Guild Wars 2

Evan Lesh.3295:

ronpierce.2760:

Evan Lesh.3295:

What about Ranked do you want?
Is it standard models?
The type of matchmaking?
Is it the map selection? Now that the maps are updated, is this still an issue?
Do you want to climb the ladder until the the season resets?

The ladder and match making would be nice.

I feel like 24/7 ladder would create a lot of burnout. Plus there wouldn’t be time for big balance patches to settle before the season starts.

Regarding matchmaking, it seems that two camps are developing. What about ranked matchmaking do you prefer over unranked?

Other competitive games push constant (every 2 weeks or less) balance patches during competitive season with an ever-present ladder. It’s not a problem. Or rather, any problems created are vastly inferior to the problem of killing any sense of community by turning off the only competitive queue for almost a month. turning off the ladder destroys any sense of progression and causes people to stop playing the game. It’s far, far, far more difficult to get people to come back to a game they’ve stopped playing than it is to keep someone playing a game.

My advice: stop going in for huge balance patches every 3 months, switch to a cadence of bi-weekly or monthly minor balance patches, and don’t turn off the ranked mode + ladder ever

;Evan Lesh.3295:

Because of the way division cutoffs work, I would not want to open ranked arena during the off-season and keep the league-style of matchmaking. We would need to switch it to the old unranked matchmaking which would just be pre-leagues ranked arena.

Can’t you compensate this by leaving ranked open during the offseason but freezing MMR?

Yep! didn’t break my streak. TY!

I’m on a 10 game win-streak solo queueing. We started our match with a DC and the guy never came back. Obviously we lost, but we made the match close. Is this going to break my win-streak?

Hugh Norfolk.2798:

That is an interesting suggestion. Who else would you like to see as returning heroes in stronghold?

Shiro + Khilbron

Now that you’re tracking winstreaks for leagues, would it be possible to get astatistic on the PvP panel that shows what your longest win-streak on your account is? Cheers.

Coolguy.8702:

They were fine before the patch. All this even did was add more power creep to the game. Please reverse the buffs

Thief was made useless in PvE due to all other classes’ DPS coming up and Anet won’t split for PvP

Instead of completely eliminating player damage to gate guards, you could give them a buff like the Amulet of Protection Guild Lord buff in GW1. Basically it prevented players from doing damage to the Lord over a certain amount, and the cap slowly increased as the match went on.

Please re-enable ranked queue to allow a meta to form before season 2 begins. The fact of the matter is that many PvP players simply won’t play unranked queue, there’s just not a lot of point in it. If unranked is the only option for the next 5 weeks, we’ll wind up with a very unsolidified meta going into S2. There will be serious balance issues that won’t be identified until 1-2 weeks into the season, which means no correction would occur before week 6.

Please re-enable ranked queue so that the new meta can form around today’s balance patch and glaring balance issues can be identified and corrected before the season starts.

Hi Gaile, does this mean we shouldn’t expect the next stages of the Legendary Backpiece before the end of March?

Luclinraider.2317:

Hi guys,

Just hit 1k drinks today….3 days in.

Now these last 3 days I’ve been farming pretty hard on these gifts. Playing at least four to six hours a day of nothing but Xmas, maybe more.

I’ve also been emptying the vendor every day with karma, getting the 100 gifts that I can before the snowflake tier.

It has still taken me 3 days to hit 1k….which means 10k will take a month of me farming at this rate….and that’s assuming I don’t run out of Karma.

I don’t even know if this event is going on for a month…and if it is it requires probably and average of 5 hours of xmas a day and 200k karma a day to achieve….

So my question is….can this be done without putting some gold into it?

As I said before, I don’t really have a problem with it since I have the gold to buy it outright….but I know a lot of players who don’t. Probably the majority, and some of my newer friends are lucky if they have 50g on them at any given time.

So I DO think Anet did this shoulder piece better. It’s much more play intensive rather than money gate….

However, if the 10k drinks literally CANNOT be achieved within the time limit of the event…(Still unknown)….then there IS still a money gate.

Has anyone else been able to farm over 1k in these last 3 days without spending any gold in a significant manner. Ex: Does anyone have 2k drinks over these last 3 days just from farming?

Also for those of you wondering how to farm it.

1. Toypoc: Average 140 Gifts an hour done well

1. Bells: 196 Bells and hours (Varies depending on luck with new maps)

1. Jumping Puzzle: I’ve personally hit 13 successful runs in the 30 mins, netting me 260 an hour. This is 2:30 seconds a run. I have been told that a guildy saw someone with 15 at the end of one. This is 2:00 per run, non stop, no mistakes. I really can’t see anyone getting faster than that and this would net him 300 gifts an hour.

