Guild Wars 2

This week’s T3 NA matchup has been a total blowout, however YB is still ~100 glicko points behind 6th place. At the rate YB is able to obtain glicko points from the T3 opponents it will likely be another month before they can rank high enough for T2.

Last linking CD was adjusted 200-300 points to escape the same types of blowouts in T4, please adjust YB so they can properly be in T2 where they belong.

I do kinda agreed YB should be manually adjusted considering YB literally owns all 3 bls for 20hrs of the day not to mention the recent xfers they got
causing both SBI/SOS to go into hibernation
Ill miss the YB bags but +1 for the adjustment

I agree too. McKenna can you push them up manually tonight? Please.

Hesacon.8735:

Last linking CD was adjusted 200-300 points to escape the same types of blowouts in T4, please adjust YB so they can properly be in T2 where they belong.

You just forgot to mention it was done after CD spent 5 WEEKS locked on T4.

When it was T4 locked with a bad matchup, all T3 people were like “no, CD shouldn’t come up, they don’t belong to T3 and blahblahblah.” Now suck it up and have YB for several weeks, like us on T4 had CD before.

Jeknar.6184:

Hesacon.8735:

Last linking CD was adjusted 200-300 points to escape the same types of blowouts in T4, please adjust YB so they can properly be in T2 where they belong.

You just forgot to mention it was done after CD spent 5 WEEKS locked on T4.

When it was T4 locked with a bad matchup, all T3 people were like “no, CD shouldn’t come up, they don’t belong to T3 and blahblahblah.” Now suck it up and have YB for several weeks, like us on T4 had CD before.

There was no glicko adjustment knobs they could turn, they developed those because of the bad T4 matchup. I was relieved when CD moved up, the T3 matchup at that point was stale, it had been the same matchup for months.

A large part of the reason the glicko wall between T2 and T3 exists is because Anet gave CD that 200 extra invisible glicko, which led to CD pulling glicko off T3 servers even when losing, and creating the glicko gap we see now.

Manually adjusting glicko has consequences. But until Anet gets an automated system that responds to dynamic changes in population rapidly it might be the best choice.

CD wasn’t tweaked just because of bad matchups, but more because it was impossible for glicko to balance enough to account for that (due to what they started with and what they could pull from the other servers in T4).

Is that the case with Yaks, or are they just dominating? If the latter and Yaks isn’t in a glicko trap, then it should be left alone.

re-links and subsequent player movement totally change the landscape, yet matchups start based on the old server placement with the previous link / pop. Glicko takes too long to adjust to the drastic changes in the landscape IMHO.

Some have asked for Glicko reset with re-link. Not sure that is the answer, but retaining old glicko after re-linking seems silly as well…

Choppy.4183:

Is that the case with Yaks, or are they just dominating? If the latter and Yaks isn’t in a glicko trap, then it should be left alone.

They are just dominating the match and that’s only the second week. YB already have a slim chance of rolling T2 (somenthing around 2%), which means it’s not impossible like it was for CD. Honestly, I’m all for moving YB up, they shouldn’t be in a tier they don’t belong. But all these T3 people didn’t gave a kitten when T4 had a far worse situation (since there was no way CD would leave without intervention), so they won’t get any sympathy from me.

Liston.9708:

Some have asked for Glicko reset with re-link. Not sure that is the answer, but retaining old glicko after re-linking seems silly as well…

It would at least allow the system to adjust itself faster since all old rating would be gone.

TBH it doesn’t matter YB will move up and the T2 reject will come down, its not like t3 will improve because of it, but just having them out for a week people would come back, but the massive PPT push yb is doing is pushing SoS and SBI players away if T3 is to stay healthy YB should move up even if its only for a week
otherwise t3 will be 2 darkhaven servers and YB

QuickRain.4735:

otherwise t3 will be 2 darkhaven servers and YB

No, because you can still drop to T4 and have a different matchup. DH and SF could not.

well your right and wrong it’ll could be weeks before that happens, at least for those weeks youll have 2 dead servers
then again they do have a 25ish% chance to drop
but I don’t care either way tbh I would rather fall for a week or 2 and see the flowers in t4 2 new servers to fight

Choppy.4183:

CD wasn’t tweaked just because of bad matchups, but more because it was impossible for glicko to balance enough to account for that (due to what they started with and what they could pull from the other servers in T4).

