Guild Wars 2

With the current anomaly events going on in PvE-land, I feel like it is a tease and am getting optimistic that open-world PvP is going to be a thing in this game.

dragonrage.8921:

Well to be honest Tonics do not have any good place in wvw it wouldn’t kill anything if they were completely disabled in the wvw maps, besides a few trolls and people trying a little too hard to win.

Tonics have a MORALE place in wvw and it would kill FUN if they all were completely disabled. It would kill Jellyfish Zergs that I’ve seen some guilds do. The suggestion to disable all tonics simply because of one particular tonic and type of player is awful.

And yet as we saw in sPvP when they removed the bunker…

The short answer to your question is yes. It is sPvP Season 1 bunker meta. Ironic that the name of the team who quit a pro match because of the meta was called Zero Counterplay.

Radioactive.1248:

jamesdolla.3954:

Radioactive.1248:

Signet of inspiration is a crime against humanity.

seen you guys using it on stream last week m8. What’s up with that?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA4XE9XaCH8

Desperate times call for desperate measures my furend.

Corrected that for you… Wouldn’t want your meme crown to tilt.

Aury.1367:

Now:
You are either on a filled blobserver who is fighting a medium Tier server linked with 2 other servers, while one of those 3 servers got an imense rate of people transfering to it. Or you are on one of those 3 servers which have constant queues 60+ on each border. Are you from a lower Tier and liked the non exsistant queues and small scaled fights? Well to bad, come back in 2 hours and be sure not to miss your queue. And if youre on a medium sized server, you might just get 2 lower tier servers to steamroll everything.

It wasnt balanced before if you look at the whole thing. But inside the tiers you almost had balance. The linking caused just chaos.

There are two factors in my mind that contributed to the creation of what we have now.

1) The current bunker meta from HoT stats and gear
2) The former “tier culture” you talk about, or rather certain WvW playstyles that existed by tier, was essentially destroyed by certain bandwagonning moments that happened a year or so ago. Players had to adapt to what essentially was originally a T1 massive blob PPT heavy playstyle. They adapted by either fairweathering or leaving a server gutted.

Server links kind of replicate the effect of #2 because it mixes up players who formerly separated themselves by tier for playstyle on purpose, but I would also argue that #2 already started fostering a kind of WvW playstyle that was not distinguishable by tiers.

Another factor that I think plays into it is the declining number of players willing to lead: both for pugmanders and separate guilds. Or it is the increasing number of players unwilling to form small raiding parties on a consistent basis. You can see it whenever someone posts here about how they log into a map, see outnumbered buff and no tag, so they log out.

fishball.7204:

Players don’t adhere to a fixed weekly participation, it is not something that you can analyze by simply looking at play hours.

Some weeks I might play 40 hours of WvW other weeks I play like 0. I’m not alone in this regard and would make balancing a nightmare.

Also just because I play a 4 hour stretch of WvW (due to the commander giving me fights) on Shard A doesn’t mean I’ll play 4 hours if the next link gives me a PPT Mander who I have 0 interest in following on Shard B.

That’s what an average is for.

Positioning is king.

X T D.6458:

The bad side of this is mainly public perception. Some people will start expecting this kind of intervention from anet, some will start their own conspiracy theories as to why X server was bumped up or down.

Nope. That’s part of it but not the meat filling.

The bad side is that it rewards stacking behavior. Just stack a server so it starts winning a match by a landslide and Anet will manually intervene regardless of whether players on that server want it or not.

Yes, I find it extremely ironic I posted four hours before McKenna on Snowreap’s thread sarcastically suggesting a glicko adjustment for NSP and here we are with exactly that.

IMHO there shouldn’t be a need to manually adjust. If manual interventions are felt to be needed, then it points to the implementation of Glicko needing adjustment. I’d also review the randomization roll.

@Leaa

That’s an argument for taking team formation out of player hands.

Simple. Just get some people to post here asking for NSP to get glicko adjusted.

X T D.6458:

That idea from Tyler, which he only brought up for discussion was to gauge reaction and feedback because it wasn’t actually something they were working on, it was basically to create some extra worlds specifically designed for smaller amounts of players in the same server system model that currently exists. It has no similarity whatsoever to battlegroups, at least not how some people are describing it.