So….its 150-200 guaranteed gifts an hour depending on luck with choir.

Or 300 Gifts an Hour if you are just a monster at the JP with some luck on the presents and no mistakes.

So….what do you guys think?

If this event last 2-3 weeks…I really don’t think it can be done without gold.

If it lasts a month+……I think it can be done….but still pushing it unless they leave it out until the end of January.

It’s very doable without buying any gifts with gold, it’s just mind-numbingly monotonous and drawn out.

If you do 500 boxes a day you’ll get to 12,500 boxes (10,000 drinks at 80% droprate) in 25 days. 500 boxes = 50 jump puzzle runs @ an average of 2 min per run every day = 1h40 min a day. Factor in fails and call it 2-2.5hrs a day. A bit less if you’re willing to drop 150k of karma a day on the vendor boxes.

FireCrescent.6512:

If they don’t nerf it the only way to get it is buying gold.

Nah, if you do 500 boxes a day you’ll get to 12,500 boxes (10,000 drinks at 80% droprate) in 25 days. 500 boxes = 50 jump puzzle runs @ an average of 2 min per run every day = 1h40 min a day. Factor in fails and call it 2-2.5hrs a day. A bit less if you’re willing to drop 150k of karma a day on the vendor boxes

It’s very doable without buying any gifts with gold, it’s just mind-numbingly monotonous and drawn out.

10k drinks * 1.2 bags/drink (80% drop rate) = 12,000 gifts needed on average. What’s the best way to farm them? Middle lane jump puzzle seems like the fastest way to met.

Am I better off just spending 80 hours in SW and coughing up 60 gold? Seems unlikely that i’d be able to farm 12k bags in the same amount of time.

Agemnon.4608:

Doon.2364:

Same. Anet usually punish exploiters but when it comes to pros, they turn a blind eye. That’s not good. Anet needs to step up and punish exploiters no matter who they are.

The only exploiters are MMR tankers. Otherwise there’s no rule stating you can’t team with lower ranked players in order to get faster queuing times. Is there anywhere in the ToS or CoD that prohibits such teams?

The pro league teams are making alt accounts with fresh MMR and league progression to exploit the matchmaking system.

Xyonon.3987:

JUST FINALLY SPLIT PVP AND PVE!!!!!!!

we ALL want this … just PLEASE do it!

They won’t do this because it would confuse too many casual players to have skills doing different things in pvp and pve

It’s a start but if you really intend to have an iterative process, balance tweaks on this scale need to occur at least biweekly. Pushing balance tweaks once every 6-8 weeks is not in any way iterative, it’s utter detachment from the issues affecting the meta.

Of course the pace will slow over the holiday, but the people in charge of balancing need to seriously reconsider their workflow priority chart if they’re planning on a 6 week cycle for balance patches. It simply won’t work.

Thangore.2935:

Would half breeds be acceptable content for a future patch?

You’d really kitten off Professor Umbridge

Tree.3916:

I wouldn’t say it is worthless because that particular build has a use in PvP. I think it would be better to say that on the build scale from clerics to berserkers (lowest dps but max support to highest dps to lowest support) Shaman gear in tandem with any trait distribution falls short of providing the necessary group buffs such as Might, Fury and Vuln.

Edit: I use the word support loosely as the other side of the spectrum relative to dps

You run cele on that spec in PvP not Shamans….but it’s effective in PvP b/c Vigor and Regen are massively important in PvP (where most damage cannot be avoided by positioning b/c of conquest points, most damage comes in a steady stream of direct + condi damage rather than one-shot direct damage skills so HoT is very useful, and players being far more intelligent than AI)

Gaile Gray.6029:

Fallenfister.8341:

I had a shaman build warrior for support and buffing with banners and the war horn, it seems now form what I read that’s a worthless spec and should do something else?

I see people playing this build in the game today. What makes you feel it’s no longer effective?

Because regen and vigor are relatively useless in most of PvE where the vast majority of damage can be avoided by positioning?

Jay.3409:

Yumiko Ishida.3769:

lv 30 story lv 35 explorable (recommended). You are not locked out below 30 if you go with a party and they enter for you.

why do many 80s run lvl 35 explorable? is it like a quest for doing paths or a achievement?

Each path of AC explorable awards 1.5g the first time you complete it each day. So it’s very profitable even for 80s to run each path once each day.

