Why the PvP Update failed, and how to fix it.

Why the PvP Update failed, and how to fix it.

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Posted by: Thoth Divine.8642

Thoth Divine.8642

So, I’m not an esports player and I don’t claim to be one of the top players of the game, but I have been playing since beta and have my share of experience in PvP / competitive games throughout the years.

Still, I think it is safe to say that the recent PvP update hasn’t met the expectations.

Let’s take a look at what was supposed to be improved:

1) Better matches
2) Less 4v5’s
3) Improve general play: better class comps & matchups, map voting, shorter q’s when possible, etc.
4) Improved leaderboards

Better matches: I think it’s a general opinion that matches in general have quite simply gotten worse. I think this is due to two main reasons: queue times for top players have shortened in compromise for less even matches, and, thus, teams are more often facing solo players or small teams with a few pugs.

4v5’s did seem to have improved with the match prompt, but there still isn’t enough penalty for AFK’ing. Instead, we have situations where you get no reward for playing a game where you were smashed by a much higher rated team, get no points and are treated as if you were AFK. Instead, there should be a way to report players AFK, with 3 votes getting this person dishonor and no match bonus. Most of the 4v5’s seem to happen mid-game now, after the initial fight has been lost, some players will simply abandon, go AFK or leave. THAT should be punished. Not getting 0 points, even though it is rare, it is quite frustrating (losing 500-0 is frustrating enough, no?).

Improve general play: First of all, map voting is stupid. It allows teams with cheesy comps to vote for a map that favors their comp. It was supposed to improve play by reducing the amount of times disliked maps would get chosen (AKA, Skyhammer and Spirit Watch, sometimes Courtyard – though I personally like it, even though it needs improvements). Before, in team maps, you would NEVER (0%) get those maps – the situation was perfect. Solo Q, you would get them sometimes. So, maybe map selection needs to be taken off ranked games and be kept only for Unranked? And please, take off these maps from the ranked rotation AT ALL TIMES.

As far as comps & such, nothing to say, seems to be working as intended. However, teams are still not even as far as player skill goes, it’s pretty evident to say. A very strong player will often get matched with absolute idiots vs a decent team and will obviously lose because 1 player doesn’t carry a whole team, even though the average rating of both teams would be equal.

Last but not least: Leaderboards. I’ll be the first one to say it, the previous leaderboards were completely random and often quite stupid. Win a few clutch games? Bam top 200. Get a few losses after playing vs exceptional teams? Back to 95%. Some players would get top 20 with <10 games played… how is that possible? There were some major inconsistencies. However, this new one is just as bad. The fact that it is based more off # of games played rather than player skill (or team skill) is quite flawed.

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Posted by: Thoth Divine.8642

Thoth Divine.8642

My suggestions:

I think the main thing that needs to happen, is to make ranked games count more. I think it would be interesting to make Ranked Team games absolutely require a 5-man team. Add in a Ranked Solo that works exactly as the previous iteration of Solo Q. Then, keep the Unranked Matches. Make playing Ranked games require rank 20 or so. This would improve team fights and make them more valuable.

Another very important suggestion I’d like to make, is to allow players to be in Hot-Join or Customizable matches while in Queue, and increase max Q time to about 15 minutes. This would improve quality of matches, by greatly improving chance that high-ranked teams face eachother instead of facing lower-rated players constantly. This is frustrating for both parties. Allowing players to be in matches while Q’d also greatly reduces boredom and allows players to duel, test strats, or just DO SOMETHING while waiting, instead of wandering around HotM.

I also think in the “make ranked matches count more” vein, losses in the top ratings need to count more. It should be more valuable to have a higher win % than having a higher number of games. Decay should also be strong, players shouldn’t be able to keep their top rank for more than 36-48 hours without playing a single match, in my opinion.

Lastly (this is a long post, I know), I think rewards for top players need to be improved. One single piece of armor (or two for top 20) per season is not enough to keep players motivated – and we don’t even know how long it will be between seasons. I think it’s safe to assume there will be one season every 2-3 months… that means if you’re top 200 (but not top 20), it will take you ONE YEAR to build a full 6-piece armor. What the kitten? And what if you play different classes? 3 years to build a full set for all 3 armor classes, and that’s assuming one season every 2 months and keeping top 200 in each of them. Completely kittened if you ask me. Perhaps make an achievement for holding top 200 for 7 days straight (with high decay, it’s not so bad I think) awarding a piece of Glorious Hero’s armor? And then something similar for Weapons?

