Guild Wars 2

Mike O Brien.4613:

Thanks for all the comments. I know there’s nothing I’m going to say that will make you feel better, but I’ll share some final thoughts for the night.

I said three weeks ago I’d focus on sustainability and quality. I want to reiterate the part about sustainability. Be angry about legendary weapons, sure, but how about the recent drought of content? That kind of thing happens when we spread ourselves too thin, and when we let the content development pipeline empty out so we can fight fires. What I think we actually owe you is sustainable, predictable, high-quality content. I’m making a decision that’s painful in the short-term so we can position ourselves to deliver that.

I support your decision and it will be better for gw2 in the long run even though player activity will probably decline in the short term. I hope most people here will understand that.

It seems obvious to me that gw2 has spread itself too thinly trying to do too many things at once.

And most people don’t make legendaries anymore, especially because of the scavenger hunt and the inability to buy parts of it off the trading post anymore. Instead of being able to play what I want, when I want, and generate gold each day that goes into making a legendary, I am forced to do 50 specific tasks and grind each HOT map for a very long time which is personally not my playstyle.

If it weren’t for the stupid scavenger hunt people the legendaries would probably already be out.

The scavenger hunt thing probably accounts for 90% of the work in making a new legendary which is why they are coming out so slowly now.

Mogar.9216:

you are missing the point here. lets say there are 10 players who have mmr 900,910,920,930,940 / 950,960,970,980,990 respectively. The guy with mmr of say 920 will have no wins until the guy with 970 moves out of his pip range assuming no one with mmr of 950 or higher move in to replace the ppl who moved out of his pip range. He is basicly kittened in today’s match making system. Because even though his mmr is only 30 blow the ‘magic’ line he will loss and loss and loss and watch his mmr drop and no way to recover. Where the guy with 950 mmr will win and win and watch his mmr get higher and higher as he climb. Until he climbs too fast and get into a pip range where he is blow that magic 50% line and he will be caught in to downward spiral himself.

What point?

So you want the teams to be perfectly balanced so everyone has a 50% chance to win at all times? Then how is anyone supposed to climb the ladder if they keep losing 1 and winning 1? That was the problem with season 1.

Losing streaks are supposed to happen when people climb up the ladder. You can only make them smaller by giving larger pip bonuses and having people start higher at the beginning of the season.

The point of my thread is to make this process faster so noobs don’t get stomped so long.

“We had several player suggesting to stop playing and continue the next day when you enter a loss streak. That is the consequence. You need to wait until the other players could catch up with you so that there are less skilled players left.”

That is a consequence of any ladder system where everyone starts at the bottom no matter what you do. All you can do is to ensure that the good players rise faster and that happens by giving larger pip bonuses or setting people in higher divisions based on mmr at the start of each season.

“However, it doesnt matter as long as he loses. A loss in mmr is a loss in mmr.”

You don’t seem to understand how ELO works. If your mmr is really low compared to everyone else then your ELO loss per game will approach 0. Yes, it actually isn’t 0, but it will be something like -0.0001. If you are being put against a low mmr team and constantly losing, then you deserve to have bad team mates.

gloflop.3510:

Gewd.8125:

Let’s say there is someone that should be at legend, they need to grind at least 60 wins and this is assuming they don’t lose a single game. The win streak system is basically a poor man’s ELO and capping the pip gain at 2 makes people’s divisions reach their true value slowly.

I understand your reasoning. However, you base everything at the assumption that the “game” knows which division you should be in.

The mmr is biased due to the first season. A player in a high division faced harder opponents. Hence, he lost more often and hence his mmr dropped. Now all players get pooled again. Then the player who had a win/loss ratio in division 5 of 1:3 gets now directed in a group of players who could not reach division 5 last season but had a win/loss ratio of 1:3 as well. The other side is a player who could not leave division 2 last season. However, at the end of the season he started playing more and (due to easier opponents) had a win/loss ratio of 2:3. This player now gets treated equally with a player from division 5 (season 1) who had a win/loss ratio of 2:3. Since the 2:3 will face the 1:3, I can tell you the likely outcome before.

