Guild Wars 2

I’m sorry, there just weren’t enough Necros to fill the other team as well.

We have several ideas on how to improve matchmaking, which should help prevent games like this. Look for a blog post and forum discussion in the near-ish future.

Is this team arena? If it’s solo arena I would say it was just a coincidence, but team arena can still produce matches like this. The only fix is to make you wait longer or require a full team when queuing.

No, the latest matchmaking changes will not produce matches like this.

The leaderboard will continue to fluctuate until each player’s deviation narrows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system

Everyone’s MMR was just reset. In the eyes of the matchmaker, you’re all newbies now.

Sorry guys, they had to do a hotfix that reset the servers. You’ll be able to get in as soon as the build is activated.

Laserbolt.6731:

Since the new matchmaking system 1) finds 10 people of a similar MMR and then deals them into two equal teams, and 2) changes your MMR based on the AVERAGE MMR of the team you faced.

Basically correct.

Laserbolt.6731:

Will it take weeks and weeks to sort itself out?

It shouldn’t take too many matches for an individual to get near their optimal MMR, but I’m not sure how long it will take the population on average to stabilize. It will depend on how many rated matches a day the average player participates in.

Laserbolt.6731:

Say that everyone starts at say a 500 MMR (on a 1 to 1000 scale).

On the first matches, the winners MMRs only go up very slightly, and loser MMRs only go down very slightly.

Correct.

Laserbolt.6731:

And If you won your first, you are likely to lose the second match. There will be few “streaks”.

Yes, your MMR will be pretty volatile for the first few matches, with each match increasing the confidence of your rating.

Laserbolt.6731:

I was just placed on two losing teams as my first two matches. I am scared that I will plummet to the dreaded GLicko2 basement with players who do not try or don’t know how to play.

Don’t worry about it. Your ratings deviation (confidence level) is still very wide, and you’re still going to be grouped with a wide variety of players.

Should you somehow find yourself in a basement, which should be less likely with the recent matchmaking changes, our plans for next year include a way for players to get themselves out.

Josh Davis.6015:

Also, as an aside, we really are taking the collaborative development stuff to heart. After we release our next PvP blog post we’re going to follow-up immediately with a preview of what we have going in before the end of the year. After that we’re going to run streams on a consistent basis to keep you guys informed of progress and preview stuff we have in development.

Think SotG, but much more official.

So looking forward to this.

I’m also planning on doing a blog post on the matchmaking changes coming next year and we’ll be following that up with a discussion thread on the topic so we can respond feedback on the proposed changes. This is one of those topics that I believe should be as transparent as possible to ensure players understand and trust the way it works.

JinDaVikk.7291:

So how does this help exploiting/4v5’s/temporary decay/afk’s?

It doesn’t. Regarding decay, look for news next week.

JinDaVikk.7291:

Might want to fix the above THEN reset leaderboard as the post reset will be just as big of a joke as the old.

Evan and I are currently in the middle of a very significant restructuring of code. When this is ready, it will go a long way toward helping many of those issues, and allow us to make changes and react to issues quicker.

As I’ve mentioned in another thread, this reset is being done for two reasons.
1. The recent matchmaking changes were very significant and we can’t trust the MMR that resulted from previous matchmaking is an accurate measure of skill.
2. We want to see how ratings recover and are distributed over time, which will aid decision making regarding future resets, if any.

Reason #2 will make more sense next week.

Is this team arena?

Josh Davis.6015:

Marcos.3690:

Josh Davis.6015:

Bringing the game closer together is something we’re actively working on accomplishing. We’ll be able to spill the beans on everything early next month. (I feel like a broken record at this point.)

But seriously. Beginning of December. All shall be revealed.

reveal it NOW dont toy with us!!

Trust me, it’s killing me that I can’t! But right now I don’t have much else to say on these things besides we have a great plan and part of it is already being implemented. You should see the first wave of changes very soon.

Seriously. Trolls are easy compared to waiting. >_<

I’ve mentioned in previous threads that I plan on including additional information like profession, play style, etc., when forming matches. When I get further along with what I’m currently working on we will put out a blog post and start a discussion about the details of matchmaking.