It is possible that one of the options they discussed was to change the server structure to differentiate between tiers and servers. Meaning smaller tiers would have a smaller population cap, highest tier with the maxed population cap, etc. Instead of each server basically being the same. Who knows.

Yes, it was a post to gauge interest. See my emboldened part.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Hypothetically-Speaking-New-Worlds/first#post6173458

“The ultimate goal of this hypothetical plan would be two-fold:
1) Give players/guilds that are too big for their ‘Full’ status world an opportunity to move to new worlds, enabling them to grow more easily again.
2) Achieve a larger number of smaller worlds that we can link together to achieve more balanced numbers for each team.”

Do you see the assumption that a larger number of smaller worlds would help Anet achieve more balanced numbers for each team? The only reason I’m associating the idea of more smaller shards with Battlegroups is exactly because of the smaller size. A battlegroup was described as being limited to 1000 players. How many players do you think one of those smaller shards would have been capped at? This is what I mean by how the battlegroup idea seems to have been “filtered” into that smaller shard proposal.

Both also have the feature of being player-formed. Guilds would theoretically xfer to get all their players into the same shard. The message I take away from the idea of a 1000-player capped battlegroup and a smaller shard is how it makes achieving balanced teams easier than the large chunks we have now.

SkyShroud.2865:

How are you gonna measure that kind of ad-hoc participation to the point that is relatively equal size?

How can they not? The game generates massive amounts of data. I realize this gets speculative here now since we don’t have view into the actual code, but consider that reward tracks are literally based on measuring individual participation as is shard population status. Why would an individual’s average weekly participation amount not be known?

Do you remember TylerB posting here asking what players thought about if Anet were to open smaller shards so that they had smaller chunks sets of players to do world-linking with? Basically the idea was that smaller shards are far easier to link into teams of relatively equal size than the large blocks we have currently. I can only surmise that’s the Battlegroup idea filtering through.

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

snip

You are asking the structure of the game mode to be changed, however, that doesn’t means the fundamental of the game is changed. Fundamental involved the type of population the game has, this game is filled with casuals and driven by casuals. Even then, there will be casuals not wanting to be placed randomly, there will be casuals wanting to have a choice, there will be casuals not wanting to be playing in multiple servers, so and so.

To forcefully change the fundamental of the game design, is to tell majority of players to get lost.

And how exactly would a more league-controlled team formation process exclude casuals? sPvP team formation right now is casual. Casuals by their definition play for fun, not for team-formation rules.

Comparing spvp, a 10-15 minutes match and only 5 person against wvw, a week long match and more than hundreds of people, really?

Yes. Really. This exercise is called “thinking outside the box”, not allowing a thought process to be constrained by barriers we automatically throw up. Why would you constrain changing team-formation rules because of match-length? That’s silly if we are imagining a WvW that is broken into “seasons”: world-linking already introduced 2-month long “seasonal” teams. That’s far different from the original “always” design of server-based teams.

What if players were automatically added to a team based on their individual participation levels rather than the shards ? Or what if there were a guild-based WvW team UI like what was created for sPvP as a means to “sign-up” to get placed on a team in order for guild teams to be able to play together? And these teams would change every month or so like what is done now? Success is measured by how well the system fosters fun and competitive matches, yes even casuals are attracted to fun. And what creates a fun and competitive match in WvW? Teams of relatively equal size and skill at any one time.

Gunner Morton.8340:

Almost nobody is using repair hammers yet the result is 50 / 50? Its either rigged or PvE players are voting on kitten they have no knowledge of, skewing the result in the process.

It’s WvW players reacting in a fearful way to anything related with the word “siege”.

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

snip

You are asking the structure of the game mode to be changed, however, that doesn’t means the fundamental of the game is changed. Fundamental involved the type of population the game has, this game is filled with casuals and driven by casuals. Even then, there will be casuals not wanting to be placed randomly, there will be casuals wanting to have a choice, there will be casuals not wanting to be playing in multiple servers, so and so.

To forcefully change the fundamental of the game design, is to tell majority of players to get lost.

