Guild Wars 2

I have been pondering for a little while on the problems that a rating system could bring to the game. The one thing that could possibly become an issue is if the rating is shared between different character types (ie Ele rank shared by unplayed Thief). What I believe this would do is discourage players from trying out new/multiple classes because they will always be paired against players of their best played character instead of “I just made this thief character 5 seconds ago”. This would also tank their rating as well as everyone in their group leading to a socially frowned upon “not playing main?!” negative spiral.

I feel this.
I’m already kinda discouraged by trying out new classes because I reached rank 34 and people probably expect me to know the profession perfectly when they see that number. The truth is, I’ve got 34 ranks as an Engineer and I’m just now starting out Guardian. This is why I always leave my Champion Genius title on, so at least people might realize that Guardian is not my main.

Anyway, you make a good point.

they just need to have individual AND team ratings, as well as a separate rating system for frees.

this will allow you to play with your team on your mains, then queue with pugs earlier in the day when you want to try out different classes

ummm… if you’re just trying out a new char for the first time, or are just picking up an unplayed character again after leaving them on the shelf for a while, should your first thought be “Let’s see what this char does in a ranked match” ?

hackks.3687:

ummm… if you’re just trying out a new char for the first time, or are just picking up an unplayed character again after leaving them on the shelf for a while, should your first thought be “Let’s see what this char does in a ranked match” ?

well, don’t be so quick to shut him out. I’ll give you a personal example.

While we have not seen the leaderboards, I can assume that my team is most likely either at the top of the list in NA or at least in some middle portion of the top players in the region as we experience 10-15 minue queues between games and only seem to face a small handful of teams. The current implemented MMR prevents us from queuing in free tournaments entirely because it pulls its players from the same buckets as paids. This makes free’s literally take 2 hours to even have the bucket drop us into the free tournament queue (waiting 2/8, etc) We can no longer try comps and strats without risking our rating because we only play this small handful of teams. Hope this makes sense.

I really don’t think it will be a big issue once ANet gets all their PvP systems in place. I’m against having some bifurcated, convoluted ranking system. IMO it unnecessarily separates the player pool. Just having one individual rating is fine as long as they have custom servers up by then.

hackks.3687:

ummm… if you’re just trying out a new char for the first time, or are just picking up an unplayed character again after leaving them on the shelf for a while, should your first thought be “Let’s see what this char does in a ranked match” ?

According to the last post the place where rating will be introduced is in free tournaments (unless their has been a chance since then). There has also been some rumor that they have been testing rating this week in paids but have also mentioned nothing on if their stance on where paids would be implemented has changed. What this means is that hotjoin would be to only way to bypass the either rated frees of paid to test a class and that does not put things into a team environment where you would want to test it.

This is also not mentioning that separating paids due to skill ranking and then giving QP (which is the way to enter into dailies/monthly tournaments) equally would mean that lesser skilled players would get into the tournaments but the top two of say the 2200’s get in which would make for an extremely biased tournament, but now you have got me WAAAAY off topic

Powerr.3649:

hackks.3687:

ummm… if you’re just trying out a new char for the first time, or are just picking up an unplayed character again after leaving them on the shelf for a while, should your first thought be “Let’s see what this char does in a ranked match” ?

well, don’t be so quick to shut him out. I’ll give you a personal example.

While we have not seen the leaderboards, I can assume that my team is most likely either at the top of the list in NA or at least in some middle portion of the top players in the region as we experience 10-15 minue queues between games and only seem to face a small handful of teams. The current implemented MMR prevents us from queuing in free tournaments entirely because it pulls its players from the same buckets as paids. This makes free’s literally take 2 hours to even have the bucket drop us into the free tournament queue (waiting 2/8, etc) We can no longer try comps and strats without risking our rating because we only play this small handful of teams. Hope this makes sense.

I don’t see this as being the same as what OP is concerned with, but it does reflect my own concerns of what MMR might bring. An already small population might not be able to afford further segmentation.

it has everything to do with the OP

This is a good point, and a tough nut to crack.