Guild Wars 2

How you don’t even want to play anymore after you’re done with your daily with a class you don’t enjoy in a PvP system which brings you the most frustrating matches ever.

At least when solo queue existed, you didn’t have to deal with idiots AND premades.

The best part about pvp is when your on a necro and your opponent thinks that are about to win the fight and then suddenly I swap to ds and 2 shot them.

Justin ODell.9517:

MystikaLsmuRF.7150:

At least when solo queue existed, you didn’t have to deal with idiots…

I’ll have to go take a look at the code and see how we were able to filter them out. ;D

If you run into an especially frustrating match, shoot me a PM with the datacenter & time and I’ll take a look.

IQ tests before matchmaking! xD

Justin ODell.9517:

MystikaLsmuRF.7150:

At least when solo queue existed, you didn’t have to deal with idiots…

I’ll have to go take a look at the code and see how we were able to filter them out. ;D

If you run into an especially frustrating match, shoot me a PM with the datacenter & time and I’ll take a look.

Keyword “AND”.

I could spend the next 30mins to type and try to get a logical answer out of all the non-sense matchmaking, but you’re already aware of its current state. You read the forums even more than we do. You know people are displeased with the matchmaking and even more with the fact that SoloQ and TeamQ have been merged. I can’t for the life of me enjoy a single sPvP match anymore and it’s sad to see that after all the time I’ve spent on this game, after all the good things I’ve said about it to bring friends and family over to it, how I was all glad to see a patch meant to improve sPvP and matchmaking simply turned it to dust for me.

That’s all.

Justin ODell.9517:

Errant Venture.9371:

Can you look at my account and tell me if over the last week people i’m paired with have especially low MMR or my MMR has tanked? I’ve had very few matches (less than 25%) where more than 1 other player knew how to rotate, contain, or even hit T to follow pinged target,

It looks like you had a very high rating and a wide deviation… which suggests to me that you may have been hit by one of the early bugs that distorted your rating. Since then it has been stabilizing downward and is now near your previous Solo/Team arena ratings, which is still above average.

You should start seeing more consistent games.

Thank you

The best part about sPvP is… when you troll people in Skyhammer hotjoin after getting bored of steamrolling in arena.

Justin ODell.9517:

MystikaLsmuRF.7150:

At least when solo queue existed, you didn’t have to deal with idiots…

I’ll have to go take a look at the code and see how we were able to filter them out. ;D

If you run into an especially frustrating match, shoot me a PM with the datacenter & time and I’ll take a look.

^ This made my night, rofl!

Justin ODell.9517:

It looks like you had a very high rating and a wide deviation… which suggests to me that you may have been hit by one of the early bugs that distorted your rating. Since then it has been stabilizing downward and is now near your previous Solo/Team arena ratings, which is still above average.

You should start seeing more consistent games.

- I would really like to see this kind of information available on a website. Would it be possible to add it to API for third party developers?

Justin ODell.9517:

Zenith.6403:

- I would really like to see this kind of information available on a website. Would it be possible to add it to API for third party developers?

While the official policy is still to not show MMR, we do have on our backlog providing a public API for PvP data.

how about just a simple colored meter…

Green at bottom, yellow for average, red for high… then use the possible color shades inbetween these three to “fill out” the rest of the meter.

This way players cannot pinpoint with any good accuracy, but you get a rough idea who is “good” and who ain’t…

If you fear that “displaying skill level publically” will lead to further elitist recruitment and segregation then lets be honest, if you’re good, people know. If you ain’t, you get the boot.

Justin ODell.9517:

Zenith.6403:

- I would really like to see this kind of information available on a website. Would it be possible to add it to API for third party developers?

While the official policy is still to not show MMR, we do have on our backlog providing a public API for PvP data.

What about showing player MMR compared to average & highest only for himself in PvP tab?
Just for his knowledge.

I believe that any kind of public mention of MMR may be a problem.

Like Prysin mentioned, elitism is more than enough reason to not make that information public.

all in all, you can always make a premade team yourself.

in the best ladder systems ever, MMR = leaderboard rank.

it doesn’t really make sense to say in one place you’re X good but in matchmaking you’re Y good.

if you’re the best you’re the best and it should be in both ways.

Morwath.9817:

What about showing player MMR compared to average & highest only for himself in PvP tab?
Just for his knowledge.

- There’s lots of interesting questions, since MMR values are different for team size and professions. You could find answers to questions like:

• Which profession gives me most consistent performance?
• Am I better at playing Necromancer or Thief?
• How has my ranking evolved during the past week?

