Guild Wars 2

This isn’t at all an important issue in the wider scope of Guild Wars 2, but I feel like it needs to be addressed.

From my recent binge of Solo Queue spamming, I’ve noticed a depressing trend that is increasingly common. New players with little-to-no experience joining Solo Arenas are causing a disturbing rise of venomocity in the sPvP community (more so than usual). This is in no way their fault, as they honestly don’t know any better. The fault lies in the structure of entry for Solo Arenas. By far, Solo Arenas are the easiest way people can get into sPvP, and while convenient for frequent sPvPers, it is a serious fault for these reasons:

1. Solo/Team Queuing can be accessed from anywhere at any time. They have their own tabs and are huge, whereas the “Go to The Heart of The Mists” dialogue is comparatively small, and offers no explanation of what it actually is. It is very likely a new player will see these join buttons first and will be greeted by a harsh first experience with GW2 sPvP.

2. By design, Solo Queue/Team Queue are ranked matches that are primarily composed of much more skilled players than your average hotjoins. When a hapless noobie ends up in a match with high tier players, venomous comments are sure to follow.

This is less an issue about fair matches and more an issue about community well being of sPvP. New players ending up in ranked matches not only alienates their experienced team mates, but also gives the new player a very bad first impression of GW2 sPvP.

I know for a fact that the dysfunctional matchmaking system is at fault for this, but fixing that is a far off dream at the moment. At present, I propose a fair solution: Implement a fair rank requirement for entering Solo/Team Arenas, not so much that it will guarantee that players who queue up are good, but at least ensure that they know what they’re doing, and not get discriminated on for something that’s not their fault. Something like Rank 10 will do.

tl;dr: Newbies in Solo Queue cause rage but it’s not their fault, put in a low rank cap requirement to protect both newbies and skilled players from rage.

I agree with your general argument. Just look at MOBA games where the matchmaking system makes two teams even by making sure each team has one beginner – you might end up with technically even teams, but you also end up with both teams trashing their noobs and often comparing out loud which one is worse in all-chat.

A level floor addresses this problem, but is only effective if the population is large enough. If the population of PvPers is too small or the distribution of ranks is too uneven then queue times could increase to the point where people start to drop out because they’re unwilling to wait. That in turn decreases the population further and soon you’re caught in a cycle that ends up with nobody PvPing.

You really need an algorithm that takes into account population, average wait time, specific wait time for each player in the queue, and maybe more variables I haven’t though of in addition to the rank of each player in the pool. It’s a hard problem and you only need to go play a few games of DotA/LoL/GW2 to see that it’s far from being solved.