Guild Wars 2

One problem I am witnessing, playing both unranked (learning thief) and ranked is that sometimes you get people who are brand new, or very new to the game put into a match that they have no business being in. Often, this player will even apologize for it being one of their very first games.

This primarily occurs because starting MMR is set to exactly average, which is honestly a terrible choice. New players should start with below average MMR (and higher volatility), which allows for two things:

1. They are less likely to get steamrolled and raged at during their first pvp experiences, increasing the likelihood that they stick around.
2. If they are good, its a more enjoyable trip “up” the MMR ladder rather than surviving repeated drubbings falling down the ladder.
3. This reduce the pollution of MMR after soft-resets and new players drawn in at the start of a season. A couple bad games thanks to still-learning newbies can completely ruin a player’s placement MMR.

On the flip side, by starting new players at average MMR, you reduce the risk of that player secretly being good but having to trudge through a bunch of worse players. However, this risk is mitigated by increased volatility (or decrease the rate at which volatility decays for the first few matches). Further, it is MUCH less likely a new player happens to be a pvp prodigy, and is more likely a newbie, who needs matches against similar players in which to enjoy and improve.

I lost a lot of games in low silver, but maybe lost 1 game through the entire gold tier. Now at platinum I’m getting a few more losses but still moving up. Seems gold and above is the functional tier where people who are there belong and those who don’t will move through.

100% agree. It’s not fun for themselves let alone the team they’re put with.

I’m not a pure PvP player, I have around 2k game played. I started in Gold tier one, I’ve progressed to t3, now hovering around the 1630 rating. Does it bother me? No, I most likely belong here right now, it would be nice to get a bit higher but I have more things to do than sit and PvP all day every day.

I went 7-3 in placements and got placed in low silver (~1160). I am now 16-6 with ~1300 mmr. All of my losses were by huge margins (>250 pts). I think this well represents the ideas in this thread. I was placed far too low in the standings at the start. I am now crushing everyone I come across, unless I get a really bad team and get stomped myself. I must say that I much prefer this season to the last season I played in, which iirc was s3, where I lost my first 15 matches due to bad players and got stuck in the very existent elo-hell. That being said, there are still a lot of problems that need to be worked out with the current system.

Effectively the same experience. Put into gold from placements and lost my first game which led me down a level into silver. I was put into a match yesterday (Silver 3) where two players didn’t even know that the game was won by by standing on points and holding them; both of them played ranged builds and just stood on the sidelines of fights/points trying for kills thinking it was a deathmatch, as I neutralized numerous uncontested points for them to cap and neither ever did.

New players have to start at the midpoint for the Elo and Glicko2 algorithms to work properly. If you start new players at some other value, that new value becomes the midpoint.

New players already have maximum rating deviation and volatility (part of Glicko2).

This really just sounds like observation bias. You notice bad players more than average or good players and think they account for a larger amount of players than they actually do. In reality, I would guess that many new players are actually average and starting them at the midpoint is just fine.

Exedore.6320:

New players have to start at the midpoint for the Elo and Glicko2 algorithms to work properly. If you start new players at some other value, that new value becomes the midpoint.

Only in the limit of infinite sample size. This isn’t true for an already established group of players when adding new players to the sample over time. Yes, it might shift the median slightly lower than 1200, but not by too much.

When you starting from scratch, yea, everyone starts at average. But when you have 90% of your players with some MMR history, and 10% without, you can start the “assumed” MMR of those 30% below your median value without shifting the mean too much.

Thus, the “soft” reset that was done took an average of the players known MMR and 1200. Rather than assume the guy with no pvp history had the “prior” MMR of 1200, it could be 600, and then they start out in a population closer their probably skill level (around 900 from “resetting” towards the median).

This is one of the biggest problems with matchmaking as far as I am concerned. The game allows noobs in with average level players with much more experience because of starting MMR for completely new players is set too high. Sure they might drop fast but when something big like the current pvp season happens a bunch of new people try pvp and if you are an average experienced player you will get many of these types of players in your matches. Now it probably evens out but thats neither here nor there. I don’t want to play with complete noobies ever. I have tons of time in pvp I shouldn’t have to play with people that don’t know the basics.