Guild Wars 2

Solstice.1097:

I didn’t think desertion lowers MMR just LB points???

It doesn’t as of last Tuesday (which changed this logic and added a grace period), but most desertions were from before last Tuesday anyways.

In retrospect this was a mistake. I don’t remember the exact reasoning for it, but I believe it was related to the original MMR based leaderboard.

Solstice.1097:

dont tell me i lost a point for that match >.<

OK, I won’t tell you.

Solstice.1097:

i just played 5 pugs vs a premade that included toker nos supcutie and 2 others

and the next game i won by ~350+ points

i have generally not had very long queues

maybe it shouldnt resort to the extremes so quickly.

I can mostly explain the first match. They had a very low rated player on their team, which skewed the average much closer to your team.

I don’t think it was intentional though, as the low rated player had a lot of desertions that probably explain why they were so low.

I’m wondering if we need to do a blanket ratings reset for anyone with a significant number of desertions.

hackks.3687:

You can’t put experienced players in the same match as your veteran players. It ruins the experience for both parties. I don’t want to play against players who are just learning their skills for the first time.

I get what you are saying. Putting players together based on skill is the central point of the matchmaking system. It may not always succeed, but it always tries to do just that.

hackks.3687:

The player experience at all levels is suffering. This is not a new issue but it’s become far more stark very recently.

I don’t agree with this, but I understand that people must put their own experiences first. The vast majority of players are getting good matches, though I am aware of some areas (the outer edges of the spectrum, for example) that are having a lower quality experience.

hackks.3687:

Food for thought: Perhaps the learning curve of your game doesn’t match the scale of your ratings system? Perhaps consider redefining your scale in order to create values that can’t be reached by either extreme of the player or party size spectrums?

The rating system scales to our players, we don’t provide a scale. It spreads and contracts as a result of the games people play. The normal distribution it produces is more a result of the players themselves, not the system.

Khal Drogo.9631:

In case anyone is interested, I am not mad because I lost. In fact the score need not even be close as long as my team knows the basics of how to play their class and the PVP map mechanics they are on.

You have 11 desertions in unranked arena. If those desertions happened before last Tuesday then they probably lowered your rating quite a bit. This would explain why you are getting matched with players with a skill level lower than you expect.

Desertions no longer modify MMR, so this won’t happen any more, but for some players the damage is already done. Keep playing and it will gradually move you upward.

hackks.3687:

The problem with matchmaking seems to be fundamental – the new player rating is simply too high. There’s no reason a player with thousands of matches played should be able to share an MMR with a player playing their very first match.

Moving the starting rating only moves the center. Also, starting players are matched by their rating – their deviation, and we prefer to make matches the same way, so I don’t believe that is much of an issue. This doesn’t mean we couldn’t try to find a better placement for players that have PvP experience but don’t yet have any games played under a rating type.

hackks.3687:

The worst part is this is just one of a variety of examples that prove that the MMR system is not OK. It is logically and fundamentally flawed. Whether it be by adding hard filters, or tiers, or adding barriers to entry something needs to be done to segregate players based on experience because the game is not played the same at every level. And that is what creates the negative experiences that hamper PvP’s growth.

I think you are conflating MMR and matchmaking, they are not the same. Matchmaking rating (MMR) is only one metric that is part (althought a core part) of matchmaking algorithm. There are lots of variables that can influence matchmaking to create a bad match. E.g. duplicate professions, party size, queue population, how long you are in the queue, how long others are in the queue, etc..

truthishly.9513:

Just a brief update, since going 28-44 over the weekend, I’ve been 21-12 since, so maybe it was just a really (statistically improbable) unlucky streak? Or maybe I should just stay out of solo queue on weekends…

It could have also been that your rating has settled closer to a proper level. Please let me know if you run into any other odd streaks or games.

LoopySnoopy.7923:

There’s 2 of us me + 1 other we seem to get a decent match evenly spread both sides are equal in ratings.

We add a 3rd player to our team another guildy the balance then shifts we seem to get an imbalanced opposing team they’re either weaker then us or they are hugely stronger then us.

We add a full guild group to the mix and the opposing team all seem to have a larger skill base then us,higher mmr,all r80.

Unfortunately this fits with what I posted earlier. Since we are weighing party size so heavily, you’re getting matched other parties of the same size (or close to it) even though you may not be a good match according to MMR. Again, this suggest we could reduce that scoring some, or increase the scoring for rating.

We basically need to find a balance between two competing goals. On one end we want to match based on rating (which is a stand in for skill), and on the other we want to match based on party size (since premade parties have an advantage.)

