Q:
i7 4770k @ 4.5ghz | GTX 780 | 8GB GSKILL RAM @ 1866mhz
(edited by Joriel.1530)
Ideal server match up system?
I agree entirely. In fact I wrote a lengthy post called Map Rotation Issue talking about something very similar to this. I don’t agree with this system at all because even if we aren’t going up against the same server we’re going up against oceanic servers (opposite timezones which is entirely unfair), WvW servers (servers that care about WvW and thus have 5x the people in every map than we do), never rotating (always staying the same kitten color which makes it impossible to get map completion when pitted against servers that are 7 ranks higher than you), watching the people that are 2 ranks ahead of us beat our faces in and still be 2 Tiers lower than us. This is a horrible system and needs to get fixed. I really only care about the map completion aspect because I got to level 80 in a month with 99.97% map completion and it’s TAKING ME MORE THAN ANOTHER MONTH TO GET 0.03% because we as a server cannot take (and have not rotated to) the green keep. Thank You.
bump i would like to see more feedback
i7 4770k @ 4.5ghz | GTX 780 | 8GB GSKILL RAM @ 1866mhz
Alternating 1 week by rating, 1 week by winner up loser down. Each month you’ll get two matches in your above/below tier, and two in your tier by rating.
Basically I agree with the OP since it would work out roughly similar, with some odd weeks being different.
(edited by Pinko.2076)
What the OP said. It would be better than the current system which almost invariably results in at least one (sometimes two) of the three teams getting a blowout week and nobody playing WvW from Monday onwards. We in Gandara have for once got a reasonable match this week (with Underworld, the first genuinely equal match we’ve had since the new system), but I can’t imagine it’s been much fun for Ring of Fire most of the time.
The main problem with one up, one down, and I think I’ve elaborated on this in the past, is when you get in situations where there’s very large gaps in performance between servers. For the sake of argument suppose there’s 9 servers, with the following ratings (and assume, for the moment, that ratings correlate strongly with skill/coverage):
1 - 2100
2 - 2050
3 - 2030
4 - 2000
5 - 1850
6 - 1700
7 - 1580
8 - 1550
9 - 1520
Another issue with one up, one down, which immediately becomes apparent, is that ratings mean nothing.
But that’s not the main problem. Pick any three servers from 1-4, and they’ll all be matched somewhat closely. But any of 1-4 will give 5 a hard time, and 6 will be left in the dust. Let’s assume that things play out about as well as you’d expect with these matchups, and one-up-one-down results in the 2nd week of matchups being as follows:
1 - 2110
2 - 2050
4 - 2010
3 - 2020
5 - 1850
7 - 1590
6 - 1690
8 - 1550
9 - 1510
The Tier 1 and Tier 3 matchups don’t look all that bad, #6 will probably come out safely ahead in T3 and #4 might have a hard time but could be competitive. #1 and #2 will almost always end up together, which doesn’t really change anything over the current system (and possibly makes it worse, as at least right now it’s possible for #1 and #2 to get mixed down into T2 once in a while – which also isn’t ideal, but consider that pre-randomization you’d be getting the same matchups every week no matter what).
Server #5 is where it gets messy. They’ll always be facing someone from the meta-T1 (#s 1-4) with little to no chance of winning a matchup to move up, and even if they did, they’d get completely crushed the next week and move back down. And none of the meta-T3 servers (#s 6-9) are likely to challenge them enough to push them down into T3, where #5 would end up steamrolling everybody and moving back up again anyway.
“But,” you say, “people will transfer and server performance will change over time.” While true, this is still a very slow process. And while this candle is burning slowly, most matchups will either stay the same or oscillate between two different matchups, leading to the “odd week, even week” problem that a lot of mid-tier servers had pre-randomization.
Is the current system perfect? No. But it’s getting better every week. The Deviation values, which determine the range of random matchups, has been steadily decreasing week to week, by about 0.7 points/week. This may not sound like much, but in the 8 weeks I’ve been running simulations (see “NA Potential Matchups X/YY” threads in matchups forum) the likelihood of a matchup happening “on-tier” (e.g. T3 matchup being #s 7, 8, and 9) has doubled or more for most mid-tiers, even with servers moving up and down in ranking every week.
The amount of rating change from a matchup is still enough to account for transfers and improvements, and (although I haven’t run the numbers) I think it may actually result in servers that have major changes (big guild transfers or coverage changes) being placed in more appropriate matchups faster than in the old system. Yes, you get the oddball matchup once in a while*, but at least it’s variety, and the setup of the rating system still allows servers to move up/down as appropriate even when fighting way out of their skill/coverage level.
*This has yet to happen, but every week I dump the results of the simulation to files. For Maguuma this week, here’s one way down in the list of possible matchups:
0.18440% - 1844/1000000
Tier 1
Jade Quarry
Sanctum of Rall
Maguuma
Likely to happen? No. Possible? Yes. And a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that Mag would gain rating by scoring 80,000 points or more on the week. And 80,000 points would be about what I’d expect of Mag against the top two servers, and in my mind this shows that the system works because it normalizes away factors like numbers and coverage.
[continued in next post due to character limit]
There’s probably a better way to communicate this to the player base, as unless you’re looking as deep into the numbers as I’ve been, most people won’t see this. Given the starting rating, deviation, and volatility numbers, it’s possible to calculate a target value for each server (actually a target ratio, since the total number of points scored each week varies by up to 10%) which shows what the expected performance of each server in a matchup would be. For the hypothetical “Mag in T1” matchup this would be (using 600,000 points in a week as the basis):
JQ - 264033 (44.0055%)
SoR - 259574 (43.2623%)
Mag - 76393 (12.7321%)
Due to what’s either a flaw in my calculator or a flaw in using glicko2 for 3-way matchups, each server goes up 0.494 rating points in a week with these scores (instead of staying exactly the same). Any server scoring more than these values would subsequently gain more rating than the others, giving each server in a matchup a target to show whether they’re under- or over-performing their rating. I’m working on a webtool to show these values (which has had some setbacks, otherwise it’d be out by now).
There’s two ways to communicate this to the player base – either show the targets in the WvW UI, or scale the displayed amount of points to the equality ratios. In the above example, this would show all servers as having 200,000 points at the end of the week – a literal tie, because that’s what it is, in the context of the rating system. Or you could have a pie chart of total points earned, with ghost lines or something similar showing the ratios each server needs to “win”.
tldr: You don’t have to have the most points at the end of the week to win. Communicated correctly, the rating system does a good job of allowing servers with vastly different participation and coverage levels to compare performance over the course of a week.