It could be interesting to display the MMR, even without numeric values, in a way that players can understand it. For example:

The best part is when u SOLO q and u end up vs million premades and u lose and they sink you HOW kittenING bad the server CODE IS HOW EXTREME bad this mmr system is compare to the one on LOL

Justin ODell.9517:

While I love your mockup, I’m not sure how that would avoid the problems associated with showing MMR.

- What are those problems of showing MMR?

Zenith.6403:

Justin ODell.9517:

While I love your mockup, I’m not sure how that would avoid the problems associated with showing MMR.

- What are those problems of showing MMR?

It would show how bad the matchmaking is.

Zenith.6403:

Justin ODell.9517:

While I love your mockup, I’m not sure how that would avoid the problems associated with showing MMR.

- What are those problems of showing MMR?

Feelings. It would hurt feelings.

Some people are like that, insecure about their own performance. I’ve seen dungeon groups on LFG tool have description like “5k+ AP points only” or players asking others to ping their gear as if a few points of damage made any difference in the grand scheme of things.

Rating points don’t tell other players anything. If the concern is “is this guy a good player?” after seeing that he has rating of 1500, what can be said about his value? The matchmaking already balances teams based on ratings of individuals. The logical choices:
1) 1500 is an accurate representation of the player’s ability.
2) 1500 is underrated ranking, because the player has been on a streak of losses and is likely to win this match.
3) 1500 is overrated ranking, because the player has been on a winning streak and is now anxious about losing this match.

So seeing individual rating doesn’t help predict the match, if the match is fair.

That being said, it could very well be just simple personal command like /rating or /rating_volatility on chat for those curious individuals who seek it to improve their own game.

MMR should be a part of the leader board for sure, even if the number can’t be displayed or a pure mmr leaderboard has too much decay / suddenly highly ranked new people who got lucky (I think the main complaint about the old leaderboard was about people with low number of wins getting ranked high).

Would it be possible for people with higher MMR to get a multiplier to the ladder points that they get? So average players get 1 to +3 for a win but good players with high MMR could earn +1-3 (x 1.5 or 1.6) or something (multiplier based on your MMR). Then people with higher rating could climb faster, but dedicated players are still getting a shot? MMR could gain a noticeable benefit without showing MMR.

It seems to me that the way the leaderboards work now the highest are people who play the most, and who play better than what matchmaking predicts, rather than just who is the best (although I am sure they are solid experienced players, still grinding for leaderboard is unappetizing to say the least). Surely some combination of the two systems is possible (I don’t know if my suggestion would work, just a thought on how you could reward high mmr and make leaderboards a little more reflective of high level play).

Justin ODell.9517:

I have to disagree with this. The whole point of MMR is to gauge the skill of players. It does this by reacting to the result of the games they play.

If this is accurate, and I believe it is, it would have a very good chance to predict the outcome. For example, right now we have stats that show when the MMR difference between the average of each team is approaches or surpasses 200, we correctly predict the winner 95% of the time. That difference of 200 is less than 10% of the spread between the top player and bottom players.

- That fits the theory of the ranking system. I’m surprised that the ranking differences of individuals in the same match are so large. It’s a factor of queue times and player volume, but also noise caused by secondary goals like preventing multiple classes on same party. One idea to increase player volume: allow queueing outside PvP isles. This would mesh well with the accurate remembering of player position on PvE world and reduce tediousness of waiting times.

Getting my title Champion Genius today. I’m very happy about it and I’m grateful to friends who have helped me to get this title o7

…is grabbing 10 points and then sitting AFK in the base because the games are so badly imbalanced and futile.

The only thing that has kept me playing this game is the combat. Pve and wvw do not interest me…as of late I find myself playing 2 matches and quitting because they are usually terrible. I feel I am getting grouped when I solo with people way below my level…I am not saying I am top tier but when I am capping a point alone and a teammate comes from no where to sit with me…well you get the idea.

DanzelOPP.5068:

The only thing that has kept me playing this game is the combat. Pve and wvw do not interest me…as of late I find myself playing 2 matches and quitting because they are usually terrible. I feel I am getting grouped when I solo with people way below my level…I am not saying I am top tier but when I am capping a point alone and a teammate comes from no where to sit with me…well you get the idea.

That happens because of the dailies. “Daily PVP Capture” for some people means: let’s all go home at the start to get the achievement

the matchmaker does an absolute HORRIBLE job of evenly distributing profs across the two teams. Justin, please look at my match history. im talking crap like 3 rangers on one team, ZERO on the other. 2 thieves on one team, ZERO on the other. or 2 necros + 2 rangers against a balanced comp of say guard, war, Mesmer, engie.

these situations lead to horrible snowballed losses because certain comps have no point presence, and even playing sides is futile. it’s obvious the matchmaker IS NOT dividing professions evenly as it should. it needs to be a lot more intelligent. I think fixing this should be your highest priority.

