Guild Wars 2

I am wondering what the reasoning is behind it. Not trying to cause a stir, or troll. Just wondering what ANet’s decision process was with this. Since most of the newer pvp players typically play unranked, having being farmed by guilds or premades is not just annoying but also getting old.

They have to practice somewhere, and matchmaking system is usually trying to match premades vs premades.
I am rarely facing premades myself, but there are some instances where I was 5th player in a team of 4 facing full premade on the other side.
Most of the time teams are balanced (party-size wise) but MMR balance can be sometimes way off and every now and then my team wins like 500-100, or we lose 100-500.

thats the story of 90% of the matches 500-200 winning or losing, premades or not, that’s how bad this game’s matchmaking is right now.

I think it should be called unranked and FoeFire mode.

I find it extremely hard to play ranked for fun. Premades get a 50% vote on map and realize how much of an advantage coordinated zerging provides on that map.

I’ve also seen a LOT of players drop foefire before the match begins in unranked.

I imagine the reason why premades play unranked is to get away from foefire.

I agree, it shouldn’t be allowed. If you’re teaming up, then you need to go to the ranked queue.

I agree. If you want to pvp you shouldn’t be allowed to do it with your friends. You can team up with your friends while farming silverwastes or whatever cool kids do these days.
But not pvp!

I mean. Sometimes people want to play with their friends and aren’t grouping up just to secure an easy win. Unranked doesn’t matter, so there’s no reason to not allow people to play with their friends when doing it.

Ehecatl.9172:

I mean. Sometimes people want to play with their friends and aren’t grouping up just to secure an easy win. Unranked doesn’t matter, so there’s no reason to not allow people to play with their friends when doing it.

There is a reason if your premade is using voice comms or something to communicate while everyone else has to struggle to get basic information across to their scrub team.

I want to play with between 1 and 4 friends of varying competence, just for fun, but don’t want to ruin my (or their) ranked rating.

Ehecatl.9172:

I mean. Sometimes people want to play with their friends and aren’t grouping up just to secure an easy win. Unranked doesn’t matter, so there’s no reason to not allow people to play with their friends when doing it.

And sometimes people just want to play pvp without having to search team, and not playing against premades.
I guess they shall go to ranked… oh wait, its full of premades.
Then maybe unranked… oh wait, this is a place with “friends having fun together”.
Well, at least soloQ still here… oh wait, it was deleted, because otherwise nobody wanted to play pvp solo against premades and “friends having fun”.
I guess we have a little problem here.

Manimarco Devil.1790:

There is a reason if your premade is using voice comms or something to communicate while everyone else has to struggle to get basic information across to their scrub team.

Not everyone who’s playing with friends are also using voice comm. More often than not it’s just some friends who want to have fun playing together in unranked. And since unranked doesn’t matter there’s no reason to stop people from joining with their friends and having fun. Unranked is for fun. It’s not meant to be taken seriously as a major competition. That’s what ranked is for.

Rednik.3809:

Ehecatl.9172:

I mean. Sometimes people want to play with their friends and aren’t grouping up just to secure an easy win. Unranked doesn’t matter, so there’s no reason to not allow people to play with their friends when doing it.

And sometimes people just want to play pvp without having to search team, and not playing against premades.
I guess they shall go to ranked… oh wait, its full of premades.
Then maybe unranked… oh wait, this is a place with “friends having fun together”.
Well, at least soloQ still here… oh wait, it was deleted, because otherwise nobody wanted to play pvp solo against premades and “friends having fun”.
I guess we have a little problem here.

You are right. I think ranked should be full premades only, while unranked would be only for 1-3 man parties. That way we could have some serious games in ranked instead of all these soloq rotations.

Sorel.4870:

Rednik.3809:

Ehecatl.9172:

I mean. Sometimes people want to play with their friends and aren’t grouping up just to secure an easy win. Unranked doesn’t matter, so there’s no reason to not allow people to play with their friends when doing it.

And sometimes people just want to play pvp without having to search team, and not playing against premades.
I guess they shall go to ranked… oh wait, its full of premades.
Then maybe unranked… oh wait, this is a place with “friends having fun together”.
Well, at least soloQ still here… oh wait, it was deleted, because otherwise nobody wanted to play pvp solo against premades and “friends having fun”.
I guess we have a little problem here.

You are right. I think ranked should be full premades only, while unranked would be only for 1-3 man parties. That way we could have some serious games in ranked instead of all these soloq rotations.

I agree with this as well and good points across the board on this thread. I didn’t consider the practice part, but I do believe practicing on un-premade teams in unranked makes it feel like wes are punching bags.

The playing with friends part I do get, which is why I think the 1-3 formation is a good rule of thumb. 5 Players from the same guild should be guaranteed ranked.

Getting rid of solo queue was a huge mistake on anet parts.

