Guild Wars 2

Shockwave.1230:

Did the company change their moto from “When it’s done™” to “coming out soon™”

I think it happened sometime after release. :P

Xista.7391:

But lets say I wanted to play my friend’s spec, because it’s really good. But I can’t, because I don’t have certain traits unlocked. That to me feels really bad.

This exact scenario is on our radar, and we definitely want to make it possible. Hopefully you’ll get a better idea of what we have in mind when we talk about the new rewards system.

Rubik.7192:

PvP gives us a tiny bit of coin. No matter how much you play pvp, you won’t be able to make as much as your average pveer. What’s the point in implementing “horizontal” progression when pveers can unlock the new traits multiple times faster than pvpers?

That is a valid concern, one worthy of its own thread. I should mention that this is only part of the rewards we have planned. We should have a blog post about that coming out soon™, but I’m not sure where it is in the schedule.

Nineaxis.1826:

snip.

Please do not presume to speak for all players. As a PvP player, I disagree with you, and I know others that do as well.

If you want to turns this into a numbers game, please do keep in mind that the vast majority of PvP players play PvE and WvW as well. We definitely want to make the game fun and enjoyable for PvP-only players as well, but we need to keep a broader context when designing systems.

sorrow.2364:

Is there at least a way to obtain those traits without spending money in PvP? For instance, back in GW1, you were able to unlock skills with factions, whose main purpose was that.

It would be great to allow players in the new reward system to be able to unlock those traits without paying gold, which can be spent in a lot of other ways (and trait isn’t exactly the way I want to spend golds on).

It could be, for instance, by paying tournament win tokens to a vendor?

I know it’s something we were discussing when we were talking about the new reward system, but I do not recall were we landed. I will bring it up with the team again. I know I’d like to see it.

Xista.7391:

So Justin just confirmed that sPvP will be vertical progression. You need to unlock abilities. I’m sorry, but unlocking new traits = vertical progression to me.

I have to disagree. If it meant more skills available to you at one time while you are playing, then yes it would be vertical, but that just isn’t the case. You get more trait choices, not more traits applied to your character.

Olvendred.3027:

Then why make a distinction? If PvP can happily go along with players getting 12/13 traits per line, why add an extra layer of frustration and difficulty instead of giving them 13/13 traits per line? It’s obviously nothing to do with easing new players in.

If it were only an additional trait, you’d more of a have a point, but we’re introducing this system with the future in mind. I can’t speak for the Skills and Combat teams long turn plans, but I know I would be disappointed if we stopped with just these new traits.

Olvendred.3027:

Horizontal progression is a nice concept… but it’s one that I’ve never seen mentioned on the PvP forums, only the PvE ones. If you want to get more players in to PvP, somehow I don’t think keeping back build options is the way to go about it.

Horizontal progression is very common, even in PvP games. Personally, I think one of the reason’s PvP rewards seem somewhat hollow is that we have no real progression beyond looks. I think you would be hard pressed (outside one-off games like most FPS and RTSs) to find a successful game without progression. As a PvP player, I love this change (disclaimer: I had no design input) and can’t wait for the 15th.

Come on guys, lets be more productive here. Saying we don’t care isn’t just wrong, it shuts down and discourages dialog between developers and players.

Don’t get me wrong, you can certainly express your opinions and frustrations, but just because we are heading in a direction you personally don’t agree with doesn’t mean we don’t care or that we are ignoring you.

Now lets get this thread back on track.

As Roy mentioned in another thread, all the current traits will remain unlocked in PvP, even for new players. It is only new traits that need to be unlocked, and you will not have to PvE to obtain them.

Also, this system is designed for horizontal progression. Unlocking traits, or what have you, won’t (at least shouldn’t, barring any balance issues) make you more powerful, they simply give you a wider range of builds and allow you to better tune your character to your play style. Many, many successful games ease players into options, and, in my opinion, trait unlocking isn’t any different.

I understand some of you are worried that we’re just adding stuff and ignoring existing problems. I can assure you, as I sit within earshot of the Skills and Combat team, that they are very aware of this and have no plans to ignore existing issues.