Last Tuesday we introduced a change that adjusts a party’s rating based on the number of players in that party. The intent is to match pre-mades with and against higher rated players, assuming that matching a premade against higher skilled solos is less offensive than a premade with equally skilled solos. However, I never went back and reduced the scoring for party size.

Blair.3796:

rainbow.4695:

Yes I have two accounts. Does it really matter ?

He wants to see your match data for two reasons. The first is to analyze exactly how your matchups went, in case there are more problems than the devs realize with the current mm system.

The second is to make sure you actually did experience these situations, and aren’t simply misunderstanding, overreacting or intentionally spreading misinformation. Which sounds kind of overly suspicious and a little Big Brother-y in my opinion, but if I were a dev I’d probably want to be able to make sure of this as well.

It’s mostly the former, as I take complaints very seriously. The latter is just a neat side-effect that is sometimes amusing.

There is also a third reason. I’ve found helping others understand how matchmaking works and what’s going on usually calms things down a bit. I believe a good deal of the frustration involved is just having a lot of the information invisible to you, preventing you from reasoning about your experience.

Aidan Savage.2078:

John Smith.4610:

As an addendum OP, you salvaged 145 ectos for 279 dust.

• OP salvages small number of ectos, gets less than desired quantity of dusts
• Claims on forums results were bad from larger sample size
• Forums more or less state it was within reasonable bounds of salvage results
• JS proves as much
• JS breaks a few toes as an afterthought

So… while we got your attention… how many ectos were salvaged in the last 7 days (1/12-1/19)?

863,000 give or take 50k

I checked the numbers and everything is normal. There is less than a .01 standard deviation since the beginning of the year in day over day ratio of ecto to dust.

If you requested a PAX ticket or seating in our special fan section, please check your in-box here on the forums in the Private Message section.

While we really wish we could have invited everyone, there were a lot of interested parties, so we did the best we could and invited the maximum number possible. If you don’t have anything in your in-box and applied with a friend, be sure you check with that friend because I may have contacted him or her to give the happy news.

If you were not included this time, we’re really sorry! We will try to have other opportunities in the future, so keep your eyes on the forums for other cool offerings!

rainbow.4695:

Is as simple as that….for solo players like myself is very frustrating to go against premade teams , why you ever though that this would be fun or fair…..

I couldn’t find any game data for you in the last week. Do you play on another account?

TDC.1627:

Hey Gaile, How can we get some ANET representation at PAX Australia in October! Would love to see the team down here!

I’m on board!!!

Now to convince my boss that I need to go.

2500 salvages is nowhere near enough salvages to be certain about anything, but it is enough to make me query the datasets for enough salvages to be sure (say 100,000,000 or so)

Morwath.9817:

Justin ODell.9517:

Were you expecting it to not show a loss?

Exacly. Since if it doesn’t counts, then it gives false image.

It’s buy design that forfeits still show as losses in the win/loss columns. Though I suppose I could have worded the patch note to make that more clear.

Morwath.9817:

Today at morning for example I’ve played Ranger, lost 4v5 and gained loss (guy was DCed early and never came back). Was unable to monitor if I’ve lost points for it, because I’ve played more than one game at that time. However loss is displayed.

I guess it gave me -points, same as I got +points for 5v4 (I think you can see it in my first 5 ranked games after preseason lanuch).

I found the game, and it’s showing it as a forfeit and had no ladder point change associated with it.

Forfeits will still show in the loss column, even though they do not affect your point standing. Were you expecting it to not show a loss?

I’m assuming you’re referring to the file signature used to retrieve the skill icons from render.guildwars2.com — if that’s the case, they’re not currently available

Alcarin.9024:

Months ago, I’ve done something similar to your suggestion Lawton, in about 10 hours of work (wiki was not as completed as it is now) I’ve created a DB with 29 tables without armors and weapons.

Huh, 29 tables seems a bit high. I’d love to take a look at your schema if you’ve still got it somewhere, as I’m probably forgetting something (working on a personal one right now, estimate around 19 tables).

A NoSQL solution is definitely more straightforward though, since the data format is so varied.

Marcos.3690:

If you weigh party size too heavily you have this kind of threads
If you don’t you’ll have premade vs soloplayers complains

I don’t think there is a way via matchmaking to fix a low playerbase

I agree with you in general, but I may have been a bit over-zealous with the scoring changes I made. It’s at least worth looking into.

Archaon.9524:

U freaking serious anet? 5 pugs vs 4que gg

You got rekt. :o

I’m looking to figuring out exactly how that happened. Not only did it put you against a 4-player premade, you team also had a much lower rating. The rating of the other team isn’t even so high that it couldn’t find better matches.

