Guild Wars 2

tl;dr version:
Survey is closed until further notice, details and results below.
I’d like to thank all participants and people who offered feedback and suggestions.

It has been 3 weeks since the 5th PvP season started, a long enough time for majority of active participants to form their opinion. And indeed, we’ve seen players express quite a few differing opinions and divisive arguments over various aspects of the new ranking system, new reward tracks, various checks and balances, matchmaking and a number of other issues. So far, at least on surface, it seems that this season has garnered the most interest, whether the cause was the sheer number of changes, or the success of their implementation.
Since we don’t have access to any sort of official statistics I’ve tried my best to build a version of a survey that could at least offer some sort of an idea where the player base in general (or rather forum/reddit goers along with some other fringe groups) stands on various perceived issues that the new season brought with them.

Unfortunately, the range of tools available to a free surveymonkey account is understandably rather limited, so the survey itself is not nearly as detailed as I’d have preferred it to be.
However, it is my hope that, if there is a large enough of a sample size, I could do a follow-up survey that’d help provide more focus to what the surveyed player base considers the biggest issues and maybe even provide a valid idea or two that could help ANet in planning future seasons (or maybe fixing issues they agree with before this season ends).

I’ve tried my best to remove any sort of bias and be as broad and inclusive as possible, but there is of course a chance that I’ve erred somewhere or missed something. Feel free to provide feedback in the survey itself as well as in this thread.

Right, apparently I didn’t count on the amount of people who’d take the survey, and apparently there is a limit of a 100 responders per survey on surveymonkey free account which led to my scrambling for patching up the whole endeavour as best as I could.

In the end I’ve decided to scrap the attempt and do the whole thing again on another platform, while learning from the precious feedback I’ve received on the presentation issues and my oversights.

While this survey was not as successful as it could’ve been (while in some areas being more successful then I could’ve dreamed) there is still quite a bit of interesting data that were the result. Feel free to extrapolate whichever conclusions you wish from data but be careful of the cognitive bias
Now, without further ado, the results (only 216 out of 480 responses were recorded, the rest are lost behind a paywall):

How often do you play PvP?
I’m new to GW2 – 1
Rarely/never played PvP before this season – 18
I only play during PvP seasons – 113
PvP is my preferred game mode – 47
I’m exclusively PvP player – 9
Other – 28 (vast majority commented that I forgot to include casual active PvP players, those who do dailies, reward tracks, a couple of matches a day for practice etc.)

Interesting numbers: amount of people who favor PvP as a game mode (almost 26%). From all of the players estimates I’ve personally never seen a number that reached that high.

How many ranked/unranked matches have you played?
Less than 500 – 65
500-1000 – 47
1000-2500 – 58
2500-5000 – 34
More than 5000 – 12

Which of these reasons best describe your motivation for participating in the current PvP season? (first number is "somewhat important, second is “very important”)
Obtaining ascended gear – 80 63
Obtaining legendary backpiece – 50 59
Trying to get the new titles – 56 15
Playing with friends – 67 39
I just like PvP – 75 103
In the Other category the most mentioned reason is missed/unclaimed achievements with 6 mentions

This question could’ve probably been phrased better and given better presentation (for example forcing a response per column).

Average rank obtained in seasons 1-4 (don’t count seasons you skipped/missed)
Amber – 7
Sapphire – 11
Emerald – 22
Ruby – 69
Diamond – 31
Legendary – 46
Didn’t play – 31

Interesting statistics, especially Ruby threshold theory that is once again confirmed.

Current league placement
Not ranked – 13
Bronze – 18
Silver – 67
Gold – 73
Platinum – 42
Legendary 4

This one was a bit surprising to me. The bell curve is quite a bit skewed.

Do you think your current league placement is an accurate representation of your skill level?
300+ below – 26
100-300 below – 65
Accurate – 117
100-300 above – 9
More then 300 above – 0

Again a surprise considering how much presence on forums people who aren’t satisfied with their own placement have. Notice the massive discrepancy between people who think they are below their deserved rating and people who believe they are above it. A whooping 10:1 ratio.

Which do you think are the issues with the current PvP season?(here I’m showing only the “major issue column”
Build diversity – 84
Placement matches impact on leaderboards – 82
Non-Hot build inferiority – 78
Class stacking -78
Class balance – 73
Top players with multis – 71
Lack of different modes – 67
MMR – 54
Default rating of new PvP’ers – 44
Limited/unsatisfactory maps – 43
Lack of team que – 26
Duo queue – 25
PvP tutorial – 22

Interestingly enough, while silver ranked players are unsatisfied with their placements, they mostly quote build issues (stacking, diversity, HoT build superiority etc.) as their primary concerns. On the other hand, it’s the gold players who are primarily concerned with new player rating, MMR and other issues I’d have thought were something silver ranked players would’ve considered more important.
Apart from that, it seems that Skyhammer is no longer the bane of everyone’s PvP experience :P And it looks like the population is willing to let go the issue of premade advantage over pugs (or at least that seems to be the case in the lower brackets).

Last, a couple of choice quotes from the participants:

MMR decay system. It should be faster for legendary but lower at the lower ranks. An alternative system for non legendary players is to have no MMR decay but you can’t go into ranked matches after not playing for a few days unless you play x number of unranked matches.

