Guild Wars 2

JaredKincade.9761:

Its amazing to me that the biggest complainers of this move is SOR, when they are the ones exploiting the rating to jump straight into near 1st position without ever having to face a tier 1 server. Ah, well actually it doesn’t amaze me at all.

The SOR jump in rating is the reason they are reseting the points. They are out of whack and the system needs tuning, the result of SoR gaining so much rating in three weeks is evidence of this. BG earned its T1 spot after 8 weeks of hard hard week by week fighting to get to where we did. SoR now has the chance to do the same and earn their T1 spot instead of rocketing by pvdooring a dead server with a high rating.

BG did it, are you afraid to put in the work to earn it? You should be pleased, if you do get to Tier 1, it will be because you earned it, not because your killing siege raiser over and over and over again.

You were definitely spot on about this one brother. I’m really looking forward to practicing against new servers

Ha, ha, ha… All those guilds in every tier thinking they were so clever jumping to another server to dominate the other 2 servers before Jan 28th. Where’s your Overall Points now, Anet sees what they did and counters. If Anet is going to fine tune the math, now is the time to do it with such a dramatic shift in populations.

Hey if the reset and new math doesn’t work out, can always switch back in a few months. The Overall rating to determine what position your world should be in, doesn’t really matter if it’s reset to zero. If your servers, World vs World community’s are so great and works so hard to be where they are now, then what is the problem? Shouldn’t the mighty servers have no issues getting back to their top spots in the next 2 weeks?

MikeFerguson.8921:

Finally, matches are going to remain a week long. We feel that the 24 hour matches are not representative of what we consider ‘standard’ gameplay, and actually create a lot of incorrect data in the system because people play the game much differently when it’s a 24 hour match compared to a 7 day one.

I have no doubt that servers do play differently in a 24 hour match vs a 7 day match. The real problem with this is, when the match is essentially over after the first 24 hours, you have 6 days of ‘terrible’ game play. When this happens 2 weeks in a row (tier 4) that means 2 of the last 14 days has been fun.

I do not want to wait 4-6 weeks until the matches are balanced. I hope this works out the way you expect and if it doesn’t, you’ll hear from us again.

Thanks for listening.

-g

Mostly agree with everything people have said in this thread, while the reset is needed having one week matches seems a bit overkill while the tiers are balancing themselves out again.

Perhaps some more consideration as to if the matches should remain one week long or revert to 24hr for a bit (or perhaps three days) would be good since it’s hard to plan anything for WvW as it stands.

MikeFerguson.8921:

Hopefully this helps some of you feel a little better about why we’re doing this. We really think this is going to be better for the game in the long run, even if it may be a bit bumpy until we have a couple matches completed post-reset.

Thanks for your response but you should address the issue that a number of people have raised about blowouts in a low tier causing the winning server in that low tier to be ranked in T1 the following week especially given that the T1 match will not be a blow out.

My suggestion would be a week of 24-hour matches starting from the current rating, but using the “winner up / loser down” system for matching. With these matches, you can calculate the new rating, starting from 0.

During this week, you can also watch the “winner up / loser down” matching rule in operation. I think it provides for more flexible matchups, avoiding eternal battles and rating gaps that the servers cannot cross (example: Europe T9).

Habib Loew.6239:

In the run up to the end of free world transfers we saw large population changes as people settled in to their home servers. This means that the WvW teams being fielded by many of the worlds are now dramatically different. In recognition of this fact, and in light of the increased population stability that comes with paid transfers, we feel that this would be a good time to reset the ratings of all the servers. A reset at this point will allow the rating & ranking system to more quickly and correctly rate these (effectively) new WvW teams.

Here’s how the reset will work:

1) We’ll let the current matchup play out. Since free transfers were available during the first part of this matchup we don’t want it to count towards the new ratings.
2) When the matchup rolls over on Friday, February 1st we’ll post the final ratings & rankings. The new ordering will determine the groupings for the next matchup as usual.
3) After the new matchup has started on February 1st we’ll reset all the ratings (and deviation & volatility) behind the scenes.

Because every world will have reset ratings the system will treat the February 1st matchup as the first matchup and will calculate the ratings accordingly. The new ratings will then be calculated normally in the way that you’re already familiar with. We expect several weeks of volatility while the ratings settle down but we believe that it will ultimately yield a more correct result more quickly than letting the current ratings persist. That also means that the coming month or two will be a fantastic time to fight for your world’s place in the rankings!

Additionally, we’re taking advantage of the reset to revisit some of the math behind the ratings. I’ll have more to post on that once we’ve crunched some numbers and made some decisions.

This is very important, there needs to be more variation in the match ups. At one point in about November, there were 6 power servers that were all very close to equal coverage. Tier 1 and 2 was very close. However most of these servers never got to face each other at their strengths because they were stuck in their tiers for over 8-18 weeks, weakening some of them.

Jade Quarry and Stormbluff Isle never got to see what Sanctum of Rall was made out of while they were in their comfy tier 1, and by the time Stormbluff Isle saw tier 2 as of 2 weeks ago it was already too late, SBI had lost some of it’s major guilds and was on the verge of self destruction.

Similarly, despite Blackgate winning for ~8 weeks in a row, comfortably much of the time they never got to test themselves against Sea of Sorrows, by the time they got out of tier 2 their coverage had already weakened because they’d been stuck in tier 2 for too long.

