Guild Wars 2

I saw solo queue as the start of something great for gw2 pvp. I thought it would increase the player base and be a good way for solo players to develop a team to go into the team queue. I have been very disappointed in the solo queue in the following ways:

1. Randomization. Randomization is the entire basis for a rating system to have any value whatsoever in a solo queue environment. If all players are truly queuing solo, then the idea to give them a rating in relation to all other solo queuers is that over a long period of time all players will experience being placed on and against roughly the same quality of teams as everyone else. Over time, the ratio of good teams you’re on to bad teams you’re on should regress to the community’s mean of good teams to bad teams. Your ratio of good teams played against to bad teams played against will also regress to the community’s mean. This will not happen unless there is a system of pure randomization. It would be comparing apples to oranges if the system didn’t randomize across the entire player pool. (Note, this is not the case for team queue and I will not get into that here).

The bottom line is that it’s pretty clear that there is no pure randomization in solo queue right now. If ANet agrees that randomization is the highest priority in having a legitimate solo queue rating system, then I believe they should:

A. Randomize the group of ten selected for a match from the entire pool available. Do not take ratings or ranks or anything into account. Randomize from the entire pool of players.

AND

B. Randomize the two teams from the selected group of ten, after that group of ten has been randomly selected.

2. Evenness of matches. Matches that are imbalanced numbers-wise are meaningless. They are meaningless to play and meaningless for a rating system. They are a waste of time for everyone involved.

4v5s and 3v5s are common in the current solo queue. If ANet agrees that imbalanced matches are a waste of time and meaningless I suggest they:

A. At the end of the countdown the match should be locked from any new players entering.

B. After the match is locked, if the match has an odd number of people then one random player should be kicked from the match.

C. After the match is locked, if there are an even number of people (or after one random player has been kicked to get an even number) then the players should be split evenly into two teams.

D. Start the match.
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If these two issues are addressed, I think solo queue will indeed be the start of better pvp in GW2.

I completely agree that these changes would greatly balance the system.

+1

The only thing i would change is that if there are an uneven number of players, i would wait untill 1 more player has joined. I would prefer to wait for 1 person then to have a chance to randomly get kicked out after having waited to enter a match.

I’ve read your first post again and i completely agree that matches should be completely random and disregard ranks. It would be a lot more fun to play with players both good and bad, instead of playing always with the same selected few.

It would also make waiting times shorter, since it would be easier to select random players than it is to select players of the same rank as yourself.

But it would need to wait for a decent player pool base to avoid syncing. For example, matches only start when there are at least 50 players available on pool. Your chances to land with a fellow teammate would be drastically reduced then:

suppose you are together with another 4 friends, and minimum player pool base is 50. Then your chances to land with at least one of them would be: 4/49 =~ 8%. Your chances to land with 2 of them would be: 4/49 * 3/48 =~ 0,5%.

This percentage decreases when there are more players on the pool, and increases when there are more.

EDIT:
Sorry, that was bad math. Actually your chances of beeing together with at least one other fellow would be 1 – (45/49 * 44/48 * 43/47 * 42/46), which is roughly 30%.

teonimesic.1403:

The only thing i would change is that if there are an uneven number of players, i would wait untill 1 more player has joined. I would prefer to wait for 1 person then to have a chance to randomly get kicked out after having waited to enter a match.

That’d work too, I don’t care how even matches are achieved just as long as they are even when they start.

The reason I suggested kicking a player was because some matches are missing multiple players and it would take a long time for all of them to join (if they ever joined). In a system that kicks a player, the kicked player should get top priority in the next available match and be immune from being kicked a second time in a row.

teonimesic.1403:

I’ve read your first post again and i completely agree that matches should be completely random and disregard ranks. It would be a lot more fun to play with players both good and bad, instead of playing always with the same selected few.

It would also make waiting times shorter, since it would be easier to select random players than it is to select players of the same rank as yourself.

But it would need to wait for a decent player pool base to avoid syncing. For example, matches only start when there are at least 50 players available on pool. Your chances to land with a fellow teammate would be drastically reduced then:

suppose you are together with another 4 friends, and minimum player pool base is 50. Then your chances to land with at least one of them would be: 4/49 =~ 8%. Your chances to land with 2 of them would be: 4/49 * 3/48 =~ 0,5%.

This percentage decreases when there are more players on the pool, and increases when there are more.

Yep totally agree with you. They’d have to find a good balance to making the pool bigger while keeping queue times to a reasonable amount. With a larger player base those times would be much shorter. I think the number one thing keeping people away used to be team queue where players got tired of going against premades. More players will return if they see that solo queue truly is random. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear random right now.

A-net should hire you. You just outlined the ideas for a true soloqueue way better then what they came up with. I would be happy for starters with them randomizing the ten selected for a match after the ten are randomly chosen. That would basically destroy synch queuing or at least make it much more difficult and its something that should have been in from day 1 of solo queue.