Guild Wars 2

I’ve been a software manager (I am an older guy). And the PvP side of this game has all the hallmarks that ArenaNet upper management made a decision to really limit the effort/investment on the PvP side of this game. (I.e. the Spirit map bug on rezzing, the limited scope of the PvP improvements and balance).

That puts the PvP developers and testers in a really tough position. No matter what they are able to do in their limited time, they will be yelled at by angry PvP community members. When you look at how many FTE (fulltime equivalent employees) assigned to PvP development, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have just two FTEs… and a 1/2 FTE manager/designer.

The big thing must be that this game will make most of its money from the Black Lion Trading company and a PvE focus.

I like it.

Solo is PURE solo. No duos.

If you keep TWO opponents busy somewhere, that means your other team members can fight 4 against 3 and win on another point and cap it.

But if you fight one on one, there is no net advantage and you are wasting time unless you are trying to take a point and you are pretty sure you can kill him and cap the point.

Don’t start one-on one fights in the middle of nowhere. That’s called “fighting on the road”, and is useless.

You paid $60 bucks and you got up to two YEARS of the game so far, and there is no subscription fee.

Yet some of you have the entitlement attitude to complain about the PvP upgrade.

For which you have paid exactly ZERO dollars.

Just keep that in mind. You’ll feel better.

So I made this graphic of a “GW2 slot machine”. It illustrates that the matchmaker will quickly throw together a match between two teams who have wildly different playing skill.

As expected, the higher skill team usually wins, and the lower skill team typically loses.

Why a slot machine? Because it is RANDOM as to how close the teams will match, on skill. The matchmaker does not try to make the match close in skill; it mainly wants to just move all the better players up and out of the division.

Yet Helseth presents my slot machine picture, “Now I want you to look at this. Look at this! This is the noobiest thing ever. This is the noobiest thing I have ever seen!”, he shouts.

Because to him, it’s fine to have unequal matchups, you just have to carry your team. And if you cannot carry then you are trash.

Really?

I watched his video and I did learn some things, and I did implement them using my scrapper. And it helped some, but not enough to make my teammates rotate better or win their fights when I was not there with my Scrapper.

I would stare at the score 2 minutes into the game and other than myself and one other person, my team would have 0 points, while the other team was a list of 80 and 100 points for every player.

There is a limit to how much you can carry.

I really want to watch his next, expanded video he promised, to learn more about carrying.

But there seems to be a limit to what you can carry.

Pull the handle…

Yes, it would be interesting to see when you jump into the base before the match:

Your team is the underdog and is calculated to have a 14% chance of winning this match.

If you win, your MMRs will be increased by 19% !!

If you lose, your MMRs will be lowered by 1.5%

Good luck and have fun! The match begins in 00:45."

Playing solo in ranked matches, I feel so much better when I remember that I cannot do it alone and if we win a match, the team won, not me. And if there’s a loss, the team lost, not me.

I know how I did. Sometimes the team wins but I know I screwed up, in spite of the win. Sometimes the team wins and I can see that I contributed really well. But essentially it’s up to me to know how I did and be honest about it.

Any win or loss is 80% not me. It’s a thing outside myself, for the most part. I just look at how I did on the fights, what decisions I made, did they turn out to be good, that sort of thing. That’s what I can control.

Also, as a solo player, once I realized there’s so much variation in the four people who are assigned with me on a team, that there’s no way I can climb up the ladder. So when I quit worrying about pips, I just start enjoying how well I played on the individual skirmish fights within a match. It’s a lot more relaxing that way. I really don’t care that much about the win, because its not me anyway, it’s the team.

That takes so much of the stress away.

I worked in corporate America for more than a decade. I have mingled among top management and I see how a corporation works and what drives it.

Look, ArenaNet sells a product to gamers, but I strongly suspect it is no longer driven by people passionate about online gaming. Especially not PvP gaming.

Rather, I imagine the marketing and finance people have taken over the show.

Heart of Thorns has all the signs of being driven by the Marketing Department serving the goals of the Finance Department.

People here are mostly young, and probably not many have actually worked at a corporation at a high level. So they do not realize what they are really dealing with. I note their honest calls for ArenaNet to listen to them, thinking that ArenaNet management is actually worried that the PvP balance is out of whack.

I do not think ArenaNet management is even thinking that much about PvP. GW2 now is, at its heart, a PvE MMO. That is what it is.

