These are a few problems I have with PvP in general. (NA)
1) Competitive PvP Rewards
Problem: There is a huge skill gap between the top teams, the mid tier teams, and everyone else. It takes an immense amount of effort to bring a team into the top tier. Likewise, it takes a reasonable effort to bring a team into the mid tier. That should be rewarded, but the current skill gap creates a big problem for new teams. Getting a team to the top tier takes time. I can reliably create a team and score 5th-8th in a tourney, but to hit top 4, I’d have to play for the same players for a few months. It is hard to keep teams together without any reward during that time. For example, UGO rewards prizes for the top 3 teams. Until my team can beat former ESL pro league players, we will get no reward from UGO. Likewise, in the monthly AT, we will be rewarded with 50-100g. It is hard to build teams in that environment. For mid tier players, the problem is the same. They have no hope in 3rd party tourneys, and can only reasonably hope to get 25-50g. Who will sign up for that?
Thoughts: Flatten the rewards. Make it so more players get rewards. This will create more competition because teams will feel that reaching “the money” will be possible. A healthy scene of mid tier players will revitalize the pvp scene at the top.
2) Matchmaking
Problem: It still isn’t producing very balanced matchups.
Thoughts: After you have gathered 10 players for the match. There are only 126 different ways to arrange the teams (assuming all solo players). Computationally, it is very easy to brute force the best arrangement of 10 total players. If that is too hard performance wise, at least do a couple passes through the rosters to see if any changes will reduce mmr spread. There is no reason the current system cannot have this added. I’ve read the code on the wiki.
3) Rating change after winning a match
Problem: Consider the edge case of a duo consisting of the best player in the world with the worst player in the world. They fight against a duo of two equal skilled players and over the course of a large number of games have a 50% win rate. At the end of this the best and worst player duo end up with the same rating. This clearly doesn’t reflect the actual skill of these players.
Thoughts: Everyone on the entire team gains or loses the same rating after each match. This will probably screw up the division thresholds, but will make the frustration of losing impossible matches and losing 15-20 points go away.
4) Match Manipulation
Problem: Match manipulation is rampant in the top of the leader board. If you don’t act on this, nobody will care about your leader boards.
Thoughts: Start Banning
5) AT Daily rewards
Problem: I can make more money playing ranked than ATs
Thoughts: Increase the rewards and potentially make them scale with the number of entrants.
Ranger | Elementalist