And how exactly would a more league-controlled team formation process exclude casuals? sPvP team formation right now is casual. Casuals by their definition play for fun, not for team-formation rules.

I’m honestly impressed that people will find something to complain about with this change. It’s a great change and one that has been needed for a long long long long long long time, especially after megaservers destroyed “server community”.

Next, I suppose, it is Anet’s fault that scouts don’t include numbers in their callouts.

I’ve had this related to transforms such as necro Lich form or getting Moa’d. Sometimes when the transform ends the Moa or Lich is still rendered on your screen and your character’s model never loads. Then you waypoint you get hit with a long loading time. The only fix I have found to clear whatever the game is doing is to change maps.

I, for one, am looking forward to a Legendary Jar of Harpy Pheromones.

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Question still remains, how are people gonna deter others from bandwagon to maintain a healthy game mode

Professional sports leagues use a draft system.

I’ve bold the key word.

What’s the point we’re supposed to take-away from your emboldening? WvW is not a pro league, but how does that matter? It is widely recognized that WvW players have differing levels of skill. Not all professional sports players are of the same skill level either. Professional leagues use several mechanisms to prevent teams with deep pockets from stacking the team. WvW has no such mechanisms when perhaps it should as a deterrant to maintain a healthy game mode.

Clearly, your idea of professional is in term of level of skills. However, my idea of professional is in literally professional. Professional is not a term to define your skill level but is way more than that. WvW players do not play WvW to reach professional stage (there’s nothing professional about wvw anyway). Just like dota, do everyone play professional? Nope. Trying to implement something that is only acceptable in professional context is…..

PS: I did play live tournaments before, not just typical online league which people are doing nowadays.

If it helps you, then remove the word “professional”. Recreational kids sports leagues where I live ignore coach and friend requests so that the league can form teams where skill is spread across all teams and the season ends up being fun and competitive rather than one team stomping everyone else.

Players cry here on this forum for fun and competitive WvW matches, but they also bandwagon. Can’t have the cake and eat it too.

Still, the point stand, you can’t force a professional level concept into a casual game like this filled with casual players.

So, again, how are you gonna deal with bandwagon?

What do you mean again? I wasn’t trying to force a professional level concept into a casual game. That’s your reading of what I wrote while you outright ignored my recreational league example as clarification.

Sports leagues utilize several different mechanisms to prevent team stacking. All I’m suggesting is that real world paradigms exist as potential solutions to be modeled in-game.

Sigh, seriously…. Changing the word doesn’t magically make the concept any more acceptable. It is like super rich pours expensive wine into a diamond cup, but you want to pour expensive wine into a paper cup. It doesn’t make the expensive wine any less expensive.

Or even a better comparison, pouring hot water into a ceramics cup is ok but you want to pour hot water into a plastic water bottle (that you drink cola from), it just gonna deform the plastic water bottle.

Are all you interested in is arguing semantics of a single word on a tangent or discussing solutions to team imbalances such as my suggestion about real world paradigms from sports leagues? I’m going to assume you have no opinion on modeling solutions.

I am literally saying what works for one thing doesn’t mean it will work for another.

Why would some of them not work? It is very easy to make a broad generalized statement without discussing the merits or demerits of specifics.

Like I wrote here players cry for fun and competitive matches yet bandwagon for various reasons. What this means is that at some point we cannot have our cake of the current game mode and eat it too. The foundations of the game mode have to change towards something that creates better matches. We have to stop poo-pooing on ideas we deem “won’t work” because they deviate too far from the current cake.

Specific real world examples that could be modeled in-game such as a type of draft or splitting “friends” at team formation and changing teams every “season” would have the effect of making fundamental changes to the game mode, to be sure. Yet we as players already are familiar with and trust in similar mechanisms in sPvP because of the hope that those matches are competitive.

Battlegroups already sound like a form of draft with time-delineated teams. We already have a band-aid version of league-controlled team formation every 2-month “season” in the form of server links. I’d be interested in seeing more automated team formation with perhaps divisions based on participation levels or timezone based league divisions that players sign up for based upon their own schedules (for example an OCX/SEA league).

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Question still remains, how are people gonna deter others from bandwagon to maintain a healthy game mode

Professional sports leagues use a draft system.

