Guild Wars 2

1. Thought on Current Situation
1.1 Rating system
1.2 Playing with a friend
1.3 Queuing possibilities
2. Suggestion
2.1 New Rating System
2.1.1 Player Skill
2.1.2 Strategy
2.2 Ratio
2.3 Group queuing
3. Thanks

1. Thought on the Current Situation
—————————————————————-
1.1 Rating system
From what I’ve experienced so far, currently if you play a game you get random people – I assume – around your rating into your group and an enemy group with players with a similar rating as well. Then the rating of your team and the enemy team is calculated and compared. If you win you gain rating if you lose you.. lose rating, duh. How much you gain or lose depends on the enemy team. Also I should mention that the rating is called “skill rating”, even though it has more to do with luck than skill.

1.2 Playing with a friend
At the moment you can queue solo or with a friend. If you queue with a friend and his rating is lower than yours, this can have a massive influence on your rating. If you’re silver/gold division and your friend is bronze division and you play a match with 3 bad players vs 5 better players at some point you can’t balance it out yourself. If you’re able to win the match you get a tiny bit of rating plus, if you lose the match you lose a ton of rating.

1.3 Queuing possibilities
Talking about queuing. As I mentioned you can queue ranked solo or with a partner and with up to 5 people on unranked. This information will be used later on, that’s why I mentioned it.

2. Suggestion
—————————————————————-
2.1 New Rating System
I’ve taken quite a lot of thoughts on this topic, since when I’m making my own game that has a ranking system it should be as good as possible. Now what I would do is:
I would divide the rating system into 2 factors.

2.1.1 Player Skill
The first factor is the actual player skill that determines how well you play your class and how well you know the other classes. It represents the pure skill level of a person, obviously. This should be influenced by top stats like damage or healing but also by your KDR and revives.

2.1.2 Strategy
The second factor is the strategy.
Even if you get a high KDR or if you deal most damage or heal the most you can still lose by fighting off point or failing to reach the match goal (gaining 500 points via conquest – as in capturing and holding points). So the other factor should be determined by your offense stat, defense stat and your match win/lose as well as how you won or lost (as in your points compared to the enemy team)

2.2 Ratio
Player Skill and Strategy should have a ratio where if 4 people are afk and you’re good enough against your enemies you lose no rating. However winning a match or losing a match should still give a big boost. So I’d say Player Skill to Strategy should be 50:50 and win to (top) stats should be 66:33.

Player Skill: 50%
win/lose: 33%
(top) stats: 17%

2.3 Group queuing
I’m going to use the inspiration from games like Heroes of the Storm here.
So yeah without much to explain.. Heroes of the Storm solves this by having a team queue and a not team queue for ranked. Something similar could be implemented as well. The problem currently is that you can enjoy ranked games but you cannot share that joy with others due to the limitations of the queue. People previously complained about fighting random vs a 5 man group. Separate queues would solve this. Now I don’t know the limitations of Guild Wars 2 nor of it’s engine and Heroes of the Storm is a MOBA that focuses on PvP but I see no other choice to solve this than to have the current queue and a queue for 3+ or maybe 1-2, 3-4, 5. I know this would require an extra leaderboards for each but if it’s possible why not. I assume it would take a few design choices and some server space since the basic system for it is already implemented.

3. Thanks
—————————————————————-
Thanks for reading through this elaborate suggestion. I really enjoy Guild Wars 2 and PvP, however the matchmaking system is a real enemy of mine. I keep getting groups according to my ranking with players that I can definitely see they aren’t as good as me. There are more and less obvious matches. Oh and by the way I do get 1-2 amazing matches here and there, where I actually have to focus to beat the enemy/enemies but it’s too rare for me to enjoy. I really love your game ArenaNet and I hope you’ll continue working on it and polishing it to touch a big audience from PvP to WvW to PvE players, including casual and hardcore.
Thanks.

I do agree that “Skill Rating” is quite weird considering it solely bases on your team performance and not your own.

I’ve also noticed that point results (eg 499 – 500 loss or a 50 – 500 loss) still has same reduction in rating, which is something really weird for me aswel.
Both mostly give -13 rating while the first result should be much less, if you ask me.

