can sound like a good idea, but can also cause you to wait in the queue longer. I want to know much longer than typical MMR pairing you’d be willing to wait. We can compensate for that wait by doing things like shutting off extra filters if you’ve been waiting, or adjusting the scoring weight by wait time.

as said before i think match making (while having its own issues) in LoL works pretty good, maybe you should look up it as an example

This leaderboard MMR system is bad itself. My whole team was like 15, 16, 20, 21, and 23. We won like 5 matches and they ALL moved up aside from me (who was 21 before the move) who moved down to 22 because our guy that was 23 replaced me at 21.

That makes no sense at all.

I already wait +10 mins most of the time, so as long as it takes. Here’s an example just now:

Wouldn’t the ideal solution be to allow people to join a queue for an “ideal” match that meets certain criteria, but then dump them immediately into some sort of battle royale space where they can just fight it out with other players? The queuing space wouldn’t have time limits or anything, you’d get some tiny reward for each kill made, but not so much that it would be the best way to gain anything, it would just give you something to do while you waited. You could tell the queuing system to either hold out for a perfect match, or to slowly tick off variables that just weren’t coming up.

I personally think the best matches have:
- Players of close skill level, evenly distributed between the teams: this is the biggest thing. Its not a HUGE deal if there is a completely new person on your team if there is also one on the other team.

- Its o.k. if there are over-represented professions, as long as it doesn’t happen all of the time. I think a slight negative weighting can be added to discourage playing 5 warrior teams all the time, but letting it happen occasionally is fine.

- Be careful, but putting players reported for abusive conversation together can be a good thing, but then it can breed a cess-pit of negativity which will spiral those players down.

A good solo Q match imo is:

• atleast 1 player greets back when I greet them (happens extremely rarely, like 20% of the time :/)
• 300-500 is a decent score
• people arent afk
• a person goes close at the beginning
• people dont say offensive words
• the server we get in doesnt lagg. I found that some servers are fine, and some have like a 1s skill lagg (while my internet is 100% in both cases)

The chat is probably my biggest issue… I once decided to do solo Q after a stressfull day, but some person called me kitten, and stuff, just because I asked who wanted to go close, and that it cant be myself because I need mobility (mesmer) ._.

Some people are so toxic

I don’t really mind losing actually. Unless the enemy team wins solely because mine is afk :P

Also, I like the new rank point reward system, but personally, it changed my style in hotjoin a whole lot. It used to be ‘_just run around and kill people for fun’, but now its _’just run around and kill people for fun /notices team is losing/ OMG were losing, I have to cap points :O’. Im not saying its bad, in fact, im aaying its amazing, because it teaches people the objective instead of just getting alot of glory/fight for fun. It just makes me feel bad when my team loses because I just run around and enjoy it :/. Its like they all get less glory because of me >_<

Oh, and with the old system I always joined the losing team, or blue if they were even. But now, if i swap to the losing team I actually lose rank points :/. And yes, its a big deal because I just want to be rank 40 for new skins :/.

Autobalqnce often has the opposite effect when it swaps me…

Situation:

1. 3v5, 300 vs 300 points, team of 5 has 3capped.
2. autobalance puts me in the other team so it becomes 4v4
3. the team that first had 3, 3caps, and spawn camps the other team forever.

Or things like this:

1. blue and red have 4, blue has 50 points and red have 400. Im in blue.
2. autobalance does nothing.

It seems to me autobalance picks a random person to make the teams even >_<

I kind of have a suggestion for a new autobalance, but I got kind of aidetracked and it turned this in a wall of text, so ill leave it out :/.

I can wait 5-10 minutes tops. And please deliver on that better match.

I don’t think this is a good time for a move like this.
With the current state of GW2 (from watching the forums and playing a few games), people are mainly playing to relax and waste a little time.
So if those players have to wait too long they (including me) won’t bother. Although if the gameplay changes, the population starts to grow and people actually start practicing/taking GW2 more seriously, I think people will be pleased with longer queues for better games.
Just my 2 cents

I dont think it is a good idea to “filter” class and builds to find a matchup in soloQ.
This would dictate The Meta someone somewhere created or said how the game have to be played on a twitch channel noone watches.
I had matchs with 3 mesmers in my team and won and this was fun + a match i will always remember.
When we have classes overpopulating the SoloQ matches than this is a balancing problem and should be solved there.

The Other Filters you named like Dishonor ppl have to fight dishonor ppl sounds good.

But i guess i would love more to join a match instant than have to wait 10 mins and i think it should not be hard to not create full 5 man grps and wait for another 5 mans to make a counterpart, it would be much better to just pair players and throw in 5 pairs and done.

