Guild Wars 2

I always wondered why it wasn’t set up so that story mode rewarded tokens (to all members) if and only if the dungeon starter had not previously completed it.

This would make it easier to find a group for new players, but experienced players would not be able to consistently take advantage of it (sure they would once per alt, or once if they haven’t previously done it).

It would also make the experienced players a bit more supportive of the new one: if the new one leaves, then the group disbands due to the dungeon owner feature. Knowing this, experienced players who don’t want to be patient with newplayers, would be less likely to join the new player than those who really want to help.

Story modes are currently frequently much more difficult than explorables because average dungeon experience within the group is usually much lower. This makes them a very different experience from explorable dungeons, and not in a starter experience sort of way. Giving rewards to those helping first timers would improve both the starter experience aspect of story mode, as well as increasing the options in terms of dungeons to run for experienced runners who are willing to help out a player who might lack experience.

Cirus.5748:

To keep it fresher and more interesting with the match ups, 1 solution I can suggest is a European football division style system. The winner of a tier gets promoted to the next one up, the loser gets demoted a tier, and the mid table one stays where they are.

Please, this.

There are only 24 or 27 servers, so a complex rating scheme (Glicko) gets in the way more than it decides good matches. If you get stuck in the loser slot for extended periods of time it becomes extremely demoralizing to the server, fewer people play, and its hard to recover from that (even without server transfers, people ragequit WvW or GW2 under such conditions).

Using this system would keep the match-ups fresh, with all new opponents (except top and bottom tier) each week. This allows developing tactical ideas to flow through the entire system, as well as preventing servers from relying too heavily on tactics against a specific server culture.

Switching to this system also has the advantage that the current ordinals can be kept, preventing the anger associated with a complete reset (by what seems to be many here). If changes in population mean that the ordinals should change significantly, this will happen fairly quickly.

The only disadvantage of a simple win/loss ordinal system is that it doesn’t recognize the difference between edging out an opponent and a complete blowout. While this theoretically may discourage people from participating late in the week if the outcome is obvious, that’s already to some degree the case (with the added feature that it can be discouraging to the following match as well if the teams stay the same). This is also somewhat mitigated against by the three server aspect: even if one server is dominated or dominant and eases up a bit, the other two servers may still have something to fight for. The possibility of a last minute victory also has much more significance; while the high stakes of this may seem a bad thing, it doesn’t happen in isolation — its the result of the entire week long battle.

Edit:
Accurate ratings are good for determining how players who have not previously competed should likely fare against each other (in systems with a large pool of players, like um, maybe spvp); they are not very useful in a small pool where direct competition to determine ranking is easier to perform, and where stagnation of rankings further leads to inaccurate computation of ratings.