There are also several threads talking about how to handle the 4v5 problem. Personally, I like the idea of both filling empty positions from the queue, and not recording the game as a loss if your team had fewer players for a significant amount of time. I don’t know yet if we want to include this topic in the matchmaking discussion or if it would be better as it’s own thread.

We are also discussing ideas on how to better introduce new players to solo and team arena that won’t ruin the experience for other players.

Simplicity.7208:

I’m not sure where I was on the leaderboard. Can’t imagine very high since I’d only played some 70 games.

I’ll keep an eye on your matches and look for potential problems.

Jae.5138:

my winrate isn’t even 50%.

copy and paste league of legends match making please

Without more information, I can’t verify that matchmaking isn’t working as intended.

It’s possible that MMR was artificially high because a player was being carried and its slowly lowering them to where they should be. If that is the case, losing would be expected.

It’s also possible MMR is lower than it should be for some other reason, and you get stuck playing with people below your skill level.

Either way, MMR is being reset on the 26th and you will likely see a change then.

Do you know where you were on the leaderboards before the update?

Jae.5138:

who says yo ucan’t create topics on things you’ve discussed already?

Code of Conduct

• Read the forum before asking a question. There’s a good chance your question has already been answered.
• Use the search function before posting. This will focus the discussion and facilitate a response.
• Avoid frivolous and duplicate postings.
• Do not spam. This includes bumping threads or making posts that lack content.

Probably not going to get a moderator on you, but it is preferred.

Edit: Search does seem weird.

I don’t mean to derail this thread, but I don’t think you can take the current player counts as representative. I mentioned in another thread that the server backend is currently preferring 8v8 due to a bug.

You do know we have multiple teams working on all aspects of the game concurrently, right? You can’t compare the output of one team to the sum of all output from every other team.

I mean, I’m good but I’m not that good.

Sure, it would be nice if we had more bodies working on PvP. That wouldn’t really get things to you faster, but could increase the number of things we’re getting to you.

I believe the intent is this thread is to retrospect the Collaborative Development initiative. You’re suppose to include suggestions on how to improve that, not how to improve PvP.

Did you think the top 3 format was a good idea? Do you want to see more developer responses? Do you have a better idea on how community priorities can be polled? Do you think your suggestions were ignored? Do you think it was hard to draw attention to the very good ideas? Do you think a vocal minority dominated the discussion?

They probably want your feedback in the top 3 suggestions/ideas/concerns format like the original thread.

GeoX.5046:

Justin ODell.9517:

Simplicity.7208:

True, I haven’t. But they’re pretty weak to conditions and can’t usually bunker a point plus they have a high skill-cap so most people who play them play them poorly. Combine that with a condition/bunker meta and you have a recipe for a net team loss.

I think you misunderstood. I love Mesmer, but I suck at Mesmer. -1 may be insufficient when I’m playing.

I know this is a joke…but at the same time i find this disturbing coming from a Dev.

:P Don’t worry, we’ve got several very good players in PvP, and I think everyone on the skills and balance team cheats (not really) because they are all really good.

I keep meaning to practice, honest.

Simplicity.7208:

True, I haven’t. But they’re pretty weak to conditions and can’t usually bunker a point plus they have a high skill-cap so most people who play them play them poorly. Combine that with a condition/bunker meta and you have a recipe for a net team loss.

I think you misunderstood. I love Mesmer, but I suck at Mesmer. -1 may be insufficient when I’m playing.

You apparently have never seen me Mesmer…

RaynStargaze.6510:

so i will always get on the least played class to get a fast q pop / get on the good team and then swap before match starts?

Yep, we’ll definitely have to worry about things like this. My hope is that we can find and solve these things together. Really looking forward to it.

Romek.4201:

ye i understand this but how this point system should work?

i mean whats wrong with engi defending homepoint and another engi make farpointassaulter?

I doubt we’d do anything that fine grained. We just want to prevent making teams that are all warrior or all bunker, etc..