That’s something you should put in your suggestion aswel: having Skill Rating based on Conquest Points as mentioned above.

Apparently the first post was too long to edit… well here you go
Oh and I added a sentence to the original considering what you said Terrorsquad
by the way the points your team makes is more about strategy than skill so I put it to the strategy category also check out 1.* of this post for some calculation suggestions if interested in theory crafting, heh.

1.4 Random composition
2.4 Group composition
1.* Point Results Consideration

1.4 Random composition
I don’t know whether a system for this is set in place already or if it’s completely random however when you get into matchmaking you’re given a group of random players with random classes around your rating. This doesn’t work out though. I’ve read about people getting multiple of the same classes and I experienced myself groups that missed on certain boons or features being at a disadvantage through the whole match.

2.4 Group composition
Group composition works really well in Heroes of the Storm. In HotS you have 4 roles (holy trinity stuff, remember that?) the roles are Warrior (the harder to kill damage dealers), Supporters (the healers keeping the group alive), Assassin (the damage dealers or glass cannons) and the Specialists (the structure destroyers with a little of everything). Now we do not have these roles in Guild Wars 2 and each class is supposed to be able to take over all roles at some point, though, currently you can see that necromancers can be damage dealers or tanky and they have mobility for themselves. Guardians can be dps, healer or tanky but only give group mobility as supporter. Warriors could give group mobility but no one plays that so they’re glass cannon or a more tanky dps. Mesmers have a lot of mobility due to their portal and are dps. Elementalist are played either back line dps or support/heal. Rangers are played either heal or dps and by default give mobility with their heal skill. The revenant gives constant mobility and is played dps or support. The thief, like the necromancer has self mobility and can be considered a glass cannon. Last but not least the engineer is more of a support with dps. A better matchmaking needs to consider these classes and which are matched against which. It also needs to make sure that no disadvantages like missing swiftness occur and prevent multiple classes (more than 1 double class) from happening.

1.* Point Result Consideration
A system to compare the end results of a match (e.g. 499 – 500 loss or 50 – 500 loss) would need to take in consideration: the enemy rating, your rating, your percentage on the points, the point difference or the point ratio.

You could say if you lose a match 499/500 your team did 99.8% as good as your enemy if you lose 50/500 your team only did 10% as good against your enemy team.

Current system is better than your proposal.

1.1 Rating System
ANet has never stated how they handle rating gains losses. Is it: individual vs. each individual on the opposing team, individual vs. average team, or average team vs. average team. The first option of individual vs. each individual is the best of the three, but far from perfect.

1.2 Playing with a Friend
What you described is not a problem. If your rating is that disparate, expect to need to carry. The real problem is that it makes it annoying for enemies to fight the high rated person.

2.1 / 2.2 Proposed System
Win or Loss needs to be the dominant factor for a rating system. Period. It’s an aggregate of mechanical skill, map awareness, teamwork, etc. with a clearly measurable value.
If you begin to weight other factors more, players will go after those factors instead of trying to win. That is unhealthy. Some games, like CS:GO, have used a gauge of individual skill to give a small bonus to better players, but still use win/loss at the main rating adjuster.
Note: Top stats and player skill overlap a lot.

3. Personal Experience
Are you sure that you’re better? It’s likely your bias – you’re only looking at what you’re doing well, not what you’ve done poorly. How many games have you played and when did you play them? A low number of games early in the season has less certainty to rating values. They’re starting to settle now.

1.4 / 2.4 Group Composition
Because you can swap characters after the game is created, matching based on profession (class) is meaningless. Also, each profession may not have the same build or same role. It’s not like a MOBA where a character’s abilities and role are fixed.

1.* Result Consideration
So 50-500 is clearly mis-matched. But what about 400-500 vs. 499-500? 350-500 vs. 499-500? The 350 team could have lost a FoeFire match where the other team grabbed the lord. The game also needs regroups, so you typically see shifts of 100-150 points. Where do you draw the line?