At the start of the glicko ratings system, there was a lot of variation in the match ups, basically whoever won got promoted a tier, and whoever lost was demoted a tier. I feel that this is how the ratings system was supposed to play out, and if a server was consistent it could stay in it’s tier even if it loses. Due to the deaths of servers though, such as HoD and ET, they fed their hard earned ratings to the teams around them as they fell down, absolutely fattening up the points in the tiers to disadvantage the servers in the tiers below them.

To keep it fresher and more interesting with the match ups,

1 solution I can suggest is a European football division style system. The winner of a tier gets promoted to the next one up, the loser gets demoted a tier, and the mid table one stays where they are.

Under this system for example, if applied to the October – December period,
- Both Stormbluff Isle and Jade Quarry would have been demoted to tier 2
- Blackgate would have seen tier 1 sooner at full strength to face Sea of Sorrows + the other server
- Sanctum of Rall would of had the reward of seeing tier 1 had they beaten the newly arrived Jade Quarry or Stormbluff Isle
- Tarnished Coast would have seen tier 2 earlier instead of winning tier 3 for 6 weeks
- Isle of Janthir would have tasted success from tier 3 instead of losing for 9 weeks in a row (IOJ has also now self destructed)

Just with these types of things, the variation in the match ups would have been ten fold had the glicko ratings system not been so stale, what would have happened in these matchups at that time, we’ll never know. I just hope we can see the best of WvWvW in the coming weeks and not just have a stale repeat of the same match ups for 5-10 weeks in a row like what we’ve just had.

We love competition, and we love variation, if people agree with the sentiment of my post please vote it a +1

Pretty good idea. I like it. I do share another post’ers concern that a server who is currently a stud in their tier could destroy the tier outright(like maguuma did because of numbers), thus vaulting them to the top whether they deserve to be there or not.

However, for the lower pop servers and servers hit with mass exouds, very good.

Suggestions: In re-visting the ranking formula, if you can consider the amount of unique account logins to WvW that week as well, or something that will reflect the server’s WvW population/presence that might help as well. Even if a server does really well in its bracket with a lot less players, and manage to move…it could move up to a tier where its a zergfest and then they have no chance.

And to correct the poster above: IoJ lost a lot of guilds. They are not out. If I am not mistaken, in the last few days they have made an incredible push for the #2 slot in the tier. They have some fight in them.

Cesmode, the Isle of Janthir I’m referring to could go toe to toe with the very best in tier 1.

They are now in tier 5 and are currently 3rd in their match up, by a large margin. There are still guilds that remain there and I feel for them, however they have lost so much of what they had. 9 weeks without a win can do that to a server.

@MikeFerguson, thanks. It’s good stuff. And it isnt like previous efforts in previous weeks mean nothing. They got you to where you are now, to the match up coming on Friday(when the reset is going to happen). So you’ve put yourself into good positions. If your previous efforts didn’t matter, they would have just tossed everyone around and let the cards fall where they may.

Good stuff.

Cirus.5748:

Cesmode, the Isle of Janthir I’m referring to could go toe to toe with the very best in tier 1.

They are now in tier 5 and are currently 3rd in their match up, by a large margin. There are still guilds that remain there and I feel for them, however they have lost so much of what they had. 9 weeks without a win can do that to a server.

As if…being in tier 5 is any different than tier 1 in terms of..what? Are you getting more reward for being in a tier 1/2 server than a 5/6? All you get is “bragging rights” that youre server can field a few hundred on every map, zerg around with some strategy (And yes, I’ve been on a tier 1 server, and a tier 3 server. I know what their WvW styles are like. SBI in it’s glory days and now Dragonbrand).

With that said, yeah 9 weeks of teeth smashing would do it. Thats why this change is needed. IoJ’s rating is so far bloated because they spent so much time at the top, they will need weeks to get to where they belong in terms of matchup(considering server sizes and all).

Look, Im not saying wanting to be tier 1 or 2 is bad. Go for it! But when I hear people refer to dropping tiers as a negative thing, I laugh. I am transferring off of Dragonbrand to IoJ because I had a lot more fun on IoJ (especially getting blown out). Zerg vs zerg gets old. Id rather 5-10 man skirmishes over zergs.

cesmode.4257:

Cirus.5748:

Cesmode, the Isle of Janthir I’m referring to could go toe to toe with the very best in tier 1.

They are now in tier 5 and are currently 3rd in their match up, by a large margin. There are still guilds that remain there and I feel for them, however they have lost so much of what they had. 9 weeks without a win can do that to a server.

As if…being in tier 5 is any different than tier 1 in terms of..what? Are you getting more reward for being in a tier 1/2 server than a 5/6? All you get is “bragging rights” that youre server can field a few hundred on every map, zerg around with some strategy (And yes, I’ve been on a tier 1 server, and a tier 3 server. I know what their WvW styles are like. SBI in it’s glory days and now Dragonbrand).

With that said, yeah 9 weeks of teeth smashing would do it. Thats why this change is needed. IoJ’s rating is so far bloated because they spent so much time at the top, they will need weeks to get to where they belong in terms of matchup(considering server sizes and all).

Look, Im not saying wanting to be tier 1 or 2 is bad. Go for it! But when I hear people refer to dropping tiers as a negative thing, I laugh. I am transferring off of Dragonbrand to IoJ because I had a lot more fun on IoJ (especially getting blown out). Zerg vs zerg gets old. Id rather 5-10 man skirmishes over zergs.