You think the ESports push is all that much money to them? It’s a gamble, they gave it a try. Throw something at the wall and see if it sticks.

When it fails, they will totally walk away from PvP. I believe that.

And they won’t see it as some big tragedy.

They live in another world than PvP gamers. I think the PvP gamers in management have all left ArenaNet, for the most part.

Who is left? What power (Read: budget) are they given?

No subscription, Robert. No subscription fee. You pay nothing per month. And you still get new content constantly.

Josh Davis.6015:

Can confirm, Justin is awesome.

-Guy who sits next to him.

I can see from Justin’s comments that he values honesty and examining the facts objectively, based on evidence.

I suspect this attitude has earned him the respect of the team during internal discussions about what actions to take.

I have seen him admit he is wrong when he makes a mistake. That always earns my respect.

I like that he uses evidence-based thinking, rather than falling into emotional arguments…unlike so many posters on this forum.

Given the different levels of difficulty the matcher throws at different players trying for pips, what are they worth really? I mean, speaking honestly. What are they really worth if you got many easy wins?

Just had a Ranked match in Forest of Nifelel.

Before it starts, I say to my team

“Let’s not take the beast in the beginning, take MID instead.”

After an exchange, a ranger replies: “BEAST WINS MOST MATCHES NUMBSKULL”

Can someone please explain why you would want to start with the beast rather than mid?

Sarrs.4831:

On the one hand, yes, matchmaking will occasionally give you a bad team and in reality you have almost no chance of winning.

But on the other hand, the only constant in your games is you. If you are repeatedly losing and repeatedly not performing well, you can’t really blame your team.

That’s what most new players think. That they control their destiny. And on a solid team in a fair matchup, that is usually true.

But look, when all your team mates are dying in seconds, or are off standing in corners, it’s not you.

Trust me.

Justin ODell.9517:

Rising Dusk.2408:

Justin ODell.9517:

Hey…. you had a 5% chance of winning. Don’t blame me if you couldn’t pull it off.

Any game where a team has a less than 30% chance of winning shouldn’t even be allowed to happen. I get that all of the other details of matchmaking are important, but match-ups like that are really the ones that result in the worst play experiences.

I literally just had one myself, so yeah, I feel you BLU.

I also agree, but I also have to balance it with queue times. In all likelihood, the other team probably spent around 6-8 minutes in the queue before it would even begin to consider making a match like that.

I am tracking these sort of matches, and am working to figure out exactly what we can do to improve the situation w/o bloating queue times to absurd levels.

This calls for handicapping to make the match interesting. Start the score ticking at 300 for the team with a mere 5% chance of winning

The other team can boast if they still win.

I think killing mobs in PvE is designed to create the fantasy that you are very powerful. People forget that in balanced PvP they are playing against real humans who are often much more skilled and knowledgeable.

It’s unfortunate that with so many classes and variety of builds, there are only a handful that are good enough for tPvP.

Is this a consequence of conquest mode? Would other builds be viable if there were different kinds of play?

Maybe they wasted their time coming up with too much variety, 90% of it being useless for PvP.

hotcarl.8621:

Yeah I’ve been dominating today and yesterday.. So far I’ve won 5/5 today in solo Q. Most of those games were against other pugs though.

You mean your 4 other team members, and you, have been dominating.

We talk about people’s MMR.

I think you can only capture a range of what it might be, with the middle the highest confidence. YES, there is the R number that captures uncertainty.

With more games the range supposedly gets less fuzzy and more like a solid line at the middle.

I don’t think that can really happen accurately in the current system. Why? Because of the current low player population and the need to put matches together in a reasonable wait time.

Not to mention at the developers conference this week ANet said they were “well aware that there are some frustrating matchups” and they hope to do something to alleviate that in Season 3.

As usual, the truth lies somewhere between the extremes of “everything is fine, it’s you that sucks” and “I am fine, it’s the matchmaking that sucks”.

It HAS to be win percentage against teams of similar average PvP rank, just like the TeamQ leaderboards.

The very fact that someone is seriously asking if it will be based on kill pts worries me.

I am happy ArenaNet is mixing up the SoloQ teams so that higher-skilled players are no longer grouped together against low teams.

But now many of these higher-MMR players are complaining that this is just not as enjoyable as being on an “elite” team, winning the majority of your matches, and becoming “famous” on a leaderboard for everyone to notice you as well.

So, they are complaining and many will probably leave. Many have already left to play some other game.