1.2 Playing with a Friend
However the current system discourages playing with a friend by dramatically decreasing the reward (low rating plus) and increasing the loss (high rating minus)

2.1 / 2.2 Proposed System
Or more like 2.3 Ratio:
How strong each element weights was a suggestion how I would do it. Of course you could weigh win or lose more.. but usually if your teams stats are far above the other teams stats.. I can’t imagine if you lose except the defense and offense stats are not calculated near/on point. Basically how well you play + if you participate in winning and/or win with a little compensation for losing if you still played better than the rest of the team strategy wise.. Or you can make skill rating + win | skill rating – lose.

Player Skill: 33.5%
win/lose: 50%
(top) stats: 16.5%

Does this sound better then?

1.4 / 2.4 Group Composition
Though you can still prevent the selection from selecting the same class or make sure a class that has the ability to provide swiftness? I mean it would be best if same classes would be matched.. then it wouldn’t be about composition.. hmmmm.

1.* Result Consideration
Right.. lords and high instant points should be taken in consideration for this. However I thought about this being more like a diminish of the loss you have according on how well you played. I mean if you lose against a team with the same rating and it was a close match one could assume your actual skill isn’t far from each other. Thus it wouldn’t make sense to lose a lot of rating compared to having a huge difference in points (without lord) which would mean you’re quite a bit below the winning group so less diminishing is required.

1.2 Playing with a Friend
Conversely, when the lower rated friend wins, he gets a huge rating increase and when he loses, it means very little – better known as “boosting”. So there’s reward in addition to risk.
But lets look at it a different way – how often do you see groups of friends who are dramatically different in rating – more than a few hundred points? In my experience, friends who PvP often are typically similar in skill. Your example is likely an outlier.

2.1/2.2 Proposed System
Win/Loss has to be most of it. I’d say no less than 80%.
Here’s an example of how to break your system which marginalizes win/loss: I queue with a friend as a rev/thief pair. All we do is double-team gank squishies off-point. We can’t care about actually capping. But we’ll kill a few people near points anyway because that’s where we catch them. We end up having high kills, a good K:D, and picked up some offense points. But what if the team loses? How much did we actually help? In your system, what we did is equally as good as winning.

1.4 / 2.4 Group Composition
In the case of GW2, having the matchmaker try and do this is an awful idea. Please see any of the myriad threads whining for class limitations and how the same counter-argument in favor of the current system destroys them all.
Basically, players are smarter (if they choose to be) than any matchmaker which also has to deal with queue times. Players will come up with a suitable team composition before the game starts (unless they’re not playing to win).

1.* Result Consideration
My point was “how close is close”? Is 400-500 close? 300-500? Where do you draw the line? Matches which are close can snowball off one mistake and not seem close based on score. If you want a sliding scale, how much is the highest bonus vs. no bonus? It’s not as easy as you’d think due to varied secondary mechanics.
Does this really matter? In Glicko2 if you’re properly rated, you should win half your close games, so your overall rating change will be minimal. If you aren’t properly rated, you win more than half of the close games and move up.

1.2 Playing with a Friend
So unless I risk losing a lot I can’t play rated with friends? I see okay.
I’d like to play with my guildies and there’s a 461 rating difference… I just want to enjoy some matches but I told them it’s not worth the risk for me and now they hate the current system.

2.1/2.2 Proposed System
Ah I see. I thought the top stats were better than they are. Yeah, I guess you’d have to go for 80% at least then..

1.4 / 2.4 Group Composition
Well then apparently 30% of my teams do not want to win. :s

1.* Result Consideration
Well having a lord kill considered close would work only if both lords were low health and one died earlier I guess. I mean if it would be 496-638 that’s obviously a close lord kill. Aside from that close would be anything in the 500-475 475-500 area I’d assume. That’s equal to a full teams wipe I guess and equal to a 5% difference.
If you’re properly rated, you should win half your close games. From all the 41 matches I had I only won 2 close and lost 5 close. Also enemy players and team players do not feel equally in skill. It’s either frustrating or boring to me with the exception of.. maybe 1-3 matches. I mean it’s not about winning 50% of my matches, it’s about having a challenge. And currently I’m not feeling that 50% of my time.
If you aren’t properly rated, you win more than half of the close games and move up.
The opposite. You get team members with which you lose matches and stay equal.