You’ve missed the point of my post, I’ve never suggested that dropping tiers is a negative thing. In fact my solution promotes that a server can drop tiers more easily. It’s the same match ups over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and entire communities leaving servers due to the lack of variation and progress that is my concern.

Dhar.6392:

Sounds like SBI won’t have to wait a month to become dead last.

Which server did you bandwagon over to from SBI?

Cirus.5748:

cesmode.4257:

Cirus.5748:

Cesmode, the Isle of Janthir I’m referring to could go toe to toe with the very best in tier 1.

They are now in tier 5 and are currently 3rd in their match up, by a large margin. There are still guilds that remain there and I feel for them, however they have lost so much of what they had. 9 weeks without a win can do that to a server.

As if…being in tier 5 is any different than tier 1 in terms of..what? Are you getting more reward for being in a tier 1/2 server than a 5/6? All you get is “bragging rights” that youre server can field a few hundred on every map, zerg around with some strategy (And yes, I’ve been on a tier 1 server, and a tier 3 server. I know what their WvW styles are like. SBI in it’s glory days and now Dragonbrand).

With that said, yeah 9 weeks of teeth smashing would do it. Thats why this change is needed. IoJ’s rating is so far bloated because they spent so much time at the top, they will need weeks to get to where they belong in terms of matchup(considering server sizes and all).

Look, Im not saying wanting to be tier 1 or 2 is bad. Go for it! But when I hear people refer to dropping tiers as a negative thing, I laugh. I am transferring off of Dragonbrand to IoJ because I had a lot more fun on IoJ (especially getting blown out). Zerg vs zerg gets old. Id rather 5-10 man skirmishes over zergs.

You’ve missed the point of my post, I’ve never suggested that dropping tiers is a negative thing. In fact my solution promotes that a server can drop tiers more easily. It’s the same match ups over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and entire communities leaving servers due to the lack of variation and progress that is my concern.

Well if that’s the case, then are you happy with this reset? I think your response above is exactly what this reset is for.

Instead of complaining, you people should be out to come up with plans on how to get to your desired tier. This reset is the perfect moment for all those arrogant people to put their money where their mouth is. You think you deserved to be in your position because of other people’s efforts? Prove it.

cesmode.4257:

Well if that’s the case, then are you happy with this reset? I think your response above is exactly what this reset is for.

I am happy with the reset, but under the current system we will be falling into the same ruts, facing the exact same problems over time.

AprilRain.7649:

Instead of complaining, you people should be out to come up with plans on how to get to your desired tier. This reset is the perfect moment for all those arrogant people to put their money where their mouth is. You think you deserved to be in your position because of other people’s efforts? Prove it.

QFT. Well said.
It helps everyone in my eyes.

Cirus.5748:

cesmode.4257:

Well if that’s the case, then are you happy with this reset? I think your response above is exactly what this reset is for.

I am happy with the reset, but under the current system will be falling into the same ruts facing the exact same problems over time.

Thank you for modding the quotes for brevity :P

Eh, I am not sure I agree. Servers are where they are now because of previous efforts. Still, a server like IoJ might need to drop another tier for a better matchup, but it will take far less time. Maybe 1 or 2 weeks. If that. Hell, if they push into the #2 spot for the week, they wont need to. A server like Kaenig, who we do not know is a stud or not yet, will get bolted to tier one, probably because of this. So yes, I can see this a problem here.

But its a better solution than to let things carry on. Way better. Not perfect, but its something.

If Anet’s wish is merely to have several weeks of “fresh” server matchups, sure, this is a good idea (and I’m not entirely against that).

However, the claim this will “stablize” the ranking much faster is completely wrong. I’m not going to go into all the details and possible cases that will cause the volatility to remain for 1 to 2 months, rather than the 1-2 weeks it’ll probably take to stabilize without the reset.

Instead, I propose a gentleman’s bet with Anet. After the first post-reset week’s matchup, calculate offline what the rankings would have been without the reset in ratings. Post it in a sticky. In one or two months when the volatility of the reset settles, let’s take a look at the current rankings and compare them to what would have happened without a reset next week. Barring a significant loss of WvW population due to getting stuck in incorrect tiers for several weeks, I bet they’re nearly the same. I bet most servers are at their correct rank, barring a few exceptions(1), of where it would have been a month or two earlier without the reset.

(1) – by this, I mean, if you moved just a few server’s ranks a few places, they’d all be more or less correct. Something that likely would have happened in the second week without reset.

Under the current system, the only way you could really progress through the tiers was if a higher tiered server died. I believe that BG only made it to tier one the first time because HoD died. BG then got stomped back to tier two while another server took its place and remained there. BG then remained on tier two for like eight weeks and didn’t make it back to tier one until SBI died. This time they’re holding their ground very well.

No offense to SoR, they’re a great server, but I don’t feel that they should be tier one. When it was BG vs SoR vs TC, they consistently got stomped by BG. The only reason they started doing better in the rankings is because BG went up to tier one leaving SoR to fight a dead server and then weaker servers.

How I see it the rankings are JQ > BG > SoR with SoS fitting somewhere in there depending on if they really are on a break. Any of these four servers, if on tier two will dominate and blowout the competition unless they’re playing with someone of a higher ranking than them (i.e. BG vs SoR). There’s a large gap between “fourth place” and “fifth place” ranking.

Things can completely change if the other servers doing blowouts on lower tiers are capable of competing with the upper tiers and are only stuck where they are because of the current rating system.

SBI is far from dead btw. Sure WvW might not be jam packed full 24/7 stacked like it was but the server as a whole is doing very well. I get tired of the term dead server.