What they should do is make a team and play Team Queue. That is what it is there for: serious, team-based players.

SoloQ is becoming more a set of lower-ranked, casual, less knowledgable players. There is less sophistication in strategy, less teamwork, and more hot-join-like chaos.

But that is the population that is available right now.

Sure Glicko2 is wonderful for accurately rating a chess player, and in other single person games.

And it can work for teams of random players if there is a sufficiently large number of people queuing for teams at all times, as in League of Legends.

But in GW2 at the moment, we have a very small pool of players, with skill ability skewed towards low level.

I just don’t see how Glicko2 can accurately judge your ability to win by assigning you to teams from a small pool of available players, many of whom are less skilled.

One very high MMR may mathematically balance 4 low MMRS…but that does not translate to an equivalent team "win probability " in SoloQ. It’s probably not a linear scale, but rather is a “discrete step function” on skill level. Meaning, sometimes a low MMR player cannot really contribute ANYTHING…but the math assumes they contribute a bit less than 1/5 of the win capability of the team.

Also, class types in a team are important for winning a match, but they are random for matches you are expected to win… to keep or raise your MMR rating.

There may be so much “noise” in the system that the true rating will not emerge for thousands of matches of the same set of people. New players introduce new “noise” in the data, skewing it, and keep the ratings inaccurate much longer still, I suspect.

Thoughts?

So, then, it’s a yes. They will eventually be matched with whomever is in the Q at the moment, regardless of MMR, and league rank. Preference will be be to first create close matches, but as before, in a small Q population the matcher eventually gives up and just throws the lambs to the lions.

I, too, would enjoy a “blank track”. I spend too much time cleaning up bag space.

“You don’t take a high school basketball team and make them face the Knicks (and then subsequently reward the Knicks for winning (lol)! " —- ArrDee Frand

+1000

Boy is that ever true.

I was just placed on two losing teams as my first two matches. I am scared that I will plummet to the dreaded GLicko2 basement with players who do not try or don’t know how to play.

knkasa.2608:

These lists are very basics that it sounds more like “most common mistakes made by hotjoin heros”. Instead, make another thread to list things you can do to help carry the team as a solo player, for example.

The only way you can carry a bad team is by RAPIDLY killing opponents, VERY fast, and constantly, so they are always off the battlefield rezzing. That takes the right build and a lot of skill. It is very hard to do and won’t save the game for many of the bad PUGs anyway.

Some of those “Level 1”s could easily be rerolls on a second account. And the actual player would be much higher.

What spec relies the most on misdirection and mental confusion to win?

That’s what I want. A sword power spec is always “out front” juking and dodging like a melee fighter. I want something that only the mesmer can do.

What spec/strategy would that be?

They could make a slot machine screen where you “pull the handle” to join the queue.

Then you’ll see two rows of five spinning wheels. Whee!!

They settle, and you see the MMR of each person and their class, and the expected win.

BINGO!!!

You get a pip or lose a pip.

Nocta.5274:

It’s REALLY silly that going up in divisions basically requires win streaks when the GAME itself tries to keep you from getting them.

Ain’t THAT the truth.

With good matchmaking, you essentially slow to a tiny crawl. Win 2, lose 1, win 1, lose 3, win 2…

“Hey guys, look! I played for a week, every day, and I have 1 more pip than I had a week ago!”

MAYBE only award kill points to the person who landed the most damage on the player who was killed.

It’s probably a lot harder to prevent zerging than we think, since it is easiest to gather points simply by hanging at the edges of a big powerful group, just soaking up the skirmish kill points.

If you award a huge bonus for the win, then when you are on an unbalanced team, losing side, you get nothing even though it was not your fault that the team you were assigned to sucked.

Justin,

I think you and the team have done the very best you could, with the situation you all are faced with. I am a supporter! And I had high hopes. Yet, in playing and thinking about it, I now see the issues and so I posted them for discussion.

I’m just suspecting that ArenaNet is not anything near the company it was a year ago. People have left and new, perhaps inexperienced people have come in with new agendas.

Ultimately the manegement want to make as much money as they can till the game fizzles out because it is at the end of its life cycle as an MMO. I suspect heart of thorns may likely be the last expansion and is kind of an end stage play at ArenaNet.

How does a MM necro win without minions (since the ele killed them all)?

Ponidus,

There is a HUGE amount of noise in the data.

Yes, Team A won. But why?

