Guild Wars 2

Having to wait 10-15 minutes for a pop only to get matched with 4 other solo players vs premades is not fun. It’s also not fun when you’re the premade thrasing 5 solos.

Nothing about mixing team and solo queue is fun.

You guys already tried merging the queues a year ago and the same kitten happened: everybody hated it.

I’ve only really found the same experience in ranked. I don’t know about unranked but why would a team queue there?

Benjamin.8237:

I’ve only really found the same experience in ranked. I don’t know about unranked but why would a team queue there?

ranked queues too long or win farming, sucks

I waited 30 minutes in soloQ and finally swapped to unranked. The skill level / matchup was really bad, had 2 mesmers, 2 thiefs and guard on our team. I really miss being able to jump into soloQ for a quick match before work or when time was tight, even though soloQ was hit or miss in team quality.

I’m in ranked queue for going on 30mins…….this is not worth playing.

Essence Snow.3194:

I’m in ranked queue for going on 30mins…….this is not worth playing.

Must be a bug, I keep getting insta pops with players roughly around my skill level. Occasionally get a new player but whatever.

Are you NA or EU?

Essence Snow.3194:

Are you NA or EU?

EU

Ahh …I’m on NA…..45mins now…and afraid it might pop any second and don’t want to restart whole process again

40 minutes and counting for ranked queue solo.

I have been trying to be optimistic about this update, but I can’t anymore. The quality of the matches since the update have been the worst I can recall experiencing in Gw2. There is more waiting than ever, and less competitive play than ever. The only thing amusing me is that I can play skyhammer, spirit watch or courtyard with my friends in queue now.

The old system was perfect, you only needed to work on addressing issues like 4v5, the incredibly flawed leaderboard rewarding inactivity and mediocre records, and the game’s balance.

Time to end the E-Sports honeymoon and actually consider the health of your game here. Has anyone’s PvP experience really improved since the update?

p.s. These queue times are on a weekend! People are mostly home from work and school.

Why is it so hard to group up people based on ranks 1 – 10. So if youre rank 10 you will only get grouped and fight against people from r10 – 20.
Is it the lack of actual people playing spvp – tq that this can’t be done ?

I agree, I can’t play anymore either ranked or unranked, I can’t carry 4 kittens going 3v1 home and pushing far 1vs2.

Actually hotjoin is a lot better lol.

I believe Ranked Arena refuses to put you with lower-skilled players now.

So apparently there are not enough skilled players in Ranked right now to find a real match for you.

They kinda killed PvP to be honest with this up date. They killed 1v1 king of the hill servers ( can’t go there while in a Q). They killed solo Q cuz matched against premades and they also nuked team Q cuz you’re forced to play trash maps like courtyard and skyhammer if an idiot chooses that map on the other team. And they kittened up the matchmaking system.

Watch out anet if a good PvP game comes out nobody will play your kitten anymore. Its even hard to log in for more than 2 consecutive hours nowadays. This game is starting to suck hard.

Celtus.8456:

40 minutes and counting for ranked queue solo.

I have been trying to be optimistic about this update, but I can’t anymore. The quality of the matches since the update have been the worst I can recall experiencing in Gw2. There is more waiting than ever, and less competitive play than ever. The only thing amusing me is that I can play skyhammer, spirit watch or courtyard with my friends in queue now.

The old system was perfect, you only needed to work on addressing issues like 4v5, the incredibly flawed leaderboard rewarding inactivity and mediocre records, and the game’s balance.

Time to end the E-Sports honeymoon and actually consider the health of your game here. Has anyone’s PvP experience really improved since the update?

p.s. These queue times are on a weekend! People are mostly home from work and school.

I keep trying to say the matchmaking it going to work out but I have to agree with this. The old matchmaking was perfect. I really like the unranked and ranked. All they needed to do was keep the old system of matching us with people but put the unranked and ranked queues in with it.

Justin ODell.9517:

Essence Snow.3194:

Ahh …I’m on NA…..45mins now…and afraid it might pop any second and don’t want to restart whole process again

This is exactly what I was afraid of when I put min potentials up higher. Sorry :\

It needs to be made more flexible, or it will just keep outliers out of the game during off-peak hours.

Actually I think unranked is hurting rateds more right now, there is a 1 minute wait on that vs waiting 20 minutes. I think it would be better if you hid the average queue time.

Justin ODell.9517:

Essence Snow.3194:

Ahh …I’m on NA…..45mins now…and afraid it might pop any second and don’t want to restart whole process again

This is exactly what I was afraid of when I put min potentials up higher. Sorry :\

It needs to be made more flexible, or it will just keep outliers out of the game during off-peak hours.

