Guild Wars 2

Now that the test season is over and changes are going to be made to the system, I feel that this is a good time to revive this debate.

3 months ago, during the first test season, I created a post and listed a number of possible leaderboard systems along with a poll:

Original post with analysis of each option: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/POLL-Possible-leaderboard-changes/first

Poll: http://strawpoll.me/3638200/r

An overwhelming majority of voters voted for a pure MMR-based system – the current votes stand at 82% of voters voting for this option with over 200 votes.
The development team decides to completely ignore this and decide that they can continue with the current system with a few minor changes.

The leaderboard is now completely meaningless when used for skill comparison, it’s more a way of comparing how much time people spend on this game. For players in the middle tier who aren’t of tournament standard, there is little motivation to actually do well at pvp. This is amplified by the matchmaking system, which makes it so that as you get better, you also get matched with worse players on your team and/or better players on the enemy team to compensate for your own improvement. This results in no reward at all for improvement – win rate isn’t improving, neither is leaderboard ranking if you don’t play 8+ hours every day.

Please take some time to review this situation and know that over 80% of players want a skill-based leaderboard, you are giving the players something they don’t want and you are losing middle tier pvp players from this. Less players => poorer matchmaking => even less players, less players = less gem store revenue.

Players also wanted a “full Berserker Meta” and now that we are approaching to that kind of Meta comp, people is complaining about Zerkers being OP.

Don’t mind me there, just my personal disbelief on (sometimes) what the players want.

I still agree COMPLETELY that this Leaderboard is meaningless right now. We all know it’s just a “farm” right now. Although you give a lot of weight on wins, it’s still who gets the most wins in that case. And someone with 1000 matches will have more wins than someone with 300.

I hope we get some meaningful changes this time around. I think this two Test Season (and probably a Third son enough) were about testing this “point system”. With all the Leaderboard farmers (no offense to them, they probably want the llama and surely they had a nice time playing all the matches) ANet should have gathered enough information on their point algorythm to make a significant move.

I think we will get leagues or something like that with this point system. That we won’t get stuck in this kind of Leaderboard. Anyways, these are just my thoughts.

I will look forward to future Leaderboard changes! I still have patience for some months more.

Adding to this, I don’t see a single member of oRNG (the current world champions) in the top 100. What does that tell you?
(Blackjack is at 79, but he’s not in oRNG currently)

Random Weird Guy.3528:

Adding to this, I don’t see a single member of oRNG (the current world champions) in the top 100. What does that tell you?
(Blackjack is at 79, but he’s not in oRNG currently)

Everyone knew this. Leaderboards do not reflect any skill, that was too obvious. No one wants to farm games just to be top on the ladder, except the few people you can see there. There has been many suggestion how to improve leaderboards and the state of pvp, but they seem to go unnoticed.

I mean how bad is it when some player creates more informative leaderboards than the devs.

My little voice on this that i would be great if there were some extra rewards for the top 1000 players on the leaderboard. Well given how it fluctuates, maybe for staying within that range for a certain time (like don’t fall off in 3 day or something). I’ll let smarter people then me word out the details on that one.

They should make ranked games number cap, otherwise it will be grind fest. Cap could be lets say 50games/month. After 50 games mark leaderboards could count only latest ranked games played or not.

Like my previuos mmorpg had similar thing. Whole season took 3 months, at the end latest games were 150 (50+50+50). Just game had different gamescount/period adjustments.

Random Weird Guy.3528:

Adding to this, I don’t see a single member of oRNG (the current world champions) in the top 100. What does that tell you?
(Blackjack is at 79, but he’s not in oRNG currently)

They prefer to stream, play with some builds and do theory crafting instead of caring for something that is broken

I agree, an MMR-based leaderboard would be much better than the current system, where leaderboard position is a reflection of time spent PvPing and “teammate RNG” rather than skill. But in order for it to work, the matchmaking really needs to be fixed first.