Current meta and balance at plat is actually very good.Every class is actually pretty viable, DPS and bunker are fairly balanced between eachother as well. However, I understand that at lower ratings this is definitely not the case, as there is a massive difference in skill ceiling and floor between various classes. SoloQ carry potential for self-sufficient and DPS classes (warrior, DH, thief, druid) is far higher than highly team reliant classes (necro, ele). The main issue with GW2 is its massive learning curve. It’s far too steep for most new players to even understand what goes on in high rated games. Without this understanding they can’t mimic pro players even if they tried, unlike games as league / … that are much easier to watch and follow. (Hence alot of people stating there is too much CC / condi / … spam going around because they simply do not know what to dodge)

there are to many hidden things that influence pvp like weapon stow or sometimes even jumping given an addvantage cause skills are executed inother way as desinged or even worse gamer Keyboards where you can spam more than one or 2 skills at once

I always enjoy reading these.

I’m not in research but two things you should consider when evaluating the results:

Freeelancer.2860:

How often do you play PvP?

Interesting numbers: amount of people who favor PvP as a game mode (almost 26%). From all of the players estimates I’ve personally never seen a number that reached that high.

This is very likely affected by a self-selection bias.

Freeelancer.2860:

Do you think your current league placement is an accurate representation of your skill level?
300+ below – 26
100-300 below – 65
Accurate – 117
100-300 above – 9
More then 300 above – 0

Again a surprise considering how much presence on forums people who aren’t satisfied with their own placement have. Notice the massive discrepancy between people who think they are below their deserved rating and people who believe they are above it. A whooping 10:1 ratio.

I wouldn’t take this result too literally considering people tend to overestimate their own performance. There is plenty of research on this topic.

I’d argue that this is actually a very positive result for the new system.

Xaylin.1860:

I wouldn’t take this result too literally considering people tend to overestimate their own performance. There is plenty of research on this topic.

I’d argue that this is actually a very positive result for the new system.

I think my placement is below skill level because I keep winning more than losing and my MMR keeps increasing. It’s gone up 400 points and climbing. I may be an outlier, but I highly suspect this is true for a lot of people. Almost everyone on my friends list has increased their MMR substantially over the course of the season.

Fluffball.8307:

Xaylin.1860:

I wouldn’t take this result too literally considering people tend to overestimate their own performance. There is plenty of research on this topic.

I’d argue that this is actually a very positive result for the new system.

I think my placement is below skill level because I keep winning more than losing and my MMR keeps increasing. It’s gone up 400 points and climbing. I may be an outlier, but I highly suspect this is true for a lot of people. Almost everyone on my friends list has increased their MMR substantially over the course of the season.

With proper placements 400+ rating gain should never happen.

Burn.5401:

With proper placements 400+ rating gain should never happen.

Ya the placement matches clearly have problems, but that wasn’t the question.

Also it should happen because people can get better. The guys with 2000+ rating didn’t start playing GW with that rating, they gradually improved.

Fluffball.8307:

Burn.5401:

With proper placements 400+ rating gain should never happen.

Ya the placement matches clearly have problems, but that wasn’t the question.

Also it should happen because people can get better. The guys with 2000+ rating didn’t start playing GW with that rating, they gradually improved.

Improvement that can take you through a whole division in the course of a couple weeks? I’m talking about the current season’s rating, not the hidden MMR.

Xaylin.1860:

I wouldn’t take this result too literally considering people tend to overestimate their own performance. There is plenty of research on this topic.

Oh, I didn’t reach any conclusions, I just pointed out some numbers that were interesting to me.

The survey itself is bound to be flawed in many ways.. just one example is that over 90% of the answers came from reddit (only 30ish came via forums) and the difference between forum and reddit replies is interesting (and if I had a bigger sample I’d even dare to include some of my own speculation as far as reasons for discrepancies between the forum and reddit goers. Of course neither reddit nor forum is a valid representative of the player base as a whole, but having widely different perspective between them tells me that these numbers may well mean absolutely nothing as far as the player base as a whole goes. Still, a good topic for a gossip methinks.

It’s perfectly possible to become a platinum player in a season. There’s not absurdly much to learn about the game. No insane combos or jukes like some games. Most won’t but a skilled person with prior conquest exp could achieve it.

Expected Results

• PvP population is healthy, though that may be bias in people who took the survey.
• PvPers play because they like PvP. Having rewards doesn’t hurt.
• The pip system sucked.
• Many players overrate themselves.
• Balance and diversity is a problem, which are primarily due to HoT power creep (class stacking is a symptom of this).
• Current MMR system works fine.

Tier Distribution
The biggest surprise to me was the tier distribution. It should be Gaussian. The assumption was that it centered on 1200, but it’s clearly not (even accounting for bias in survey takers). I’m wondering if the rating scale is actually centered on 1500 (most Elo and Glicko systems use that value) and ANet’s soft reset toward 1200 actually skewed people downward. If that was the case, seeing a roughly even silver (centered on 1200) and gold (centered on 1500) makes sense. I hope it’s not, since doing a skew left of center will make it harder to reach legendary in each successive season.

Leaderboard
Despite all the complaints, the leaderboard is doing exactly what it’s supposed to be doing: displaying the people with the highest rating in order. Top players with alt accounts should have high ratings on those alt accounts, even after few games. Rather than kittening progress on alt accounts, it seems like a complementary system to rating is needed for the top players.