But for eu time, is not possible differenciate and use a more flexible system only for off peak Hours and more quality matches for other hours?

Or there will be always the problem of bad matches vs fast queue.

They can’t win. Trash games or too long queues.

And you guys want to split up unranked and ranked into solo/team? It would even be worse. The population is just too small.

Can you guys write a script to change matchmaking variables at set intervals based on number of players queuing or something?

Caedmon.6798:

Why is it so hard to group up people based on ranks 1 – 10. So if youre rank 10 you will only get grouped and fight against people from r10 – 20.
Is it the lack of actual people playing spvp – tq that this can’t be done ?

Because rank have a grand total of nothing to do with actual experience or knowledge of sPvP?

Justin ODell.9517:

Sins.4782:

Can you guys write a script to change matchmaking variables at set intervals based on number of players queuing or something?

It isn’t just a matter of how many players are queuing, it’s how many are queuing within your skill range.

Just bring back the old match making system. Is it that hard? The new system is obviously not gonna work if there’s like only 1k players that actively play spvp.

But wouldn’t you say overall more players are having fun today, than they were when they were being crushed 500-0 by a few teams of high skilled players that they were fed to?

I think so. And that is great for the future of the game.

glock.6590:

Justin ODell.9517:

Sins.4782:

Can you guys write a script to change matchmaking variables at set intervals based on number of players queuing or something?

It isn’t just a matter of how many players are queuing, it’s how many are queuing within your skill range.

Just bring back the old match making system. Is it that hard? The new system is obviously not gonna work if there’s like only 1k players that actively play spvp.

So glad people like you aren’t in charge of running this game, lol.

If you want great things in a game, you have to be willing to try things that aren’t easy and stick with them until they work.

I’d honestly say there are a lot less people playing PvP now that they can’t PvE or roam WvW.

I think that’s the true kicker right there..

Dahkeus.8243:

glock.6590:

Justin ODell.9517:

Sins.4782:

Can you guys write a script to change matchmaking variables at set intervals based on number of players queuing or something?

It isn’t just a matter of how many players are queuing, it’s how many are queuing within your skill range.

Just bring back the old match making system. Is it that hard? The new system is obviously not gonna work if there’s like only 1k players that actively play spvp.

So glad people like you aren’t in charge of running this game, lol.

If you want great things in a game, you have to be willing to try things that aren’t easy and stick with them until they work.

Yes sure, a multi- million $ company will try new things just for fun and see if their playerbase likes it or not. Are you kittened, they shouldnt fix stuff that isint broken just for fun .

glock.6590:

Yes sure, a multi- million $ company will try new things just for fun and see if their playerbase likes it or not. Are you kittened, they shouldnt fix stuff that isint broken just for fun .

Are you new to the game?
Because if not, you would have been fully aware that ArenaNet does indeed test out new stuff quite often.

How are we now supposed to find out our PvP Rank? I queued today for 10 minutes and got no ranked queue pops. I’m Rank 52 and previously rated 320 on the Leaderboards.

Been around since launch and I just came back after a long break (since about march, due to frustrations in competitive solo spvp), and its painful to see how little has actually changed. seems like a few quality of life changes for the better (vendors in Hom), but otherwise it seems like things have either stagnated or taken a major step back.

If spvp in this game isn’t dead (which is debateable), then how much longer are the remaining few expected to stick around when it is just virtually impossible to get a competitive match?

And there seems to be see-sawing in philosophy of where to take the game. Back to merging queues? Do we remember why the didn’t work in the first place?

@Justin, since you’re being kind enough to read through this. What’s the word on letting players do something other than running around HoTM while waiting for a queue pop?

I know many people that enjoyed PvE, WvW, hotjoins while waiting for a pop that have all together dropped PvP because they can’t do their favored activity while waiting for a pop.

Justin ODell.9517:

Lewis Burnell.2493:

How are we now supposed to find out our PvP Rank? I queued today for 10 minutes and got no ranked queue pops. I’m Rank 52 and previously rated 320 on the Leaderboards.

Ladder rank? The beta ladder does not start until the 16th.

What time were you queuing?

Thanks for the reply, Justin. I’ve tried queuing Ranked 3 times today. The main queue was this morning at… 11am UK time. I waited and waited but no queue. I switched to Unranked and got matches instantly. I’ve tried a few more times today (2pm was the last I think) and got nothing again. I asked in map chat and people said there were no queues popping at all.

