Guild Wars 2

I’ve read through the new matchmaking algorithm and with the new weighting toward balancing professions across teams, I can definitely see where this is coming from. If the algorithm works to match up professions, players swapping out will throw a wrench into what it’s come up with, devaluing the matchups it creates.

As it is, though, players swapping classes is primarily a way that they compensate for the failings of the matchmaking algorithm. By removing that option, you’re essentially asking us to take it on faith that the matchmaking algorithm is going to spit out reasonable matches. If the community really trusted that to be the case, I think this would be much less controversial. That trust won’t happen until we see the new matchmaking algorithm actually and consistently producing good matches, and we haven’t really had time to see that yet.

Profession-specific MMR is a good thing, though. There’s not much to argue with on that count. Better matchmaking also means more accurate MMR scores, which in turn means even better matchmaking.

I’m not completely sold on the algorithm as it is, though, assuming the wiki article is an accurate representation of the code. For example, why isn’t there a second pass? Once you have ten participants selected, why not double check that your teams are the best matched they could be across those ten participants? A simple rating of each team based on MMR and profession diversity, then a quick check to see if there’s any way to shuffle those ten players around to better equalize the teams’ scores. It’s strange to me that there’s nothing there to check the chaos theory.

Either way, unless you’ve got the metrics, testing, and/or the overall player exposure to demonstrate that the algorithm does what it hopes to, I don’t know how much sense it makes to take away the safeguard that is class switching. But if the algorithm really does work, there are a lot of excellent benefits to doing so.