Guild Wars 2

This is strictly hypothetical, please treat it as such.

If all 3 servers in tier 8 get a ton of transfers, and we have great even fights in tier 8, but ALL 3 servers with their mass hypothetical transfers end up performing at a much higher tier’s level, how would glicko treat that?
The way I would see it is, if we are all 3 fighting at an even level, we would end up averaging our points (979, 636, 577) and settle with all three servers at the average; 730.
So to further this hypothetical scenario (only because I’m asking about how the system would react to this, not because I think this is what is happening), let’s assume all 3 servers in T8 start performing at a T1 level… wouldn’t they still just sit at roughly 730 points forever unless a server from a higher tier drops down to our average score?

Please discuss, and try not to flame me ( too much :P ) because I’m not trying to insinuate anything here about my server or any other servers strengths, and I’m not voicing an opinion on the transfers, I’m just honestly curious if the system could recognize that a tier as a whole has gotten stronger, or not.

D W.5179:

Cactus.2710:

It’s called tier locking, and it’s a huge flaw of using the Glicko-2 system for tiered match play. The same thing could happen in Tier 1 if all three servers there lost 80% of their players but still battled to essentially even scores each week.

Thank you, that’s what I was thinking.
It leads me to believe that to a much lesser extent that the longer three servers remain in a tier together, the more that tier, and the surrounding tiers become unrelated to each other, and sort of out of sync or scale.
If a few tiers end up locked like this I could see the scale of scores becoming wildly inaccurate in relation to other tiers.
Perhaps I can’t draw this conclusion from tier lock, I really don’t know.

no, that sounds about right…

now imagine allowing the possibilities when you allow drastic population shifts in locked tiers. doesnt fix the tier locking. just allows the locked tier to balance or unbalance.

itll get worse as the game ages if nothing is done.

The server with the most points wins…
In other words you can be a 1 man army and tick 695 all day everyday and become the best server

Vodka.3958:

The server with the most points wins…
In other words you can be a 1 man army and tick 695 all day everyday and become the best server

I guess you don’t understand the question, or I just didn’t communicate my question clearly enough.

In less words.
If T8 fills up with the 3 BEST servers in the game (remember, hypothetical), and they are all 3 at equal skill, would they somehow move up together, or would all 3 of the best servers in the game be stuck in T8 forever because they are even skill (scoring even points every match-up) even though all tiers above are lower skill (again, hypothetical, I’m delusional and all, but not that delusional)?

They wouldn’t move up together. You’d have to grind out points and then a server from T7 would come down. Once that happens then it’s easier to climb up.

At least that is how I understand it.

gvaughn.4163:

They wouldn’t move up together. You’d have to grind out points and then a server from T7 would come down. Once that happens then it’s easier to climb up.

At least that is how I understand it.

But if all three servers continue having a virtual 3-way tie each week due to equal population and skill, wouldn’t they all start to just get 0 points? I’ve never seen a match-up where all three servers in the tier gain points.

D W.5179:

gvaughn.4163:

They wouldn’t move up together. You’d have to grind out points and then a server from T7 would come down. Once that happens then it’s easier to climb up.

At least that is how I understand it.

But if all three servers continue having a virtual 3-way tie each week due to equal population and skill, wouldn’t they all start to just get 0 points? I’ve never seen a match-up where all three servers in the tier gain points.

Yes.

D W.5179:

This is strictly hypothetical, please treat it as such.

If all 3 servers in tier 8 get a ton of transfers, and we have great even fights in tier 8, but ALL 3 servers with their mass hypothetical transfers end up performing at a much higher tier’s level, how would glicko treat that.
The way I would see it is, if we are all 3 fighting at an even level, we would end up averaging our points (979, 636, 577) and settle with all three servers at the average; 730.
So to further this hypothetical scenario (only because I’m asking about how the system would react to this, not because I think this is what is happening), let’s say all 3 servers in T8 start performing at a T1 level… wouldn’t they still just sit at roughly 730 points forever unless one team managed to break in to T7 to fight a server that actually has some points?

Please discuss, and try not to flame me ( too much :P ) because I’m not trying to insinuate anything here about my server or any other servers strengths, and I’m not voicing an opinion on the transfers, I’m just honestly curious if the system could recognize that a tier as a whole has gotten stronger, or not.

It’s called tier locking, and it’s a huge flaw of using the Glicko-2 system for tiered match play. The same thing could happen in Tier 1 if all three servers there lost 80% of their players but still battled to essentially even scores each week.

Cactus.2710:

It’s called tier locking, and it’s a huge flaw of using the Glicko-2 system for tiered match play. The same thing could happen in Tier 1 if all three servers there lost 80% of their players but still battled to essentially even scores each week.

Thank you, that’s what I was thinking.
It leads me to believe that to a much lesser extent that the longer three servers remain in a tier together, the more that tier, and the surrounding tiers become unrelated to each other, and sort of out of sync or scale.
If a few tiers end up locked like this I could see the scale of scores becoming wildly inaccurate in relation to other tiers.
Perhaps I can’t draw this conclusion from tier lock, I really don’t know.

insanemaniac.2456:

D W.5179:

Cactus.2710:

It’s called tier locking, and it’s a huge flaw of using the Glicko-2 system for tiered match play. The same thing could happen in Tier 1 if all three servers there lost 80% of their players but still battled to essentially even scores each week.

Thank you, that’s what I was thinking.
It leads me to believe that to a much lesser extent that the longer three servers remain in a tier together, the more that tier, and the surrounding tiers become unrelated to each other, and sort of out of sync or scale.
If a few tiers end up locked like this I could see the scale of scores becoming wildly inaccurate in relation to other tiers.
Perhaps I can’t draw this conclusion from tier lock, I really don’t know.

no, that sounds about right…

now imagine allowing the possibilities when you allow drastic population shifts in locked tiers. doesnt fix the tier locking. just allows the locked tier to balance or unbalance.

itll get worse as the game ages if nothing is done.

I’d love to hear what ANet has to say about glicko in a tiered environment, and if they added anything special to it to try and keep the different tiers in the same score scale, or in sync with each other. If tiers settle down and become even matches across the board, we would all be tier locked to the point that nobody would know if T6 was actually significantly stronger than T3, for example.

Well after the free transfers, this is proving itself. The match-up in T8 is at least somewhat fun now, so no complaints there, but looking at how T8 and T7 are becoming further and further separated by points because of this change, shows the issue very clearly with tiers becoming out of scale with the rest of the tiers because glicko doesn’t work in a tiered environment where the same three servers get stuck together for any duration of time over a single match-up.
According to our score before the transfers, SF was almost ready to fight any of the three servers from T7. Now that the two servers we play have gone up in score, and even though our strength didn’t change much (got better if anything) glicko shows that we are hundreds of points away from being ready to play T7… even though there was no change to our server. Well, that’s because glicko doesn’t know how to compare any of the 3 servers in T8 to any other tier, because we have only played each other for about 3 months.
ANet, comment on this, let us know you are doing something, let us know you acknowledge there is an issue. Please bring this up in a meeting and discuss it internally.

I want it to be clear that I am very happy that we have some good fights going on in T8, I’m just using an obvious example to show the issue with glicko in a tiered environment.