Romek.4201:

and plz understand im not against this^^ i just throw in my arguments before its to late^^

Don’t worry, I’m going to make a blog post and forum discussion about it before we make any final decisions. I’m also designing the system so it can be tweaked without having to go through our normal release cadence.

Romek.4201:

how i said before overpopulated classes in soloQ should be fixed by balancing team and not a filter

The scoring system I mentioned is not a filter. We don’t want to force players to play something else in order to play, we just want to provide as much balance as we can given the population at any point in time. This could mean a couple things that some people won’t like, especially during low concurrency, matches may resemble what they are currently and professions that are very popular will wait in line a bit longer than everyone else.

Narcarsis.5739:

However from what I hear there are people in EU who know how to check their solo queue roster. They could easily ask a teammate what’s on the other team before entering and adjust that way – something to look into.

Already got you covered. We’re not even going create a game instance until everyone has committed.

Narcarsis.5739:

This could push some players away from PvP as they like to log onto other characters to PvE while the queue pops – forcing them to sit in queue and do nothing isn’t a very good system.

We would give you a window of time to allow you to change characters. You just wouldn’t be able to do it after committing.

Yuki.1765:

And what about the rerolls? People will still be able to reroll another class or change their build before the game start? Or, do you want to block professions/builds composition after people click “go now” ?

This is something we could do. I don’t know how well received that would be though. Maybe if we provided a preview of what the team looks like and let you back out before committing, at the cost of losing your position in the queue. At that point it would be much easier to replace you.

Narcarsis.5739:

Justin are you able to tell us the specifics of what the MMR is based off of? This will give us a better idea of how we’re being placed on teams and what the game is looking for in order to place us. It will also help us make suggestions for better improving the system to help ensure a better solo queue experience for the majority.

We use Glicko2 for our MMR. When updating your MMR, we base it off the average MMR for the opposing team.

The current matchmaking will find 2 sets of 5 players that have are within each others MMR range. That range expands the longer a player has been waiting. Once all 10 players have been found, it will take those 10 players and form 2 rosters by shuffling players by rating (03478 12569.) It does not go out of its way to find low skill players, and does not factor in PvP rank or leaderboard rank at all.

Future matchmaking will go one step further and grab all players within range and use a scoring system to find the best quality match possible with those players. This means we’ll be able to do things like limit number of professions/builds, and more.

The most likely culprit for low skill players being matched is their default placement on the curve, and several ideas are being discussed on how to best handle that.

fodem.2713:

Also you could use MMR to place people on leaderboards but not on matchmaking.

Are you being sincere? You’re suggesting we don’t use the match making rating (MMR) for matchmaking but you think it would be okay for the leaderboard?

Mrbig.8019:

snip

We do the range filtering already, but we could turn off, or slow down, the growth of ratings deviation over time. That’s a very plausible solution, but like you said it could mean some players would never get a match because there simply aren’t enough players online in their range.

The only advice I can really give to those who want more advanced tactics and strategy in their play is to form a group and play team arena.

We want solo arena to be a bridge from the casual play of hot-joins to the more serious play of team arena. We’re going to continue to improve matchmaking, but playing with less skilled players is likely to always be a possibility in solo arena.

Team arena also has no roster shuffling, so you can play with exactly who you want to.

This is a very complex subject. Please feel free to share your ideas on how to improve things.

I agree, these are very good suggestions.

Phantom Master.9582:

Make Solo Q rewards significantly better depending on your position.

Can you clarify what you mean by position?

fodem.2713:

The main problem is proud… Imagine if you create something that is complex and you think it’s very nice in theory but it doesn’t work, would you let go ? Would you stop the MMR system on solo queue and let it random ?

Well, no one on the team created the MMR system. It would pretty simple to make solo queue just a pure queue with no matchmaking at all, but then it would not be much different than hot-join except it would have a leaderboard based off something, probably wins.

fodem.2713:

solo arena is supposed to be SOLO, so it should be random, play with noobs, veterans, medium players, whatever, just enter and play… The best solo player is the one that can win more, regardless teammates or enemies…

A leaderboard based on wins is going to have most of the same problems as a leaderboard based on MMR, namely that your progression would be heavily influenced by the teams you get. This would mean, at best, your progression would be simply be a measure of who plays the most.