I’ve bold the key word.

What’s the point we’re supposed to take-away from your emboldening? WvW is not a pro league, but how does that matter? It is widely recognized that WvW players have differing levels of skill. Not all professional sports players are of the same skill level either. Professional leagues use several mechanisms to prevent teams with deep pockets from stacking the team. WvW has no such mechanisms when perhaps it should as a deterrant to maintain a healthy game mode.

Clearly, your idea of professional is in term of level of skills. However, my idea of professional is in literally professional. Professional is not a term to define your skill level but is way more than that. WvW players do not play WvW to reach professional stage (there’s nothing professional about wvw anyway). Just like dota, do everyone play professional? Nope. Trying to implement something that is only acceptable in professional context is…..

PS: I did play live tournaments before, not just typical online league which people are doing nowadays.

If it helps you, then remove the word “professional”. Recreational kids sports leagues where I live ignore coach and friend requests so that the league can form teams where skill is spread across all teams and the season ends up being fun and competitive rather than one team stomping everyone else.

Players cry here on this forum for fun and competitive WvW matches, but they also bandwagon. Can’t have the cake and eat it too.

Still, the point stand, you can’t force a professional level concept into a casual game like this filled with casual players.

So, again, how are you gonna deal with bandwagon?

What do you mean again? I wasn’t trying to force a professional level concept into a casual game. That’s your reading of what I wrote while you outright ignored my recreational league example as clarification.

Sports leagues utilize several different mechanisms to prevent team stacking. All I’m suggesting is that real world paradigms exist as potential solutions to be modeled in-game.

Sigh, seriously…. Changing the word doesn’t magically make the concept any more acceptable. It is like super rich pours expensive wine into a diamond cup, but you want to pour expensive wine into a paper cup. It doesn’t make the expensive wine any less expensive.

Or even a better comparison, pouring hot water into a ceramics cup is ok but you want to pour hot water into a plastic water bottle (that you drink cola from), it just gonna deform the plastic water bottle.

Are all you interested in is arguing semantics of a single word on a tangent or discussing solutions to team imbalances such as my suggestion about real world paradigms from sports leagues? I’m going to assume you have no opinion on modeling solutions.

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Question still remains, how are people gonna deter others from bandwagon to maintain a healthy game mode

Professional sports leagues use a draft system.

I’ve bold the key word.

What’s the point we’re supposed to take-away from your emboldening? WvW is not a pro league, but how does that matter? It is widely recognized that WvW players have differing levels of skill. Not all professional sports players are of the same skill level either. Professional leagues use several mechanisms to prevent teams with deep pockets from stacking the team. WvW has no such mechanisms when perhaps it should as a deterrant to maintain a healthy game mode.

Clearly, your idea of professional is in term of level of skills. However, my idea of professional is in literally professional. Professional is not a term to define your skill level but is way more than that. WvW players do not play WvW to reach professional stage (there’s nothing professional about wvw anyway). Just like dota, do everyone play professional? Nope. Trying to implement something that is only acceptable in professional context is…..

PS: I did play live tournaments before, not just typical online league which people are doing nowadays.

If it helps you, then remove the word “professional”. Recreational kids sports leagues where I live ignore coach and friend requests so that the league can form teams where skill is spread across all teams and the season ends up being fun and competitive rather than one team stomping everyone else.

Players cry here on this forum for fun and competitive WvW matches, but they also bandwagon. Can’t have the cake and eat it too.

Still, the point stand, you can’t force a professional level concept into a casual game like this filled with casual players.

So, again, how are you gonna deal with bandwagon?

What do you mean again? I wasn’t trying to force a professional level concept into a casual game. That’s your reading of what I wrote while you outright ignored my recreational league example as clarification.

Sports leagues utilize several different mechanisms to prevent team stacking. All I’m suggesting is that real world paradigms exist as potential solutions to be modeled in-game.

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Question still remains, how are people gonna deter others from bandwagon to maintain a healthy game mode

Professional sports leagues use a draft system.

I’ve bold the key word.

