Guild Wars 2

So this is my second night in a row where I’ve been stuck in a huge chain of losses. The first night was with my ranger which had 6 straight losses before a win and tonight was with my engineer which I think had more than 6 losses with like one close match the entire string. Funny enough both of these were broken against the same individual who was only present in the final game. Sure, I’ve had chains of losses before but this is excessive and facing the same chain two nights in a row seems highly unlikely. What’s the deal? Is HoT messing the system up or something?

Welcome to the club of players who get pinned with freak lose streaks. The next part of your initiation will include other players posting in this thread about how they have 60%+ win ratios in solo que and how you must be a bad player.

To answer your question directly, I think it’s normal right now. There are a lot of new free to play pvpers hitting the scene and their MMRs are volatile, placing them randomly in to matches they shouldn’t be in. Also the system aims at giving us 50/50 win rates so if you win a lot one night, you get to lose a lot the next night.

What is more interesting to me though, are the players who don’t seem to ever get these mandatory lose streaks. It makes me ask these questions:

• Who are these people who claim to have 60%+ win rates while always running solo que?
• How are they avoiding the kinds of situations that equate to these lose streaks? “You are rank 80 but placed with visibly new players who are inept in combat and do not understand rotations. Your opponents are organized veteran players. It happens 10 matches in a row”
• Why are they so quick and defensive enough to post in every “what’s up with MMR?” thread to tell us that this never happens to them and how the OP must be over-exaggerating the problem?

These are all very good questions, especially the bolded.

Heyho,

there are several ways how you can increase your mmr in solo, if that is what you want to do, although there is no real leaderboard atm.

1. If you play bunker guardian, while there is no other bunker in your team, you have a high chance of winning, if you know how to play with it.

2. If there exists a good decap build, use it and tell your team to avoid far, you are a decapper.

3. In general type a tactic in your team chat at the beginning of the game ( like 1 close, 4 mid. I go …)

4. If you are very good in 1 vs 1 cap close (not far). Play the role of a defensive roamer.

5. look at your team composition, and think: To which class can I switch to improve it? Then switch.

6. If your good at one class, people will notice it, and then swap accordingly (this only happens at a certain mmr and higher (in the old leaderboards – the real ones, not the kitten of this year) it happened around rank 900). You can then stay on a class that you are really good with.

7. If there are 2 thieves in your team, ask if one can switch.

8. If they will ever add sky hammer again to competitive play, run a sky hammer build!!!! (it leads to 80% win rate on that map). A lot of people are not willing to change build or underestimate how much impact it had on this special map.

9. On temple of the silent storm, write the timers in the beginning of the match: “Hi team. Plz be aware there are buffs appearing on the middle of the map at 11:30 (only upstairs) at 8.30 (upstairs and downstairs), 5:30 (upstairs), and 2.30 (again upstairs and downstairs). And plz all ignore Sidebuffs, they are useless and a waste of time (very important to write this).” Its also very important to remember the 2:30 tranquility buff, a lot of players forget this buff, and you literally can steal games with remembering it.

10. Concentrate on primary targets (with the exception of silent storm).

11. On Legacy of the Foe Fire, you need to learn to determine, in what situations a lord rush makes sense. It never makes sense before 350 points. If the enemy team just barely reaches 350 and attacks your close point, prepare for them rushing your lord!

12. Play meta builds.

13. You have to know the basic roles and how to play them (defensive roamer (close point defender), mid bunker, offensive roamer, far point assaulter (decap bunker)).

14. If you die on far, you add a huge factor for losing this game. If you go far, unless you are a decap bunker, make sure the point is contested and not in there favor, and that you retreat in the right moment. Learning not to die on far gets your win percentage higher.

15. Don’t fight, where it isn’t related to a primary target.

16. Train 1vs1.

17. You have to know all meta builds of all classes, which are meta. Think how you can counterplay or counter composition them.

At the moment, you have to understand, that most of the people doesn’t really act competitively, because there is no leaderboard. This might change with the add-on, if the new system doesn’t suck as much as the last one.

For me it is actually quite easy (unless the other team outshines us by miles).

• I am roaming and keep mainly watch of the cap points. Often have I sacrificed my mates in a mid fight, when I could keep side nodes capped.

• Sometimes I try to identify the weak chain in the enemy team and focus on bursting him down, keeping the enemy team at a constant numbers disadvantage.

• Many people seem to have trouble with condition builds. Depending on the situation – because I usually run a mantra lockdown build – I will either keep the other condi roamer bussy or help cleansing conditions in the mid fight.

