Guild Wars 2

Oops. My bad.

hangs head in shame

Seiishizo.7162:

Would love to see this. Maybe also in API version?

Yes, things like this are also possible now.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug that occasionally caused the Lotus Harvesting Node unlock item to disappear without unlocking the harvesting node in players’ home instances.
• Text was updated for the World Tournament Series special event for all regions.

Laserbolt.6731:

If the MMRs are not truly a measure of a player’s actual skill, then you would see blowouts, and the expected win prediction will usually be wrong.

Assuming the match was fair, or the blowout was not already predicted.

Laserbolt.6731:

I take it you guys are primarily turning the dials trying to FIRST make the Expected Win prediction truly accurate? Am I right?

I have dual priorities, that do not conflict. 1) Improve match quality, 2) Ensure prediction is accurate.

Laserbolt.6731:

Isn’t an accurate prediction the best proof that the MMRs are accurate?

It depends. We factor more into the prediction than just ratings. If the predictions do not match the trends, then either the prediction algorithm is wrong, or we’re are missing some essential metric that is required to accurately predict, or the, yes, MMR could be not working the way it we think it should.

Essence Snow.3194:

I am inclined to agree. It has been far too reliably observable by too many players to not warrant suspicion.

Seriously, again, this isn’t a thing.

We’re continuing to experiment with improving the way cutscenes work. I won’t go into details, since I don’t want to say “We’re trying out X” or I’ll get asked after every update “What happened to X?”

joe.7684:

How long is the replacement golem good for once it’s activated?

For fourteen days, just like the golem that was used when the bug was in place. Here’s the wiki article about the Golem Banker for more information.

There’s a bigger technical issue—during “in game” scenes, the NPCs are moving around and things are happening (gadgets might be activating, props may be animating, etc.) and if you just skipped all that, it could lead to some really bizarre behavior. Trying to manually set a “failsafe” to teleport the NPCs, fire off effects, etc. to replicate what the world state is if the cutscene plays is extremely tedious and error prone.

That’s why the old style “dialogue cutscenes” (and the fancy but rare full blown cinematic sequences, like the Order movies and racial intros) are skippable, because we aren’t doing anything to the world while the dialogue plays, so skipping it doesn’t have any effect. We’ve moved away from those, because the in-game scenes are a lot more satisfying, but there’s a trade off.

Luckily things like this are totally doable in the new system!

Ahh, this one was my bad. We found out what happened though, and the rest of the golems should be sent within an hour or so of me posting this. My apologies, and thanks for letting me know!

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

I thought in this regard the old system worked fine. There was a 2 minute countdown before the match started, which, it seemed to me, was enough time for everyone to get into the game.

Would it be frustrating if AFK players caused you to wait 2 minutes at a time when the match is ready only to place you back into queue?

People staying in queue after not accepting a queue pop sounds like a bug.
You must get dishonor for declining a match or else will troll the queue constantly. Do you know how the new dishonor system works? It isn’t nearly as harsh as the old system for small offences.

As mentioned by Dark Jericho.8609 (thanks Jeri!) this thread already covers this. Feel free to continue discussion there.

Sunshine.5014:

Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think this will reduce the number of duplicate professions. If I understand it correctly, it reduces the MMR of the team with duplicate professions by 500, and increase the MMR for the unique profession by 500. That means a team with duplicate professions will have the benefit of fighting a lower skill team (since they got the reduced MMR). That’s even better for them. For example, a team of 5 engis stacking now will totally farm the newbies 500 MMR lower.

No, the penalty doesn’t reduce MMR. It is in reference to scoring a roster versus all other possible rosters that could be included in a match.

MMR is still in the forefront because we do not even consider a roster as a potential match unless it’s within the MMR range, and it also has a scoring penalty for being further away from the target MMR.

If you haven’t submitted a ticket for this please do so.

Shadey Dancer.2907:

Chears GM Talon and the team, all sorted and good to go now.

Glad to hear it! =) Thanks to everyone for the reports and fix confirmations!

Thanks for letting us know! Our QA team is taking a look into the issue.

Since I’m confessing oversights I corrected later, I changed Explorer Amoxtli to be a green hylek while she and the others were at the Repair Station Waypoint, as of the Dragon’s Reach Part 2 release.

Amoxtli was always intended to be Zopatl, and therefore green-skinned, so the six weeks that she appeared blue in-game must have been a result of Savio spiking her water jugs with hylek blue hue potions as a practical joke. Ha ha!

Saiyan.1704:

This may or may not be in the ladder matches, along with skyhammer.

It will not be included during season play.

lordhelmos.7623:

But did that unranked play have to come at the price of subjugating all solo players to months if not an entire year of being curbstomped so you can build metrics?

