Guild Wars 2

I get that randomizing match-ups makes it so that more servers get to be more colors, but I’ve been thinking about it a bit and had a realization.

Weren’t the team colors organized so that the third place/red/weakest/smallest server had an easier time bunkering, while the first place/green/strongest/biggest server had a harder time traveling and defending?

We’re only talking about Eternal Battlegrounds here, sure, but EB is a huge part of WvW. Red gives up Speldan and Anzalia (and to an extent Mendon’s) in exchange for having a huge central defensive core. Blue has great terrain to work with/in/around and several choke points, but has to deal with Durios being under constant attack and Quentin being harassed by Hyleks. Green has a relatively even spread of everything, but has to deal with its structures being pushed way off toward the side and the terrain being low, flat, and watery.

Wouldn’t putting, say, the biggest server in a match-up in the red or blue slot weaken the other servers that much more?

personally, I can’t stand the thought of being blue, the keep is easily contested, umber can easily be taken and durious is unable to be trebbed from the keep, the two red towers closest to them are almost impossible to take (ogre and veloka), red have the hardest tower to take in the game (veloka), all of their towers can be trebbed from their keep and they can even treb SM from their keep without worry of having people try and take their trebs down. Green is easily the best to play as.

which is best. ogre/frogs/dredge to have on your side?

As far as I know, no developer has said that the colors are used for balancing. There has been a lot of conjecture, some not agreeing with others. If anything, yeah there are some imbalances, but im not entirely sure they are intended.

I played a lot on red last week as Underworld against a much stronger enemy(Augury Rock). I like red. Easy to move there and one good defendable camp(east like a mine – pangloss in cave where you can place AC).

Now I’m blue… hate this… harder to move around here. Annoying ruins in front of the keep.

I think I prefer red > green > blue.

But the keep of green itself is a bit crappy designed – and if I remember corretcly 2 “open” camps(easily to attack and harder to defend).

Red by far much better than the others.

sostronk.8167:

As far as I know, no developer has said that the colors are used for balancing.

Yet there are glaring unbalances – see red able to treb everything in his zone + SM for his keep safety.

The issue is that making the red server having somewhat an “advantage” made some sense because reds used to be the 3rd server, so ideally the weaker/newer one in the tier.

With randomized matchmaking, you can easily end up with giving the “underdog buff” to the biggest/most powerful server, which makes the unbalance in EB map a problem.
If you can’t anymore have the weakest server in the best side with consistency, might aswell get rid of the unbalance.

But since each server gets an even chance of colour and a random selection of hard or soft opponents each time, it makes no difference in the long run.

The match-ups are not entirely random.

There is a margin of error in a servers rating. The randomness is to account for that. Instead of saying your server is this rating, it says your server is somewhere between this rating and that rating.

When the matches are determined, the rating used is a random number between those two values.

After that, it’s exactly the same as it’s always been. Highest goes green, lowest goes red.

As the deviation gets lower (which I think it should with lots of varied matches, my understanding of the math is a bit fuzzy here), there is a shorter range your rating could fall into, which means we shouldn’t get quite as many weird matches as we have been getting.

This also means that generally if you have the highest rating you are most likely to be green, especially if the other servers have significantly lower ratings.

JJBigs.8456:

which is best. ogre/frogs/dredge to have on your side?

Most definitely the dredge. All the mercenary groups are pretty much exactly the same with the exception of the freaking dredge.

Why? They’re a pain in the kitten if you’re a roamer or a small group player. The dredge cannons they get are the most annoying thing ever. They constantly daze you from a range for other zergs to eat you up. Also, its harder to destroy the cannons if you’re condition damage.

Phoenixfudge.5290:

Most definitely the dredge. All the mercenary groups are pretty much exactly the same with the exception of the freaking dredge.

The fact that the dredge themselves are an exploit and need to be deleted from the game aside, they can take a camp that isn’t fully upgraded by themselves with zero human intervention. Only time they have trouble is a camp with four upgrades, and sometimes if the dolyak bringing supplies is far enough down the road for the dredge to miss it (and its guards) the dredge squad can take a fully upgraded camp as well.

Nabrok.9023:

After that, it’s exactly the same as it’s always been. Highest goes green, lowest goes red.gs.

http://mos.millenium.org/matchups
Not rly, (this is europe matchups)
Tier 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8 show that it isn’t like that anymore.

Tier 7 is the best example rly, Gunnar’s hold has more rating than other two servers together.

there is some randomness involved, but the highest-rated server is more likely to get green, and the lowest-rated server is more likely to get red, especially if the ratings are far apart. if the ratings are very close, the chances of a color swap are much higher.

“more likely” is of course not the same thing as “always”, so sometimes you will see color swaps that are unlikely.

for example, look at NA tier 5 (SBI vs BP vs AR). this week, the colors came out “as expected”. SBI has the highest rating and got green, and AR with the lowest rating got red. but last week, these same 3 servers played but got different colors even though they had the same relative rankings. last week, BP got red and AR got blue (SBI was still green, though).

to see how rating differences can affect the probabilities, here are some examples:

on June 14, SBI had a 1473.6749 rating, compared to BP and AR with 1344.205 and 1332.0161. given those ratings, if SBI were to face BP and AR (which they did) they would have a 40.5% chance of being green, a 31.1% chance of being blue and a 28.4% chance of being red.

on June 21, SBI had a 1403.425 rating, compared to BP and AR with 1395.4209 and 1343.9324. these ratings were much closer together than they were on June 14, and as a result the probabilities changed so that SBI had a 36.3% chance of getting green, 32.3% for blue and 31.4% for red.

-ken

Gwalchgwn.1659:

Nabrok.9023:

After that, it’s exactly the same as it’s always been. Highest goes green, lowest goes red.gs.

http://mos.millenium.org/matchups
Not rly, (this is europe matchups)
Tier 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 and 8 show that it isn’t like that anymore.

Tier 7 is the best example rly, Gunnar’s hold has more rating than other two servers together.

ok, let’s try to explain this with an example. Let’s say server A has a rating of 1,600 and server B has a rating of 1,500.

Server A’s match-up rating might be anywhere between 1,400 and 1,800.
Server B’s match-up rating might be anywhere between 1,200 and 1,700.

If server A rolled low their match-up rating might be 1,450.
If server B rolled high their rating might be 1,600.

In this situation, server B becomes green.

However, because server A starts out 100 points higher than B and the range of possible values is the same, it is far more likely that A will be green.

More likely does not mean always.

If you look at NA matches, four out of the eight have the highest ranked server as green. If it was entirely random you would expect 33%, not 50%.

I understand chances mate, I was reading the wrong part for rating earlier, I was reading the score and not the rating (which would change a lot obviously)
Anyway, the standard deviation has to be a minimum of 150.000 right now .. which is a pretty big sd. ROF and Miller’s differ 300.000 points and yet miller’s rolled under rof.

matchup ratings are currently based on actual rating, plus or minus an adjustment factor. the adjustment factor can range up to the server’s rating deviation, plus 40.

so a server with a rating of 1600 and a deviation of 100 can get a matchup rating between 1460 and 1740.

-ken