Guild Wars 2

I would like for the “winner up, loser down” (WULD) rule to be applied for future matchups. Here are a few reasons in favour:

• Everybody gets different opponents every week, providing for variety.

• Your result against your current opponents becomes most important; there is no “remote competition” where you compete against the score of a server in a different tier. This may result in more intense matches.

• It avoids uncrossable ratings gaps. (Note that the ratings system essentially redistributes rating points between the competitors in a tier; if a gap is big; it cannot be crossed any more. For example, we had this problem in Europe T9 with two rather inactive servers at ~700 rating points; the third server in that tier (rated ~1000) had little chance to get out of it by good performance despite of blowout victories for weeks.) Such a gap can occur anywhere, and as a result there is no more comparison between servers on different sides of the gap.

To counter the criticism that it might produce unbalanced matches:

• New opponents too hard? Learn from them.

• New opponents too easy? Don’t lose in your preferred tier.

• At most, a server experiences 50% unbalanced matches. With uncrossable ratings gaps, a server’s matchups can become perpetually unbalanced.

The reset is a good point to start using this system, because the ratings will be unreliable for few weeks anyway.

• The anticipated silly matchups next week between winners or losers of vastly different tiers will be avoided.

After a few weeks, we can then review the matchups and decide whether or not to revert to the ratings-based system. (Note that a rating formula can be applied regardless of how the matchups are determined; just like in chess, where the ELO system is used in this way).

Thats one legit acronym, i had to Google it to find out more about this rule and its background workings…

I guess the rule goes like this: Every tier has a first a second and a third place.
third place will be first place one tier lower, first place will be third place one tier higher and second place stays in the tier.

Except for the first and the last tier in the first tier place 1 also stays and in the last tier 3rd place also stays.

The rule is usually used in every major sports league whic features many “tiers”.

I agree that this system is much more fun than the actual one! I hope they drop the current one to this one!

In many matches the server that is first in a given tier often can determine who comes in second or third. They may place the weaker server in second and the stronger server in third. This becomes an issue in the top tier. This may tend to happen in any tier as stronger servers want to push strong servers away and hold onto weaker servers to move up.

So the next time a load of bunny guilds to join a low-pop T9 server, rather than facing decent competition within two weeks or so they will instead have five weeks of easy matches & all the farming they like. Yep, great idea.

Saweth You Him.9047:

In many matches the server that is first in a given tier often can determine who comes in second or third. They may place the weaker server in second and the stronger server in third. This becomes an issue in the top tier. This may tend to happen in any tier as stronger servers want to push strong servers away and hold onto weaker servers to move up.

In other tiers than the top this is useless to the winning server, as it will move up a tier anyway, so it does not matter much to them who stays in the old tier and who drops.

The kind of “griefing” you describe is possible with ratings too. If a server has nothing better to do than grief another server, I do not think you can prevent that at all. In fact with ratings, it might be generally more useful, because it may determine which servers you face the next week.

I am in favor of retaining a ratings formula for prestige; to use it for matchups exclusively may lead to stale matchups and ratings gaps across which no comparison takes place any more.

To stay with the chess example: the world champion is not determined by ELO rating, and he/she does not play the handful of players with the next-best ratings exclusively.

CorliCorso.6254:

So the next time a load of bunny guilds to join a low-pop T9 server, rather than facing decent competition within two weeks or so they will instead have five weeks of easy matches & all the farming they like. Yep, great idea.

The last weeks in Europe have shown that with ratings, it takes several weeks for a recently-fortified server to rise and for a recently-deserted server to drop, so there does not seem to be much difference either way. We have seen jumps over more than one tier as well as rising servers stalled in a tier, as it took time for them to overcome the ratings gap.

Glicko rating system sucks for this game, those locked in tiers have to “constantly win” by “this much” to go up. What is really dumb is that you win and you lose a ton of rating because you were “expected” to thrash them. If Red comes first, Green second, Blue third, Red should be green, Green should be blue, Blue goes down to the tier under, and someone else takes red. If Blue first, Red second, Green third, green should drop a whole tier, blue goes up, red becomes blue, loser of the tier above drops.
If Green is first, Red second, Blue third, Green goes up to the next tier, blue goes down a tier, Red goes up to blue. If its Green first, blue second, red third, green goes up, blue stagnates, red goes down.

Basically, who cares if theres a 100 point difference between third and second, bad luck, you have to fight for your place.
This system will make new matches every week, and especially new colours.

They should simply normalise the rating gap. Make it more pronounced with a wider gap or over a period of time. Make it smaller but more viscous. Stuff that moves faster through it encounters more resistance. A T9 blowout that might amount to a smaller point gain would move more freely across a smaller gap. A Kaigneng blowout that would normally amount 200+ points would encounter more resistance due to viscosity thus the point gain would be reduced across gaps. Normalized gaps that are smaller and have a higher viscosity.