Just pulled up your game history. I believe this is caused by us weighing party size so heavily to prevent stacking solos against pre-mades.

Since you seem to play near exclusively with a full party, we’ve preferred matching you against other full parties, of which there are fewer queued at any given time. This reduced selection limits match quality, which is why you get the occasional uneven matchup.

I have some changes coming next Tuesday that may help, and I’ll see about easing up the party weighting some now that we had some changes that came in last Tuesday that also helped.

Hi, guys! You are all so awesome for taking the time to research and really delve deep into the lore. I can confirm a few things that may help you sort this out. I’m sure I’m telling you stuff some of you already know, but this is just to confirm it, so there’s no doubt.

1. The Pale Tree is not omniscient. She does not get a complete report of events when a sylvari dies. She feels the death as a loss, but she doesn’t always know exactly what happened. Sometimes, she sees a part of what happened, especially if the emotions surrounding it are strong. But, not always. If the sylvari is Soundless, for example, she may not even feel the death. This is evidenced in the Personal Story by the fact that she had no idea what exactly had happened to Riannoc.

2. Riannoc was the first to die (evidenced in the Personal Story). The implication that all sylvari felt Riannoc’s death is not intended to be literal, but rather emotional. The sylvari can’t all tap into the Force and feel each others’ deaths. Once they learned of the death, however, all sylvari were deeply affected in a very personal way by it. When did the Pale Tree tell them about it? Not until after the Secondborn were kidnapped and also killed, confirming for the Pale Tree that the feeling of loss probably meant the sylvari in question had died. She is not omniscient.

3. Trahearne was the first Firstborn, but is not a night bloom. At heart, he is scholarly, studious, and intelligent. That should give you a clue to his cycle. He did not want to be the leader of the Pact.

6. The Pale Tree can keep information she knows out of the heads of newly awakening sylvari. They do not have free access to everything she knows, especially if she doesn’t want it known.

And I’ll end this post on a question. What do you imagine that first conversation between Caithe and the Pale Tree was like, Spoiler if you haven't played all Season 2--and don't read the responsesafter Caithe killed Wynne? I’d love to hear your imaginings.

Morwath.9817:

Losses will not count toward the leaderboard standings if a teammate outside your party has deserted. - Patchnotes

Thats not true.

Do you have a specific game date and time in mind where you believe that was not true for you? I’m querying your game history now, and that info would help me find it quicker.

MrKrataus.6420:

Did you tweaked something ? Because I see 6ppl in the top 25 lb with more lose than win, and when I see the first Guy with 80 points (80w/40l), I wonder if losing games matter now since I get only 1pts per win with 0lose

Can’t we reach the top without being able to spam games all the day ?

We’re in an off season, there have been no rule changes, and there will be no rewards. I suggest you only follow the leaderboard as a way of gauging your personal progress.

We may also change the off-season rules at any time to experiment with scoring changes ahead of the next test season.

Vatras.2806:

As I could not find a dev post about my particular question:

Now that the ladder has been reset and the rewards for the top 250 players have been sent out can we expect to get the same rewards (glorious hero armour pieces, mini llamas) again once this ladder will be reset?

I heard the phrase “off season” going around in this forum, but I could not find any information about possible rewards of the end of this ladder cycle.

Random Weird Guy.3528 is correct. This is an off-season, there will be no rewards. We enabled it just so people could monitor how they perform, if that is something they wish to track.

The API backend don’t have any tables whatsoever.

I’d probably store the attributes of each subtype in a separate table to maximize normalization. e.g., the items table would just store the attributes common to all items; for items with a “consumable” type, the items_consumable table would have the corresponding type-specific fields; and for consumables with an “unlock” type, the items_unlock_dye or items_unlock_recipe would have those details.

So for this somewhat contrived example, I would probably use something like —

CREATE TABLE items (
    item_id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
    item_name TEXT NOT NULL,
    item_type INTEGER NOT NULL
    -- etc
);

CREATE TABLE items_consumable (
    item_id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
    item_consumable_type INTEGER NOT NULL,
    item_consumable_desc TEXT,
    item_consumable_duration INTEGER
    -- etc
);

CREATE TABLE items_unlock_dye (
    item_id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
    item_unlock_color INTEGER NOT NULL
);

(the types/nullability of these fields are from http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/API:2/items)

And then, for example, https://api.guildwars2.com/v2/items/20357 would have the following values inserted into the tables:

items(item_id=20357, item_name="Ash Dye", item_type=Consumable)
items_consumable(item_id=20357, item_consumable_type=Unlock, ...)
items_unlock_dye(item_id=20357, item_unlock_color=474)

In the December PvP update, the command was updated to allow /rank # to show any unlocked rank finisher.