Justin ODell.9517:

Another part of the problem is the perception players have, which is being fueled by a selection and confirmation biases, and was not helped by unranked and profession ratings starting at the default.

We only have our experience to work with. Reading between the lines here, it sounds like you’re saying, “just give this new system a chance and a while to stabilize.” I can understand that.

But like I said initially, how long to do you expect people to continue to wait? We’ve been told to hang in there since release, but when you boil the experience down to its essence, regardless of all the work that has been done, its still as it was a year ago: a painful 5v5 conquest with people ignoring the meta, not rezzing, zerging the map, with a palpable dunning-kruger effect from hotjoin and wvw zerging success.

Do you have any estimates as to when the new system will begin to stabilize? Because these matches are tough to endure.

Justin ODell.9517:

When we had them together everyone hated being stacked (which is understandable) and wanted a solo queue. When we had solo queue everyone hated how it was random and the ladder meant practically nothing.

The only time matchmaking seemed random in the previous system was when there weren’t enough people in my tier logged on. But when we had more than 5 people in high elo queuing concurrently, we had great games.

I don’t think the previous iteration of MM algos were bad, in fact I think they were the best you’ve had yet. They only seemed bad because population (specially at higher elos) wasn’t large enough, so a lot of the time 2-3 high elo players end up curb stomping unloucky nubs.

With this new (and 2 generations old) system, you take the same (and only problem) you had last iteration, and making it worse. Take this scenario for example…:

Suppose we have 10 players, 3 in top 1% and 7 in garbo/who_cares elo.
In the previous system, 1 team would get 1 good player, the other team 2, and then it would spread around the other 7 as it best saw fit to try and make it a closer matchup. Most of the time this worked really well. In fact, 90+% of the games in the last MM system were really close. There weren’t any stomps unless someone was smurfing, or playing a match out of decay.

Under this new system, these 3 players in top 1% realize…. I could either take my chances with the MM algos, or i could just hit up the other 2 homies and farm the ez wins. This is exactly what is happening now, and will continue to happen in a system where teams and solo players get dumped in the same low population bucket.

Population simply isn’t large enough to sustain this mixed system. I’m not against revisiting it in the future, when the game has much a much healthier active population, but right now it simply isn’t an option you should consider.

PS: This is something a lot of us could’ve said if there had been a CDI Topic on this subject… but no….. let’s just drop huge changes to a system that already works just to watch the world burn.

Justin ODell.9517:

longbawl.5072:

And there seems to be see-sawing in philosophy of where to take the game. Back to merging queues? Do we remember why the didn’t work in the first place?

When we had them together everyone hated being stacked (which is understandable) and wanted a solo queue. When we had solo queue everyone hated how it was random and the ladder meant practically nothing.

Now we have them together and everyone hates being stacked against (again, understandable.)

The solution isn’t to try the same thing no one liked, the solution is take care of the actual problem: being stacked against. I’m working on that. Looking at the data, the current implementation seems to be helping, but still has a quite ways to go. I have a few ideas I’m going to run by some people on Monday, and I’ll run a lot more simulations before bringing them into the server.

Another part of the problem is the perception players have, which is being fueled by a selection and confirmation biases, and was not helped by unranked and profession ratings starting at the default.

Let’s be frank justin. No amount of fixing is going to correct the core issue of all this, and it is the lack of playerbase. 2 years of conquest and barebones balance patches really did it in. Too little, too late.

If i’m mistaken, what’s the average amount of players off peak and prime time? Even if you came up with the most perfect matchmaking, it won’t do a thing if only a handful of people are playing. Are you going to match the the few dozen players against each other over and over? Make them wait hours? Pair them against the newbie players?You really can’t win this. People will whine regardless. For comparison, i heard people from the highest tier of league of legends, wait for hours for a single match.

Heck, a casual world versus world stream had 3 times more people watching than the official tournament, even DnT dungeons tournaments.

Until we get new modes, new professions, more frequent balance patches and all the mambo jambo, so yeah, until that soonTm trade mark stop popping up, and we see results, i don’t think anything will get better. I’m just completely jaded, been playing this game ever since beta, and seeing its pvp slowing withering away with nothing being done killed all hope i could have.

As for the issue you were talking, just rename practice to Hotjoin, bring back solo queue, and keep team queue as it is. I think the biggest problem that people had with solo queue were the afkers, the constant 4v5 and lack of punishment. Now that is somewhat fixed.

Sorry if it sounded a bit offensive Justin, i really don’t blame you, neither Evan. Both of you have worked and collaborated a lot with this community, to try to finally make things right and i love you 2 a lot.