If you had a high MMR last season and you belonged there, you would have a win ratio of 50% which means your MMR would not change.

Last season people were matched in their MMR range. If a player with 1000 MMR had a win ratio of 1:3, let’s say he would have 500 MMR. If a player had 2000 MMR and had a win ratio of 1:3 then he would maybe have 1500 MMR this season. MMR does not equal win ratio. It highly depends on who you are matched against.

I kept playing solo queue in legend last season stabilizing 8 pips in and frequently saw ESL players, and I have no issues with huge losing streaks.

The reason is quite obvious, not sure why so many people have issues understanding this.

Let’s say there is someone that should be at legend, they need to grind at least 60 wins and this is assuming they don’t lose a single game. The win streak system is basically a poor man’s ELO and capping the pip gain at 2 makes people’s divisions reach their true value slowly.

There are 3 solutions to fixing this problem and I have no idea why Anet again feels like they need to reinvent the ladder system.

1. Place people in higher divisions depending on their MMR.
2. Allow win-streaks to give you more than 2 pips which is laughably small.
3. Just make divisions directly equal to MMR.

Before anyone asks, I am almost diamond and I’ve only lost 2 games not including disconnectors.

Derigar.7810:

You have to be able to be experienced at raids to participate at raids, and if you missed out in the beginning by looking 24/7 for a group, you’re in deep kittene now.

Yup, this happens in every MMO and which is why I rushed raids asap.

Problem is that most people that are capable and interested in the raid have already finished. The ones that are left are usually bad.

Maybe a small handful are capable. It is just a hassle to find out which is which.

I’ve been in the late-comer situation and the best you can do is just to suck it up. That’s what anet asked for when they came out with raids.

Current MMR is already extremely inaccurate given the amber/stronghold exploiting and the fact that Anet changed matchmaking criteria in the middle of a season.

The meta is making massive changes forcing most people into different builds, classes and playstyles. Their current MMR isn’t going to match their future MMR.

A reset would be good, and win-streak plus glicko ensures that mmr settles much faster than several weeks. The best players play dozens of games each day and they will rise faster.

Aylpse.6280:

Fatallion.5389:

Will there eventually be a clarification about title being avalaible only during this season?

I hope not. That means the exploiters and Stronghold farmers will be the only ones with it. Come a time people forget about all this and they will brag about being the best of the best.

Inb4 “ur just salty”. No, I’ve demolished nearly every legendary I’ve come across. Only a handful actually deserve it. Then again I am pretending this is a prestigious thing and not something to be farmed out. I haven’t the time or premade to farm legendary, so I’ll be happy with diamond for now.

Skill is more than just 1v1 ability, it also includes knowing when and where to rotate even when you are in the middle of a battle and trying to make up for your team’s shortcomings whether it be picking the right class or helping them when they should’ve been able to 1v1. This is a concept that many people stuck in diamond don’t know or refuse to believe.

If you have demolished every legendary you’ve seen, you’ve never had ESL players in your games. I frequently come up against the full PZ team and individuals like Noscoc in my matches.

From what I’ve seen stronghold farmers and smurfers weren’t that common. I"ve seen some but not that many. It is difficult to find 5 decent people who want to commit the time to farming stronghold as a team, and most people don’t have an extra hot account and someone that doesn’t belong on amber to play on it.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Kevin.4209:

Evan Lesh.3295:

The changes for season 2 will make this less of a problem. Each team will have a tight MMR grouping such that each teammate should be very similar in skill to you. This is different from season 1 and unranked where we balance players on each team, i.e, high MMR and both sides and low MMR on both sides.

The goal is to ensure than if the higher skilled team wins, all the higher MMR players go up the ladder. Less unlucky high MMR players will drop on the ladder, and fewer low MMR players will get carried up the ladder.

Am I right that the intention of this system is to enable high MMR players to climb very very quickly? I’m just trying to understand why this would be better than a reset – I’m guessing because given a reset, it will still take a long time for ESL players to climb up just because of the element of randomness that is involved. The downside of the system you are proposing is that during the first couple weeks, there will be hugely one sided matches (I’m guessing you guys see this as a necessary evil – but perhaps it should be publicized before you get huge numbers of people whining) – however, after that the high mmr players will be in high divisions and it won’t be as much of an issue.