It would be no problem to have:
Pair 1: rank 4 vs rank 12
Pair 2:Rank 80% vs rank 78%
Pair 3:Rank 50% vs Rank 30 %
Pair 4: rank 486 vs Rank 346
Pair 5: no ranked vs no ranked

this would be somehow balanced and would create fast matches

and there can be a filter to matchup pairs with similiar rankings like +-100 ranks and every 1 minute this filter goes 100 higher

or simple make leagues:
gold sivler and bronze

gold: rank 1-500
silver: rank 500-80%
bronce- rank 80% – unranked

and make matchups only with pairs from a league. This would give fast instant ques and very fair matchups. And something people wanna work for.

I think “I’ll wait how long it takes, no matter what!” is very easy said, but I don’t think this will be true at the end, and a long queuing time will scare a lot of people away.

I remember the day in WoW where we waited 30min to over 1h for a rated Battleground, ending up playing against one of two other teams. We had fun in the teamspeak, and I think I’d wait for so long again, but it scared a lot of people away.

Current Problems:

• The current community of active SoloQ players is very very small, with huge gaps between their ‘skill’ levels. It can happen, that a team with top 100 players will be forced to play against a team without a single person in the top 1000. Which is not a fun experience for both teams. Yes, you talked about shuffling the teams, but I think there should also be rank difference under which teams do not get match together.

• In TPvP the waiting times are very very small, but f.e. the day before yesterday we played against the same team three times one after the other, even though, we won every single one of them. I think one rematch is fine, but personally I’d prefer not to play against the same team twice, but three matches are definitely too much.

I don’t think people mind waiting for a match that is full/exciting and totally different from conquest..

And since I am waiting for one year now, I don’t mind waiting for another.

;)

I would bet that queues longer than 5 minutes are not acceptable for a game that is <15 Min. in duration. The long queue contributes to balking and reneging which are both contributing factors to the longer queues and poor quality matches (specifically the 5 v 5-x problem).

I wouldn’t mind waiting for a little longer than 5 minutes (in fact I often do now), but I am not everyone. Your straw poll is going to have a biased sample due to where you’ve posted the poll. People on the tPvP section of the forums are inherently more prone to care about the match up issue than the masses. Commercial viability of the game trumps the degree to which balanced matches are important, and this is a critical understanding for solving the queue problem in this case. You need to use hard data from in game for this problem. Community perception will lead you astray.

The queueing problem that you have is interesting. Do you have any data on the rate of Balking (exiting the que before match) and Reneging (leaving or afk-ing once in a match)? If you do, then I have to imagine you have someone on staff that knows how to optimize a queue system. If you don’t have the resources to solve this in house, then I would offer to crunch the numbers for you and generate some conclusions based on the data. I’m doing some post graduate study on this stuff right now anyway, and given the data it shouldn’t take much time. If you want to take me up on this, then just shoot me a PM.

BTW, thanks for the matches last week, Justin. I haven’t seen you in game since to say it.

An important function that is currently missing, which could impact the queue time and improve the quality, is an option to confirm/drop out of queue 20 secs or so before the game starts. If the player does not confirm, he/she gets removed from queue and replaced without penalty, and the same thing happens if the player decides to drop out at that time.

This is a similar system to some mobas I have played and will likely help get 5 active players on each team, which is the most important basis for a good game.

Honestly I don’t see how “time” should even be a factor in determining a match-up.

Allow me to elaborate. Time should be inconsequential in that the issue is not with putting bad players up against good players. The way the system is currently set up is that it is drastically biased towards splitting teams up based on their MMR, meaning it has a huge propensity to putting the top 5 rated players in any given match on the same team.

By either COMPLETELY shuffling the 10 players picked for Queue or scattering them based on a formula that evens out the chances of winning it shouldn’t take more “time” to get a better match-making system.

The only reason I could see time being a factor would be if you were trying to force matches to have all players within a certain range of each other, which is a pretty ridiculous goal given the current setup (if you wanted to accomplish this then a better addition would be tiers that only places players of similar tiers within the same matches). The main concern I have heard is that people are tired of the illusion of sync Queueing. No one wants to see the same top 20 players in the exact same team for 5 hours in a row (I’ve been there, both on the top and bottom team—it’s especially bad during oceanic time zone).

IMO I expect both good and bad players in any given match. All that I ask is that it’s randomized WITHIN the match to prevent both organized syncing and to promote a more balanced game (thus resulting in less people leaving mid-match).

Hey, just a quick word to say thank you for listening to the community and start using polls to get the opinion of the players, that’s a great idea

I would wait 10min at max at prime time. If I have to wait longer I need something to do at the mists.

Better quality for me would be 1 class per team with right match making adk grouch i can wait even a day idc

10-15 min is fine for me if i can do a “good” match without afk/leavers, score closed etc.

I think is very important people play this game because if people are afk because decay don’t punish them, it’s very hard to improve matchmaking.

I voted “as soon as possible” because I know how these things go. You’ll come up with a “better” setup, but it really won’t be better, and we’ll all end up waiting 10+ minutes for a matchup that’s not much better than going to hot join.

No thanks. If you have a better approach, roll it out for a month and see how it goes. Then yank it if it isn’t any better.