Evan and I were literally just talking about this (leaving players on the scoreboard). We would both like to see this, and it has other benefits beyond just what we present on the scoreboard.

I’m not sure when we would be able to do it, assuming there are no technical reasons why we can’t, but this definitely seems like a worthwhile QoL change.

Zuik.7158:

Thedenofsin.7340:

Justin ODell.9517:

Chaith.8256:

Typically, there is a somewhat useful Blog Post before a huge change is rolled out, and the playerbase is free to discuss how that will affect the game for them! An example is the mention that ranks are intended to be removed when the new PvP progression system rolls out. This was super useful to mention – and the feedback given made this decision pull a complete 180’.

Currently, with this (hopefully) imminent PvP progression overhaul, things are locked up SO tight behind closed doors. I can only imagine one outcome, really.

We’ll have a lot to talk about, so be sure to catch the Ready Up this Friday.

Less talk, more action. Justin, when the patch rolls out, you get on your Mesmer and I will get on my lolwarrior and meet me on a 1v1 server. Then we will see how well this game was balanced over the past 5 months.

#gauntletThrown
#dropsTheMic

A good shatter mesmer should beat a good warrior in a 1v1 arena. :/

I’m not a good shatter mesmer!

Alas, the gauntlet has been thrown, honor demands I rise to the challenge.

Chaith.8256:

Typically, there is a somewhat useful Blog Post before a huge change is rolled out, and the playerbase is free to discuss how that will affect the game for them! An example is the mention that ranks are intended to be removed when the new PvP progression system rolls out. This was super useful to mention – and the feedback given made this decision pull a complete 180’.

Currently, with this (hopefully) imminent PvP progression overhaul, things are locked up SO tight behind closed doors. I can only imagine one outcome, really.

We’ll have a lot to talk about, so be sure to catch the Ready Up this Friday.

I can’t wait to delete the old PvP servers!

Chaith.8256 is right though, a lot of those changes were in response to what the playerbase wanted at the time.

lilz shorty.1879, I respect your critical approach to the subject, but I have to disagree. As a counter-argument, consider the reverse. Would you prefer we remain more (or completely) static and not respond to changes and player feedback? Yes, being agile can have its downsides, I believe (and hope you will soon™ agree) the benefits greatly outweigh the costs.

Really DoYourBestBear.6810, really? It’s not funny when you do it. :P

Can you be more specific? Also, can you follow the instructs here? This will help me pinpoint where the problem may be.

They still drop because you can still use them. Not everyone has a huge stack of them.

Horo.7395:

snip

Rank does not necessary correlate to skill, it is most closely correlated with time invested in the game. Time spent correlates with skill, but it has diminishing returns.

Roster shuffling, to be consistent with matchmaking, currently only uses MMR and ignores rank.

This will be changing, but we aren’t ready to talk about the details. I will say that we have definitely included a lot community feedback from past threads, and I believe it’s a substantial improvement. I’m definitely looking forward to another round of community collaboration.

We can’t do roster shuffling in Team Arena, so lopsided matches like this can and do happen.

This likely happened because 1) rank isn’t factored into MM at all, 2) the players on the red team had an MMR near the default MMR , 3) blue team doesn’t have a very high MMR despite of having very high ranks, and/or they had been waiting in the queue long enough for their MMR range to expand enough to encompass the MMR of the red team.

We have been actively working to MM more intelligent, but those changes are not yet ready for testing. We will have more news about the MM changes as we get closer to releasing them.

Ganathar.4956:

Chaba.5410:

Why did ppl stack boosters in the first place?

Some people got too many from PvP and just couldn’t spend them all, others got them from achievement chests and black lion chests and never used them because they simply didn’t play PvP.

The people who get kittened the most from the removal of the boosters are the ones who bought them for gems and never got to use them and the ones who got them from black lion chests because they could have gotten a booster that they would actually use.

However, one could argue that PvPers get kittened as well because the daily PvP achievement rewards where balanced around giving glory boosters. If the PvP dailies have nothing to replace glory boosters they will simply have inferior rewards to the PvE dailies.