2.* Other Ranking System
So on a side note.. I read about the current rating system being Glicko2… now what do you think about TrueSkill/TrueSkill Ranking System?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/trueskill-ranking-system/

461 isn’t that large of a difference. And if you play together often, isn’t less rating for you and more for him (assuming you’re the higher one) more representative of the players you should face? And unless you’re a top player, does it really matter what rating you end up with? This seems more like a psychological barrier.

Many people would rather complain than identify/admit their flaws and fix them. The pile of rating complaints on this forum is a prime example. The people who move up in rating are the ones who “play to win”.

Example 1: Blue team loses a fight at 350 points, it snowballs, and red team gets the map with 200 points. Red can hold that easily to 400 points. But instead, blue goes straight for lord with the full team and kills it. Game ends at 500-300. The game was close, but the score doesn’t look that way.
Example 2: Blue team and Red team are even on Temple of the Silent Storm. At 8:30, both buffs appear. Red overcommits to bottom, loses the fight and blue gets both buffs. Blue then gets a 200 point advantage and wins 300-500. The game was close, but because of a couple mistakes at a key point, they lose by a large margin.
Example 3: Blue team clearly outclasses red team and beats them in every large fight. But blue team has a very good thief who de-caps and harasses constantly. As a result, the score ends 400-500 in favor of blue. It would seem a lot closer than it was.

I’ve read a little bit about TrueSkill. It’s compared to Elo and shown to be better. However, Elo was designed with ease of calculation over performance, since it was developed before calculators were common (1960). Glicko and Glicko2 are better than Elo, but hard to run without a computer database. TrueSkill also works better on large PUG teams and not so well on small PUG teams.

GreenNekoHaunt.8527:

2.1 New Rating System
I’ve taken quite a lot of thoughts on this topic, since when I’m making my own game that has a ranking system it should be as good as possible. Now what I would do is:
I would divide the rating system into 2 factors.

2.1.1 Player Skill
The first factor is the actual player skill that determines how well you play your class and how well you know the other classes. It represents the pure skill level of a person, obviously. This should be influenced by top stats like damage or healing but also by your KDR and revives.

2.1.2 Strategy
The second factor is the strategy.
Even if you get a high KDR or if you deal most damage or heal the most you can still lose by fighting off point or failing to reach the match goal (gaining 500 points via conquest – as in capturing and holding points). So the other factor should be determined by your offense stat, defense stat and your match win/lose as well as how you won or lost (as in your points compared to the enemy team)

That doesn’t make any sence whatsoever.

First of all, ‘player skill’ : if i understand correctly, you’re basing the player skill on his stats (how much healing, damage …). But this stats don’t mean anything without context.
A good player don’t get better stats than a bad player, because a good player is fighting with and against other good players (who knows out to mitigate damage, peel, ect) and a bad player is matched against other bad players. The only time this is relevant is when you have a very good player against bad players.
And even then, context means everything, as these stats can easily be manipulated. An engi 1v1ing a minionmancer all game on a enemy node will get top damage/offense easy, but is absolutely worthless.

As for teamq, the gamemode simply don’t have enough population to have a decent matchmaking.

Also, microsoft ‘TrueSkill’ rating is basically glicko-2.

I guess it might be the psychological barrier.. but I plan to get platinum at some point soo.. it kinda prevents me from reaching my goal.
I play to win and do not move up. What now?

Example 1: Why should this be a close game? Blue won and red didn’t even get “close” to winning.
Example 2: Ah, yes. This would be considered close in my eyes.
Example 3: Though 400-500 may seem good it wouldn’t fall into the ~5% or 475-500 range… hmmm.

Large PUG teams? Do you mean 5+?

A good player is fighting with and against other good players and a bad player is matched against other bad players? And good players do not get better stats than a bad player? Ah I see. So it should not be possible to win a match with an KDR of 12 to 3 and 4 top stats? I swear I played normal. I want to win but not against an enemy team that dies in 5 seconds where not even one of those can live more than a few seconds in a 1on1.
Luckily this only happened one.
Either ways I agree with the manipulation thing though… but there must be a way to improve the system.

I see.

I can’t find a comparison on the web, so what’s the difference?
I mean.. there must be a way to implement a better system.