Anyone who submitted a request to attend: We must have your full name and address before we can add you to the group from which tickets and seats will be drawn.

If you did not include your name address, please send me your full name and address via PM. Check your PMs and you may find one from me, in which case just respond to me. Otherwise, send me one on your own. We cannot process requests for tickets or access to the Fan Section without a name and address.

Thank you!

I just met with Customer Support again on this issue. I thought you’d appreciate a little more insight into this situation:

• The account being used to send the scam mails is probably a stolen account
• Sometimes people come back to the game and report such a scam mail that’s weeks old. When that happens, the CS team needs to look at the whole history of the account to see if the account was stolen and if it was returned to the rightful owner. (This is to avoid terminating the account of a legitimate player who was an account theft victim.)
• Best Advice: If the in-game mails is recent — say less than 3 days old — please report it using the exclamation point in the mail itself.l If it is older, just delete.

Thanks for helping us with this!

There’s been no intentional nerf to ecto salvage rate, but I’ll pull the numbers and check it out.

blakkrskyrr.7413:

JS, do you ever think you are one of the Tyrian gods when it comes to the economy? The amount of insane changes to the game over the last 2 years in terms of economy is, to me, bewildering. Prices of goods have fluctuated astronomically since the game released. How many of these changes were you guys aware would occur when implementing updates to the game such as: changing weapon skins (and some other skin types) to BoE, rich orichalcum vein add/removal, introduction of ascended gear and ascended crafting (especially the crafting. balance of goods is ridiculous. 100 silk bolt >> 50 mithril bars is frakking ridiculous, not to mention linen and cotton. leather also is pretty much worth as much as the dirt beneath our feet), the mystic toilet (several guild members seem to be extremely lucky getting 2 dusks or zaps within 20 rares in the toilet whereas most, included myself, have dumped hundreds upon thousands over time in the toilet and have received not one). the economy is almost, if not more so, frustrating as the economy was in WoW between vanilla and the release of BC.

I’m not entirely sure what you’re asking, but I’m going to make an attempt.
Prices of some goods have fluctuates in accordance with new content, new players or changes we’ve made, but overall the Tyrian economy is incredibly stable.

It’s really rare that the price of any major good fluctuates in a way we didn’t design or expect (it has happened, I think I spoke about it before in another thread). That doesn’t mean I think all good prices are where they should be or always will be, it means that we pay attention and make what changes we feel confident in.

The mystic forge itself plays a role in the economy, but the nature of the distribution of goods from it is another topic entirely (literally, it should be on the first two pages of this forum or so).

If this doesn’t answer what you were asking, follow up and I’ll try to answer more specifically.

I just met with Customer Support again on this issue. I thought you’d appreciate a little more insight into this situation:

• The account being used to send the scam mails is probably a stolen account
• Sometimes people come back to the game and report such a scam mail that’s weeks old. When that happens, the CS team needs to look at the whole history of the account to see if the account was stolen and if it was returned to the rightful owner. (This is to avoid terminating the account of a legitimate player who was an account theft victim.)
• Best Advice: If the in-game mails is recent — say less than 3 days old — please report it using the exclamation point in the mail itself.l If it is older, just delete.

Thanks for helping us with this!

Clearing your browser cache won’t help, GW2 has its own browser built-in. Try this instead.

1. Close GW2
2. Open “My Computer” or “Computer” (depending on your version of Windows)
3. Type “%TEMP%” (without the quotes) into the address bar.
4. Delete all folders starting with “gw2cache-”
5. Open GW2

Here’s some example folder names to help you identify the right folders. They will have slightly different names on your machines.

gw2cache-{16611E0B-2F1D-1A36-081E-61161D2F361A}
gw2cache-{16611E0B-472E-1A67-081E-61162E47671A}
gw2cache-{16611E0B-539F-19C2-081E-61169F53C219}
gw2cache-{16611E0B-53F4-1988-081E-6116F4538819}
gw2cache-{16611E0B-5459-19A5-081E-61165954A519}
gw2cache-{16611E0B-B678-199A-081E-611678B69A19}

kaat — Thanks for the information!

And in respect to the “Sorry” message, we’re having a few forum issues that prompt that message. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Justin is my MMR on this account terrible or do I just keep getting paired down when I duo/trio/etc queue?