• Also I will often tell my team my general role and what I will do in some standard scenarios. Communication is one of the most important things for PvP and many people don’t do it enough… besides the “CAP CAP CAP”-commands people like to throw out sometimes^^

Thing is, I have loss streaks too. But they include often quite close games (450 – 500) and thus, I am not that frustrated, when it happens. Because I know it was maybe just bad luck or I can actually trace it back to a mistake I made. Trying to attribute things to yourself helps quite well dealing with frustration, because the events happen around things you yourself can improve.

I have a 61% win rate overall. Majority of which are solo queue. Here’s how I feel you can get a good win rate.

1. Always play a role which your team is missing. If your team has all roles fulfilled, play whatever you’re most comfortable with.

2. Communicate with your team to the best of your abilities. Don’t rage, be polite and try to offer advice in a suggestive instead of commanding manner, people are more likely to listen to you then. E.g. ‘perhaps the thief can go and decap the far point that’s empty atm? Ty’

3. Accept that you may be the reason why your team loses and that it’s not always your teams fault. Try to analyse and think of how you can improve on your games. This applies for rotation. To be mechanically adept, spend some time in dueling servers every day on your pvp spec, don’t spec for 1v1 because you aren’t improving then.

4. If you’re on a losing streak, take a break. Your negative feelings will only impair your ability to play well and cause you to continue losing. As a rule of thumb, once I lose 3 games in a row, I’ll just stop and watch an episode of my TV series before going back to continue if I feel like it. Just do whatever you like during your break.

Just my two cents.

The above commentary lists basic functions of solo que that most players understand. I appreciate the feedback but for those of you who are not experiencing mandatory lose streaks, let me better explain what is happening:

These lose streaks include matches that are beyond savable and are flat out impossible to win. This is why players come in here and take their time to make posts including but not only questions such as: “What’s up with MMR?”. I see that most people assume they are all bad players and that they have no idea what is going on in Guild Wars 2 but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Most of these players have been playing for years now and at times, notice something is off with the MMR match making. Let me detail some of the tell-tale signs of a mandatory lose streak that equates to impractical and unreasonable matches that are beyond saving, no matter how good you are or what class you play: “this is no over exaggeration”

• Your team reeks of Queensdale. You load in to the match, surrounded by four players wearing starting chainmail who are using inappropriate weapon sets for their class. When the match starts, you immediately notice people on the other team wielding legendary weapons, with glowing fractal capacitor backpacks, who have legendary titles above their heads, who have a strong understanding of spvp.
• The match starts, your players avoid capping home point and begin making other gross errors in rotations. Then begin asking questions out loud in chat: “What am I supposed to do here?” “Why is my build different right now?”
• First mid fight happens. Your team mates put up little more of a fight than ambient creatures floating around in explorable maps. In other words, they wipe in 2 seconds each and every combat they engage.

With the above three circumstances in play, you won’t be turning any matches around and this is what people come in here posting about. No one is confused about losing 500 to 450 three or four times in a row. No, they are confused about losing 10+ matches in a row where most of the matches include the three circumstances listed and feel like “you are being made to lose by the server” seeing as how one team is stacked with all new players and the other is stacked with all veteran players. This isn’t just someone’s misunderstanding of solo que tactics guys, this is a real problem that still happens to some people.

I personally no longer experience lose streaks. My match flows tend to look like: win/loss/win/loss nowadays rather than win/win/win or loss/loss/loss but I used to experience this problem often before the recent MMR match making bug fix. It is why I wrote this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/High-MMR-is-punished-for-solo-que/first I noticed a problem months and months before it was identified. People came in my thread saying the same things “maybe you’re just a bad player, here is some advice” but it turns out I was right about everything that I said and there was indeed a bug that was causing certain players to catch a lot of bad match making.

Even though match making has been greatly improved in my opinion, I still play with a lot of people who are now experiencing the same problems that I was experiencing six months to a year ago. Freak loss streaks of 10+ matches that are impossible to save, no matter how good of a player you are. At very competitive levels, it only takes one bad player who is a liability to completely screw your chances of winning a tournament game. So you can imagine what it would be like to be on a team where you are the only seasoned player, surrounded by four novice level players, put against five opponents who are all veterans. Do you really believe that anything you can do will… turn that game around?

So rather than look at these MMR algorithm posts vindictively or with patronization, help the OPs of these threads ask the right questions so that all of us, including the arena-net staff, can better gauge where and why these problems are still happening to certain people because they are still happening.

And for those of you who have not experienced becoming some strange outlier numeric within the MMR algorithm that gets tossed one unreasonable match after another, consider yourselves lucky.

What you mentioned happens to majority of high mmr players, me included. I just stop playing after 2 or 3 matches like that because evidently the system doesn’t look like it’s gonna pair me with better players in that time period.

Every time I come back after a break, that kind of kittenty matchmaking usually disappears. At least for awhile. This is why you don’t just charge head on like a bull and insist queueing when that happens.