MikeFerguson.8921:

Here’s why we think this is a good thing.

If it helps, think of the last few months as the preseason games that determined the initial seedings for the season opener (to use a really generic sports metaphor that is in no way indicative of future plans).

Finally, matches are going to remain a week long. We feel that the 24 hour matches are not representative of what we consider ‘standard’ gameplay, and actually create a lot of incorrect data in the system because people play the game much differently when it’s a 24 hour match compared to a 7 day one.

Mike, I don’t agree with your opinion that since 24 hour match is not always a good reflection of week long match, we should stick with week long match for data accuracy.

First, while 24 hour match is not always accurate, the alternative of sticking with 1 week long match has a much bigger negative impact. The main negative of 24 hour match is just that after the first week of 24 hour matches, you may have couple tiers experience 1 or 2 addition week of uneven fights. Under week long matches, most of servers are going to experience at least 1 month uneven fights that really discourage players from playing. I think the cost of un-fun playing for weeks or months certainly outweigh the cost of a having a few uneven tiers for couple weeks.

Second, you seem to underestimate the accuracy of 24 hour matches as proxy for server strength. Based on past 4 months of playing, when servers of uneven strength face each other, the results are typically decided in the first 24 to 48 hours of reset night. Week long match is only relevant when servers already have roughly equivalent strength and the week long match helps to decide rankings within a tier. To accurately settle servers to respective tiers, 1 week of 24 hour matches is plenty.

Third, you seem to underestimate the negative impact of 1 week long matches. The gap between server strengths has significantly widened compare to 4 months ago. A tier 1 server can easily completely dominate a tier 3/4 server within 24 hours, the “freshness” of new matches is not going to last long when most matches are lopsided since first day of the match. In addition, many servers have already experienced weeks of uneven matches where players have stopped playing. Many of them start to think things are finally stabilizing, with week long matches, these players are going to experience weeks of uneven fights again, and that is going to have huge impact on player interest and active wvw population.

I do believe that reset ratings is a good idea as too many inaccurate historical data has been built up due to population migration. However, I would like you to seriously reconsider using 1 week long matches to determine new rankings. Thank you.

Two simple ways to prevent this happen:
1) Reduce all current rank to 1/4, then + 1500 as the start rank.
2) Based on the current tier. every 1 tier get 50 more start rank than the next one.
e.g. all 3 servers in tier 1 start from 1700, tier 2 start from 1650, tier 3 start from 1600.

Both of them reduce the distance between No. 1 server and the last server. So every server will fit its place much more quickly.

Actually you wouldent even need to use the gliko2 system on the daily matchup week.

Just use this week for positioning servers adecuately. And then kick in the maths once we are all on the correct positions.

I cant imagine a month of roflstomping lower populated servers till we reach our correct tier again. Its NOT gonna be fun. And its NOT gonna be fun for to long.

Thanks for listening and I hope you reconsider this point.

I like the style one poster mentined, I think it was a euro ladder style:
Win your matchup, you move up a tier. Lose, you go down a tier. Take 2nd, you stay.
When the server that won moves up..if they are stomped, they go back down. Vice versa for the guy that lost.

SBI isn’t dead, but the end of free transfers means we’ll never be able to compete in the top tiers again. We have roughly 2 guilds that stayed with us through thick and thin, and roughly 4 out of every 5 commanders have little experience (but are trying, which is promising). I expect we’ll bottom out somewhere near IoJ in T5, but we’re still able to field enough people to fight well in the T4-T5 region.

In some sense, I look forward to the reset, in others I don’t. In the grand scheme of things, my server will still fight as hard as it always has, through thick and thin, and we look forward to seeing you all on the field. Best of luck.

The different (50) could be adjust to smaller one to let a server goes up/down more quickly but still need it to prevent real tier 1 server lost in the first week goes down to too lower tier (like tier 5 or lower)

MikeFerguson.8921:

Here’s why we think this is a good thing.

As Habib alluded to in his post, we are also revising the math behind the ratings formula. Habib will be explaining the math in a later post, but for now, I can give everyone a glimpse into why we are updating the rating formula and resetting the ratings.

Over the last couple of months we’ve seen that when worlds experience dramatic changes in their ability to field a consistent fighting force for whatever reason, it can take quite a while for them to work their way through the ratings until they end up in a match that suits them better. In a lot of cases, some worlds took multiple matches to work their way through a single tier even after a series of blowouts. We really dont like that, so one of the goals for updating the math behind the ratings is to try and reduce how often we experience the repeated blowouts that can come from that sort of situation and get those teams through the rankings quicker.

We also expect that the large population changes that impacted a number of worlds and helped create a number of those type of blowouts should be much less common now that we are well past the launch period and free transfers are no longer available.

So, not only does world choice have quite a bit more meaning now that paid transfers are online, we also want to adjust how the ratings are calculated. If we redo the calculations involved with the ratings, then it’s much better to just reset the ratings and let the new formula do it’s thing instead of trying to carry the old data over from the old system and have those numbers pollute the new ratings.

In essence this gives every world a chance to start fresh now that everyone is on their ‘real’ team and will help protect against worlds in a state of flux being involved in consecutive blowouts for weeks on end in the future. For us, that means it is actually the perfect time to update the rating system and address some of the issues we’ve noticed with it since launch then reset the ratings.

If it helps, think of the last few months as the preseason games that determined the initial seedings for the season opener (to use a really generic sports metaphor that is in no way indicative of future plans).