GreenNekoHaunt.8527:

2.* Other Ranking System
So on a side note.. I read about the current rating system being Glicko2… now what do you think about TrueSkill/TrueSkill Ranking System?
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/trueskill-ranking-system/

The TrueSkill algorithm is superior to glicko. It approaches accurate rating much faster than glicko, and it accounts for the fact that team are comprised of multiple differently skilled players. TrueSkill does not have any kind of MMR hell.

However TrueSkill is also patented by Microsoft and using would require a license.

Crinn.7864:

The TrueSkill algorithm is superior to glicko. It approaches accurate rating much faster than glicko, and it accounts for the fact that team are comprised of multiple differently skilled players. TrueSkill does not have any kind of MMR hell.

Source?

Everything I’ve been able to find doesn’t come down definitely for Glicko or Trueskill. In fact, Glicko and Trueskill are very similar in concept. Trueskill has advantages for certain applications (more than two teams in a game, lots of draws), but neither applies in the case of GW2.

“MMR hell” is an invention of players, so it won’t be in any real analysis. MMR hell is from matchmaking (not rating) and only exists because of limitations in the matchmaking pool.

Exedore.6320:

“MMR hell” is an invention of players, so it won’t be in any real analysis. MMR hell is from matchmaking (not rating) and only exists because of limitations in the matchmaking pool.

So the actual problem is the low amount of PvP players queuing at the same time and the match making system / rating system implemented wasn’t designed for a) group play b) this low amount of people?

Exedore.6320:

Everything I’ve been able to find doesn’t come down definitely for Glicko or Trueskill. In fact, Glicko and Trueskill are very similar in concept. Trueskill has advantages for certain applications (more than two teams in a game, lots of draws), but neither applies in the case of GW2.

Trueskill is a evolution of glicko. Glicko’s main feature is the use of deviation, where deviation is the matchmaker’s uncertainty that it’s at the right rating. Trueskill uses deviation in the same way, but Trueskill is Bayesian while Glicko is frequency.

The other big difference is that glicko was designed for two players, no more no less. Adapting glicko to 2+ player games results in the algorithm equivalent of a duct tape fix. Trueskill was designed with arbitrary teamsize in mind.

http://www.moserware.com/2010/03/computing-your-skill.html

“MMR hell” is an invention of players, so it won’t be in any real analysis. MMR hell is from matchmaking (not rating) and only exists because of limitations in the matchmaking pool.

Of course. However there are still mathematical faults with glicko. (one proof has even been done on this very forum)

GreenNekoHaunt.8527:

Exedore.6320:

“MMR hell” is an invention of players, so it won’t be in any real analysis. MMR hell is from matchmaking (not rating) and only exists because of limitations in the matchmaking pool.

So the actual problem is the low amount of PvP players queuing at the same time and the match making system / rating system implemented wasn’t designed for a) group play b) this low amount of people?

No. MMR Hell happened in S2 and S3 because of hard divisions in combination with pip restrictions which caused extremely low matching pools.

In S2 and S3 (and S1 and S4 to a lesser extent), you could only be matched with people in a similar pip count. Within that pip count, it would try and find similarly rated people. You progressed pip count by wins and regressed with losses, but you couldn’t regress back over some boundaries. This caused players to pool just over the boundaries – the biggest pool being the bottom of ruby and bottom of diamond being second biggest. The weaker players were the ones getting stuck. But if you were a stronger player and hit some bad luck, your rating would drop and you would constantly be matched with this ever-growing pool of weaker players. Since progression was based on winning significantly more than losing, it became very hard to climb out of this pool.

S5 doesn’t have any of these hard boundaries, so MMR hell doesn’t exist.

Moral of the story: Progression-based rating systems (move up with wins, down with losses) don’t work for competitive PvP.

Doesn’t exist in S5? Though it feels like that… Currently I just hope that at some point I miraculously increase my rating until I met enemies that are challenging. :/

I was also thinking whether or not it would be possible to use the current technology of AI programming as in neural networks to develop a kind of a judge that watches your play and reaction to the enemy to decide on your game play which skill rating you would get/lose/win. I think that’d be one of the best systems and quite modern.. however neural networks is… a rather new topic though ever growing.
Do you think something like this would be possible in the future?