That is one goal of the system. With an MMR reset, it would only create instability (ability to climb) for a short while. Part of having the ladder better represent skill is that the beginning of the season will be chaotic as everyone fights out of amber.

I still think you need to reset MMR because you will be making massive changes to the meta and severely nerfing the effectiveness of some classes.

I expect people that mained those classes that were previously legendary to drop to playing at ruby or even sapphire level as they are forced to switch classes or builds. And they will distort matchmaking next season if you do not reset MMR.

There are no hard counters in the meta now except diamond skin vs full condi. And after the proposed balance change there will be 0.

Why would you want to get rid of a feature that stops 3 thiefs on a team?

Now at 16 members.

We now have 11 members.

Well I don’t think it is stupid and you’ve done nothing to refute this than to say that people have different skill levels.

And what I am saying is that blowouts like this shouldn’t ever happen in the legendary division especially when there was nothing wrong with the comp or no groups of 4+, and no disconnects.

And if they absolutely must happen due to an extreme shortage of players, then we should be gaining 2 pips and the losing team should be losing 2 pips. Or given the fact that nearly all of us were solo queued, the matchmaker really couldn’t balance the teams any better???

But even then, these people don’t belong in legendary and I hate the idea that they might end on my team in future games.

Either way you argue about this, it shows how deficient the matchmaking system is.

Matty.1953:

Gewd.8125:

messiah.1908:

Gewd.8125:

The main reason why mesmer is imbalanced right now is because of this:

Nearly unstoppable and very short cd quickness + stability stomps/resses. This is essentially equivalent to having your opponents waste all their best skills and then healing your team mate for 8000 hp.

The only other class that can do this is rev but they are not as durable and are very susceptible to getting cleaved before they finish.

And the 2nd reason is double 3 second PULSING aoe stun.

Honestly continuum split should never have existed. I don’t know what anet was thinking.

Portal is also a bit imbalanced too, it forces someone to sit at an empty point.

have you tried to play bunker guard with mercy rune or suport rev with those rune ? you will have 30% res speed…. it wont solve a thing as ppl will probably will used those

also i have never encounter much problem with wells as i used my stun break or time my dodges when needed or stability to make the mesmer used his CS and elite skills

also portal just watch the map or ask you team to give you location of enemies to decide if to leave to point

Runes of mercy only add 20% res speed while quickness adds 50%. It is not even close. And you also don’t get quickness stomps. And you lose the ability to use better runes. And you don’t get stability every 10 seconds.

You can stun break out of double gravity well, but then you can’t sit on the point so it is a guarenteed decap. And most mesmers will wait until you are at 50% hp to drop them.

Gravity Well is so well projected (slow, obvious cast animation with sound effect) that for you to get caught up in one would mean that either you failed, or the mesmer used it from stealth.

Do you even play bunker mesmer? When you shatter continuum split you get quickness which means 0.5 cast times. Dodging out of it means you get decapped. The CC pulses every second so you cannot just dodge out once and go back on it.

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

First of all, as I said, it doesn’t matter how bad you beat them by. It matters how many points you score. You get the same number of pips for winning 500-500 as you would for winning 649-0.

Actually pip gain is based on score ratio. Why would you even think that pip gain should be equivalent for a 500-499 game vs 500-0 game?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm#Configuration_3

And before you point out that the configuration says you only get 1 pip if you are favored to win no matter what the ratio is, this is the kind of poor design decision I am arguing against.

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

Lastly, I’m not sure why it wasn’t a more fair match up with solo queuers, but often it comes down to comp. It’s possible it was predicted to be a 50/50 winrate, but they had a poor comp or just incompatible players. There are many factors that are hard to predict.

People are free to switch classes. And if they are inflexible it will result in an appropriately lower MMR and division. There was nothing wrong with their comp that I could see, they did not have all warriors or thieves. I have not seen complete stomps like this unless there is a group of 3 or more.

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

I don’t mean to be a kitteny kitten or a kitten, but you would probably get pooped on by a lot of people too.