Finally, matches are going to remain a week long. We feel that the 24 hour matches are not representative of what we consider ‘standard’ gameplay, and actually create a lot of incorrect data in the system because people play the game much differently when it’s a 24 hour match compared to a 7 day one.

I know many of you are concerned about what all this means and it might seem scary from the outside, but from our perspective this really is a great time to reset the ratings and improve how the math behind all of this works so we can benefit from more competitive matches in the future.

Hopefully this helps some of you feel a little better about why we’re doing this. We really think this is going to be better for the game in the long run, even if it may be a bit bumpy until we have a couple matches completed post-reset.

The problem here is that servers are already very close to where they should be in the rankings, at least on the NA side of things. All this will do is set back getting into balanced match ups by several weeks and cause the game to lose some WvW players due to massive blowouts across the board.

Your “preseason initial seedings” analogy makes no sense because there are no seedings: unless I’m mistaken, all the top servers are essentially seeded against one another, which will extend how long it takes to achieve balance. If you actually did seed servers so that the top 8 servers are all in different tiers to start out after the reset along with the mid 8 and bottom 8 it might at least put servers somewhere close to where they should be after the first week. Either way, this will lead to volatile rankings and many more unbalanced matchups than we would experience otherwise.

This seems like a knee-jerk reaction to address complaints stemming from a few servers that have had mass exoduses and a few that have had large influxes of bandwagon transfers. Yes it can take a few weeks for weakened servers to drop down and for bandwagon servers to rise up, but this is not nearly as bad as forcing every server to endure terrible matchups for as long if not longer than that. We are very close to achieving the most balanced match-ups we can and this will be a major setback.

JaredKincade.9761:

stuff

I could have sworn I switched tabs over from our match up thread where you were throwing needless jabs at us. Guess you have some urge to do it all over the forums.

Ayrilana.1396:

No offense to SoR, they’re a great server, but I don’t feel that they should be tier one. When it was BG vs SoR vs TC, they consistently got stomped by BG. The only reason they started doing better in the rankings is because BG went up to tier one leaving SoR to fight a dead server and then weaker servers.

Honestly, not sure how we would do against BG. We were consistently stomped (and I use that term loosely looking at the stomping that Kaineng is doing, and we are participating in now) due to a lack of coverage in a particular timezone. We have since filled that time slot with needed guilds and I would love to test our servers once again in the near future.

Now enough speculation about match ups, I am truly interested in the formula changes that are ahead (being a mathematician myself). I think that the first couple of weeks will be somewhat unbalanced as people have stated, but the adjustment duration will solely rely on how Anet decides to make changes.

I had a really cool example of how I think the volatility will play out involving a rubber band and nails, but I have already posted enough :P Ultimately, I love WvW, I love killing people, I love taking SM even with all the lag, I love this game, and I will still be here after this is has all played out. I will see you on the battlefield whoever you may be

I am happy to see a reset, it is reasonable… but let’s do it in a QUICKER manner, like 1-3 days matchup instead of a whole week of PvDoors.

I mean c’mon, don’t waste time…

So what is the problem about awarding fewer points if you have fewer foes to fight and more points if you have more foes to fight?
Sounds like a lot of players are getting their kicks out of taking empty forts guarded by npcs and then boasting about playing pvp.

Nymph of Meliai.6739:

So what is the problem about awarding fewer points if you have fewer foes to fight and more points if you have more foes to fight?
Sounds like a lot of players are getting their kicks out of taking empty forts guarded by npcs and then boasting about playing pvp.

If I understand you correctly, if I’m in server A and I’m roflstomping server B and C since they are empty, and only gain a small rating due to your point scheme, I will remain in that tier much longer than I should. If anything the points should bounce you higher with that degree of stomping to separate server A from B and C further so that never happens again.

Proumbro… I think your argument is weak. You seem to be promoting the numbers game rather than the skill game.
SFR for example fights with fewer people than VS all the time. During our primetime we dominate… come 2am CET then VS run around the map with 2 huge zergs capping almost empty forts when there are no more than 10 people on the entire map. Where is the skill in that?
Don’t try and say it does not happen… every top WvW server in the game (incl. SFR) were trying to recruit European or US guilds before the server hopping changes. Sometimes there is a decent amount of balance… like when PRX were on SFR, there was a healthy amount of 24 hour action that was evenly matched in terms of numbers but SFR completely outclasses VS every time when the numbers game are more even.
I am arguing that this should be reflected some how in the game.
In your example, server A only roflstomps server B and C during certain times (i.e. when most of Europe… or most of America/Oceania are asleep) but when they are awake server A is the one that gets roflstomped.

Are you talking about the overall glicko system (that’s what I was talking about) or the in game score for that week’s current match up? If it’s the latter, then I wouldn’t be totally opposed to some sort of points scaling like you mention. However, that is a very delicate situation because with server A, if their efforts are being deflated due to facing an underpopulated server, is that really their fault?

If anything I would promote something that has been hashed out a ton, which is an outmanned buff that boosts points. This does two things, first boosts the points for the outmanned team (some percentage of takes like sentries and yaks) and maybe provide a capping point addition (not sure if they already reward points for capping towers and such). Second, as a side effect, the outmanned population is prompted to show up more because their presence matters more than the usual 50v5 they usually get and not being able to hold anything.

Cirus.5748:

To keep it fresher and more interesting with the match ups, 1 solution I can suggest is a European football division style system. The winner of a tier gets promoted to the next one up, the loser gets demoted a tier, and the mid table one stays where they are.