Dungeons award 3/4 of a level’s worth of xp for completing, so this weekend they’ll offer a level and a half. If you don’t mind repetition, you and your friends could run AC story mode a lot.

link

Standard Edition will be $9.99, and all other editions will be 75% off. Also there will be double xp for kills all weekend.

The hype train has no brakes?

Evan Lesh.3295:

If you haven’t played since September, the damage log now has much more robust information. When you open the chat tab filter menu there is an arrow next to the combat channel with more options.

The combat log is vastly improved but it’s still not a good way to study your performance in real time as it is not a GUI and updates too rapidly to study while playing.

The ideal option, imho would be to go the route of SWTOR: add an option to have the combat log saved to a text file (in real time) that could be parsed (in real time) and processed on the player’s computer using player written apps in order to display information about combat (in real time, and solely based on the information in chat logs).

That would solve the issue of players going to 3rd party memory reading techniques to generate these tools.

Hey Blu, do you guys have any mechanism set up for experienced players looking for teams to participate in the conquest tournaments? I’d definitely be interested in filling a roster/alternate spot for teams that need a 5th. Cheers.

No more buffing AI skills plox <3

Vet NA player, I’m interested

Justin ODell.9517:

Errant Venture.9371:

It’s simply not reasonable to expect a team playing down a person for 2 minutes to have any chance of victory.

I tend to agree. I’ve seen people suggest a grace period of 2 minutes, and that seems far too long to me.

I think something like 15-30 seconds is better, keeping in mind that you reconnect to the game before you finish loading and you may persist for a few seconds before the game registers the disconnection.

That sounds very reasonable to me.

Justin ODell.9517:

style.6173:

It would be better if you ran another check AFTER the map selection.

Map selection is so quick, I’m skeptical about how much that would improve things, if at all.

I’ll look at the data and see if I can figure out just how often people confirm but leave during the vote. As well as how many games start with a player missing.

He means after the map has been chosen and people load into the game. The majority of times i’ve had seen a case 4v5 have been when the last player simply never shows up for the map or DCs before the game starts. TBH i think if a game starts with a 4v5 or if a 4v5 persists for more than 2 minutes the 4-man team should not lose ladder rating.

It’s simply not reasonable to expect a team playing down a person for 2 minutes to have any chance of victory.

Justin ODell.9517:

Errant Venture.9371:

So are we only using profession-specific rating? Or only core rating?

Only core.

Thanks

Justin ODell.9517:

Errant Venture.9371:

Can you look at my account and tell me if over the last week people i’m paired with have especially low MMR or my MMR has tanked? I’ve had very few matches (less than 25%) where more than 1 other player knew how to rotate, contain, or even hit T to follow pinged target,

It looks like you had a very high rating and a wide deviation… which suggests to me that you may have been hit by one of the early bugs that distorted your rating. Since then it has been stabilizing downward and is now near your previous Solo/Team arena ratings, which is still above average.

You should start seeing more consistent games.

Thank you

Justin ODell.9517:

Flumek.9043:

What is “blending” ?

Does it mean all my alts share same MMR with my main?

Or that my main is great, but my alt which i only played a few matches with and could be considered beginerish – but is “upleveled” because im obviously a great player with my main.

The latter.

We keep a core rating per arena, and a profession-specific rating per arena. If blending is enabled, we would combine your core and profession ratings and use that for matchmaking.

So are we only using profession-specific rating? Or only core rating?

In a similar situation: looking for team NA. Most matches are from soloing in Team Queue and occasionally playing with pug teams. Located on BG.

Roe.3679:

I can beat that. See picture; 7 engineers, one team was all engineers and only 2 of those engis on the 5 engi team are in a party so that is almost all matchmaking’s doing.

One of them was me, and yes I did it because of the daily.

ty based engi daily

Justin ODell.9517:

Arietta The Broken.1875:

Also, just a side bar.
The match making/map choosing UI is horrible. Fix please. -

Horrible how? 1990’s website horrible?

Hey, I liked my yahoo homepage you meanie

Play wuv wuv if you want more stat combos. Most of us want a game where gear plays as little impact on success as possible.

Justin ODell.9517:

Saiyan.1704:

What’s so wrong with changing the odds of victory? A team’s odds of victory Should drastically reduce if it’s a handicap.

If the handicap team wins, they should be rewarded due to their odds of victory being much lower.

If they lose, their rank points shouldn’t take a huge toll, if any.

We need to be able to message the information consistently through out the match, so we use the starting information.