Is that the case with Yaks, or are they just dominating? If the latter and Yaks isn’t in a glicko trap, then it should be left alone.

Why would you be in support of bad matches? If an obvious mismatch is in existence, Anet should act quickly to rectify that. This is an issue as important as population and scoring. They are all related.

If fact I would say that Anet should have addressed matchmaking before population or at least at the same time. There’s no sense in changing linkings around every two months if you’re just going to make bad matches out of them.

Nothing destroys morale worse than population imbalance coupled with a mult-week bad match against the same opponent. It causes people to not play. It hurts the servers. It hurts the game.

Caliburn.1845:

A large part of the reason the glicko wall between T2 and T3 exists is because Anet gave CD that 200 extra invisible glicko, which led to CD pulling glicko off T3 servers even when losing, and creating the glicko gap we see now.

The other large part was because they used a 2 month old frozen glicko rating when CD became a host server. And what’s happening now is due to the lack of a partial reset when servers were relinked like what was done previously.

I don’t see how more manual tinkering with Glicko rankings (despite changing server composition & turnout) is supposed to fix the prior round of tinkering with Glicko rankings.

What this highlights is that Glicko is a bad tool for making matches for WvW. It’s not about the values themselves but the entire system is unfit for its use.

I totally agree with Heimlich Glicko just causes problems

Johje Holan.4607:

Why would you be in support of bad matches? If an obvious mismatch is in existence, Anet should act quickly to rectify that.

I’m not. But which server in its place wouldn’t also be a mismatch? If Yaks isn’t stuck behind a wall, then each week their chance of rolling a better match improves.

While I agree that at best glicko is imperfect and at worst broken and absolutely stupid, bad matches happen. They have happened since the very beginning, manually adjusting the matches should only happen if the T4 situation happens again. YB will move eventually and until then find the good times where you can.

Agreed with how backward the Glicko works with the linking. Support changes done to it, like reset all glicko to 1500 (median) on new linking, and let servers battle out to new positions, until we got established tiers last few weeks. Bit of both for everyones taste.

Alternatively, make a mechanic where servers gain/lose a certain amount of glicko each week, so everyone slowly creep back towards 1500 (median). Or cap Glicko at X and Y, so they can’t run away far enough that they can create glicko-walls.

Fernshade.9016:

While I agree that at best glicko is imperfect and at worst broken and absolutely stupid, bad matches happen. They have happened since the very beginning, manually adjusting the matches should only happen if the T4 situation happens again. YB will move eventually and until then find the good times where you can.

Patching over bad matches (by adjusting Glicko) ignores the fact that there are a lot of bad matches that can never be good because WvW scoring (and fun gameplay) only works when servers have roughly even populations and coverage.

Adjust systems so that a matchup between Blackgate, Dragonbrand, and SBI could exist and have interesting gameplay and suddenly match-making becomes a whole lot more free because there could be multiple interesting matches.

WvW breaks down into total garbage when population/coverage is imbalanced — that’s the root problem.

Choppy.4183:

Johje Holan.4607:

Why would you be in support of bad matches? If an obvious mismatch is in existence, Anet should act quickly to rectify that.

I’m not. But which server in its place wouldn’t also be a mismatch? If Yaks isn’t stuck behind a wall, then each week their chance of rolling a better match improves.

There may be no server that wouldn’t be a mismatch. But we’ll never know if the matches don’t change. Plus, even if another server is a mismatch, mismatches with variety is better than stagnant mismatches. If I’m going to get destroyed, I’d rather it be by different people each week. Either FA or DB would be good.

Even if a server is not stuck behind a wall, it takes too long to move. And now with re-linking every 2-months, if you have to wait 4 weeks for Glicko to adjust that’s half the linking period.