Please, this.

There are only 24 or 27 servers, so a complex rating scheme (Glicko) gets in the way more than it decides good matches. If you get stuck in the loser slot for extended periods of time it becomes extremely demoralizing to the server, fewer people play, and its hard to recover from that (even without server transfers, people ragequit WvW or GW2 under such conditions).

Using this system would keep the match-ups fresh, with all new opponents (except top and bottom tier) each week. This allows developing tactical ideas to flow through the entire system, as well as preventing servers from relying too heavily on tactics against a specific server culture.

Switching to this system also has the advantage that the current ordinals can be kept, preventing the anger associated with a complete reset (by what seems to be many here). If changes in population mean that the ordinals should change significantly, this will happen fairly quickly.

The only disadvantage of a simple win/loss ordinal system is that it doesn’t recognize the difference between edging out an opponent and a complete blowout. While this theoretically may discourage people from participating late in the week if the outcome is obvious, that’s already to some degree the case (with the added feature that it can be discouraging to the following match as well if the teams stay the same). This is also somewhat mitigated against by the three server aspect: even if one server is dominated or dominant and eases up a bit, the other two servers may still have something to fight for. The possibility of a last minute victory also has much more significance; while the high stakes of this may seem a bad thing, it doesn’t happen in isolation — its the result of the entire week long battle.

Edit:
Accurate ratings are good for determining how players who have not previously competed should likely fare against each other (in systems with a large pool of players, like um, maybe spvp); they are not very useful in a small pool where direct competition to determine ranking is easier to perform, and where stagnation of rankings further leads to inaccurate computation of ratings.

I understand why people want shorter matches, so things even out faster, but that’s not going to work.

The reason is that some servers have much better coverage on some days than others. For example, our matches against Black Gate from a few weeks ago were more or less even during the weekend, but we were blown out during the week.

A better solution might be to just bite the bullet and assign some subjective ratings to the server. Look at your metrics from the last two or three WvW rounds, determine population and ratings trends, look at the old ratings, and then assign a rating, instead of going across the board with 1,500. There will be some crying and gnashing of teeth, but overall I think this will be a better starting position. It should avoid some of the things described in other posts, like servers moving up a lot because they were facing a weak opponent.

Of course, if we have 4 very strong servers now and the next server is significantly weaker, the 3-way setup unfortunately guarantees that there will be a blow out in T2. Every week. Maybe Anet will allow free transfers in that situation, to make servers in position 5 and 6 more competitive?

Don’t let the perfect (everyone pays for transfers) be the enemy of the good (balanced WvW matches).

Vodka.3958:

JaredKincade.9761:

Its amazing to me that the biggest complainers of this move is SOR, when they are the ones exploiting the rating to jump straight into near 1st position without ever having to face a tier 1 server. Ah, well actually it doesn’t amaze me at all.

The SOR jump in rating is the reason they are reseting the points. They are out of whack and the system needs tuning, the result of SoR gaining so much rating in three weeks is evidence of this. BG earned its T1 spot after 8 weeks of hard hard week by week fighting to get to where we did. SoR now has the chance to do the same and earn their T1 spot instead of rocketing by pvdooring a dead server with a high rating.

BG did it, are you afraid to put in the work to earn it? You should be pleased, if you do get to Tier 1, it will be because you earned it, not because your killing siege raiser over and over and over again.

You were definitely spot on about this one brother. I’m really looking forward to practicing against new servers

What is it they say about Karma?

So… after the end of free transfers and 2 + weeks of blowouts and meaningless WvW, Anet decides to reset the entire thing and create 8 weeks of blowouts and meaningless matches. This is the stupidest idea ever. The rankings were starting to sort themselves out, this next weeks matches were going to be fun. Now you want to place a 1st place Tier 8 server against a 1st place Tier 1? Gee.. I wonder how that will work out.

Personally, I think Anet doesn’t have a clue, they are about to make the next 8 weeks of WvW a blowout festival while ranking resettle, to probably close to what they are now.

Oh, and thanks for pointing out that the past 4 months of WvW has been “pre-season” Excellent, thanks for letting us know that AFTER IT IS OVER. I am sure glad to have wasted money, badges, and time on the “pre-season.”

Time to take a break from GW2, maybe look for a decent game run by people who know what they are doing.

Doth thou even math? Many seem not to.. and the way the math is done (currently) will be changing anyways to help furthur compensate.

Bring on the ratinpocalypse!!

Cactus.2710:

MikeFerguson.8921:

Here’s why we think this is a good thing.

As Habib alluded to in his post, we are also revising the math behind the ratings formula. Habib will be explaining the math in a later post, but for now, I can give everyone a glimpse into why we are updating the rating formula and resetting the ratings.

Over the last couple of months we’ve seen that when worlds experience dramatic changes in their ability to field a consistent fighting force for whatever reason, it can take quite a while for them to work their way through the ratings until they end up in a match that suits them better. In a lot of cases, some worlds took multiple matches to work their way through a single tier even after a series of blowouts. We really dont like that, so one of the goals for updating the math behind the ratings is to try and reduce how often we experience the repeated blowouts that can come from that sort of situation and get those teams through the rankings quicker.

We also expect that the large population changes that impacted a number of worlds and helped create a number of those type of blowouts should be much less common now that we are well past the launch period and free transfers are no longer available.

