Guild Wars 2

Evan Lesh.3295:

brz.1509:

Congrats! In general I’m really excited about these changes and I hope it’ll lessen the need for a separate solo Q (the thing I really want). That said…

Gaile Gray.6029:

While we’ll be using divisions to match you against your immediate opponents, we’ll still use your MMR to place you on teams with similarly skilled players (from your division point range) to help ensure that you’re not forced to play with individuals that are of a much higher or lower skill than you.

If match prediction is based on division/pip count within a division, this is going to create situations where low MMR players end up with extraordinarily long loss streaks based on the fact that the bad players in a match will end up on one team. This is especially true at the start of each division and it’ll be exacerbated in times of low player population.

This can be mitigated if match prediction uses MMR to prevent low MMR players from losing pips when facing a much better team. From the sounds of the above descriptions match prediction may be using division + pip counts instead, which would be a mistake.

You bring up very good points. And the answer is two-fold:

Low MMR players losing more often is the same high MMR players winning more often. This will help the ladder better represent skill.

Because of how matchmaking is changing, the prediction can now use MMR instead of ladder position. This will create a more accurate prediction, and is actually required for players to distribute properly over the season.

Thanks for the reply! It’s true that low MMR players lose more, but it’s important that losing MMR is the result of losing many matches and not the cause. Ultimately a players true MMR cannot be determined if they can’t be placed in enough evenly-matched games.

I’m glad to hear that MMR can be used for win prediction, it sounds like season 2 will strictly be an improvement over season 1

Congrats! In general I’m really excited about these changes and I hope it’ll lessen the need for a separate solo Q (the thing I really want). That said…

Gaile Gray.6029:

While we’ll be using divisions to match you against your immediate opponents, we’ll still use your MMR to place you on teams with similarly skilled players (from your division point range) to help ensure that you’re not forced to play with individuals that are of a much higher or lower skill than you.

If match prediction is based on division/pip count within a division, this is going to create situations where low MMR players end up with extraordinarily long loss streaks based on the fact that the bad players in a match will end up on one team. This is especially true at the start of each division and it’ll be exacerbated in times of low player population.

This can be mitigated if match prediction uses MMR to prevent low MMR players from losing pips when facing a much better team. From the sounds of the above descriptions match prediction may be using division + pip counts instead, which would be a mistake.

Tried this again today, the achievements are still bugged. The pacing in the story is slow enough that it’s really frustrating to have to do this twice on a single character.

Most of the new events and meta events are ton of fun when I can find an organized map of people who actually want to achieve the highest tier of success. It’s a great blend of individual contributions to the smaller events an overall co-ordination as a community when all the events on a map succeed and we get tier4 rewards.

That said… I haven’t ‘naturally’ landed on a map that was able to successfully complete a meta event since the expansion was released. I’ve had to resort to using the LFG tool every time I want to participate in a map’s meta event. The LFG tool is by no means well suited to this purpose. Once a group of 5 fills up the LFG posting disappears, so filling up a map requires a ton of people taxiing at once. Furthermore, there’s no way for me to know when browsing the tool how full the map actually is, whether it’s being organized by a particular guild, or what most of the players on the map are actually trying to achieve.

The game already has a tool that does a pretty decent job of this: custom pvp arenas let the host put up a name/description, and tell us how many players are in there. Why not have a similar UI for finding an instance of a map to play on? This would go a really long way in transforming the game from what often feels like a ghost town into something with a stronger sense of community by giving players more choice about what content they want to play (and finding others with similar goals) as well as greatly reducing the frustration a lot of players feel (seriously, read map chat during most meta events) at players who aren’t as committed to succeeding in the event.

To build on this idea, it would be fantastic if guilds or even just players could spin up their own private instance, taxi in their own guild members/friends to seed the population, and then open it up to the public. I can imagine a lot of people would be willing to pay some small amount (1-2 gold) to spin up their own map for an event, which will then also benefit all the other players who join after it gets made public.

The long waits associated with finding a decent map for meta events are the biggest factor limiting my enjoyment of the game right now. The content itself is fantastic when it’s playable but sadly it’s often not. I’m really hopeful that something like this can be implemented to reduce the long wait between logging in and actually playing enjoyable content.

Kravick.4906:

Getting one shot isn’t challenging. Especially if there aren’t any dodge queues to avoid said hit, like on Legendary Wyvern in VB. When it does the fly by attacks that leave the acid on the ground, if you get hit by the fly by, you instantly go down, then die from the acid. No chance to even recover. The fly by has no tell, no marker, nothing. It just happens, and you have to be lucky it doesn’t target you, otherwise to bad, so sad, dead.

You can jump off the platform and glide around it during this phase to avoid the acid/fire entirely.

If you don’t have updraft yet just stay near the middle, keep moving, and dodge once you see the line of acid start on one edge of the platform. You’ll have time to dodge it, it moves across the platform in a line, it’s not instant.

I absolutely agree with the OP.

As breakbars are currently implemented, CC skills (soft or hard) may as well not have individual effects – they all do the same thing. There’s really no difference between a chill, a daze, or icebow #5 against champs with breakbars in PvE.

The slow regeneration speed of the breakbars I encountered this weekend also means that breakbars did not encourage co-ordination during a champ fight. Even if the group somehow managed to interrupt a large attack by breaking it at the right time (unlikely with everyone spamming CCs), the loooong regeneration time during which the boss was immune to all CC and interrupts meant that learning big attacks and interrupting them simply was not a relevant or useful tactic.

I see a lot of promise in the mechanic. I think fights would be really interesting if breakbars regenerated faster both before & after breaking – thus requiring more coordination to remove them and rewarding groups for understanding the fight and saving interrupts for crucial moments rather than spamming CCs as soon as the breakbar is up. I really hope these see more tuning before the next beta event.

It’d be great to see some different effects that really change the dynamic of a boss fight when the bar is down. Even something as simple as causing the boss to go into a frenzy where it has vuln but also hits harder would introduce more of a tradeoff with the mechanic than the current ‘spam all your CCs now, then forget you have them on your bar’ approach.

Really excited about the potential for this!