Fernshade.9016:

While I agree that at best glicko is imperfect and at worst broken and absolutely stupid, bad matches happen. They have happened since the very beginning, manually adjusting the matches should only happen if the T4 situation happens again. YB will move eventually and until then find the good times where you can.

Just because something has been some particular way for a long time doesn’t mean it should stay that way. Especially if its universally acknowledged as being bad.

What’s your reasoning for only manually adjusting if the T4 situation happens again? I assume you mean a wall. But why have that as the criteria? If everyone can see its a terrible match, why wait for Glicko to do its slow and painful adjustment? As I mentioned above, eventually is not good for the game. Especially when we only have these linkings for two months.

yea that was my point if you want to keep the servers healthy since the overall linking this time were pretty good, it would be best to manually move them, if we don’t care about the server health then we leave it as be and let it play out

The way Glicko is being used means it is not moving fast enough to account for massive population swings we see from week to week.

I also agree with Jahje, I don’t mind getting destroyed week to week, but at least make it a new face doing it. Watching the same blob run over our BL night after night (well, night for me) gets tedious. It get to be enough to log off and go do something else. I can’t imagine Anet likes it when they bore people out of their game.

Johje Holan.4607:

Just because something has been some particular way for a long time doesn’t mean it should stay that way. Especially if its universally acknowledged as being bad.

Absolutely, I agree with you and would love a different system to be in place. My reason for not manually adjusting matches unless movement becomes impossible is because it only perpetuates the wall. No matter what happens the main problem, as has been said, is population imbalance. People will inevitably fairweathr away from hard matches, which turns hard matches into bad matches, and then bandwagoning goes and imbalances everything even more. It’s a tough problem that is hard to solve without alienating a bunch of people.
The main thing is that until a new system is in place we are stuck with what we have. Tweaking glicko whenever a bad matchup occurs is a bandaid fix that fails to address the real problems.

How about deleting the Yaks Bend server instead?

jamesdolla.3954:

How about deleting the Yaks Bend server instead?

Only if everyone get a free transfer to Maguuma…

Yes. Let’s do this.

QuickRain.4735:

TBH it doesn’t matter YB will move up and the T2 reject will come down, its not like t3 will improve because of it, but just having them out for a week people would come back, but the massive PPT push yb is doing is pushing SoS and SBI players away if T3 is to stay healthy YB should move up even if its only for a week
otherwise t3 will be 2 darkhaven servers and YB

YB was a T1 server before the last link and, it would be like if you threw Blackgate int T3 and said go to town.

I’m not saying YB is being obnoxious (they’re not, they’re just bored), but that still doesn’t make the matchup worth playing. It’s basically one big k-train as either SoS or SBI reclaims their stuff while YB attacks the other side. As much as I like rank-up chests, that’s not why I play.

Heimlich.3065:

I don’t see how more manual tinkering with Glicko rankings (despite changing server composition & turnout) is supposed to fix the prior round of tinkering with Glicko rankings.

What this highlights is that Glicko is a bad tool for making matches for WvW. It’s not about the values themselves but the entire system is unfit for its use.

Here’s the problem. What we have is Glicko. Anet possesses the tools to adjust matchups using Glicko. They could take action using Glicko today.

A new rating and/or matchmaking system would be nice. The problem there is that if they decided to start work on it today, it would be weeks or months until it’s functional enough to put on live servers. The skirmish system is a step in the right direction for scoring, but does not help matchmaking.

It’s better to focus on what can be done today and worry about what we want to have for that letter we’re going to write to Santa.

I hate to break it to you guys but it’s like this in every tier. One of the three servers always has a significant coverage advantage. Sometimes the difference in population is larger but the problem is the same. Two of the servers can only compete at certain hours while the third server has enough activity to compete at any hour. Maybe they don’t always have a commander but they always have enough people they can band together if they need to.

Mag for T2, YB for T3 and NSP for T4. All of them have tons of active players when the other two servers are sleeping and even more when the other two servers are awake. Either they outnumber the other two servers by a ton during off hours or they outnumber the other servers by a little bit during prime. Either way, they’re always at a coverage advantage.

It’s everyone’s fault for stacking one server all the time. Move your guilds to losing servers for a change to create some semblance to balance. Maybe then ANet won’t have to intervene every month.