So, not only does world choice have quite a bit more meaning now that paid transfers are online, we also want to adjust how the ratings are calculated. If we redo the calculations involved with the ratings, then it’s much better to just reset the ratings and let the new formula do it’s thing instead of trying to carry the old data over from the old system and have those numbers pollute the new ratings.

In essence this gives every world a chance to start fresh now that everyone is on their ‘real’ team and will help protect against worlds in a state of flux being involved in consecutive blowouts for weeks on end in the future. For us, that means it is actually the perfect time to update the rating system and address some of the issues we’ve noticed with it since launch then reset the ratings.

If it helps, think of the last few months as the preseason games that determined the initial seedings for the season opener (to use a really generic sports metaphor that is in no way indicative of future plans).

Finally, matches are going to remain a week long. We feel that the 24 hour matches are not representative of what we consider ‘standard’ gameplay, and actually create a lot of incorrect data in the system because people play the game much differently when it’s a 24 hour match compared to a 7 day one.

I know many of you are concerned about what all this means and it might seem scary from the outside, but from our perspective this really is a great time to reset the ratings and improve how the math behind all of this works so we can benefit from more competitive matches in the future.

Hopefully this helps some of you feel a little better about why we’re doing this. We really think this is going to be better for the game in the long run, even if it may be a bit bumpy until we have a couple matches completed post-reset.

Changing the math doesn’t address either of the two issues I raised in the post just before yours … unless by changing the math you mean changing the rating system itself. If all you do is alter the parameters you’ve been using in the Glicko-2 system you won’t have fixed anything. Three well-matched servers in the same tier will NEVER break out of that tier unless something dramatic happens in the tier above or below them to kick on of them out, and in the “ideal” case where all tiers are perfectly balanced matches each week there will be no movement at all even if servers in lower tiers become more proficient (or even more populated) than servers in upper tiers.

You need to change the system, not just the math.

Two things:

Why is that a problem? If the servers are evenly matched, they’re still receiving a solid WvW matchup and experience, which is the entire purpose of the ratings system. It does not exist to show “who’s the best.” That’s stupid and pointless. The purpose of the ratings system is to ensure competitive matchups. In your extremely unlikely scenario (anything that results in an imbalanced match would allow a server to advance, so the only situation is one where all three servers become “better” at almost the exact same rate while all other servers stay the same) the matchup is still competitive. It doesn’t really matter if they’re competitive in T5 instead of T4.

What’s the better option? I’ve seen countless complaints about the Glicko-2 system, but the only suggestion for replacing it is that atrocity of an idea of “winner advances, loser falls.” As has been pointed out time and again, that system is completely worthless and only guarantees non-competitive matchups. So what’s this other option that would be so much better than the one people constantly rail against?

About the suggested point system that balances with population I find it really absurd.

We would have tactics like “hey lets not log on so they win less points”

Not to mention that players that only play during the night (like myself and many many others) due to many RL reasons, would be unfarly wronged.

It is better to assume this is a 24h 365 days war game and stop crying about it.

Kraken.7514:

About the suggested point system that balances with population I find it really absurd.

We would have tactics like “hey lets not log on so they win less points”

Not to mention that players that only play during the night (like myself and many many others) due to many RL reasons, would be unfarly wronged.

It is better to assume this is a 24h 365 days war game and stop crying about it.

Why assume? That is what it is. People will cry because their concept of “fair” is inherently selfish.

lady lisz.7849:

I could care less if they reset or not… at least ANET should come up with something to encourage players to come play wvw NOT the other way around, lots of playtime hrs, gold, effort etc. and for nothing really… give rewards base on time play and participation pls

I couldn’t agree more… This is Guild Wars…. WVW should be the lifeblood of this game, yet it seems to be the furthest thing on the devs mind…. This Reset is going to take 2 months for things to get back to a point where it would take 1 maybe 2 weeks to iron out with the current system… Just seems like a total waste unless they decided to go with a 48 or 72 hour reset timer for all tiers…

Kraken.7514:

We would have tactics like “hey lets not log on so they win less points”

It wouldn’t be to the degree that the outmanned team would be winning in points, they would still be winning immensely in PPT, but the outmanned team would now have incentive to flip sentries and kill yaks and flip towers since it actually contributes.

Kraken.7514:

Not to mention that players that only play during the night (like myself and many many others) due to many RL reasons, would be unfarly wronged.

I addressed that and said it is the vital point against such a system. It isn’t anyone’s fault that one timezone outnumbers another, it is a numbers game after all, but it is also somewhat unfair to the outnumbered because they essentially have that aspect of the game removed for them. Hence the reason for the discussion about ways to counter this.

Kraken.7514:

It is better to assume this is a 24h 365 days war game and stop crying about it.

No crying to be had, merely hypothetical situations and how they would play out. Trying to better a community that I love.

Whats going to be bad is when a T1 server goes to T5 or lower… T1 servers have Que times in most the Boarderlands 24//7 honestly you guys wont even be logging in for those weeks…. You guys can’t fathom the pain train coming your way…

We dont PVE…. We PVP thats why we chose our servers…. This reset is going to be pointlessly Ugly and hurt more servers than it will help….

I am ok with ANet ignoring server rating and manually selecting match ups from educated guess from data they have, but I am not sure if this is the case. They didn’t explain. If they are simply resetting rating and pretty much randomly matching servers then I completely oppose. Would this meas T1 may end up fighting with T4, T6 servers? I don’t think so.