Crinn.7864:

Trueskill is a evolution of glicko. Glicko’s main feature is the use of deviation, where deviation is the matchmaker’s uncertainty that it’s at the right rating. Trueskill uses deviation in the same way, but Trueskill is Bayesian while Glicko is frequency.

Pretty sure both use a Bayesian distribution mechanic, but applied in a slightly different manner.

The other big difference is that glicko was designed for two players, no more no less. Adapting glicko to 2+ player games results in the algorithm equivalent of a duct tape fix. Trueskill was designed with arbitrary teamsize in mind.

In some cases, Glicko’s “duct tape fix” does remarkably well compared to Trueskill. To the point where there isn’t much of a difference. In Microsoft’s own testing on Trueskill, it had trouble in 4v4 games when compared to Elo (not much of a difference).

Also, a lot of these comparisons are against Glicko, not Glicko2. Glicko2 is an improvement over Glicko and did fix some mathematical problems with the model.

I’m not saying Glicko2 is better – but I have yet to see any paper or analysis which shows either Trueskill or Glicko2 being significantly better. All the Trueskill development analysis was against Elo.

Exedore.6320:

I’m not saying Glicko2 is better – but I have yet to see any paper or analysis which shows either Trueskill or Glicko2 being significantly better. All the Trueskill development analysis was against Elo.

The only comparison I could find was from rankade… though they too only compare glicko and not glicko2… It kinda feels like glicko2 doesn’t seem to be a real thing.. or a late 2016 thing…
https://rankade.com/ree
Even though the comparison lacks..

Glicko2 wasn’t finalized until 2013.

Exedore.6320:

Glicko2 wasn’t finalized until 2013.

Glicko2 definitely predates 2013 since there are google hits for it on pages from 2010. 2013 was the last time it was revised. (according to Glickman’s official site)

As an aside I’m rather perturbed that the glicko Wikipedia page only has two references and one of those is a forum post on these very forums.

Crinn.7864:

Glicko2 definitely predates 2013 since there are google hits for it on pages from 2010. 2013 was the last time it was revised. (according to Glickman’s official site)

As an aside I’m rather perturbed that the glicko Wikipedia page only has two references and one of those is a forum post on these very forums.

Go straight to the source: Mark Glickman
http://www.glicko.net/glicko.html

Glicko2 had some issues with the volatility update calculation which were revised in 2013 to their current version.

It’d be nice to have some word from ANet on whether or not they’ve updated their implementation of glicko2 to the latest version and on their thoughts if the TrueSkill approach would be worth it to implement. Although I doubt it’d satisfy the complainers since the two algorithms update similarly and they’ll just keep repeating “Rate by individual player skill!”. They seem to think it’s all about top stats.

You realize that match stats heavily favor bunkers/bruisers? Roamers almost never get stats due to… well roaming (given balanced match they will never have high dmg because half of the time they are roaming, same goes for healing, revives etc.). +1 never awards any stats simply because you jump in, down someone and run off – you don’t exactly get much credit for it. Your teammate is dying, you drop stealth for him and save him – it won’t show up on stats. Peeling for teammates is not shown on stats. Keeping 3 enemies busy on beach is not shown on stats. Roamers have huge impact on game but it is not registered.

Now I just recently came across some other ideas and/or questions whilst helping few people here on the forums.

Now.. I tried to approach finding the skill of a player via the top stats.. However the goal is to reach the 500 points..

• Killing an enemy gives 5 points
• Capturing a point and holding a point gives 1 point per 2 second

And each map has additional variation giving bonus points

• Svanir/Chieftain – 25
• Capricorn Bell – 25 50 75 100
• Enemy Lord – 150
• Orb Carry – 15 30
• Meditation on Stillness – double team points
• Meditation on Tranquility – Capture all points

Now.. just saying if you’d implement a counter that increases

* for each player that counts each kill (5 points)

• each kill participation (1-2 point) [having dealt or dealt a certain amount of damage to an enemy or dealt damage in enemy downstate]
• for each capture (1 point per 2 seconds until attacked)
• for each capture participation (1 point per 4 seconds until attacked) [participation as in fighting enemies near the point and it’s captured afterwards in like 5-8 seconds]
• or for doing a map objective (respective amount of points it would give)
• or for participating in a map objective (half of the respective amount of points it would give) [participation as in fighting enemies near the objective and it’s captured afterwards in like 5-8 seconds or dealing damage to the objective]

Shouldn’t something like or similar to this actually work? What do you think?