Woo hoo! Thank you! Both matches have been great so far

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Hey everyone,

We adjusted Yak’s Bend rating by +150 so they would move out of tier 3.

Was that the reason for the double reset? T3 was originally SBI/JQ/SOS, but a minute into the new matchup everyone was kicked, and T3 became SBI/FA/CD.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Hey everyone,

We adjusted Yak’s Bend rating by +150 so they would move out of tier 3.

Do you guys ever reflect on how you tend to only reward those who complain loudly with selfish requests?

I mean not to downplay yb’s position or anything…but they were asking for 1 server to get preferential fidgeting on the almighty untouchable glicko. I mean…that is HUGE that you granted this server request when there are countless others asking for the same thing. You didn’t even give a reason why yb out of all the servers was granted this…its like all the other grants you give off these forums.

You might consider giving a more inclusive reason for granting the request so people don’t feel you are rewarding the loudest most selfish requests….might help try to delude people into thinking you grant community requests on an argument basis rather than….I can only say selfish and loud so many times. Would that not be wise?

Like here is just an idea for a better response off the top of my head:

“Upon reviewing community arguments, and crosschecking with our own data, we have decided to move YB up 150 points out of tier 3 in order to to provide better matchups for the rest of the servers.”

Just a thought.

Honestly, I’m impressed they decided to do that change. But tell me: Is that a “invisible rating” change like it was done on the CD fiasco? Because if it is, FA may get locked in T3 because YB will leech off a lot of rating merely from being in the T2 matchup and FA is likely to lose a lot of rating for having CD on their matchup.

I’m sure they checked their own internal numbers, too. Even looking at the total score for the last 2 weeks, YB had a higher total score than any other server, including those that were winning in their own tiers by a large margin. Same thing happened in the last round of pairings with CD in T4.

Sylvyn.4750:

Same thing happened in the last round of pairings with CD in T4.

But they took 5 weeks to intervene in the CD issue.

Jeknar.6184:

But they took 5 weeks to intervene in the CD issue.

Is it not a good thing that they intervened faster now?

Btw in retrospect CD was weaker than SoS, SBI and YB in tier 3 when they adjusted. It lead to YB and SBI beating tier 4 even harder than CD had, so the problem wasn’t really solved with it back then.
I think YB is different now, they woke up “hard” after the hibernation and I seriously think they are able to compete in tier 2 with this activity, but if YB or FA is in tier 3 may not really matter much for their opponents.

I think it is good that it was adjusted in this case. The problem persists though: if you have to manually adapt a scoring system just to get a “chance” for a fair matchup, then maybe a deterministic system where you “create” the matchups fairly would just be the better choice.
I consider YB a 4th tier 2 server atm. So in this case this would mean each week another tier 2 server will have to go tier 3, so nobody gets locked down there permanently.

Cerby.1069:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Hey everyone,

We adjusted Yak’s Bend rating by +150 so they would move out of tier 3.

Do you guys ever reflect on how you tend to only reward those who complain loudly with selfish requests?

I mean not to downplay yb’s position or anything…but they were asking for 1 server to get preferential fidgeting on the almighty untouchable glicko. I mean…that is HUGE that you granted this server request when there are countless others asking for the same thing. You didn’t even give a reason why yb out of all the servers was granted this…its like all the other grants you give off these forums.

1) I was polite and said please, that’s rare around these parts
2) Anet acknowledged the issues with CD last linking, that’s why the new system exists
3) After the double-reset my server ended up in T4 anyway, which I guess is okay, it’s a matchup we’ve never had before, which is nice

Thanks, McKenna!

Why bother having glicko ratings anymore, if players just come in here, make a request for a server to move out and it gets accepted. Is everyone happy where their opponent servers are right now? should we just lock the tiers?

Xenesis.6389:

Why bother having glicko ratings anymore, if players just come in here, make a request for a server to move out and it gets accepted. Is everyone happy where their opponent servers are right now? should we just lock the tiers?