Frankly I think it depends on traffic, I don’t want to wait much longer than 5 minutes for a match. It’s frustrating when I talk guildies into going into tPvP with me and then we have to wait 20+ minutes around reset.

The two options, “put me in a match now” vs. “wait” I think are good ones. However, if I choose “put me in a match now” would I still have the same 20 minute wait?

It would be nice to have a way to see the volume of traffic going into tPvP. When I’m waiting 20 minutes + for a match I start wondering if anyone’s even playing.

Justin first of all thank you for your dedication.

How far fetched is this suggestion from ever happening?

Merging EU and NA Heart of the Mists and allowing both to queue for the same pool. The peak hours from EU would fill in for the NA deserted hours and the NA peak time would fill in for EU deserted hours. This would result in much faster queues and a more homogeneized population throughout the day.

The only issue I see raised from this would be a slight latency increase, which I dont think it would be much significant unless you can shed some light on it’s effects.

If a NA vs EU PvP merge can’t happen for the foreseeable future, how difficult would be to create a region-wide HoTM (EU HoTM consisting of all EU servers, and NA HoTM consisting of all NA servers). This wouldn’t have a direct effect on Queue times, but it would contribute to a live, populated HotM, which could then indirectly lead to players sticking around longer and eventually queue more often!

Jesus.

I cant wait 1 hour if needed

Honestly with the low player base I feel like true matchmaking should be done at a specific time of day and that should be the only way to increase your ranking. The rest of the day people could just use custom arenas.

I know that sounds bad but with a revamped rewards system this could work but with such little incentive to play custom arena it sounds stupid.

i want to be in a match as soon as i click “Join”

Other games display average wait times on queues which is good. This should be in WvW and PvP imo.

On topic: I hate waiting. If I have to wait over 7-8 minutes then I get kitten ed with the game. Also the longer you wait then the more afkers you get because people get bored and go make some food and then get put into the game they forgot about. That is another reason why games like dota 2 make you confirm when the queue pops or it puts you back into the queue to find another player with priority.

BlackhawkSOM.6401:

Honestly with the low player base I feel like true matchmaking should be done at a specific time of day and that should be the only way to increase your ranking. The rest of the day people could just use custom arenas.

I know that sounds bad but with a revamped rewards system this could work but with such little incentive to play custom arena it sounds stupid.

If custom arenas were like TPvP instead of hotjoin, random side swapping, zerging….
I could agree.

But SPvP ends up playing out like a much different game.
I think revamping custom arenas to be more of a personalized que system would be glorious.
Like, a bunch of options for ‘timeframe’ (how long you are looking to wait), what level of competitiveness, which maps, exc. exc.

Right now ‘custom’ arenas are just token SPvP servers of a year ago, with the occasional duel one… token SPvP servers are EXTREMELY casual.

Justin ODell.9517:

…grouping people by rank or play style, etc…
…..

how do u identify play style?

I want a solo match without afkers, where i can really play.
I played 3 arenas today, and i’ve met 3 afkers there.
Ofc 3/3 have been lost and I meet with this every single day.
Its like… u’ve to be so lucky, to have 5/5 team, which team u can really play.

If I was a few days ago really highly ranked, then after 2 days im at the very end ;]
It looks, like i knew how to play PvP, but after 2 days i just became noob ;D
Nvm, Im going to play moar with afkers, its so… fun ;3

Eh.

Good idea, ideally people would rather wait to get a decent/better match.. but like Duke said this might bring the problem that with longer waiting time, the higher the chances of getting an afker. In order to fix this i would suggest the following:

After 1 minute since you queued there will have a popup message (maybe not in the middle of the screen but somewhere in the corner), with a 10-20 second time-frame for you to apply… something along the line “You still here?” (perhaps followed with an estimation of your queue pop if possible), if this message is not answered you get automatically kicked from the queue without punishment. And the process should repeat every 1 minute (debatable), so you still have time to do whatever and you don’t need to worry if you really need to leave in a hurry or just go make food or something.

The only thing we need is a smarter system that divides the 10 players selected for a match onto the two teams in a way that makes them as close to possible in rating. If we can increase the popularity of spvp then maybe we can look at other ways but first things first. Otherwise you are looking at intolerable queues. Intolerable to me would be greater then 10 minutes consistently.

Justin ODell.9517:

Better quality can mean what ever you want. E.g. only one or two warriors at most.

If you have an opinion on what a good match should look like, please share it.

I kind of like the idea of having only one of each profession per team. That can lead to some serious thinking towards strategy. That combined with better matchmaking can lead to better games. Truthfully, I’d rather wait on more game types, but this can be a quick fix.

In regards to 4v5 situations, I think that everyone has to hit the ready button before the match starts and if there is one player that doesn’t click the ready button, they should be replaced by another player currently queued until everyone is ready to play. It might lead to slightly longer wait times, but LoL players are willing to wait until there are two complete teams before starting so I’m sure most of us are willing to wait as well.