Also, have you considered finishers / titles for top players? Top 50, top 200, top 1000 kinda thing. That could be something to expand on…


TLDR:
- Make ranked games count more
- Add Ranked Team (5-team only), Ranked Solo, Unranked Matches.
- Increase Max Q time to 15 minutes, allow people to play in Hot-join and custom maps.
- Increase rewards for top 200 players, while increasing risk (losses are more punishing, decay stronger)

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Posted by: Justin ODell.9517

Justin ODell.9517

PvP Server Programmer

Next

queue times for top players have shortened in compromise for less even matches, and, thus, teams are more often facing solo players or small teams with a few pugs.

This has always been true. It happens less with the new matchmaking because we start this process later.

It was supposed to improve play by reducing the amount of times disliked maps would get chosen

It has. Our least popular map (I won’t say which) has gotten 4% of votes, and has only been selected in 4% of all games in the last 24 hours. It use to be uniform, which meant all 6 maps had a 16.7% chance of being chosen.

Last but not least: Leaderboards.

It’s a test scoring system, no the final one. One of the biggest problems is that we simply aren’t messaging any of the details to you in-game. That said, we will be taking all feedback into consideration.

Server Programmer (sPvP)
Isle of Janthir: Flux, Latch, Aegir

(edited by Justin ODell.9517)

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Posted by: Erwin.5603

Erwin.5603

I don’t have time to comment on everyone OP said, but I just wanna note that as someone who has pretty high MMR (I assume, Justin tell me pls), I get only 2 kinds of games when I queue solo:
1. I am with mostly soloq players / players I dont know the names of (which most of the time means, that they aren’t players who were high on the old Teamq Ladder) and playing vs premade grps (e.g. a game today vs denshee, tage, vanish and texbi + random).
2. Both my team and the enemy team consist of “PvE Players”, which refers to people severely below my skill lvl, who probably don’t play sPvP or GW2 in general for too long (Its really obvious from their gameplay, like either moving or casting abilities, never simultaniously). Obviously not all of them are that unexperienced, but the rest are, just to a lesser extent.
I enjoyed the old matchmaking way more, as long as some top players were online I would get a decent quality game, which was only diminished by skyhammer/spiritwatch pops.
I also don’t agree with the current Leaderboards, I don’t have the time to compare it to other games like Hearthstone, Starcraft, LoL, Dota but I wish you would take more inspiration from those, you don’t have to invent something new.

Fixi

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Posted by: Silentshoes.1805

Silentshoes.1805

“One of the biggest problems is that we simply aren’t messaging any of the details to you in-game”

Ummm.

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Posted by: Justin ODell.9517

Previous

Justin ODell.9517

PvP Server Programmer

“One of the biggest problems is that we simply aren’t messaging any of the details to you in-game”

Ummm.

Like your odds of victory, what score you have to get to get N points, etc..

Server Programmer (sPvP)
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Posted by: Roe.3679

Roe.3679

I made some posts earlier about how the matchmaking wasn’t so bad – I take it back.

I had horrid games today. Literally going up against some of the top players in NA, who are teamed up and all of whom are an even match for me at least, while I’m the top player on my team full of people I don’t recognize. Lost 500 to 36 or so, and faced some of those same groups and players for match after match. You can’t afford to have players who don’t know what they are doing in matches like that, but it happened quite a bit. And insult to injury, I lost multiple points on the leaderboard for it. If there is a 100% chance I lose and we are getting spawncamped for minutes at a time, I now have to lose points? Kind of a joke.

The matchmaking is weak. I’d rather wait for good matches than get pushed in with whatever rabbit rank also happened to push the queue button at the same time as me. I can see why others are upset after that experience.

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Posted by: Mysticjedi.6053

Mysticjedi.6053

I just want to know how a match affected me. Did I get a point or two or did I perform well under.