I agree with another poster that having no way to do anything but stand in HotM while waiting for queue is incredible boring and unrewarding to the player. If I wait in wvw i sell items (i got a personal merchant), or i farm mobs nearby, or farm materials (wood, ore etc). Or i put up some costume brawl for fun if the wait is to long in Pve. Or I sell stuff on TP, etc etc. Lot’s of things to do pve/wvw. Even opening bags you can do there. May sound silly, but pvp (maybe not in HotM, haven’t tested yet), but in matches you cannot open 70% of containers in the game, so you can’t even open your bags while waiting. So much wrong with letting people do nothing while waiting in queue.

I used to do hotjoin during queue. Sometimes get jsut the end reward then get into a queue. Something i can only dream off now. Only prob with past system was that if you got removed at 490 points, you’d get no reward from the hotjoin. I rather have a system where the game calculates your playtime, and if to prevent abuse it always uses the ‘loose’ status, to compensate. This would mean 1-200 points depending on playtime (the system is already there), when playing hotjoin and getting pulled out to A Ranked match. That system would a dream, a cake. Now? Just boredom, and lack of rewards. Sure ranked play gives a little more if you win (or loose), but it doesn’t make up for it imo.

You keep defending the matchmaking model you just released, but don’t see even the mistakes you made that are NOT connected to matchmaking at all. Like what I listed here. Haven’t seen a dev post at all mentioning it, and the pvp devs posts lately have been massively in numbers 100-200 posts, yet nothing about this problem. Dissapointing disconnection between player and dev ‘needs’.

Everyone keeps asking for new modes. But that’ll split up the pvp population even more, regardless of attracting new pvp’ers. GW1 had a ton of modes and it had it’s population issues because of it.

i just had a 3v3 cuz 4 guys had Q pop within a game : D

If population is the problem then make the spvp side of the game free.

Under this new system, these 3 players in top 1% realize…. I could either take my chances with the MM algos, or i could just hit up the other 2 homies and farm the ez wins. This is exactly what is happening now, and will continue to happen in a system where teams and solo players get dumped in the same low population bucket.

In Ranked Q if you do this now, you just won’t get a match if there are no other teams of your skill to play against.

That’s what the long Q times are about today.

Laserbolt.6731:

Under this new system, these 3 players in top 1% realize…. I could either take my chances with the MM algos, or i could just hit up the other 2 homies and farm the ez wins. This is exactly what is happening now, and will continue to happen in a system where teams and solo players get dumped in the same low population bucket.

In Ranked Q if you do this now, you just won’t get a match if there are no other teams of your skill to play against.

That’s what the long Q times are about today.

They’ll get a pop… after 30 minutes. So instead of waiting forever, they’re just gonna go do unranked and curb stomp nabs there. Back to issue in OP, this is boring for both teams.

tico.9814:

If population is the problem then make the spvp side of the game free.

This. This would be pretty amazing. Talk about opening up the pop.

Acandis.3250:

Laserbolt.6731:

Under this new system, these 3 players in top 1% realize…. I could either take my chances with the MM algos, or i could just hit up the other 2 homies and farm the ez wins. This is exactly what is happening now, and will continue to happen in a system where teams and solo players get dumped in the same low population bucket.

In Ranked Q if you do this now, you just won’t get a match if there are no other teams of your skill to play against.

That’s what the long Q times are about today.

They’ll get a pop… after 30 minutes. So instead of waiting forever, they’re just gonna go do unranked and curb stomp nabs there. Back to issue in OP, this is boring for both teams.

I think most of the mature top tier players have more empathy for the new/average player than to do that mindless, boring stomping any longer.

We need A.I. Bot to pretend to be human players in the times when Queue times are too long.

Give them random legit names and most people won’t even notice =]

longbawl.5072:

This. This would be pretty amazing. Talk about opening up the pop.

Talk about also completely destroying the whole game-mode. With people being able to create unlimited free accounts the amount of trolling, griefing, flaming and just plain bad behavior would increase quite a bit.

PvP is kind of a mess atm. I use to be a huge soloqer, but I refuse to do it, I only do premades now. However, that’s what happens when you implement a new system, you’re going to run into a lot of problems. Hopefully it gets sorted out sooner than later.

lordkrall.7241:

longbawl.5072:

This. This would be pretty amazing. Talk about opening up the pop.

Talk about also completely destroying the whole game-mode. With people being able to create unlimited free accounts the amount of trolling, griefing, flaming and just plain bad behavior would increase quite a bit.

Yea no one has done a free pvp game with a functional mmr before…. ?_?