GreenNekoHaunt.8527:

Now I just recently came across some other ideas and/or questions whilst helping few people here on the forums.

Now.. I tried to approach finding the skill of a player via the top stats.. However the goal is to reach the 500 points..

• Killing an enemy gives 5 points
• Capturing a point and holding a point gives 1 point per 2 second

And each map has additional variation giving bonus points

• Svanir/Chieftain – 25
• Capricorn Bell – 25 50 75 100
• Enemy Lord – 150
• Orb Carry – 15 30
• Meditation on Stillness – double team points
• Meditation on Tranquility – Capture all points

Now.. just saying if you’d implement a counter that increases

* for each player that counts each kill (5 points)

• each kill participation (1-2 point) [having dealt or dealt a certain amount of damage to an enemy or dealt damage in enemy downstate]
• for each capture (1 point per 2 seconds until attacked)
• for each capture participation (1 point per 4 seconds until attacked) [participation as in fighting enemies near the point and it’s captured afterwards in like 5-8 seconds]
• or for doing a map objective (respective amount of points it would give)
• or for participating in a map objective (half of the respective amount of points it would give) [participation as in fighting enemies near the objective and it’s captured afterwards in like 5-8 seconds or dealing damage to the objective]

Shouldn’t something like or similar to this actually work? What do you think?

There are still too many intangibles. You’re right in that the only goal that matters it to win. That’s the only thing in the end that matters.

What if you’re the reason a teammate capped a point yet you were never there? Say you were holding off a bunker on his way between points while your team mate capped. How are you going to compute that? What if you CC’d a thief about to steal Chieftain at 2% but you never did a point of damage to the beast? How would you even write the code for that?

The thing is, there are so many scenarios and so many minor plays throughout the match that it’s impossible to calculate them. It’s almost endless. Theses are all subjective human decisions that don’t present themselves in an easily definable way that you can put in a box and build metrics around. You have 10 different humans making decision after decision, one right after the other for up to 15 straight minutes. No computer code is going to be able to calculate if and how each one was the right one or not.

Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. In the end the sum of your decisions is going to be what factored into that win or loss. That team objective. That’s what we’re rating against. Not individual player skill by itself but individual player skill that contributes to the team objective. Like it or not, I don’t care how much individual talent you posses if it does not consistently win me games. Cause if you don’t, what’s the point?

Cynz.9437:

You realize that match stats heavily favor bunkers/bruisers? Roamers almost never get stats due to… well roaming (given balanced match they will never have high dmg because half of the time they are roaming, same goes for healing, revives etc.). +1 never awards any stats simply because you jump in, down someone and run off – you don’t exactly get much credit for it. Your teammate is dying, you drop stealth for him and save him – it won’t show up on stats. Peeling for teammates is not shown on stats. Keeping 3 enemies busy on beach is not shown on stats. Roamers have huge impact on game but it is not registered.

That’s why I had originally started this: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/The-economy-of-worth-in-PvP-Discuss

because it’s game specific.

While all the above is real interesting, it doesn’t seem to respond to the player’s “feeling of deservedness”, aka there is no good return on individual skill in said matches. This is why over time you keep hearing about top points in matches or top stats now, but can’t really know if the value/participation/impact of each player is adequately reflected by any current scoring system other than if in the end the team won or lost. And even then…you might have done everything you could possibly do to win on your side, but some other guy from your team could throw game momentum by making a mistake or worse being bad.

There is more to players than win/loss, thought in the end it is a main factor.

there is also:

• self worth/assessment – mechanical skills and decision making
• impact on team – tactical decision making
• and the human relationship factor that come into play as well…

Cause lets face it, you could be an ace but have 0 affinity with the ace next to you and just want to ruin the game for him at the cost of the other 3 players who have nothing to do with your dispute.

