Guild Wars 2

First the disclaimer, I’ve benefited from the changes to MM in S2. I reached Legendaryx2 in S1, and I’ve played 6000 matches, and this has lead to two things being in my favor for season 2: my MMR is relatively high and my MMR is very stable. Both of these are huge advantages in Season 2. A high MMR will put better players on my team, and a stable MMR will protect me from a losing streak artificially lowering my MMR and setting me on a downward spiral. And… what do you know, getting to Legendaryx2 was very easy for me in Season 2 (I reached Legendaryx1 in 170 games played, and Legendaryx2 in another 30 to 40 games).

So why am I writing this post? I have been one of the people who are skeptical of the complaints about MMR hell. I still believe that in some cases the people who are complaining about MMR hell are in fact just hitting their current skill ceiling. But, that said, I also believe the current MM is flawed, and flawed in some ways that people haven’t yet mentioned.

Flaws in Season 2 Matchmaking:
1) The “average MMR” for a particular division and tier is NOT constant. It varies by:
1a) Time since start of season. Amber is very hard on day 1, but by the 2nd or 3rd week has probably settled down.
1b) Time of day. There are fewer people playing during off hours. And Ive noticed that the level of competition can vary by time of day, perhaps certain people play in certain time ranges. Things are most competitive on weeknights from server reset to reset+5 hours. People who hit their appropriate tier playing weekday mornings, might go on a massive losing streak if they play on a weeknight or weekend when competition is greater.
2) People can pair up with other players (or a premade team) and get carried to a division/tier that is beyond their own personal skill level. Then when they try to soloq they can go on massive losing streaks and be stuck in MMR hell because they cannot drop tiers or divisions to reach their appropriate skill level.
3) People can get into a MMR negative feedback loop. If they have fewer matches played, their MMR can vary more. If they get unlucky and lose matches that the MM thinks they should have won their MMR will drop quickly, and will cause them to get poorer team mates, and set up a viscious cycle. If this happens enough times, and especially if they have already hit the division appropriate to their skill, they will likely keep losing matches. And worse still, even if they get better, that increase in skill may not cause an increase in MMR (as it ideally should) if they keep getting paired with team mates who just can’t win matches at that division level.

All in all, I think season 2 was an improvement over season 1 in terms of allowing people to reach a more appropriate division quickly. But it fails in terms of creating matches that are competitive. Even in Legendary I see more blowouts than I see close matches.

Some things they could do to improve the system:
1) Pre-sort players into divisions at the start of the season either by MMR or by their division in the previous season.
2) or Hold a pre-season qualifying period to allow people to get a higher placement at the start of the season.
3) Assuming the implement either suggestion #1 or #2 to presort people into divisions, then they could stop using MMR to determine matches. Instead they could just use division and tier to randomly draw both team mates and opponents. This would eliminate MMRhell from the equation. Who you would play with and against would purely be a function of your current division/tier, and in that case assuming your allies and opponents are drawn from the same pool on average the main variable would be your own skill relative to the other nine people, allowing players better than their div/tier to be more likely to win and players worse than their div/tier to be more likely to lose.

My suggestions do not create a perfect system. In fact there would still be blowouts. But it might be an incremental step forward from what we have in Season 2.

Discuss.

No MMR, no pip safety nets. This would have been ideal IMO.

That or a system that uses the MMR function from season 1, but has no pip system.

There can’t be both. It’s non-competitive by nature.

All I want is to be where I belong and know where that is. Even if I actually am where I belong, it’s hard to accept it while knowing I was placed there by a system that logically shouldn’t be putting me in the right spot. It’s a simple mathematical contemplation, that if you get stuck on one side, you will snowball in that direction for the rest of your trip. They match only your team based on MMR and the enemy team is a random MMR. It’s completely divergent. To futher jack it up, they left you with the MMR from the last season that was disfigured by all the players taking advantage of lower division players. Of the thousands of competitive games and sports that have ever existed, I’m surprised Anet couldn’t understand this fundamental consequence.

Nobody deserves this misrepresentation. I’m seeing a large number of friends bailing for Black Dessert because honestly, how many times in a row can you mess something up and not expect people to say no more?

I think they need to get back to MMR leaderboards, with scrapping the leagues entirely, the layout for leaderboards itself can be different. But pure MMR based system is just way better in terms of match quality and fun.

They can add some special fluff for top 1000 top 100 etc. They can relocate legendary to special ranked track, but which will require ranked play. But I am not sure, I don’t think that playing pvp should be rewarded at all.

Competitive is not a black or white issue. Honestly, I think that by “competitive” many people mean “exploitable.” As evidence, I cite the many stacked teams of necro/dh/ele.

Competition needs to be fun or people will find other things to do. If there were no “safety nets” people would get stomped too hard, see no hope and leave.

S1 was a better compromise between competition and fun than s2. This is not a virtual reality MMA tournament, or at least I thought it wasn’t.

The fact of the matter is that there are not enough players interested in being cannon fodder for a system like s2 to be successful. Two other factors will also cause S2 to fail;

High level players alting to get easy matches.

The season is too short. Evan Lesh talked about a bell curve, I don’t see it happening.

Ithilwen.1529:

Competitive is not a black or white issue. Honestly, I think that by “competitive” many people mean “exploitable.” As evidence, I cite the many stacked teams of necro/dh/ele.

Class stacking (or playing “good” classes/builds) is not an exploit. And i doubt, anyone mean exploitable when talking about competitive. Except from you probably …

Ithilwen.1529:

Competition needs to be fun or people will find other things to do. If there were no “safety nets” people would get stomped too hard, see no hope and leave.