Cirus.5748:

This is very important, there needs to be more variation in the match ups. At one point in about November, there were 6 power servers that were all very close to equal coverage. Tier 1 and 2 was very close. However most of these servers never got to face each other at their strengths because they were stuck in their tiers for over 8-18 weeks, weakening some of them.

Jade Quarry and Stormbluff Isle never got to see what Sanctum of Rall was made out of while they were in their comfy tier 1, and by the time Stormbluff Isle saw tier 2 as of 2 weeks ago it was already too late, SBI had lost some of it’s major guilds and was on the verge of self destruction.

Similarly, despite Blackgate winning for ~8 weeks in a row, comfortably much of the time they never got to test themselves against Sea of Sorrows, by the time they got out of tier 2 their coverage had already weakened because they’d been stuck in tier 2 for too long.

At the start of the glicko ratings system, there was a lot of variation in the match ups, basically whoever won got promoted a tier, and whoever lost was demoted a tier. I feel that this is how the ratings system was supposed to play out, and if a server was consistent it could stay in it’s tier even if it loses. Due to the deaths of servers though, such as HoD and ET, they fed their hard earned ratings to the teams around them as they fell down, absolutely fattening up the points in the tiers to disadvantage the servers in the tiers below them.

I agree with most of this, but I honestly think the difference between Tier 1 and Tier 2 was much bigger than you think.

BG goes down from Tier 1 getting, I’ll admit it, pretty beat up. But we didn’t free fall, we stayed in that 4th position. Then we did have to slowly work back up, and it gave us the time we needed to ground out our guild base, get organized, recruit, train, gear up. When we did make it into Tier 1 (most SBI transfers happened after they went to Tier 2, we were not handed our spot because they died while still in Tier 1) things were pretty tough on us, even though we were blowing out Tier 2 the very week before (although we still went up in rating).

To those not fighting in Tier 1, it is a different game, and I’m not talking about coverage. Even in the last two weeks, the meta changed again, I’m not going to go into specifics, but things are played a little differently in Tier 1 than in Tier 2 and it did take BG a couple of weeks to adjust.

As for myself, I was really hoping we could edge out SOS so we could fight SOR this week, even with their new henchmen, and see if bandwagon or trial by fire prevails, but it looks like that isn’t going to happen for awhile and who knows what our servers will look like when we do happen to match up again.

Still, I think the reset is a good thing, but there is one change you guys should really really consider making.

If “Season 1” really was like a “Preseason” then this makes that much more sense.

Seat the Tiers with rating, you know in the long run they are just going to go back to something very very close to this, assuming there are no more mass transfers, which you guys are.

Tier 1 (SOS SOR JQ) 1700
Tier 2 (BG TC FA) 1650
Tier 3 (Kain, Mag,DB) 1600
Tier 4 (SBI, YB, CD) 1500
Tier 5 (EB, IOJ, DR) 1450
Tier 6 (BP, AR, NS) 1400
Tier 7 (DH, GoM,HoD)1350
Tier 8 (SF,FC,ET) 1300

This honestly does achieve all your goals while also maintaining some semblance of week two not being so screwed up. It resets the rating to clear old numbers from a bad system for the new numbers to work with. It mathematically brings Tier 1 and Tier 8 much much closer in rating so those that want to move up, have the opportunity to. And it will give week 2 and week 3 a fighting chance to have competitive matchups, instead of having to wait for weeks 5 and 6 for what we have now.

50 points too much based on the new math your considering? make it 25, or 10, just give something appropriate to help balance out the fact that the lower tier blow outs will be week 2s tier 1, and that is just not accurate and everyone knows it.

Sounds fine to me. Most of us have known for weeks that the rating system has not be appropriately matching servers together just merely due to their increased population or “losing” and still “winning” the tier because of their current rating. It’s all great and lovely that certain servers have “battle hardended victories” and that they should be “rewarded” for that be being up top, but this is a versed game and as such it should have a dynamic aptitude applied.

Yes it looks like this next week’s matchup will be interesting indeed as there will be T1 servers dropping to T5 and lower and T8 servers going up to T5 and up, and everyone else in the middle will still pretty much be in the middle. However, we all know that those servers getting bounced up and down will be up or down dependant on their time invested anyways and if they want T1 back, they’ll work for it again.

It’s about time a game didn’t “give” away the objectives and made people appreciate it more.

“So, not only does world choice have quite a bit more meaning now that paid transfers are online, we also want to adjust how the ratings are calculated. If we redo the calculations involved with the ratings, then it’s much better to just reset the ratings and let the new formula do it’s thing instead of trying to carry the old data over from the old system and have those numbers pollute the new rating.”

This makes no sense at all. You want to sort the servers by their strength. You have an imperfect sorting of the server rankings. You contend this “pollutes” the new system and that setting all rankings to the same number is better because everyone will sort to their proper places faster.

This means

a) your sorting algorithm is seriously flawed as heck. Any partial sort should be more accurate than no sort at all, and should help stabilize things faster for a majority of the servers.

b) if you need to deal with inertia within the system, design a better system. Don’t have to reset ever year to fix it.

c) you are willing to let us suffer through weeks of bad matchups rather than use the much more accurate “polluted rankings”.

d) if you feel that certain servers are much stronger or weaker, suddenly, due to the guild movements, then bloody well just put that in your ranking formula for a few weeks.

Seriously, just hand over the data to the community. They can model it and come up with a free simulation for you to use every week. They can do this without disrupting servers for a month. Personally, I hate when i can’t play Wvw because my server has “packed it in” and we are camped at spawn.