Even when solo queue was still around, I never lost that badly when the other team had ESL players. And for some reason Anet is not able to balance matches now that they claim more people are doing ranked than ever?

OlrunTheBlade.1486:

It doesn’t matter how much you beat them by. It matters how much you score. If you are expected to win or have a decent chance to win, you’ll only get one pip for a win. That’s 5 legendaries vs 5 legendaries. MMR could have a large difference, but I see no reason to think that you should get more than one pip from the screenshot. If anything, judging by the score, your MMR might have given you an advantage in win chance. I see nothing wrong here.

What I’m saying is this.

Because I only got 1 pip for this win, the theory that the other team had super low MMR is plausible, sure.

But so what if they might have had super low MMR? Why are these people even allowed to be in legendary when they play as bad as emeralds, to the point where we only get 1 pip for utterly destroying them?

Since the matches still take into account MMR, then why couldn’t the matchmaker split the teams fairly when almost all of us were solo queued?

If this happens in ESL then it means that one team clearly outclasses the other.

If matchmaking was working it would never create such an imbalanced matchups, especially in a game where almost everyone was a pug and in the same division. Unless divisions are meaningless…

messiah.1908:

Gewd.8125:

The main reason why mesmer is imbalanced right now is because of this:

Nearly unstoppable and very short cd quickness + stability stomps/resses. This is essentially equivalent to having your opponents waste all their best skills and then healing your team mate for 8000 hp.

The only other class that can do this is rev but they are not as durable and are very susceptible to getting cleaved before they finish.

And the 2nd reason is double 3 second PULSING aoe stun.

Honestly continuum split should never have existed. I don’t know what anet was thinking.

Portal is also a bit imbalanced too, it forces someone to sit at an empty point.

have you tried to play bunker guard with mercy rune or suport rev with those rune ? you will have 30% res speed…. it wont solve a thing as ppl will probably will used those

also i have never encounter much problem with wells as i used my stun break or time my dodges when needed or stability to make the mesmer used his CS and elite skills

also portal just watch the map or ask you team to give you location of enemies to decide if to leave to point

Runes of mercy only add 20% res speed while quickness adds 50%. It is not even close. And you also don’t get quickness stomps. And you lose the ability to use better runes. And you don’t get stability every 10 seconds.

You can stun break out of double gravity well, but then you can’t sit on the point so it is a guarenteed decap. And most mesmers will wait until you are at 50% hp to drop them.

Crinn.7864:

This thread is stupid. There where esl matches even before the bunker meta that had bigger discrepancies in points. Being high level doesn’t remove the possibility of blowouts. Heck real life sports tourneys often have a number of blowouts.

But whatever, I’m honestly convinced that people will complain about their pips regardless of the match. All I ever see on these board is people whining about pips 24/7.

You can see on our team we had 2 necros and 1 engineer, hardly a full bunker team. They didn’t have one either even though my screenshot was too late to catch it.

The main reason why mesmer is imbalanced right now is because of this:

Nearly unstoppable and very short cd quickness + stability stomps/resses. This is essentially equivalent to having your opponents waste all their best skills and then healing your team mate for 8000 hp.

The only other class that can do this is rev but they are not as durable and are very susceptible to getting cleaved before they finish.

And the 2nd reason is double 3 second PULSING aoe stun.

Honestly continuum split should never have existed. I don’t know what anet was thinking.

Portal is also a bit imbalanced too, it forces someone to sit at an empty point.

People told me they are winning more, but I am seeing really bad legendary players now. Probably because they can’t smurf anymore. It is really awful.

Erzian.5218:

Why should you get more than 1 pip in the first place?

Because they were utterly destroyed and in the same division which means they don’t belong there?

Unless it is a full premade against pugs, legendary games should never be this bad and as you can see from the screenshot it is all pugs except the losing team even had a duo queue.

Cynz.9437:

I think gw2 could be esport but if they didn’t neglect pvp so badly after launch where probably majority of pvpers quit. Then we just had fail experiment after fail on pvp system. I am not even going to start on terrible class balance right now. All that extra AOE spam and passives added with HoT made issue so much worse. I played this game for years and even i can’t tell most of the time wth is going on on stream due to visual clutter.