People who bought boosters can file a ticket for a refund. See: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/March-18th-Glory-change-FAQ/

Garrisyl.7402:

My bet is they turn it on when they are in need of attention and want to show, and disable it when they want to relax, play like normal players, or infiltrate the playerbase

OK, you got me… but I will also wear my tag tag when playing a bunker build and want to distract the enemy team.

kdose.5309:

Please improve matchmaking parity first

I don’t think we are ready for ladders or seasons until we address matchmaking right now. Players of like rank and like skill need to be better matched together. I worry that ladders and seasons would isolate large groups of players from each other that might otherwise be compatible, due to the imbalance in matchmaking in the months up to this point.

We are still seeing too many matches of ranks like this: red team: 36, 13, 14, 52, 7 vs blue team: 37, 32, 28, 29, 34. Number averages don’t equal normalizing skill across a team.

Until this is fixed, you will be artificially pulling apart similarly skilled players and putting together incompatible players with any kind of additional layer of tournaments, ladders, etc. on top of a matchmaking system that isn’t working as well as it must.

Matchmaking improvements will likely come out at the same time, or some time before. We don’t have any dates yet, but a requirement of anything coming out of this CDI would have the new server infrastructure as a prerequisite.

Can you get in now? If so, please follow the instructions in this thread while I take a look.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Lagging-in-sPvP-Report-it-here/first#post3163092

If you get disconnected again, please provide the full error code that comes up.

Due to server crashes? Have you reported these? When did they happen?

isolatedchimp.2510:

I’m lagging in all maps too. It’s not my internet, I’ve checked blah blah blah.

When we ask you to perform a trace route, it isn’t just your internet connection that is being checked. It will also tell us if something is going wrong between you and the game server. We have even ran into issues where one of our ISPs is having issues, and this information can help us catch that as well.

We’ve looked into this and believe it may be a hardware issue and will continue to monitor the server in question. In the mean-time, we have moved instances of Temple to another machine.

Please let me know if this continues to the be a problem.

We have been looking at the problem, and we believe it may be a hardware issue and not the map itself. We have reconfigured so new instances of the map are being created elsewhere, and it appears to have improved.

Please let us know if it continues to be a problem, or if begins to happen on another map.

Yes.

#15charronadeadmanschest

garethh.3518:

When matchmaking knows it has less reliable info on a guy it should NEVER, like core rule of any kittening MMR system, use that lack of information to assume that the guy is a capable player…

We don’t assume they are a capable player by default, the filter range grows over time.

garethh.3518:

You always base matchmaking around the lowest possible number in the filter range.

You’re right, and we do do that. I left the detail out, as well as the way the range grows over time, because I felt it was irrelevant to the point I was trying to make.

Jinx.7258:

Hm that makes it crystal clear for me then. Thx.

I hope so, I wasn’t entirely sure what you meant.

Jinx.7258:

That diminishes the mirroring of players skills on the leadboards. Why are those players at the top when the gap with those at the bottom is low? Lucky wins can get you higher place while unlucky loses can get you down?… Pointless to show and rank us with something that is not properly stating who is this player and how skillfully he’s playing along the match…

What I meant to say is that the gap between #1 and 50% isn’t as wide when you also consider their deviations.

Take this example:
Powerr has a rating of 1800, and a deviation of 30.
Flux has a rating of 1500, and a deviation of 200.

Powerr’s filter range is 1800 +/- 30 * 2 or 1740 – 1860.
Flux’s filter range is 1500 +/- 200 * 2 or 1100 – 1900.

Even though Powerr’s rating is significantly higher than Flux’s, since Flux has a large deviation, they could still end up being matched together.

To put this another way; Powerr’s MMR is stable enough to say he is a skilled player, but we don’t enough about Flux as a player. So even though the matchmaker would try to find a better fit for Powerr, he might still get stuck with a Flux every now and then.

Cynz.9437:

How do you explain that when it happens to ppl that play at top 1000?

Not enough people in the queue at the same time around the same MMR. Also, the distance in MMR between #1 and 50% isn’t as wide as people tend to think.

jayvux.4128:

snip

This probably happened because you are very near the starting MMR. It happens, but we are working on improving things so it won’t happen nearly as often.

Dahkeus.8243:

So many people in this community bash newbies…

With good reason. They aren’t very good.