5v4’s/abandons shouldn’t count toward anyone’s MMR or leaderboard score. people who mostly PVE go into RANKED to do their achievements need to be somehow segregated or filtered, instead of ruining our experience. basic stuff like that I hope makes it into the next major patch.

From my experience I have seen few blowout matches. Cases where one team gets less than 200 points happen seldom (really only a few) and close matches (> 400) are far more frequent. This is from a total of almost 150 ranked (only) matches.

i wouldn’t lie if i said that about 1/3 of my matches are blowout (no matter what side)…. how does it work?

Rangelost.4857:

It could be interesting to display the MMR, even without numeric values, in a way that players can understand it. For example:

My RPM is over 9000!

Shift already!

Unless it’s Japanese engine.

Justin ODell.9517:

Zenith.6403:

What are those problems of showing MMR?

Promoting harassment, elitism, and a toxic environment where artificial numbers are put over playing well together.

I understand the desire. I believe there may be some way of showing standing without the issue above, but I haven’t found it yet. Hopefully some one will soon.

Harassment, elitism and a toxic environment is in everything that is online, it´s just how people are. But many of us would like to see our MMR or rank ingame, and so forth. Doesn´t Anet feel like you may be choosing one playerbase too much over the other? At the moment your are looking at things from the “not so gifted” player perspective and trying to defend them from harrasment, but the harrasment is still there and will unfortunately stay there in a form.

But many players would love to see MMR, have more leaderboards or even see damage/healing/boon applied just to compare builds or see how much damage/healing/buffing they can do and which build is the best with their team lineup.

Wouldn’t making MMR visible make things better? I mean if i just started to play PvP and for my first game i join a Ranked match and the team pretty much loses because of me. As it is right now i don’t even know that me and the others lose MMR. But when i see my MMR going down (noone wants to be on bottom of the leaderboards) then i realize that i need to improve my PvP “skill”. So, a player who wants to get better at PvP would look for guides and videos or ask others how to be better, how does this make the community more toxic ? A player could go practice PvP, because the next time he/she joins a ranked match he/she would want to win or atleast do better. Showing MMR would make the PvP newcomers play more practice games and the old pvp masters would mostly play ranked games because they would want to get their MMR as high as possible. This would maybe make the practice pvp matches even more fun because perhaps there wouldn’t be so many one sided matches because most of the players would only be there to practice pvp or try out a new build and veterans would put their time into Ranked games. At the moment most people just don’t care because there is nothing measuring how well or bad they are doing (i’m not taking the leaderboard on the web into account, because most ppl don’t understand how it works and it’ s outside of the game).

The MMR algorithm should give and take MMR points based on the team average MMR so that the players with higher MMR wouldn’t lose so much because some of their teammates have a low MMR. Maybe it already does that.

To be continued in the next post.

Showing MMR and other competitive number ingame would give a new life to GW2. There would be more guides, videos on how to be better at something, people would be more interested in doing and seeing guides. People would be more excited in doing these things if they’ d see the real impact in numbers : getting a new pvp build and winning matches and by doing so getting higher in the leaderboards, or changing gear and seeing more healing/damage by the end of a dungeon run.
At the moment there is no sufficient ingame information to measure someones “skill” in a certain game type (wvw, pvp, pve). And because of that, there will always be players who blame others in losing or in their own failure just because they don´t have anything to measure others or themselves by.

For example: Someone is being harrassed in a dungeon situation, because others “claim” they know, that he/she doesn´t do enough damage for instance. Maybe he/she doesn´t deal as much damage as someone else in the group, but gives lots of boons or healing or buffs. And maybe he/she was the main reason they even got so far.
On the other hand, there can be another type of situation where, let´s say, someone new to the game, who really doesn´t do any damage, or give buffs or boons and is basically totally useless to the group in general. But because of the lack of information, that person won´t even know the flaws of his/hers gameplay choices and has no knowledge of how to be better for that group. In a group situation, by having more information, others could teach that player how to improve rather than guess what is being done wrong. You can´t presume that having more detailed information about someone would automatically lead to more toxicity rather then goodwilled feedback.
In general a veteran player can spot a newcomer miles away by looking at his/hers movement, weapon choice, level, achivement points, armor, utility skills etc. But this doesn´t mean the newcomer will be harrassed to death.