What’s the point we’re supposed to take-away from your emboldening? WvW is not a pro league, but how does that matter? It is widely recognized that WvW players have differing levels of skill. Not all professional sports players are of the same skill level either. Professional leagues use several mechanisms to prevent teams with deep pockets from stacking the team. WvW has no such mechanisms when perhaps it should as a deterrant to maintain a healthy game mode.

Clearly, your idea of professional is in term of level of skills. However, my idea of professional is in literally professional. Professional is not a term to define your skill level but is way more than that. WvW players do not play WvW to reach professional stage (there’s nothing professional about wvw anyway). Just like dota, do everyone play professional? Nope. Trying to implement something that is only acceptable in professional context is…..

PS: I did play live tournaments before, not just typical online league which people are doing nowadays.

If it helps you, then remove the word “professional”. Recreational kids sports leagues where I live ignore coach and friend requests so that the league can form teams where skill is spread across all teams and the season ends up being fun and competitive rather than one team stomping everyone else.

Players cry here on this forum for fun and competitive WvW matches, but they also bandwagon. Can’t have the cake and eat it too.

The fact that I didn’t notice them being used against me during their beta means I don’t see them having a game-breaking impact.

The glicko system is only preventing faster transitions between tiers because of the way it is being used. Please review: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/The-math-behind-WvW-ratings/first

And how many guilds rally 50 members every night?

SkyShroud.2865:

Chaba.5410:

SkyShroud.2865:

Question still remains, how are people gonna deter others from bandwagon to maintain a healthy game mode

Professional sports leagues use a draft system.

I’ve bold the key word.

What’s the point we’re supposed to take-away from your emboldening? WvW is not a pro league, but how does that matter? It is widely recognized that WvW players have differing levels of skill. Not all professional sports players are of the same skill level either. Professional leagues use several mechanisms to prevent teams with deep pockets from stacking the team. WvW has no such mechanisms when perhaps it should as a deterrant to maintain a healthy game mode.

SkyShroud.2865:

Question still remains, how are people gonna deter others from bandwagon to maintain a healthy game mode

Professional sports leagues use a draft system.

morrolan.9608:

Chaba.5410:

morrolan.9608:

1st scenario is far more likely under a 2,1,1 system.

Until there is a better Skirmish UI, the generic player will have no clue about any of this.

The generic player doesn’t govern strategy.

They don’t, but how does that excuse the game mode from lacking an instruction manual? That puts a burden on the experienced players. Mechanics should be designed to be self-evident.

morrolan.9608:

1st scenario is far more likely under a 2,1,1 system.

Until there is a better Skirmish UI, the generic player will have no clue about any of this.

Here’s a good one: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/The-math-behind-WvW-ratings/first#post890370

“However, the wAPercent function serves to centralize values around 0.5. While the wAGlickoScore transformation does help mitigate this around edge values in [0,1], it is linear in neighborhoods of 0.5. This seems to split matches into two possible directions of motion:

1) A blowout where one server wins heavily and causes all three servers to be adjusted strongly due to being at the “edge” of the wAGlickoScore transform (see HoD and ET)

2) A convergence as all servers have fairly close to the same score and are normalized near the 0.5 mean value.

Ultimately, this seems to result in a stratification between tiers; within-bracket matchups converge to the median glicko rating (unless there is a blowout) while between-bracket scores diverge. This seems unhealthy for overall matchups as people seem to prefer playing different opponents (even if the matches will be more uneven) rather than the same matchups over and over."

Glicko is far too slow to adjust at four-weeks, but I believe that is more due to the way the data is being fed to glicko and how the algorithms are being used. There are discussions from three years ago saying the same thing. A two-week adjustment period would seem more appropriate for an “always-on” game mode as it allows more room for players’ personal schedules.

Please review this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/The-math-behind-WvW-ratings/first

Some samples all still valid today:

The system and formula works well, but with free transfers in play, servers can change quickly and no longer be as strong as their rating indicates. HoD is the prime example. When the Titan Alliance fell apart, it took time for HoD to fall out of Tier 1. A possible solution is to take a page from the NASCAR Sprint Cup series. After the ratings are determined, baseline them by making the gap between each place 10 points (for example). This would make it easier for the places and match ups to change from week to week.

Any system that doesn’t also take Participation Population into sampling VS. these Results, … just seems half baked to me.

