I’d also like to add that when this happens, I never get wins to balance it back out. I have 48% win rate in ranked and unranked but 56% win rate in custom arenas. Total account wins are at 50%. This makes me need to ask the question: When the match making aims for 50% wins, does it read all my wins accrued concerning all current and previous match types including hotjoins and custom servers? If so, this would explain the lose streaks. Is the algorithm trying to keep my account win rate at 50% and I am being punished in ranked nowadays due to an old lingering good win rate from hotjoin/custom arenas?
Matchmaking doesn’t look at existing win rates, it only lowers your matchmaking rating if you lose and raises it if you win so that over time you should balance to a 50/50 win rate. Custom arenas, unranked, and ranked all have no influence on each other.
We’ve resolved the root issue, but players will not be automatically freed from stuck matches. If you are stuck, log out for ~10 minutes and log back in to try again. If this doesn’t work, you will be unstuck when everyone gets back into the office in the morning.
I was also placed in stronghold once when queuing unranked, even though I only had conquest ticked on.
This bug shoooould be fixed for the next beta weekend. Anytime a substitute player was found during the match-ready process, the mode preferences were getting cleared.
So I usually attribute complaints about match making to just general whining about team mates, but it looks like there were some legitimate problems here.
My question is, how do we know when we are getting unlucky with match making versus when there is a real problem? I guess what I’m asking is…. how do we give realistic feedback that’s meaningful on this issue, as opposed to complaining about the MMR system each time we get a bad team? Seems tricky.
I think what has been happening is the only effective way. We have a lot of data we can look at, but without players having gut feelings and ideas of things that could be wrong, we have no idea where to focus our efforts.
It stands for Match Making Rating. We use the Glicko 2 algorithm to assign a number to each player that represents skill level in order to match similarly-skilled players together.
How on earth does an obvious bug like that go unfixed for such a LONG PERIOD OF TIME…..
It’s not an obvious bug at all. It changes entirely depending on what roster sizes and player MMRs are in the match. The 10 players are already very similar in MMR before splitting them onto teams, and the ‘best’ player is different every match so its not like one particular set of players was always being affected by this bug. Players still have ~50% win rates. It’s very hard to track down ‘gut feelings’ about matchmaking :P
Luckily we have some powerful tools now to get better global data about how matchmaking is performing that helped lead to the discovery.
The way it is intended to work is the next biggest roster gets put onto the smallest team so far, or the next highest MMR roster gets put onto the team with the lowest total MMR.
I want to thank everyone who has given us great feedback on our matchmaking. We’ve been crunching the numbers, deep diving on the data, and running simulations to help identity the root cause of the reported issues. This has led to some discoveries, and I’m happy to say we’re making two changes to matchmaking that should help improve match quality.
First, we’re disabling some code that was attempting to account for outliers on teams when updating MMR. The goal was to prevent adjusting a player’s MMR too much if they were much more or much less skilled than the rest of their team. Unfortunately this was causing players with low, inaccurate MMR to never properly rise back to their true position. It was effectively creating ‘Glicko-Hell’. After the fix, players in this situation should return to their correct MMR range.
Second, we’ve found a very sneaky bug in the way we distribute players across the two teams. The goal of the system is to ping-pong back and forth between red and blue team to evenly distribute player skill. In reality, the bug caused the highest rated player between the two teams to usually be teamed with mostly lower skilled players. For matches with high skill spread, this could result in one player feeling like they were matched with a surprisingly low-skilled team. This was hard to notice because matchmaking was always picking ten similarly skilled players to start with, so the problem only really presents in the high and low MMR brackets where there are fewer players to choose from.
Both of these issues will be fixed in an upcoming release. Thank you all for the continued feedback; it has helped tremendously while identifying these types of issues.
That’s typically the problem with the current MMR. Matchmaking isn’t giving enough credit to Player A because MMR is mainly based on the Glicko system – a system based on wins and losses. Player A is actually reducing the score gap but Glicko doesn’t look at that.
Glicko does support score-ratios, but in our tests we found it causes MMR to move so glacially slow that you end up having more bad matches because your MMR can’t keep up with your true skill level. This is due to the fact that most losing teams still get around 300 points.