So since the current system doesn’t allow each player to get a good feedback on their play from the system, they are left to estimate this themselves, and rarely do you get constructive feedback from other players. I got blocked a couple times simply explaining why this or that happened in a match while the other player was salty, and wouldn’t have ever happened if it didn’t follow a lost match anywhere else in the game.

So the emotional aspect of the game is high in spvp, even in unranked pvp.

Most people have a hard time looking @ themselves and see where they made mistakes and work on improving their game…that usually comes with the price of “hurt”.

All this talk about people with regards to changing the current system is related to these elements imo, could be more or a little different, probably not too much off target.

Exedore.6320:

GreenNekoHaunt.8527:

Exedore.6320:

“MMR hell” is an invention of players, so it won’t be in any real analysis. MMR hell is from matchmaking (not rating) and only exists because of limitations in the matchmaking pool.

So the actual problem is the low amount of PvP players queuing at the same time and the match making system / rating system implemented wasn’t designed for a) group play b) this low amount of people?

No. MMR Hell happened in S2 and S3 because of hard divisions in combination with pip restrictions which caused extremely low matching pools.

In S2 and S3 (and S1 and S4 to a lesser extent), you could only be matched with people in a similar pip count. Within that pip count, it would try and find similarly rated people. You progressed pip count by wins and regressed with losses, but you couldn’t regress back over some boundaries. This caused players to pool just over the boundaries – the biggest pool being the bottom of ruby and bottom of diamond being second biggest. The weaker players were the ones getting stuck. But if you were a stronger player and hit some bad luck, your rating would drop and you would constantly be matched with this ever-growing pool of weaker players. Since progression was based on winning significantly more than losing, it became very hard to climb out of this pool.

S5 doesn’t have any of these hard boundaries, so MMR hell doesn’t exist.

Moral of the story: Progression-based rating systems (move up with wins, down with losses) don’t work for competitive PvP.

Of course MMR hell exists! Nothing has changed! The only difference between seasons 1-4 is that you had duos, 3-man and 4-man premades. In season 5, you just have duos. Premades distort the matchmaking system, creating unbalanced games and therefore, MMR hell.

The problem is that there is no 5-man or FULL solo! With 5-man team queue and true solo queue, the matchmaking works like it’s supposed to. No more premades of any kind. Period.

JTGuevara.9018:

Of course MMR hell exists! Nothing has changed!

I see your lack of skill in game is matched by your lack of knowledge outside of it.

S1-S4 you were matched within your pip range. You also had safeguards so you couldn’t fall below certain pip amounts. This caused people to pool at these pip thresholds. “MMR hell” happened to a few people who couldn’t escape this pool and had their rating dragged down, making it harder to escape (I explained it in more detail earlier in this thread).

In the S5 system, there’s no safeguard against going down in rating. Consequently, there’s no forced pooling of players by the system. The matchmaker also isn’t artificially restricted by pip range so you’ll have matches with people near your rating most of the time.

Exedore.6320:

JTGuevara.9018:

Of course MMR hell exists! Nothing has changed!

I see your lack of skill in game is matched by your lack of knowledge outside of it.

S1-S4 you were matched within your pip range. You also had safeguards so you couldn’t fall below certain pip amounts. This caused people to pool at these pip thresholds. “MMR hell” happened to a few people who couldn’t escape this pool and had their rating dragged down, making it harder to escape (I explained it in more detail earlier in this thread).

In the S5 system, there’s no safeguard against going down in rating. Consequently, there’s no forced pooling of players by the system. The matchmaker also isn’t artificially restricted by pip range so you’ll have matches with people near your rating most of the time.

Wow a jab at my skill AND my intelligence. Looks like I get a two-fer today.

The matchmaker may not be artificially restricted by pip range, but it is most certainly artificially restricted by premades(duos). As I said, premades artificially distort the matchmaker when people form parties. In a sense, it’s taking the matchmaking system in your own hands. You’re directly manipulating it. It’s “tricking” the system into thinking your team should be matched better than they should be.

Only FULL solo queue and FULL team queue can work with the matchmaker. No duos, 3-man or 4-man. This way, matchmaking will not be compromised.

Please take your baseless whining to one of your other whine threads.

By the way, the first step to improving is admitting you’re not as good as you think you are.