Seems like I never play with good players….

You’re currently 23 and 3 for the off-season. You must carry so hard. :P

Your ranked rating is a bit higher than average, but lower than your unranked rating. This suggest to me that your desertions, of which there are more in ranked, may have lowered your rating and it’s still adjusting upward.

truthishly.9513:

In the past two or three days, I have had an abysmal win-loss rate. Up until then, I managed to hover between 48-52%, which I assumed was fairly normal, given that I queue solo most of the time. Since the leaderboard was reset on Saturday, I am now 28-44. I know I haven’t gotten suddenly much worse than I was before, but I have felt overmatched significantly more often than before, and I’m wondering if the reset or something else affected my MMR, or if there was some kind of change to MMR itself. I did recently rank up to bear, I’m not sure if that would have an impact, but I’m getting increasingly frustrated with imbalanced matches which, for whatever reason over the past few days, have seemed overwhelmingly in the opposing team’s favor. I don’t play for leaderboards or reward tracks or increasing rank. I just want to have fun, evenly matched fights that, even in a loss, I can at least learn something from, and it’s pretty hard to do when your team is getting rekt right from the start seven out of every ten matches. Beginning to feel like all really is vain…

Sorry for the delay, I’ve had your game history up all day just waiting for me to respond.

I don’t believe your issue is premades. Of the 72 games you played, only three had you stacked against premades (11111 vs 311, 11111 vs 311, 2111 vs 32). Every other instance involving premades also had your team with an equivalent premade.

I’m at a loss to explain your losses. I’ll keep an eye on your account over the next few days to see if anything stands out.

On the first question, add this:

• Are your characters getting stuck in the same spot?

In attempting to merge several threads about bugs with this story section of Episode 5, the forum appears to have made “obscura” every one of the merged threads. So sorry for that!

Here’s the latest on this situation: The team is trying to replicate the bug and identify issues that might prevent someone from completing the storyline. If you could answer a few questions about the problem you are having it would help greatly:

• Do you have multiple level 80s on your account that you were taking through the episode? Have you been able to complete with any character?
• Were you in a group and if so, were you the instance owner?
• Did you switch from Episode 05 to a later episode before you completed Episode 05 for the first time?
• Have you been able to complete Episode 05 at least once?

With your answers to these questions, the team hopes to be able to test using different variables that will enable them to nail down what the core issue is, then take care of correcting that issue. Thanks for your help.

Matchmaking does not know about or operate according to win/loss streaks or account averages.

There may be some merit to adding logic to bust up streaks, but it isn’t a planned feature afaik.

Jaken.6801:

Will you all engage more, after the event at PAX? I gather you will reveal a good chunk of information there was well. So it would be nice to get some feedback from you as well (like how you feel about the matter and such. Are our fears unneeded, etc. the usual you know).

I plan to be a little more active on the forums and in the game after next week. We’re just a bit busy right now.

Are you folks mostly on NA or EU servers?

Moxin Rift.7983:

OK … someone had to do it …

You’re right — someone did, and I’m glad for it.

Sorry, I meant to suggest using the existing data to infer what constraints can be applied. The backend doesn’t really follow any rules (in particular, string lengths are unbounded), so the existing data is the only thing we have to go by.

I want to remind everyone that this isn’t a discussion about precursors or specific rewards, that’s a different conversation. This is a discussion of the pro/cons and philosophy behind different forms of RNG implementation.

The ids should be the same between v2/items and v2/commerce/listings. Which one(s) in particular look incorrect?

There isn’t an RDBMS behind the API, so there’s no schema per say. I think the quickest approach is to pull the entire dataset and tinker with it until it makes sense.

This thread is incredible (awesome way to start a Monday)! I, for one, welcome our new evil overlords with a little crossover of my own…

That’s a bug from the story restructuring—the next step (which is the start of Chapter 3) is L30, so you’ll get the mail when you reach L30. The “Read your mail” step was accidentally left in the end of that L20 storyline, though the mail won’t be sent until you’re L30. (It used to be sent immediately on conclusion of the L20 storyline.)

Thanks, everyone, for posting your thoughts here. It means a lot to us that you continue to discuss and debate the story and lore.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

I’m not having any slow load times…for pages or posting. Haven’t edited anything since the forums came back, but editing is always very slow.

Glad the forums are back, though! Thanks. =)

Edit: Actually, just edited a post elsewhere, and it went through faster than usual. Lol.

You know, I just edited the above post and I think I found it was faster to post than edited posts have been in the past! But logging in? That took a looooooooong time. We’ll see what we can do to make everything spiffier.