That’s also intresting… capturing points is less rewarding when you already have 90% of the points than when have 0% of the points. Basically, it rewards the big losers more heavily than the big winners for doing something.

This curve currently over rewards lower performing servers and under rewards higher performing servers.

A good model will need to be able to take into account drastic increase/decrease in server WvW strength and adjust accordingly, instead of allowing the server to raise/fall tier by tier, causing uneven match ups.

One-up-one-down will increase burn-out. Players will feel pressured to “push” every week in order to maintain rank and that’s not good for an “always-on” game mode. No other part of this game generates that kind of stress; not even competitive sPvP since matches are only 15m long and players can take long breaks between them. That is why the WvW tournaments saw a permanent drop in population after each one. One-up-one-down will replicate that.

Was in a fractal and at the end could not exit it. Had to log out after I filed /bug. Now cannot get back in on the account that got stuck and another account.

Players like their 60 v 60 v 60 blob “fights” too much for Anet to simply lower the map limit again.

When I first saw it, I had hoped it was a form of open-world PvP.

The meta in WvW right now feels very much like the sPvP Season 1 bunker meta where matches could be played til timer ran out (remember the pro team Zero Counterplay quit because of a single cap while the rest of the points remained indefinitely contested?). And that’s no surprise since the HoT bunker stats that got removed from sPvP are still in WvW.

All the boosting of defense has done is encouraged players to get more numbers for wins. That’s bad news for a game mode with a shrinking population.

Anet originally had the host servers artificially marked as Full and there were quite a lot of complaints about this on this forum. ¯\(?)/¯

Jeknar.6184:

Chaba.5410:

He means a few of the guilds that came to FA or were on SoR before they either died or transferred to T3 about a month ago because fights in T2 tend to be more like T1 blobs.

If these are the guilds that took Aandiarie’s money, yeah, I’m sure these are the ones he’s talking about.

Nope. Different guilds.

He means a few of the guilds that came to FA or were on SoR before they either died or transferred to T3 about a month ago because fights in T2 tend to be more like T1 blobs.

mako.6493:

Not quite sure what this means for the week. I get restoring and cancelling the 5 minute round glitch. However since i cant remember what all the server glickos were at the end of the original matchup lets say FA was 1 880.000. Is that glicko rating at the end of this mathchup gonna be 1 880.000 regardless what happens the next 3 days or so? Will the glickos fluctuate during the week as normal based on score or is it frozen until the next roll at reset?

I think it means that the rating at the end of this match-up will be +/- off the restored rating as normal. MOS has the original ratings if you look at the end rating of last week (week 36): http://mos.millenium.org/servers/history/39

So for example, FA’s restored rating should be 1 878.785 even though the leaderboard shows 1 854.921. None of the usual prediction websites utilize this restored rating so it is difficult to tell what it will be at the end of this match (maybe Snowreap will adjust when he runs his probabilities).

I don’t know what it means for Yak’s Bend’s rating though. It isn’t clear if the restored rating will include the +150 adjustment.

Ah, now I finally found what I was looking for…

Due to the increased deviation and volatility combined with fewer total worlds, there shouldn’t be a “Glicko hell” again for a little while.

It’s not yet determined what approach we’ll use for Glicko data for guest worlds when world links are changed, in the case that a guest either becomes a host or goes solo.

Anet, you guys basically created the glicko hell of T4 with CD when you turned that server up with a 2 month old frozen rating that didn’t reflect its quad-server status. Then trying to fix it by adjusting CD’s rating upward so it rolled T3 developed a widening gap between T3 and T2, which in turn expanded when new server links were made without a reset of deviation and volatility.

Until you address how glicko rating is fixed at server linking time, the band-aiding is going to dig a deeper hole.

Chris said you guys did not determine an approach yet. You need to determine one now. You need to also perform some sort of reset of Glicko data at the formation of new teams. Please avoid these issues in the future.

Hesacon.8735:

Chaba.5410:

Is this the sarcasm thread?

Half-sarcasm, half-snarkiness.

You sayed it!