One of several reasons I’m glad we’re going to keep ranks. (Thanks, community!) Ranks should act as a decent proxy for game-knowledge, allowing us to place people better.

Newbies can learn with people that won’t dominate them, which is good because that isn’t very fun. Trolls, err… veterans won’t have to worry as much about picking up the slack. Win/Win.

Pixels.6532:

… why, in a team game, do you have individual Leaderboards?

We have Solo Arena leaderboards because people asked for them. I agree though, but think this will be much less an issue if we decide to have a ladder for individual players.

Pixels.6532:

Why not have teams … play as a registered team

That’s a good idea.

Pixels.6532:

… is something like this already in place?

No, but we do plan to make adjustments after the leaderboards are deprecated.

style.6173:

After all, this is a ladder. Outside factors such as your overall PvP level should not be included.

I agree, and we’re taking that into consideration. Unless we start requiring a full roster for rated play, we need the matchmaker to consider more data when creating/merging rosters. When we do use this extra data, we will likely use it more as a preference rather than a requirement.

style.6173:

The changes that need to be made to matchmaking are to ensure games do not start with a 4v5.

Definitely a priority.

BrunoBRS.5178:

that sounds reasonable and all, but at the same time, it sounds like the best recipe to improve your rating is to stop playing, let it decay, and then come back to improve your rating on leaps, instead of crawling your way up.

at least that’s the impression i got from the quote you highlighted.

Assuming you had reasonable confidence that you would win most of your games, possibly. It’s also a recipe for having your rating drop quickly. Lower confidence also means an increase in the range of players you can be matched against.

The biggest issue we have now seems to be pairing people around the starting rating. Player experience is very diverse at that rating level and it can often leader to poor quality matches when new players are paired with veterans. When we introduce ladders, climbing the ladder would be the best way to improve the quality of opponents and teammates.

One of the ways we plan to change matchmaking, not the MMR system, is to match on more than just MMR. E.g. ranks, ladder tier, etc..

This should improve the quality of matches and should also make MMR more accurate.

Errant Venture.9371:

Just out of curiosity, what made you guys decide to switch from the the simple and robust Elo system from GW1 to Glicko2 in GW2?

Elo seemed to work very well and was an entirely transparent way to rank + matchmake players.

I wasn’t with ArenaNet when the decision was made, so I can’t say for sure.

My guess would be because of the ratings deviation available with Glicko.

Professor Glickman

The problem with the Elo system that the Glicko system addresses has to do with the reliability of a player’s rating. Suppose two players, both rated 1700, played a tournament game with the 1st player defeating the second. Under the US Chess Federation’s version of the Elo system, the 1st player would gain 16 rating points and the second player would lose 16 points. But suppose that the 1st player had just returned to tournament play after many years, while the second player plays every weekend. In this situation, the 1st player’s rating of 1700 is not a very reliable measure of his strength, while the second player’s rating of 1700 is much more trustworthy. My intuition tells me that (1) the 1st player’s rating should increase by a large amount (more than 16 points) because his rating of 1700 is not believable in the 1st place, and that defeating a player with a fairly precise rating of 1700 is reasonable evidence that his strength is probably much higher than 1700, and (2) the second player’s rating should decrease by a small amount (less than 16 points) because his rating is already precisely measured to be near 1700, and that he loses to a player whose rating cannot be trusted, so that very little information about his own playing strength has been learned.

http://www.glicko.net/glicko/glicko.pdf
http://www.glicko.net/glicko/glicko2.pdf

kirito.4138:

Since decay is reset/undone basically when LB updates, which MMR is actually used in the formula when you decay? The current fake decayed value or your original.

Original. The decay is exclusive to the leaderboards. It’s applied to the data when we take an hourly snapshot.

Harbinger.8637:

Is there anyway to tell or see what your individual MMR is?

No, not currently.

Ryan.9387:

Does mmr change merely from win/loss or your preformace during the game?

Win/loss only. If you have any thoughts on how you would like to see it done, feel free to share.

We use Glicko2 with very minor alterations. When updating your rating, we adjust based on the average MMR of the other team.

We want to do further alterations and tuning to our MMR system, but not until we deprecate the current leaderboards.