There is the mix of classes in the match, and it matters how they work to effect a win, or a loss. Class interactions matter.

There are decisions made by each team member that affect the win or loss. Some can be disastrous based on the situation when it was made.

Yet the MMR is adjusted after a single match. A single case. A single data point.

If you had the matched teams play each other 20 matches in a row, you would not get the same number of wins per team! Each player has a “range of skill” and they do not always play their best. In one set of 20 games Team A might win 15. And another series with the same players, Team A might win 10.

That’s a reason why the World Series is seven games; not one.

Yet the MMRs are all adjusted based on ONE match of the two teams.

So, just as in a double blind controlled case study, you need LOTS of data points. n=100,000 is good. n=10 is useless. Because of the confounding variables and the noise that you need to sift out over many, many cases (i.e. matches).

The actual Accurate MMR values will not emerge from game data very quickly. And I think that is the MMR problem.

There is a low PvP population, and they need to throw together matches in a few minutes. They get bad data from such matches about individual player skill. And then they use that bad data to generate MMR adjustments.

Playing solo, doesn’t it feel like you are basically pulling a slot machine handle?

Do you feel like when your team loses, you could not have prevented it?

Do you feel like when your team wins, it was not primarily due to your personal skill?

Does it feel like you have the most impact on the team’s performance?

Or not?

I think the basic Mesmer issue may be that the fundamental abilities of the class allow very high-skilled players to wreck everybody, so the class has been nerfed. For a long, long time now.

Average-skilled players cannot be competitive with it now. High-skilled players can barely bring it up to average performance.

If the developers un-nerf it even a little bit, the top players “just take off with it” and are too powerful.

Surely there is some way to redesign it such that it’s power scales up more linearly with player skill. And not exponentially, as I think happens.

Well at least they have a LADDER CUTOFF in the matching. Thank goodness.

Please keep the Sapphires+ out of the Amber pool.

fadeaeway,

Right now you can announce before the game that when you need help, you will “ping” the minimap, causing a flashing red circle. (Just shift click on the minimap. See more things you can do in the minimap above in my earlier link post.)

Fay,

Thank you. I was honestly asking, not daring people to find what I missed.

So, the plot thickens as to how much skill and how much luck is involved in the leagues.

I do love the idea of profession ratings.

I think the lesson here is the HIGH cost to player morale of the average player, of resetting MMRs. Top players just romp and stomp.

That new ranking is paid for with a LOT of unhappiness, for hours and hours.

Isn’t GasmaskTheSuffocating a warrior? He’s the top player on the new leaderboards.

Naseria.5130:

You need to learn how to play.

Not all that helpful. Direct him WHY he is not killing. Ask him some questions.

I am guessing the original developers of the combat system moved on to better things and the people who came after were just not of the same talent.

Teutos.8620:

Laserbolt.6731:

How many games will it take to progress through emerald at a 51% win rate (20 pips)?

51% win rate = 51 wins and 49 losses in 100 games = +2 pips per 100 games or +1 pip per 50 games.

To gain 20 pips you need to play (50*20) = 1000 games.

1 game takes about 10 minutes (between 8 and 15, can’t really be accurate here, I would get 12 on average, but let’s just take the more favorable 10 minutes) + 5 minutes queue time = 15 minutes per game / 4 games per hour.

To achieve the 1000 games, you need to play 250 hours.
(If you every day the whole season, you need to play more than 4 hours every day to climb with a 51% win rate through emerald.)

But you need to take streaks of wins and losses into account. That is what really happens, and we can’t ignore that just to make the calculation easier. Because then we’ll get a wrong answer.

Your analysis (which is how I first approached it as well) assumes no uneven streaks. But we know those happen based on who is in the queue during your several hours of gaming. You can win 7 and then lose 6, that’s 13 games right there to get one pip. Or you can lose TWO pips. It is complex.

If they let you queue from anywhere, you should automatically be yanked from whatever you are doing and put right into the match you queued up for.

Otherwise, it’ll create 4×5s or longer Q times waiting for people to “just finish up real quick this thing I am doing”.

SaintSnow.6593:

Keep your combat log up primarily. It’s much more useful than chat which could derail at anytime.

I’d watch the chat. Only ignore it if it is trash talk. Otherwise, you can miss key information.

Look it’s a team game. End of story. It doesn’t work to reward people to solo, like they’re fighting mobs. We saw that in solo q 2 years ago.