We could have a configurable range to rescale the win ratio to help mitigate this (per game mode, unfortunately). We would have to run simulations first, though, because making any changes that affect glicko can be very dangerous.
Clarification: Professions have their own MMR tracked, but it is not currently used in matchmaking because players can switch professions after a match is made.
So a loophole is disabling a powerful tool to generate good matches?
I’d, uh, kinda close the loophole…
The problem with doing this is that players can no longer switch to a more effective profession once they see the enemy team’s roster which happens quite often.
Clarification: Professions have their own MMR tracked, but it is not currently used in matchmaking because players can switch professions after a match is made.
Matchmaking is always trying to make 50/50 matches. There is no active streak-prevention built into matchmaking other than the fact that your MMR adjusts each game. Since you’ve been playing so much, your MMR is ‘certain’ and changes slowly. It has certainly adjusted over the course of the weekend, though.
I suggest watching your game history via a site like http://gw2efficiency.com/account/pvp that uses our new PvP API. This way you know exactly what streaks you’re on.
Edit: Both your streaks were when you played Engineer, which has a lower profession MMR than your account and other professions. Looks like you win more often on Thief
Your MMR is still volatile since you haven’t played many matches. The more you play, the better matchmaking will become for you. Also remember that ranked and unranked have separate MMRs so if you decide to jump into Ranked when you hit 20, you will have a similar experience until you adjust for that new pool of players.
Maybe because all the <rank 20 players aren’t in queue anymore.
So instead of fixing queue times you’ve actually made them worse?
Brilliant.
Ranked will always have higher wait times than unranked because it has a smaller population of players. The only way to compensate is to make worse matches. This will be a different story when Leagues start though
Wanted to pop in and say that you did fight premades a handful of times, but there was an almost equal amount of 3+2’s you fought as well. You also had some 4-queues on your team. There are many ways matches can be made, and you can’t always trust the party check.
There are some changes we are exploring that would further reduce the number of uneven roster sizes in matches, but nothing concrete on that yet.
The longest streak I saw was 5. Not as bad as my record of 12
Funny enough, over the past 7 days you had the exact same number of Victories and Defeats (with some forfeits and byes thrown in). There was a suggestion thrown out a while ago to make players on losing streaks be put on the favored team if there is one.
More statistics is definitely something we’re interested in.
Why do you only cherry pick post take make the new system look good? It’s funny that you never show up in threads that logically describe how bad the change to solo queue is.
Fair question. It’s easy for me as a programmer to combat precise statements with some data to try and keep things from snowballing, but I’m not really the guy to comment about the game design choices behind solo and team queue. I just pop in where I can be useful. I’d love to try and get some global statistics for everyone though.
I did a quick looky, and your record today is 7-4 with your worst loss being 150 points and your best loss being 360. It doesn’t seem to match up to the experience you describe. Before that you were on a massive win streak so perhaps your MMR is settling back down.
If I get time I can try and see how many matches were against premades.
Edit: The 150 loss was against all solos with a team score of 300.
The grace period has not been fully tuned since it hasn’t been fully put through its paces, and I fully expect us to adjust it some after dishonor is enabled.
There is still a configurable grace period for allowed disconnect time. The old dishonor system required players to be present when victory is declared, but that is no longer the case.
Krysard is correct, there is currently not an active season running, so the leaderboards are frozen.
Unless I’m mistaken, the leaderboards worked just fine before the last season was active. In fact, they seemed to be functional long before “seasons” were a thing.
Was it frozen to add “having your name at the top of the frozen leaderboard until the next season” as a reward for doing well? Because I haven’t been able to find anything posted before the end of the season that even mentioned a frozen leaderboard.
We were running off-seasons between our beta seasons, which was why the boards were active. We currently haven’t announced plans to start a new off season ladder.
This feature is currently being beta tested, so your feedback is appreciated. It sounds like having at least one option selected is a confusing experience. Maybe some extra tooltips explaining the functionality could help.
It also looks like there have been some bugs where people get put into the wrong game mode.