Personally I’d want a different matchup every week. Two different opponents is nice, but even one changes the dynamics. For months T3 was “locked” with maguuma, SBI, and SoS and it was really boring. It wasn’t until YB fell down and CD was adjusted up that the matchups finally got interesting again.

When you play the same opponents every week, you get a feel for how they’ll attack you as well as their coverage.

Oh boohoo other tiers have been locked for months before, you all just didn’t want to play against yaks bendyouoverwitharrowcarts any longer, now they’re t2’s problem until DB finally drops to t3. I mean might as well have asked to swap DB with YB and saved everyone a few weeks glicko changes. Looks like FA will be enjoying their highest kdr ever at 1.9

Cerby.1069:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Hey everyone,

We adjusted Yak’s Bend rating by +150 so they would move out of tier 3.

Do you guys ever reflect on how you tend to only reward those who complain loudly with selfish requests?

I mean not to downplay yb’s position or anything…but they were asking for 1 server to get preferential fidgeting on the almighty untouchable glicko. I mean…that is HUGE that you granted this server request when there are countless others asking for the same thing. You didn’t even give a reason why yb out of all the servers was granted this…its like all the other grants you give off these forums.

You might consider giving a more inclusive reason for granting the request so people don’t feel you are rewarding the loudest most selfish requests….might help try to delude people into thinking you grant community requests on an argument basis rather than….I can only say selfish and loud so many times. Would that not be wise?

Like here is just an idea for a better response off the top of my head:

“Upon reviewing community arguments, and crosschecking with our own data, we have decided to move YB up 150 points out of tier 3 in order to to provide better matchups for the rest of the servers.”

Just a thought.

1 3rd place skirmish finish all week – matchup was so lopsided several guilds went eotm Saturday prime time…. And….. 2-3 guilds joined yb/fc during the week (that I know of). It was the right thing to do in this case.

Cerby.1069:

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Hey everyone,

We adjusted Yak’s Bend rating by +150 so they would move out of tier 3.

Do you guys ever reflect on how you tend to only reward those who complain loudly with selfish requests?

YB didn’t ask for the change. The request came from someone on SOS.

So, now that it has happened…how are SoS and SBI enjoying being steamrolled by FA now?

Guys, settle down seriously. Anet did not alter a matchup because some guy on the forums asked them to, ok, stop being ridiculous and stop kidding yourselves. They did this because glicko is a fundamentally flawed matchmaking system that can be very slow to adapt to changes in matchups. Another blowout week, where players get frustrated and sit out, would make the new skirmish scoring system look really bad as it was designed to help address situations like that. Also with a new living story coming out on Tuesday, its even more incentive for them not to allow another such matchup where many players simply sitout and maybe not even login.

RyuDragnier.9476:

So, now that it has happened…how are SoS and SBI enjoying being steamrolled by FA now?

Eh, SoS wouldn’t know because they got punted into t4 as a side effect. Bu hey, anything better than having every tower and even camps loaded with siege.

And now, more requests need to be made!

RyuDragnier.9476:

So, now that it has happened…how are SoS and SBI enjoying being steamrolled by FA now?

Well you mean CD and SBI, but maybe one of them can start a topic asking for FA’s glicko to be “adjusted” so we get out of T3. :/

ArchonWing.9480:

RyuDragnier.9476:

So, now that it has happened…how are SoS and SBI enjoying being steamrolled by FA now?

Eh, SoS wouldn’t know because they got punted into t4 as a side effect. Bu hey, anything better than having every tower and even camps loaded with siege.

Just as a reality check, YB barely sieged up anything last week, for the obvious reason that most of the time there was minimal risk of anything getting attacked much less taken. Towards the end of the week, when neither SoS nor SBI seemed interesting in defending (for perfectly sound, logical reasons) there was a point at which Commanders were barely bothering to place offensive siege either because the zergs were just PvDing through the paper gates anyway.

I’m sure we’ll get right back on our arrow carts this week thanks to ANet’s deus ex machina intervention.

Tiny Doom.4380:

I’m sure we’ll get right back on our arrow carts this week thanks to ANet’s deus ex machina intervention.

Someone need to repel the Asian Hordes when they come…