“With YB and SoS bleeding glicko points to CD (despite CD coming in third), there is a glicko wall forming that will prevent movement between T2 and T3.” – Hesacon

Jski.6180:

The real problem is FA went from T1 (all be it a very low % roll) to T3 in one go due to doable reset.

Hrm no I don’t think that’s the real problem. As glicko rating differences shrink between the top and the bottom, a server in the middle like FA is going to enjoy more variation in match-ups. That is something that can be expected based on the current system. The real problem is player agency moved out of the game and onto this forum. Don’t like your match-up? Just quit playing and ask to have the other server’s rating adjusted here outside of the established system of rules.

Johje Holan.4607:

Plus you should be happy. I gave you all matches with higher servers since you’re complaining about facing lower servers.

Hey now. Your words. They’re being put into my mouth.

Johje Holan.4607:

I wouldn’t have an issue with that. Except I wouldn’t bother adjusting Glicko. I’d just make the matches next week be:

• YB/Mag/BG
• JQ/TC/FA
• DB/SBI/NSP
• CD/HOD/SOS

Good one-up-one-down match-making there… wew

Is this the sarcasm thread?

Bridget Morrigan.1752:

In other words, that DB is still inappropriately matched just goes to show that tinkering with the Glicko just causes a cascading effect of other problems, because Glicko is still too unresponsive to the real-time population realities of the game, and it’s carrying too much outdated data with it. Fixing it by hand is not good; not fixing it by hand is also not good. So I’m still in the camp of thinking a complete overhaul of the way in which WvW does ratings and matchups is the only way to get out of this cycle. It needs a total wipe.

That cascading effect is exactly why we needed the partial reset with new server links and why T4 had needed 2-month frozen ratings to be merged/adjusted somehow in order to avoid that artificially created 300 glicko ratings gap.

Here’s more possible tools with regards to “tinkering” of the glicko matchmaking that constitutes systemic changes rather than individual one-offs:

This post from three years ago for example identifies correctly how population and performance are intimately related and suggests solutions to automatic adjustment of performance prediction based on a fluidly changing population over the course of the week long match.

This post illustrates how this fluctuating population over the week affects the predictions, seen as an error which perhaps is only evidence of a symptom. “That 0.05 difference is significant over the course of the week where the overall proportion shrinks as the scores go up.” You see this when you saw that YB was in 2nd place and close in score to JQ and now they are not.

The issue of servers “belonging” to tiers counter-intuitively exacerbates this slow glicko movement. When a server only fights against two or three other servers, their rating becomes inaccurate because they never get compared to a larger sample size.

morrolan.9608:

Anet do not seem to understand how hamstrung servers get when they don’t get a link for 2 whole months.

Nah. It’s the players still thinking it is 2013. Ever since the world population calculations were changed, it became clear what the vision was for server size. I don’t think it is an accident that FA remains Very High and has skirted Full status without a single timezone one would consider as stacked ever since the population calculation was changed.

Then there’s the skill lag that occurs in larger fights that I think Anet tried to discourage in the higher tiers with the population calculation. In addition, something not talked about a lot, not everyone plays this game on the best computer available. FPS dropping to slideshow levels is a big disincentive to players to zerg. I wouldn’t be surprised if a survey were taken that showed a relationship between tier/playstyle and hardware/graphics settings.

Bridget Morrigan.1752:

I think it’s pretty obvious for anyone watching the scores right now that both the T2 and T3 matchups are closer and more competitive in their current makeup than they would have been if YB and FA had stayed where they were.

Bridget, I finally got some time earlier this evening to read your essay. I think you write very well on the issue. This one quote bothers me though and here’s why.

A server’s performance is always sensitive to multiple factors, the most visible one being a server’s population and coverage at any given time. The other factor not immediately visible is the mix of servers they are together in a match with, what those server’s population and coverage looks like. To me that makes what is “obvious” not so “obvious”. DB lost a lot of population and isn’t linked to another server and can’t bring the numbers the other servers bring. Score gain by the two other servers therefore may not truly be reflective of what those servers are capable of in a true three-way match, and especially the rating gain/loss due to the “lag” of glicko adjustment along with the fact that volatility and deviation were not reset with the last server links.

This is why I never truly trust score as a method measuring server performance and why this round of glicko ratings are hard to rely upon.