One of the things that bothers me right now, is I spent a game defending my home point from constant attack, but didn’t get any defense points like I would capping or decapping. Under the leaderboard system, my ranking will tank because I’m not capturing points, but I was defending our only point which kept my team in the game, even if we lost. But because I didn’t score enough points I lost points (I think).

With all of that said. I would love if we did leagues in tiers so I’m more likely to be matched with people around my skill level. It’s no fun to destroy people or to be destroyed. I want people I can go 50/50 with and learn from the fight.

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Posted by: White Wolf.3291

White Wolf.3291

In my opinion I think it’s too soon to say that the pvp update failed.
It took me more than 50 wins and very few losses to finally play against good teams and have very good and balanced matches.

The simplest way to have good matches and small queue times at every hour would be to merged NA and EU regions in pvp like GW1. But as a dev said a long time ago would be technically impossible, correct me if i’m wrong please.

Anyway, EU pvp starts dying at 1:00 gmt, average time queues change from around 10 seconds to 8/10 minutes, not bad though, and getting worst through the night as it is suppose to happen.

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Posted by: Silentshoes.1805

Silentshoes.1805

“One of the biggest problems is that we simply aren’t messaging any of the details to you in-game”

Ummm.

Like your odds of victory, what score you have to get to get N points, etc..

Ok. I see now. Yeah those are my top suggestions.

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Posted by: Thoth Divine.8642

Thoth Divine.8642

queue times for top players have shortened in compromise for less even matches, and, thus, teams are more often facing solo players or small teams with a few pugs.

This has always been true. It happens less with the new matchmaking because we start this process later.

It was supposed to improve play by reducing the amount of times disliked maps would get chosen

It has. Our least popular map (I won’t say which) has gotten 4% of votes, and has only been selected in 4% of all games in the last 24 hours. It use to be uniform, which meant all 6 maps had a 16.7% chance of being chosen.

Last but not least: Leaderboards.

It’s a test scoring system, no the final one. One of the biggest problems is that we simply aren’t messaging any of the details to you in-game. That said, we will be taking all feedback into consideration.

Thanks for replying (and hopefully reading the topic), but I hope you this was not your best shot… I’m glad you’re taking the time to at least attempt to address these issues but really I think something more needs to be done. Cool if least popular maps aren’t being chosen and cool if you’re testing things, but at the end of the day, this update will need tweaks, some would even say major tweaks, to reach it’s original goal.

I for one would like to know perhaps a little bit more on what happens after a match. Like +’s and -‘s to your rating, at the very least. And I quite sincerely hope that your rating change isn’t solely based on the points you made during that match, because more often than not, players who were most important to a win didn’t make more points, sometimes quite the opposite (the example given above of a home point defendant). Also, when playing with really zergy teams, if you’re playing smart and actually trying to win the game instead of just zerging wherever there’s people to kill, you’ll often end up in a 2v1, 3v1, die, and THEN the zerg will come to your defense. You didn’t get no points, but if you weren’t there, you would’ve lost the point, and perhaps the match (or, sometimes you’ll lose anyway).

I don’t think it’s worth mentioning my points again, but really I hope you’re taking into consideration bringing Solo Q back, and making full-teams mandatory into Ranked Team matches. I think honestly this would be the bigger step in the right direction you could take, in addition to all the little details that go with it.

Ah and one last thing, saying “the matchmaking will put you vs other soloers before team” is a fun thing to say, but when you lose 7 on 9 matches during the first day of play, where most of them (probably around 5 of them) were absolutely one-sided, it’s just not reassuring at all.

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Posted by: Thoth Divine.8642

Thoth Divine.8642

It was supposed to improve play by reducing the amount of times disliked maps would get chosen

It has. Our least popular map (I won’t say which) has gotten 4% of votes, and has only been selected in 4% of all games in the last 24 hours. It use to be uniform, which meant all 6 maps had a 16.7% chance of being chosen.

I just wanted to address this because I think it’s an important topic. NOBODY complained about ANY of the maps in ranked team Q. Nobody. Even though some players like some map more than another (I’ve heard people say they prefer every single map, so it’s not like there was a general hate for a map, like Skyhammer had). On the contrary, this allows for teams that have perhaps an easier time on certain maps (a Mesmer on Khylo, heavy range on Temple, etc.) mass vote for that map and have a higher % chance of getting a map that directly favors their comp. That’s not what I’d call an improvement.

