Guild Wars 2

I only started playing WvW at the end of October so in some ways it’s all still new to me. I’ve mostly figured out what to do when I’m playing but the wider implications are a bit fuzzy.

In particular I don’t understand what determines the colour each world is assigned, except that at some point in the past it was changed to make it more random because before then certain worlds were always one colour and it made map completion very hard.

Is there now a specific system, or is it random?

For example my server, Desolation, seem to be blue the majority of the time, occasionally green and I’ve never seen us play as red. I don’t know if this is because it’s random and sometimes that’s what happens or if it’s to do with how we score in each match.

(For the record yes I am waiting for us to go red to finish WvW map completion – I need 2 points in the red keep in EB. But I’m only at 56% total, so it’s not like it’s holding me up, I’m just curious.)

matches used to be made strictly in order by rating. anet would sort the servers by rating, then take them in groups of three. the top server in the group gets green, the middle one gets blue and the bottom one gets red.

once server ratings settled down, the matches became very stagnant with servers getting the same opponents (and colors) week after week. there was also a problem with ratings in higher tiers becoming artificially inflated, which made the stagnation problem worse.

to address this, anet added some randomness to the ratings when determining matches. originally the amount of randomness was quite high, which allowed servers to play against much higher or lower servers, and as a side effect of this the color assigmnents were for the most part random.

recently, anet has reduced the randomness so you won’t play servers ranked too far above or below you as often. as a side effect, the amount of randomness in colors has been reduced as well. if 2 servers having ratings that are very close together, the chance for them to switch colors is quite high. but if servers have ratings far apart, then the higher-rated server is much more likely to get green than red, and the lower-rated server is much more likely to get red than green.

if you are interested in the actual math, anet has posted about this in the past. see this post for example, which describes the original random implementation:
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/big-changes-coming-to-wvw-matchups/

-ken

incidentally, it looks like Desolation has a 27.6% chance of getting red next match. chance of blue is 29.7% and chance of green is 42.7%.

this is based on the currently expected ratings for the servers at the start of the next match — as the ratings change each week, the probabilities change as well.

-ken

Thanks, that’s really helpful.