Please consider this solution: adding a button to hide or show all competitive information about your character (mmr,dps,healing,buffing etc). If a player doesn’t want to show others their competitive information, then he/she can just turn it off. People who don’t care about a certain game mode can also just turn of the “competitive” information. That would be fair to everyone! The players who want to be competitive can just do that and the casual players who don’t care for showing others anything can just turn it off, but they would still see themselves the “competitive” information if they’d want to.

There could be players who demand to see your MMR/dps/healing/buffing etc., but these players already exist: “Link gear before entering or kick”, “Show Finisher before entering or kick” i can go on all day. If Anet would add this “competitive” information choice, the game wouldn´t lose anything, it would only gain in possibilities. Everyone would still have the chance to play as they have been doing till now, but would also have a chance to show others their “skill” and what they have accomplished.
Anet, if you want nothing to compare one player to another then you shouldn’t show player level, outfits, achivement points, rank finishers, wvw titles or any other titles in that matter.

Please Anet, don’t punish the whole playerbase just because there are some people who are toxic to others. They will continue to be toxic wheter we have competitive stats shown or not. We just need to work together to make these people understand that being toxic is not the way to go. And if they don’t understand, then devs can “persuade” them by force.

Please make more competitive information available and make an option to show it to the others or not.

Thank you for your time and sorry for the long post.

As tl:dr version of Tamps post…

To deal with trashtalking and so called elitism you can always deal with proper ingame reporting (thats what other Esports usualy do, e.g. LoL). “Toxic” players will remain “toxic” even without displayed values, because they consider themselves 100x better than average Joe, even if they lack proper understanding of game mechanics.

Justin ODell.9517:

Promoting harassment, elitism, and a toxic environment where artificial numbers are put over playing well together.

I understand the desire. I believe there may be some way of showing standing without the issue above, but I haven’t found it yet. Hopefully some one will soon.

So then show my MMR only to me on my PvP UI, not to anyone else.

The usefulness of showing MMR isn’t for people to complain about how bad their teammates are, it’s for a user to know how good the system thinks they are. That is incredibly useful, and if we implement it so it’s only self-showing then there is no toxicity, no elitism, and no harassment. Problem solved.

As a hard core Hon and Dota player I know the real meaning of toxic. But it never ruined my experience at a game. It’s part of Pvp. You either get good, learn not to pay attention or pvp is just not for you. Go kill mobs, they can’t flame you. PVP IS competitive part of the game. If you can’t handle that they are better and worse people than you… It’s not for you.
They are highly competitive people who don’t like losing… If you get flamed just forget it. It happens in real life also, in sports. And in competitive game of course there need to be elitist… The real best of the best. As it is in rl. Some are toxic some are friendly..

Rising Dusk.2408:

Justin ODell.9517:

Promoting harassment, elitism, and a toxic environment where artificial numbers are put over playing well together.

I understand the desire. I believe there may be some way of showing standing without the issue above, but I haven’t found it yet. Hopefully some one will soon.

So then show my MMR only to me on my PvP UI, not to anyone else.

The usefulness of showing MMR isn’t for people to complain about how bad their teammates are, it’s for a user to know how good the system thinks they are. That is incredibly useful, and if we implement it so it’s only self-showing then there is no toxicity, no elitism, and no harassment. Problem solved.

Exactly. The only problem would be that if only the player sees his/her MMR then its hard to compare it to anyone else or knowing if your MMR is high or low. In my opinion there should be a way ( if chosen by player) to show your MMR, Rankings or any other competitive information to others. For me this goes beyond PvP or MMR. There are so many aspects in GW2 that could be measured. Those who want to show their accomplishments should have the option and those who don’t should not be forced to do so.
A player could have account wide lets call it a “competitive information tab” that he/she can see. From there the player can choose which information other players can see about them.

Somnium Luna.6294:

It’s part of Pvp.

You could just say that toxicity is part of the internet experience as well, but they do take a stance on and if they choose to take a it’s PvP stance it very much could lead to problems of why is Bob’s account banned for harrasement in PvE, when Jim is say the same kinds of things in pvp. PvP shouldn’t get a pass, there are levels of behavior that is expected in these kinds of interaction.

But what do I know they just hand waved a weapons threat away as that someone just joking or being passionate about the mode. So maybe that is setting the tone of pvp in gw2.

I think alot of people need to just learn to chill, that goes for both the “toxic flamers” and the “toxic take what someone else said to them on the interwebs too seriously people”

You are both doing your best to ruin this game.

For me the MMR is not that important. But I do want to see how I performed compared to my peers. Did I do exceptionally well against a better opponent? Did I lose because I played bad or was it because the other team out-classed me?

You can already deduce some of this information. Every hour you can see on the leader-board how good/bad you did by the amount of points gained/lost divided by the amount of matches. You could get an exact result by only playing one game an hour. This is not an ideal solution.