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Posted by: Erwin.5603

Erwin.5603

Sometimes I really see the argument of vocal minority. I don’t mind map selection in ranked queue at all. There is no map that you could “abuse” with a specific comp anyway, yes some are slightly better than others, but it isnt even close to engi – skyhammer lvl. Also I feel like this is supposed to be a competitive mode, so I would advise any team to actually play all maps to pratice. My team always practices the maps we feel uncomfortable on.

Fixi

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Posted by: khani.4786

khani.4786

“One of the biggest problems is that we simply aren’t messaging any of the details to you in-game”

Ummm.

Like your odds of victory, what score you have to get to get N points, etc..

Ok. I see now. Yeah those are my top suggestions.

I too want to know these in-game (after the match of course). I’m not a competitive person at all, but it would help me to understand more what happened and what I might could have done differently.

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Posted by: skullmount.1758

skullmount.1758

queue times for top players have shortened in compromise for less even matches, and, thus, teams are more often facing solo players or small teams with a few pugs.

This has always been true. It happens less with the new matchmaking because we start this process later.

Yeah, I’m gonna have to disagree with you on that one. Its gotten to the point where I hate ranked and unranked and am just going back to just custom arenas to finish the dailies.
iirc on patch day and the day before, I was getting put in matches against kitten guild/teams while my side was pugs (I think once or twice I got a guild duo on my team). Even got put against in a pug group against 4 and a pug (or 5th wasn’t repping, not sure) of the guild that won the championship (yeah, that match was really kittenin fair…). As a solo player, I really hate this combined matchmaking/queues.

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Posted by: NeXeD.3042

NeXeD.3042

You all know some of you have to lose…. we can’t all be the New England Patriots k we need some Jets fodder.

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Posted by: Roe.3679

Roe.3679

You all know some of you have to lose…. we can’t all be the New England Patriots k we need some Jets fodder.

The issue is being the Jets and playing the patriots every game.

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Posted by: brannigan.9831

brannigan.9831

Nobody plays the patriots every game though. There aren’t that many dedicated teams playing GW2 for one thing. And they also aren’t all on at any given time. There has always been tons of bad matches and there always will be because this game has a small population base and they can only tweak the matchmaking so much.

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Posted by: NeXeD.3042

NeXeD.3042

^ this 10000000000000000 times.

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Posted by: Thoth Divine.8642

Thoth Divine.8642

^ this 10000000000000000 times.

Yes but when about half your games are completely one-sided matches (I just played one, pug vs pug, we lost 500 – 50 or so). Can’t say the matchmaking is doing a good job at ALL.

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Posted by: NeXeD.3042

NeXeD.3042

Why doesn’t everyone kittening wait a few weeks for kitten to get stabilized. Did some of you seriously think they could just implement a new system and immediately you will get matched with people of equal skill? It’s going to take a little but for there to be enough of a sample size for better matches. So for now there are going to be some bad ones…. I really don’t see why people are crying so much. Oh noessss I lost a video game. Anyway… did you guys know a candle smells like burnt hair? Take a wiff.

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Posted by: Roe.3679

Roe.3679

Nobody plays the patriots every game though. There aren’t that many dedicated teams playing GW2 for one thing. And they also aren’t all on at any given time. There has always been tons of bad matches and there always will be because this game has a small population base and they can only tweak the matchmaking so much.

I had situations yesterday that was very similar to being the jets and playing the patriots game after game. I tried spacing out my queues to avoid the groups I was being queued against, but I still played them, and I don’t have much business playing with ESL level groups as a SoloQer. I don’t think playing games at 36-500, 111-500 are fun, and they shouldn’t happen.

As much as I disliked some details about the old system, it didnt result in games this lopsided this often. So of course I’m going to voice that, because if they continue to push some adjustments it would make my experience better, and clearly I’m not alone. I originally thought it was alright, got a really rough game which, whatever, that happens, and continued to play getting matched against the same groups, or with players who are so oblivious that it brings my team down.

So which is it, should I be playing against competitive scene level players, or with people that don’t even bother to execute the most basic actions of guild wars 2 pvp? Because both happened to me in one night. Pretty inconsistent matchmaking.