I’m guessing you’re expressing skepticism here, but its only been 2 days… give me a bit more time. I’ll consider it a personal failing if I can’t resolve the issue after a year.

lordhelmos.7623:

Unranked matches are going to turn into a reward farm for organized teams to climb the R80 ladder. Even fewer still are actually going to play at the level envisioned for ranked team matches.

Unranked will not have a ladder, so maybe you meant ranked? The goal is to make it far more likely that high skill level teams are paired against each other.

lordhelmos.7623:

If you want to drive people towards organized play only, with no step ladder to get there

We choose unranked because it acts as a stepping stone. We expect the more organized players to gravitate toward ranked arena for the additional ladder rewards.

lordhelmos.7623:

Some people, like myself, just want accessible pvp with decent rewards. SoloQ made that happen.

I hope unranked will fill this place for you. I understand what you’re saying, and we are paying attention.

Jak Shadow.2864:

I can understand that there were improvements that could be made to the matching algorithm but did this require also the merging of SoloQ and TeamQ. Not sure how this was supposed to help but it surely hasn’t.

I am sure all the work on the algorithm is worth it just restore SoloQ as an option. Most major issues improved instantly.

The shortest version of that story is that we believe there is more value in having an unranked place for people to play. Part of that choice includes the fact we can now modify the servers much more easily and make changes faster.

That does mean we’re ignoring what people are saying about solo vs premade.

Laserbolt.6731:

Are you guys validating the “expected win algorithm” against actual games, then?

If there is not a very strong correlation, i.e. “80% of the predictions come true”, then there is a real problem.

Right?

Yes. I think its key for ladders to have value. With this release we’re collecting way more metrics than before, and many of us are hyped for a chance to get at that data.

Booms.2594:

wow it sure is promising when this is what our pvp devs know..

Hah You’d be amazed at number of things I don’t know. :P

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

could they have been disconnected by the server?
or they were just maliciously disconnecting the games, causing 5v4 to occur, since no dishonor in place yet?

I’m not sure, I’ll need to look at the data.

Pandatrice.7183:

well I didn’t get any information from the pictures…yeah I’m very new…is it two players standing on one point? could someone point out for me? thx

All I got from the pictures is that apparently Backpack stands outside the enemy spawn and taunts players looking for a challenge… or something.

That and his team was pretty spread out.

Booms.2594:

is this seriously the reason? So if we want to get legit mmr we should only play 1 class for forever ?

Yes, it’s a temporary situation that is more noticeable to those players who are further away from the default MMR.

No, it’s by design that it lowers your MMR when playing a class you play less frequently. Sure, playing only one class will probably mean your core MMR and profession MMR are in sync, but I wouldn’t say this is preferable as the profession MMRs should catch up quickly.

Some of these are really hard to make tangible in code.

Stand The Wall.6987:

average knowledge of pvp strategies, rotations, and roles

We can sort of make assumptions about this by looking at rank and rating, but it’s not a direct correlation.

Stand The Wall.6987:

the power of 3rd party communications

This isn’t something we can detect. Even if we could, some teams just communicate better. We definitely want to do things that lessen the gap in this regard, so feel free to start a new thread if you have ideas here.

Stand The Wall.6987:

average player skill

MMR is suppose to correlate with this by gauging your performance over time versus other players.

Stand The Wall.6987:

what a 2 player premade can do

We try to pair like-sized rosters together to compensate for things like this.

Stand The Wall.6987:

a timeline (impossible as of now) of larger premades vs smaller ones

We’re recording the result of all games played under the new system. So, hopefully this data will improve our understanding and give us more ways to test the assumptions we are making.

Stand The Wall.6987:

team composition in a pick up group environment

Team composition (as in roles, etc.) would be nice, but people already don’t like not being able to change character… I think they’d like being locked into a build even less.

Stand The Wall.6987:

what all of these things can do for a team when they are in sync

This is a big one. It might be nice to pair players together in the long run by their performance together over time, but we’re not at a point where we want to try this yet.

Backpack.8517:

http://i.imgur.com/AdvKQMr.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/etjI8C1.jpg
pls….
I was rank 2 team Q, rank 30 solo q before the patch..
I had a very high MMR, and I rarely played with or agaisnt bad players….
WHY AM I PLAYING VS THESE PEOPLE (And with)

Btw, we won 500-190…. Someone died to the boss once as well.. Pls anet pls

Just took a look at your account. Your profession MMRs are taking a while to catch up to your account MMR. Not my fault its so dang high. :P

Lexiceta.4156:

idk I thought the idea was to lessen duplicates, maybe I am misunderstanding
the new info.

I’ll look into it tomorrow, but we can’t do anything about people who party with multiple of the same profession. Don’t know if that is what is happening here, but I wanted to make sure that was clear.

