Guild Wars 2

Seems a few WvW guilds in our server has made a command decision. We should allow our borderlands to fall. Thus losing this weeks matchup so to play against lower ranks (or tier) servers. What is the community’s thought on this? Shall we take a dive or shall we fight on?

you probably need to do a lot more than just let your borderlands fall. losing rating (and thereby getting lower-ranked opponents) is a lot easier under the new system that it was under the old system, but it’s still not trivial, and it requires your whole server to work together.

if you can’t get your whole server to commit to this plan, it’s probably not a good idea to pursue it at all. what server are you on, and which opponents would you prefer to face? I can run the numbers and tell you how much of a rating change you actually need to achieve this.

-ken

It’s easy and advantageous to manipulate the system. In the lower half of tiers, sometimes a server is being held together by just one guild. If that guild decides to quit WvW, you lose the fairweathers and the result is devastating. For example,

SF lost KING and dropped two tiers.
AR lost ALS and is in the process of dropping two tiers.
With ABYS, DH is T5. Without ABYS, DH is T7.

To manipulate the system, you want to win by as few points as possible in matches that you should easily win. In matches that you should lose, you completely tank it so you lose as much rating as possible. By doing this, you can keep your rating artificially lower than its true value, giving you more easy matchups.

I bet you can have a server winning percentage of 70-80% if you did this.

bleach.9074:

SF lost KING and dropped two tiers.

Nope KING = STaR now.

What killed SF (tier wise) was too many of the whining masses not realizing that we weren’t going to Tier 1, sadly our “wake up” call came too late, by the time we faced you guys on DH with the superior round the clock coverage you tend to enjoy, we got facerolled.

Some people have transferred off the server well after we left the DH matchup, but not enough to cause the variation you’ve seen out of us lately. What is hurting SF is that we spent 14 weeks in a matchup that could be won by essentially a server playing only 8hrs of the 24…And so people got trained to think that they could show up for an hr, jump on the pain train and get their badges/xp/karma etc, and then go back to killing poorly designed computer baddies.

As far as the OPs suggestion: Supposedly this matchup issue is ANET’s attempt at getting true ratings info (Seems to be somewhat working for the lower 12 servers at least). Now what they will do with said info is anyone’s guess…However throwing matches intentionally will only serve to give them MORE false numbers that caused servers like mine to be stuck in blowout matchups under the previous system. The numbers are already getting skewed enough by the fairweather quitting that goes naturally in each server when things aren’t going as expected, to intentionally skew them even more in an attempt to get a random match for 1-week seems worrisome.

With the new system dropping rating doesn’t guarantee you will fight worse servers next match. Need to learn what to do when you’re outmanned and outmatched other than wait for it to end.

Back when SoS was leaving T1, our two largest remaining WvW guilds decided to take a dive so that we’d just lose “by a little bit” and prevent a bad matchup.

Word of this got out, and all our casuals and PuGs left WvW for weeks. It was bar-none, the worst decision I’ve seen in WvW (though well-intentioned).

Trust me, anyone who is serious about WvW will avoid your server like it’s plague-infested if you do that.

In the new system taking a dive so that a server might beat up on less populated one is pretty low.

Prior to the random ranking addition this might have been a legitimate tactic. Some matchups became stale and some servers got stuck with a very strong server for weeks or months (over 3 months my server got wailed on by the same significantly stronger server). This tactic could have allowed a respite from that matchup, but that is no longer an issue.

Interesting info guys, thanks for the replies. I would like to get into the issue of ethics. I’m not comfortable with tanking a match. I’m more of a “Always do your best” kind of guy. Is taking a dive a legitimate way of managing your server’s ranking?