Competition and fun don’t exclude each other. For some players competition itself is fun. The problem is, you won’t find many of those in Guild Wars 2, because the game was never really competitive outside from few tournaments. There was never a real reason to improve, nor a feedback about how well you are doing.
Which obviously becomse an issue if you suddenly try to introduce some sort of “competition”, regardless of how well the system works.

Ithilwen.1529:

S1 was a better compromise between competition and fun than s2.

That’s your personal view …
For me season 1 was neither fun nor competitive.

Ithilwen.1529:

Competition needs to be fun or people will find other things to do. If there were no “safety nets” people would get stomped too hard, see no hope and leave.

If there is no safety net, the player falls a division and continues falling until they match with people of the same skill level and start winning again. However that wouldn’t even be a reality with this MMR locking. They would probably fall all the way back to amber despite previously being ranked in the top 5 percentile.

Season1 matchmaking was horrible for me, I got matched with total noobs all the time and every single pip was a fight for me.

Season2 at least this only started after I reached ruby and took a few days break. And since a few days ago I can again progress due to facing not quite so much higher teams.

Of course season1 was “fun” for below average players. They got put on teams with above average players and got carried by them.
Season2 changed that. And rightly so.

I posted this quite often now before, but since this is yet a new thread about this….

Season2 moved in the right direction with matchmaking based on mmr only for finding teammates. There should however be a max distance between teams too.

For example:
TeamA has 500 rating
TeamB has 1,200 rating
TeamC has 1,500 rating
TeamD has 700 rating

Atm, whichever team gets filled first, matches up against the one that gets filled next.
So this would result in following matches:
TeamA – TeamB (500 – 1,200) and
TeamC – TeamD (1,500 – 700)
If, however, anet adds a max distance of lets say 500, then the matches would be:
TeamA – TeamD (500 – 700) and
TeamB – TeamC (1,200 – 1,500)

If that max distance is big enough to allow lopsided matches, but keep total blowouts from happening, then players still get fasttracked to their position in ladder, but without creating total havoc like this season start.
It also makes for better match quality for both sides.

Important change in season2 was moving away from 50/50 matchmaking. This was a step in the correct direction.
Now anet only has to prevent total blowouts from happening, and has to prevent pure grinding and rest will sort itself.

To remove the grinding, anet has to change locks. Theres no way around it.

Amber → pip and tier lock
Emerald → tier lock, 5 pips per tier
Sapphire → division lock, 4 tiers
Ruby → no locks, 5 tiers
Diamond → no locks, 6 tiers

This way, everybody can grind out of amber into emerald, but the bigger tiersize will be enough of a challenge to keep players from bottlenecking sapphire t1 like they do atm in ruby and diamond.
The reduced amount of tiers is to make up for removing division locks.

I think those two changes would reduce the amount of players reaching ruby, diamond and legendary to make those titles count for something.
While the above mentioned change to matchmaking between teams will make for better matchups and better progression.

While everything suggested here is great and what the system needs to start moving to, I don’t think Anet will change the system until after Year of Ascension.

This is because of the way their achievements are structured and how they already told the PvE player that the backpack will be achievable by the end of the year. They won’t change their system in the middle, imagine the rage from all the PvE players that treat “competition” like a reward track.

My second point would be. Yes Anet needs incentive for players to play PvE, but i don’t think adding legendary items to PvP is the way to do that. I feel the skin alone, or titles/AP/feeling like you actually accomplished something should take president. Adding a PvE item for hardcore PvPer’s was IMO a bad decision.

They could however still change the backpiece to a 4-tiered reward track.
Each tier can only be done once.

Instead of wings being the end reward, tickets are awarded accordingly.
Track 1 -> 10 tickets, thrill of battle
Track 2 -> 20 tickets, tapestry of sacrifice
Track 3 -> 30 tickets, monument of legends
Track 4 -> 40 tickets, hymn of glory

The other rewards could be your basic glorious reward track rewards. Only the endchest has to be changed into tickets.

To get the missing 25 tickets I think it was? You have only to make it out of amber twice.

These reward tracks would only progress if you are in ranked matches. So they would have to be separate from the common reward tracks. Maybe use a separate “league reward track gain” thats only available on win/loose of ranked matches during seasons.

So, for all those that already got meta achievements done, the next reward track would be unlocked, the ones already done wouldnt be available.
Meaning, if you have Part II meta achievement done and are currently working on Part III, you get Track 3 unlocked. Finishing Track 3 would unlock Track 4, no matter if you have the meta achievement Part III done. This would be a one-time thing to separate the backpiece from achievements.

So, it is possible. But of course, its extra work.

/edit:
Or, to make ranking up divisions still desirable in addition to those tracks, anet could make the meta achievement items available for tickets and increase ticket gain in reward track accordingly. So players that make it to legendary can buy them directly with the tickets they accumulated, whereas players that dont make it out of emerald can “grind” the reward track.

Quozex.9430:

While everything suggested here is great and what the system needs to start moving to, I don’t think Anet will change the system until after Year of Ascension.

This is because of the way their achievements are structured and how they already told the PvE player that the backpack will be achievable by the end of the year. They won’t change their system in the middle, imagine the rage from all the PvE players that treat “competition” like a reward track.

My second point would be. Yes Anet needs incentive for players to play PvE, but i don’t think adding legendary items to PvP is the way to do that. I feel the skin alone, or titles/AP/feeling like you actually accomplished something should take president. Adding a PvE item for hardcore PvPer’s was IMO a bad decision.

The main problem of gw pvp it’s spvp population, pve and wvwvw players are major part of it. When everyone ll get their wings done they ll be out.

The system which we have now is not fun for PVErs, for wvwvwers it’s mostly easy they ll have their stuff done even faster. The question is though who ll suffer from major population drop when there ll be no big incentive to play. At this point I don’t care already. Cant wait for some grand salt drop about que times.