Ithilwen.1529:

I think that the major ques are these:

Seeing the same (winning) group of players repeatedly.

Seeing groups entirely or mostly composed of one guild.

Coordination in a team that makes it clear that they are on voice or otherwise highly experienced.

Admittedly; This last cue could represent a group of random high skill players or an organized group. The effect is the same either way.

I think not factoring MMR is as big a mistake as factoring it only. The game should factor MMR and other statistics.

If this is true, it would suggest we increase the scoring penalty for rank. I’ll take another look at the data tomorrow.

Ithilwen.1529:

@Justin ODell: This debate is about perception, not statistics.

This is not a debate over numbers. It is over subjective experience. In my opinion, the experience of PvP has suffered badly because the skill levels are blatantly unbalanced.

This is exactly why I asked the question. I wan’t to know what ques people are picking up on that are leading to this perception. There could be something else going on, maybe if we gave players more information it would help, etc.. There could also be a disconnect between the data, which I’ll need to look at and see if we can make improvements.

Not losing MMR means exactly nothing emotionally when you get steamrollered.

Agreed, which is why we moved away from the old matchmaking that only factored for MMR.

Evan and I were talking about adding roster size logic to the filter part of the algorithm, which would match what you’re saying here. We’d need to expand the filter over time though, because we’re pretty hard set on making sure people get a match.

We’re going to run some simulations and go from there.

Mike.4830:

much worse..like i keep fighting 5 engis that r best engis game… and we all solo q

Um… I just made these changes. Shortest match eva?!

Evan and I got together and took another look at the data and have decided on some matchmaking changes.

We’re upping the minimum potentials filter setting from ‘1’ to ‘20’. This means the queue will have you wait when customizing a match for you until we have 20 or more potential player matches. We had this previously set to 1 to have matches start as quickly as possible.

We’re increasing the penalty for roster (read: party) size distance from ‘-100’ to ‘-500’. This means parties of different sizes are less likely to be matched.

We’re decreasing the penalty for ratings distance from ‘-25’ to ‘-5’. We found matches were already really close together and felt this penalty was too strict.

We’re increasing the penalty for duplicate professions from ‘-200’ to ‘-500’, and increasing the bonus for playing a unique (read: only one on team) from ‘100’ to ‘500’. Hopefully this will reduce the number of duplicate professions seen.

As always, let me know how this plays and if you can feel a difference.

Thanks.

Ithilwen.1529:

I have seen no evidence of consideration of team vs. solo. Skimming the matchmaking algorythim, I may have missed it. I was tired but didn’t see anything in the psuedocode that dealt with team size.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm#Pseudo-Code
Look for roster size and max roster size.

FOX.3582:

100% Agree…. 10 matches today vs 9 pre-mades… Lost 9 (ofcourse) -.-

This is why I asked the question. Player perception doesn’t always match the empirical evidence. I pulled up your match history since we launched the new servers.

5 vs 4+1
2 1+1+1 vs 2+1+1+1
1+1+1+1+1 vs 2+2+1
5 vs 4+1
5 vs 1
2+1+1+1 vs 1+1+1+1+1
5 vs 3+1+1
1+1+1+1+1 vs 4+1
5 vs 2+1+1+1
3+1+1 vs 2+1+1+1
1+1+1+1+1 vs 2+1+1+1
1+1+1+1+1 vs 1+1+1+1+1
2+1+1+1+1 vs 1+1+1+1+1
2+1+1+1 vs 1+1+1+1+1

Only 3 of those were matches that were stacked against you.
5 vs 1
1+1+1+1+1 vs 4+1
5 vs 2+1+1+1

I’m want to improve things so even those don’t happen, but sometimes things just don’t happen the way we perceive them to have happened.

Obsidia.5127:

Ranked Arena wins were wiped since patch also they are no longer counting, not sure if that was part of the plan as well.

Is Obsidia.5127 the same account you play with?

This is the same as how it worked before. Rewards are based on playtime, which gets reset each time you connect.

Katz.5143:

I too would like to ask that the BLTC forum be kept in some form. I read it more than any other.

Yes, I think it’s a popular forum.

Question: Where will we discuss crafting? Not that it gets much activity or discussion but just in case something comes to mind.

Crafting = General Discussion/Guild Wars 2 Discussion. Unless you’d have a different suggestion?

The full update hasn’t hasn’t gone through yet to fix profession stats. Things should get fixed up on your next map change after ~20 minutes from now. However you will lose your new ranked/unranked totals since the patch. It was the only way we could restore the profession data.

Wakani.1829:

So, now my proffession ranked games are there, but my overall games on the stat page still doesnt match, and doesnt count in all the games either.

And the ranked/unranked play buttons still don’t work for me.