We could change that, but I believe it still would not be accurate because a 4v5 can impact a team in multiple ways that aren’t easily predictable. It also makes the prediction algorithm much more complex because we’d need to factor in how long players were missing.

Simplest option seems to be that you simply award no ladder change to a losing team that played man-down (or more) for some arbitrary duration during the match (2 minutes?)

In the case of a tie, the winning team is decided by summing the personal scores for the individual players on each team

See the note on the wiki page

I think the point the OP is going at is that: fairly often you’ll get the scenario where a match will be formed but 1 player will leave before the match starts or early in the match. The team with 4 players faces a situation where it is very, very , very unlikely for them to win the match, yet their prediction for match victory is still based on the original 5 players. The 4-player team is very likely to lose ladder rank despite facing a practically un-winnable match.

Ladder rank changes based on match-outcome predictions should be made based on the players present at the end of the match or there should be no rank change for the losing team if they played man-down for more than 2 minutes of the match.

Another 5 ranger game at 5:30 EST Justin. Queue popped in 2 min and my team was wretched.

Excellent solution!

Justin ODell.9517:

Torin.7129:

Double or tripple profession in same team: Can’t you make an algorythm that doesn’t allow to join 2 or more same profession in a team? Then can be all of the games more balanced.

Looking at the data, the system is actually really good at this, but can be over-shadowed by the new profession dailies. We do not wan’t to put a hard cap on the number because it could greatly increase queue times for the more common professions.

Justin, is there a plan to deal with the negative imp-[act of the profession-specific dailies?

As a war in this day and age your job is more to hold the hand of your damage dealers (necros, thieves, mesmers, engis). I’d advise not trying to 1v1 and engi on a hambow as they’ll be able to overload your condi management v quick.

Justin ODell.9517:

Errant Venture.9371:

What’s the deal Justin?

Since there are so many people playing the same profession, they keep being held back, and held back, until finally we give up and stick them all in the same match.

That’s what I suspected. Can we please get an immediate pause on all profession-specific PvP dailies until a better solution can be arranged? I appreciate that they probably weren’t your idea, but they’re making arena matchmaking horrendous for the 3-4 hours after daily reset.

Another match with 3 eles on one team at 10:20 EST. What’s the deal Justin? These aren’t “off-peak” hours. The other team had three thieves until two of them swapped. The profession-specific dailies are destroying matchmaking in the hours after reset now.

Justin ODell.9517:

This was likely caused by low availability during off-peak hours. Longer queue times would probably have helped, not so much for the solos but for the pre-mades. I wonder if slowing down the fail-safes for larger parties would help.

This sort of thing seems to be happening fairly consistently during “peak” hours as well Justin (5-8pm EST). It’s especially bad right around reset when PvE players do the profession-specific daily and get matched up way above their skill level due to having new-class MMR. Please remove the profession-specific dailies ASAP.

PvP Profesion Win Dailies need to go. The combo of low queue population (even at peak hours) means you get a huge jump in bad pve players with bad builds getting paired up with players way outside their skill level around reset. My last match had 5 rangers and all 5 of them were not regular PvP players (yet myself and Magic Toker both ended up playing in the match).

I’d imagine it would be virtually a stalemate against even skill levels. The amount of CC + condi hate + healing is pretty similar. Rifle engi has a bit of an edge in CC, but ele has more potential for disengage to reset the fight

PLEASE remove the profession daily achievements. In combination with the low population queuing (even at peak hours) and the strain that puts on matchmaking, you get massive numbers of truly terrible players joining arenas for the daily and getting paired up with players way outside of their skill level. It’s not fun for anyone.

Edit: 3 of the rangers specifically told me that they were PvE players with little to no PvP experience who were simply there to finish the daily and leave. These dailies NEED to go (or at least be restricted to practice mode ONLY). That’s not even getting into the fact that these players with almost no experience are getting matched up with players like myself and Toker at 9:00 PM EST (theoretically right in the middle of the biggest NA primetime)

Ranger isn’t meant to have mobility as it’s a top range weapon class. You can’t have both mobility AND 1200 range DPS weapon.

Matches with 9/10 cele are making me sad

I’m happy that Anet is starting to introduce armor sets through gameplay again (Glorious, Crapace, Luminous), but there’s one thing that’s kind of disappointing: all of the sets are massive, bulky, flamboyant, guady, and (imho) pretty ugly.

It would be really, really nice if a few new armor sets in the future could be simple, streamlined, and elegant. Less is more an all that. I don’t like to look like a pile of random geometric shapes on a human-ish model.