You need playerbase for esports, idk why they don’t understand it.

Well what I am trying to say is that even if Anet didn’t neglect pvp, they would’ve failed anyway because gw2 design emulates WoW which appeals to pvers at the cost of esports.

You can see this by looking at WoW. Even though they are flush with cash and have a huge player base, their esports scene pales in comparison to games like Hearthstone, CS:GO and Dota. Simply having a huge player base is not enough to become an esport.

I want anet to succeed, but at this point I don’t think they will by throwing away so much money on something that is doomed to fail. They wanted WoW’s pve success and Gw1’s pvp success but in the end they will achieve neither one. These problems won’t be solved by simply throwing more money at tournaments and more balance patches.

velmeister.4187:

They said, “The title should unlock once you enter legendary. It’s a bug, and is slated to be fixed in our next release.”

Keyword is “Unlock”. That means you will be able to work on this title “only” after you reach legendary rank aka division 6. You will receive the title once you cross division 6. That means Legendary x1.

Unlocking a title does not mean unlocking a collection/achievement. The achievement was already “unlocked” in the collection sense without reaching legendary so we could only take it to mean that we are supposed to get the title upon hitting legendary.

But why wouldn’t they keep farming stronghold then?

And what is the point of legendary when you can get it while playing like most ambers?

It wasn’t deleted. The forum has a bug where if there are enough posts to hit the 1 page limit, clicking on the link will bring you to the empty 2nd page.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Primordial-Legend-is-not-bugged/5893526

I only got 1 pip for this win.

…short of anet propping it up with millions of dollars down the drain.

The game wasn’t designed for esports and was tacked onto a system trying to emulate WoW. The main design flaw is that there are too many skills.

For example as mesmer you can have 25 skills to press and the other classes have similar amounts.

So what’s wrong with this, you may ask? I can imagine some of you esports buffs scoffing already, but I have watched streams of even ESL players mindlessly spamming skills such as using rev sword 2 on another rev that was in hibernation for 2 seconds (and no he did not use phase traversal).

With this many skills there’s just no way you know the cooldown status of all 20+ of them nor are you making a conscious decision to use the appropriate skill at the appropriate time unless your opponent has the APM of a sloth. You are lying to yourself if you say you do.

Then there is also your dodge bar and you and your enemies’ condition and buff bars. You cannot know exactly when your opponent will be able to dodge because of all the random applications of vigor/weakness and sigils of energy, so you can only hit the skill randomly or hope they won’t double dodge.

And the same thing goes with random aegis/blind/cripple/distortion etc… There’s so much boon/condition spam that you cannot take the time to look at the status bar to see which of the 15 icons the size of an ant are applicable to your situation.

If you look at the 2 dominant esports game types, moba and fps, you will notice that they have very few skills yet are considered to have a high skill ceiling. Even gw1 only had 8. And even though WoW has so many players, its esports scene is relatively dead, yet that is what anet wanted to emulate with gw2.

This is the main reason why gw2 doesn’t have many Twitch viewers. It is a spam fest with people mashing a large amount of skills from different professions.

I do not see gw2 reducing the skillset any time soon as it conflicts with pve design of having a large amount of skills and they would have to re-balance everything.

I am legend now and I have to queue with random lower division players so I don’t have to wait forever for a queue pop.

These games aren’t all blowouts, some of them are quite close and I’ve only gained 1 pip for each win.

There might be people that bought an extra hot account and have a skilled friend to play on it, but not all legends do.

Have you ever needed a few people to fill your guild raid?

Do you want to make a pug that is better than grabbing people off the LFG?

This guild was made for that purpose. Apparently there is guild for this in EU but not NA.

All members are required to have the eternal title and at least 9 insights.

Pm, add me, or post here.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Gewd.8125:

This might not be related, but has anyone seen mesmers magically able to port after their portal disappeared?

That has happened to me twice, but now that I think about it, it might be a clever way to disguise the fact they are telehacking.

Assuming what you’re saying is the portal expired before being opened, for this to happen…

Mesmer Portal still has 30s worth of CD if the portal is laid and never opened. So whatever you’re seeing, it’s highly doubtful its suspicious. You might just have the wrong idea.