Edit: for some reason the numbers wont show on the pie charts on screenshots,
I have:
732 engineer games,
360 mesmer games,
174 elementalist games,
90 thief games,
82 guardian games,
50 warrior games,
37 ranger games.

All played in paid tournaments back in the day, now known as ranked arenas. these games are all missing on the overall stat page, and now only appear in the pie charts.

Technically the tournament matches weren’t the same as team arena, and we don’t show legacy stats that far back. I’m suprised the profession games are there for rated arenas though…

rfdarko.4639:

Thank you! I hope you’ll also consider keeping BLTC distinct, but this is a very good change.

I will pass along your thanks to Mike and Colin, who ultimately made the decision. I’m really happy that they supported the change!

As to the BLTC or some forum related to the economy, I see your point and in fact I want to talk about that over the next couple of days. Clearly, we can’t move to reorganize and consolidate our forums and then spin up the exact same number of forums. On the other hand, just as there was a case to be made for retaining Dungeons (and actually expanding it to be more useful by adding Fractals), there may be a case for something economy-ish as well.

I won’t know about this for a few days, so please bear with me.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

so what will happen to the current professions balance forum?

Fair question and I’ve been thinking about that. I would suppose that, as we see how things shake out, general professions feedback (such as those relating to balance — and don’t dare say Ranger are OP, kthnx) would go in the Guild Wars 2 Discussion Forum. I believe that there are several team members who would see it there. On the other hand, balance information specifically for a certain profession would go in that profession’s sub-forum. (Unless it was about Rangers being OP, in which case it would go on the Better Homes and Gardens cooking sub-forum.)

Sorry, I have a really bad cold, and my head is a little spinny, and I took that in odd directions, didn’t I?

Bottom line:

• Profession-specific: That profession’s sub-forum
• General Balance: GW2 Discusssion Forum

I just fixed up a bunch of people. Those who can’t queue, try again.

Serophous.9085:

My question stems from the last paragraph:

So, the forum expert(s) see a topic they like and join in on the discussion. The discussion goes great, but the forum expert makes no promise to relay this to the devs. So is there a standard or something that must be met for the topic to be relayed? If so, how high is it set?

We will determine this as the process evolves. Basically, we’re not relying on the forum specialists for an effective forum; their time and their efforts are entirely voluntary and contribute to the information flow but do not drive or own it. The front lines for communications will remain Forum Communications Team members and ArenaNet developers. Specialists will help us focus the vast amount of information — reports, suggestions, issues, concerns, complaints — into a reasonable quantity of information to relay to the developers. Based on their level of experience with the forums and the game, they’ll make a judgment on the quality of a topic and share it with the FCT who will do a second review and analyze it before relaying it to the devs.

Next, does this mean less Dev time in talking? I understand they get busy, they have a game to run, and I’m glad both you and Chris and others have even spent some weekend time chatting on here, I’m grateful for that. But I’m scared we are going to go back to when an actual discussion or meaningful (content, features, etc) thread would be visited by a Dev once in a blue moon (I know support posts a lot XD). I think the community is still hung up over that, and have been spoiled a bit with interaction at present.

I think and hope it will mean devs will be able to participate more, since they’ll be able to focus on the topics in a distilled form.

As for Dev posts, if the thread IS relayed, would a Dev pop in as well to view or communicate? Or is it just the volunteers?

Yes, ideally the devs will pop in and respond. Forum specialists will be amassing information to allow just that!

The final thing I see being an issue is these people will be basically on the front lines now, taking much of the heat an anger from people, all while doing it for free. Its going to require a very thick skin requirement, as I said before, these people will probably be labeled as “white knights”.

I’m not saying this is a bad idea, but a few details are still missing.

I appreciate what you’re saying, but it would be illogical for anyone to attack a forum specialist. They are not in a position to give an answer, they are in a position to help a dev give an answer, and that’s an entirely positive thing for which I hope they will be appreciated.

JustTrogdor.7892:

Also please make sure these specialist posts don’t show up in the dev tracker forum.

No, they will not for sure.

But Louveepine — you are talking to us, and you’ll continue to do so! Anyone is welcome to post, and you’ve been involved in the past and I am sure will continue to be involved.

The Forum Specialist program won’t in any way impact your ability to participate in either the French or English forums, as you wish!

fishball.7204:

Credit where it’s due. Thanks for listening and making changes Gaile!

Hey, I give full props to Mike O’Brien and Colin. They were on board, and end of the day they’re the ones that matter.

Sins.4782:

Gaile hates us

But, provably, I DON’T! ~grumble!~

In case someone only reads the latest posts, I’ll repost here:

We’re listening!

See this

Or for those of you who are link impared:

Edited:

• Adding Fractals & Dungeons
• Moving Players Helping Players to Game Discussion

;)