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
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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
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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
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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.
(edited by GreenNekoHaunt.8527)