Guild Wars 2

I made a reddit post about it but I will share it here again to spread the information, perhaps it will reach the Devs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4r9yf8/things_that_are_just_wrong_with_ranked_queues/

With the season 3 of ranked pvp almost coming to an end, we should voice our opinion to help ANet improve pvp for the next season. In this thread I will list all the things that are just wrong with the Season 3 Ranked Matchmaking that I have noticed on my way of getting Legend. Note that this thread is about the matchmaking, not the balance for ranked pvp Feel Free to add to the list in the comments or discuss them with me, as I could be wrong however, a large amount of ranked PvP players can agree that the current ranked matchmaking system is not good. This doesn’t mean that it is bad, but rather that it has large room for improvement.

1. The queues take way too long; Anet tried to compromise it by matching you also with people of the prior division with a high pip count. This leads to partially totally unbalanced teams and can frustrate players that are close to the next division as they get stomped by high skilled players. Especially people who have acquired the Legend Rank have this issue. Under common sense you would assume that there are not a lot of Legends, which is why to match them together. In reality, it just tries to match the high MMR, which I will talk about in the next point

2. Teams are clearly unbalanced; Those that have made it to higher divisions such as Diamond and Legend most likely have noticed that it was fairly easy for them most of the time because their team was simply better than the other one. The matchmaking system clearly favors players with a higher winrate, as they match together a team with a higher MMR (Match Making Rating) together in a team against a team with lower MMR with similar pip counts. This leads to some players that go on a winning streak early on to constantly win as they are matched in a team that is basically meant to win every match. As result, most of the ranked player community hit 50/50 win/loss matches, where they heavily win once and then just lose, and they can only progress with the streak pips.

3. If you queue in a party, you will almost always face a party in the enemy team, however it is mostly a team of 5. It is often the case that you face a full guild team if you queue in a party, as the matchmaking system counts you as a team, even though you are just queuing with a friend. The system punishes you most of the time for queuing in a party if you are not high MMR as it will most likely put you on the team that is not favored to win.

What are your opinions on the current Season? Write it down here. What rank have you acquired in Season 3 and what is your experience with the matchmaking.

TL;DR Ranked matchmaking is not good; We have to help ANet improve it by voicing our opinion; Queue Times are too long; Matches are heavily one sided; Matchmaking system punishes you for queuing in a party.

2 is a result of 1. If you want to match people of equal skill levels on a team it can take time especially at the extreme ends of the skill spread. Match quality and queue times will always be a balancing act.

To be fair people that queue in groups should have to fight other groups.

To me the biggest things are to

1. publish people’s MMR and the distributions that exist in the different tiers.
2. do a better job of advertising how the matchmaking system works, and what players can do to increase their position on the leader board.
3. put in a soft cap on divisions and tiers. For example you get 5 pips that can be used as a credit for losses when you have 0 in a division or tier. Once you spend them, you can drop down divisions or tiers.

This system cannot be fixed. If you have a system with pips, you’re going to keep having the same problems.

You gotta scrap it.

we made it to the guild wars 2 subreddit front page, thanks for all the support! Now its time to attract the developers attention.

Overall, a ton of these problems are also issues with the fact that the game tries to force 50% win ratio on you (you mentioned it but didn’t talk much about it). If players are good enough to win 99% of their games (there are some out there, I’m not one of them but I’ve met some of that level) then for the love of tyria let them. The system now frustrates people on both ends as higher skilled players have to carry people 24/7 in order to win and newer players get upset because they can’t contribute to their team because the system has paired them up against people who are just too good for them to take on at the time.

P.S. Love the analysis you put into each problem and the time you took to make this post. Hope you get some dev attention.