It would be nice to get this feedback immediately after the match has finished in the score window. Including the odds you would win/lose this game and how much points are added or removed from your score. Optionally including the average rank/MMR of all the players of your team and the opponents team.

This way you avoid some of the negative consequences of showing MMR, but you can still get some direct feedback on your performance.

Zenith.6403:

Justin ODell.9517:

While I love your mockup, I’m not sure how that would avoid the problems associated with showing MMR.

- What are those problems of showing MMR?

OMG LOW MMR everything you post or talk or write about PvP or your Class is INVALID even your existence on the forums is invalid because YOU HAVE LOW MMR !!!!

seriously just check the WoW pvp forums. you will understand why its bad to show it.

the moment someone would post about his class or PvP the 1st thing for the elitist community would be to check his MMR then bash and troll him to oblivion because OMG low MMR ur useless and a crap player.

NO THX i don’t want to see the elitist jerks of the community rise to power overhere.

MystikaLsmuRF.7150:

How you don’t even want to play anymore after you’re done with your daily with a class you don’t enjoy in a PvP system which brings you the most frustrating matches ever.

At least when solo queue existed, you didn’t have to deal with idiots AND premades.

Personnaly, it’s not about idiots and premades, but about build wars. I’m quite done having to deal with heavy + ele + engineer + dps, having myself mesmers necros and thieves. Having beginners in a party makes this even worse, since you just get rolled 500-150, match ending with one of them on each point.

Also, it’s not neither entertaining when all wins are giving me +1, and meanwhile, #3 gets 4 loses but doesn’t seem to lose any rating point.

Justin ODell.9517:

Rangelost.4857:

It could be interesting to display the MMR, even without numeric values, in a way that players can understand it.

While I love your mockup, I’m not sure how that would avoid the problems associated with showing MMR.

I don’t understand how you can take this stance when we have AP on public display.

Why even bother hiding MMR when you can add someone to FList, see they have 800 AP and instantly know they are a new player?

Admittedly for in this case it’s a bit different, people that spend most of their time in PvP might have little/high amounts of AP but their skill level isn’t shown here. However the fact we can see how much someone plays already should give some indication of skill level.
Until you remove AP from public display I see no reason not to put MMR on public display.

Also these 4 engineers +1 ranger premades in unranked are boring. Every match of mine today just about has been 500-49~ usually my team winning, but this time it’s the other way around. Something seems wrong, matches shouldn’t be this easy.

Justin ODell.9517:

Zenith.6403:

What are those problems of showing MMR?

Promoting harassment, elitism, and a toxic environment where artificial numbers are put over playing well together.

I understand the desire. I believe there may be some way of showing standing without the issue above, but I haven’t found it yet. Hopefully some one will soon.

I’m disappointed to see a dev say this! not a good sign for the pvp community. I can easily argue in length how not showing MMR can lead to toxicity as well, or also argue that toxicity and MMR are not correlated.

toxicity is always going to exist in a competitive environment. but toxicity is also a vague term. when I see a player in the top 300 who does not know how to use his profession, or is playing a highly ineffective build that feeds points to the enemy team, I politely ask him to either change the build up for the next game, or to queue in unranked until he learns the build better. is telling someone theyre individualistic and ineffective toxic? if it is, then how are people supposed to get feedback?

the only thing that can be done about “toxicity” is reporting/suspending verbally abusive players / rage-quitters / rage-afk’ers. have you played dota 2? punishment for these types of behaviors is very harsh, and it must be in a pvp game. problem with ANet is you guys don’t have the resources to manage all the reports and take appropriate action, and the community is so small that we cant afford to create a low priority queue. basically, it boils down to the need to make a better game so we can get more players, make more money and hire more people.

I would like to argue that the matchmaker you guys came up with is so ineffective that you’re basically afraid to display people’s MMR to prevent an outcry from the community! besides, when I see someone play in a questionable way, do you think I don’t know his MMR is lower? even if it isn’t, he will be receiving “feedback” from better players whether he likes it or not.

You could just show a bar which fills up based on your MMR. If the bar is filled then it shows that you have a very high MMR… if the bar is empty then you should probably spend more time in PvE… The very center of the bar is “average”. This bar would only be visible to yourself. The only way other players could see it is if you screenshotted it and sent the picture to them. I doubt many would bother with that

At the end of a match this same bar could pop up and show how your MMR compares to everyone else playing in that 5v5 match up. This would give you a better idea of where you stood in the match up and maybe explain why you were steamrolled. Of course this match up bar would only display your own MMR.

Because you only know your own MMR this does not contribute to elitism.