Even if the matchmaking system would be perfect and for example a 5 man premade gets ranked against much higher MMR solo queuers there will still be the perception that the solo queuers lost because the other team was a premade even if they had a fair chance at winning. Of course this is very unmotivating for the solo queuers (and they are probably the majority mind you).

I really hope they fix it with HoT…

I solo queue in Ranked and usually have a great time versus whoever… Teams need a place to practice and train. That is what unranked is for.

Archon.6480:

I solo queue in Ranked and usually have a great time versus whoever… Teams need a place to practice and train. That is what unranked is for.

And what exactly stopping teams from doing same thing in ranked? Not enough ppl to farm and make yourself feel competent?

Anet, bring back soloQ, and lets see how much all these “friends having fun”, “teams on practice” and tryhard premades will like 20-50m queues without free meat.

Rednik.3809:

Anet, bring back soloQ, and lets see how much all these “friends having fun”, “teams on practice” and tryhard premades will like 20-50m queues without free meat.

I don’t understand what you are trying to say. Maybe you are happy with queuing on your own, but some of us actually like to play with our friends. Crazy right? When my friends are online, I don’t think: “let’s face roll the opposition in unranked”, I just like to play with people I know.

Furthermore, teams of average skills tend to be matched against other average teams or better solo/duo/trio queuers. When you play in duo or trioq, half your games are against full premades, and you consistently win against those. Good teams roflstomp everyone, but they have 20+ min queues, and believe it or not, winning without opposition is not fun.

That’s why I think bringing back soloq would be a terrible idea. This new system is great for those of us (and I’m sure we are a major portion of the player base) who play with one or two friends. So I would rather have a full premade only ranked queue (so that teams can really practice and not wait 15 minutes for a boring game against a PUG), and a 1-3 man unranked queue. If you want to queue with three friends, you could always find one more, it’s not that hard.

@OP:

The better question is why does the matchmaking system pair up a premade against a pug team. That’s the issue.

Sorel.4870:

I don’t understand what you are trying to say. Maybe you are happy with queuing on your own, but some of us actually like to play with our friends. Crazy right? When my friends are online, I don’t think: “let’s face roll the opposition in unranked”, I just like to play with people I know.

Furthermore, teams of average skills tend to be matched against other average teams or better solo/duo/trio queuers. When you play in duo or trioq, half your games are against full premades, and you consistently win against those. Good teams roflstomp everyone, but they have 20+ min queues, and believe it or not, winning without opposition is not fun.

That’s why I think bringing back soloq would be a terrible idea. This new system is great for those of us (and I’m sure we are a major portion of the player base) who play with one or two friends. So I would rather have a full premade only ranked queue (so that teams can really practice and not wait 15 minutes for a boring game against a PUG), and a 1-3 man unranked queue. If you want to queue with three friends, you could always find one more, it’s not that hard.

So what exactly will be bad in new system?
Big queues for you? But that means you are minority and currently majority is forced to play in your queue to please you.
You are not minority? Then you will get same short queues and everybody will be happy.
Right now situation when majority of solo players is forced to keep partial teams happy – this situation is NOT normal. Majority must be heard and taken into consideration, not other way around.

Rednik.3809:

So what exactly will be bad in new system?
Big queues for you? But that means you are minority and currently majority is forced to play in your queue to please you.
You are not minority? Then you will get same short queues and everybody will be happy.
Right now situation when majority of solo players is forced to keep partial teams happy – this situation is NOT normal. Majority must be heard and taken into consideration, not other way around.

What do you call the “new system”?

There is no way for me to know if my pvp habits make me part of a majority or a minority. I mostly duoq and trioq, often soloq, sometimes play in a team. I usually play late in the evening (like most casual players over twenty), so my queue times are very reasonable usually.

I actually think that they are a lot of partial teams. Under the old system, the solo queue was empty: I had 15 minutes queues when I was not even dragon rank yet. Granted, a lot of solo players played in team q, but also because partial premades are probably a lot more common than you think.

It’s definitely stupid, and it’s one reason GW2 pvp fails to qualify as any kind of “esports.” SoloQ was highly popular because you could just jump right into a game without having to worry about dealing with team management/creation. I enjoy playing on pre-mades, but sometimes I just want to do my own thing.

Now there’s absolutely no way for me to do that in structured pvp. IF Anet had a powerful matchmaking system, THEN the current situation would be acceptable. But as others have said, random teams are matched against pre-mades. I’m not sure how it often it happens, but imo it shouldn’t happen at all. It just ruins the matchup for both sides.

And I’m not even talking about full teams here. A random team is at a serious disadvantage even against a team with a 2-man pre-made in it. Having a random arena just makes so much sense that it continues to make me wonder what the hell the devs are thinking by refusing to put it back in.

I thought all the people on the top of the leaderboard were solo queuers…