What I’m saying is that I won home and the mesmer left a portal there.

I know that it lasts for 30 seconds. So I waited for he portal to visibly disappear before leaving, and as soon as I walk far enough for the mesmer to decap, the mesmer magically appears and there is a portal there.

So either there is a glitch with the portal visibly disappearing when it shouldn’t, or these people were telehacking and casting a portal to make it look like they ported there.

This has happened to me twice.

certificates of support

This might not be related, but has anyone seen mesmers magically able to port after their portal disappeared?

That has happened to me twice, but now that I think about it, it might be a clever way to disguise the fact they are telehacking.

Well you should be glad that gw2 will even let you switch.

They blocked switching entirely before.

The condi removal from the glyphs only remove 2 at a time after a delay. Most of them don’t spec for extra condi removal as it would drop their damage too much.

Necro should be favored 1v1 unless you are viper. Maybe condi revs too.

But yes they die fast from focus too.

Liam McColgan.7689:

Remember for 1 month when everyone cried about the power creep, how mesmers and thieves could 1 shot. How power engi could 1 shot (not literally)?

I remember those days and I can say that even this meta is preferable to the one-shot days. There is nothing fun or skilled about being downed in 2 seconds and having the thief repeatedly stealth away and reset the fight if he screws up.

Unless you are in a tournament I have seen no games time out before 500. People are exaggerating way too much. Revenants melt bunkers and they are hard to kill too.

I had issues with the last division of sapphire too even though I got through ruby quickly.

I believe the problem is because you are being matched with 0 pip ruby players that grinded there and don’t really belong there skill-wise and/or trying to get the profession achievements done on classes they don’t play since they can’t drop down to sapphire.

There are a lot of bad diamonds, that don’t deserve to be therebut solo queing to diamond legit is not that hard.

I would say it corresponds to maybe top 1000 in skill-level when the leaderboards were pure mmr based.

It will take time and you aren’t going to get there with a 90% win rate due to all the mmr tankers and bad matchmaking. But it is certainly possible in a week.

Oh ok guess its time to make an asura rev.

Yeah it was a revenant, how do you do it?

I have standard models enabled but I saw an enemy asura in my ranked game.

Is there a glitch that lets you bypass standard models?

I agree with this. The downed mechanic was supposed to prevent spikewars from gw1 where 1 person called 3-2-1 and everyone on the team pressed their nuke at the same time.

Now it allows people to practically ignore the downed mechanic or to res people forever.

I am not talking about that. I am talking about the part where you said they told you to report MMR tankers for botting or LFG abuse.

And also I am not singling them, there are many MMR tankers out there, or accusing them of anything. I know for a fact that they are MMR tanking and Anet will know for sure if they check.

Do you have a link to the quote?

What’s wrong with name dropping?

I reported one of them about 2 weeks ago and they are still queueing.

How does it make sense to report them for LFG abuse or botting? It doesn’t seem to fit.

How are we supposed to report these people and when do these players ever get banned?

Here are the ones I’ve run into.

khorg.2195
boomcrakpaw.1869

But the matchmaking code can group people with large mmr differences the longer you wait.

The match prediction is the part of the code that determines how many pips you actually win or lose.

I am seeing extremely lopsided games with pip gain/losses that don’t match with the perceived difficulty of the game.

Also the matchmaking prediction score doesn’t make any difference to me. Here you can see it only takes into account the lowest rating of each group. Why isn’t it the average?

1. adjust score by lower-bound rating distance
   distance = abs(team.ratingLow – roster.ratingLow)

Does this mean that a team with 100, 7000, 8000 rating is equivalent to one with 100, 500, 600? It seems horrible but the most plausible explanation for all these bad matchups.

See my thread here.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Questions-about-the-matchmaking-algorithm/first#post5883846

According to the PvP algorithm, MMR is disabled.

I have been reading the algorithm.

People said MMR is used, but then why does “Rating” have a weight of 0? The pseudo code states that the number is multiplied by the weight.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm#Match_Prediction

Also what is the difference between rank and ladder?