Does anyone want a leaderboard based only on the amount of time played?

pedrst.3127:

Justin ODell.9517:

We have several plans being implemented right now that are aimed at increasing the number of players.

Any of these plans are aimed into balance correctly? active play instead of passive? conditions not replacing direct damage n’ so on?

Sorry, I know the skills and balance team has some great things planned but I don’t know what is likely to be release, or what their timetable is.

Edo Tensei.8254:

I gonna start to make a blacklist and go AFK if i ever play again with newbies in a Match.

Please report people that do this.

Edo Tensei.8254:

i rather wait for 1 hour for match before i play with newbies.

This may be one of the options we allow in future matchmaking changes, but I’m hoping the other systems we’re working on will eliminate the need for this.

Ixl Super Ixl.7258:

Can we get a permanent leaderboard decay just for symbolic please? pretty please!

No. You’ll get something better, but you’ll have to wait to find out what that is. Sorry, it’s outside my control when the news will be posted.

I’ve gotten a few PMs about this, so I’ll post what I was going to say to each of them here.

There are only three things being considered in the current matchmaking; 1) your MMR, 2) how long you’ve been waiting, and 3) who is available to play with.

1) MMR is not broken, it works exactly as it should and I’ve personally verified this. Yes, we want to place new players on the curve better, but simply lowering the default rating will only work if the curve has already been established. As a reminder, everyone’s MMR is being reset on the 29th, so that takes changing the default off of the table.

If you’re trying to gauge the correctness of the MMR based off the leaderboards, you will very likely fail because decay makes things much less predictable and consistent. Even more so now that we have increased the frequency of the decay calculation.

For details on the MMR system we use, please go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system

We’re open to suggestions regarding other ways of handling MMR.

We’re discussing ways to place new players more appropriately, and we’re open to suggestions in this area as well. The only thing that is off the table right now is splitting the user base, we can’t do this until it gets larger. We have several plans being implemented right now that are aimed at increasing the number of players.

2) When we scan through the queue to find matches, we use your ratings deviation. As time goes on we gradually increase your ratings deviation to increase the odds that we’ll find a match for you. This does lead to lower quality matches, but its very common to do this on the assumption that a lower quality match is better than no match at all.

If you’re on the outer edges of the ratings curve, this is very likely the culprit for why you’re being matched with players with a much different skill level than your own.

3) Related to #2. During low concurrency you will likely need to wait a longer amount of time because there are fewer people around your skill level, increasing the odds #2 will kick in and you’ll get a lower quality match.

That said, a few people that are on the high rating side are upset because they are now being grouped with lower skill players. Before the matchmaking change these higher rated players would be grouped together and they would just stomp the other team. Now they are being shuffled around on teams, which means no more lopsided matches in general. You can still get a lopsided by chance just because of who was available at the time, but even when this happens the match is still much more even than before the changes went in.

Leaderboard rank = your order when sorted by MMR – decay.

The decision to not show MMR was made before leaderboards were a thing. I’d guess it’s related to how people treat rank, and Glicko is even harder to explain.

Personally, I’m all for transparency. I’d rather have a transparent system that’s documented than hide potential mistakes. Though an transparent system may mean less flexibility when it comes to making iterative changes because they’d need to be announced ahead of time.

That error is a timeout and has nothing to do with dishonor, or PvP.

The fact this happens is why we don’t ban people after getting a single dishonor stack.

Oblivion.8307:

you can’t normalize where people start on the leaderboards after a reset. it’ll look exactly the same as this leaderboard just with higher/lower mmr numbers.

Oblivion is right. Just adjusting the numbers won’t do much, if anything.

I hope by the next time we reset, if ever, we’ll have a much nicer way to deal with the problems Acandis.3250 mentioned. This is one of the reasons we were very resistant to the idea of an MMR reset.

My understanding is we just want to gate the number of custom arenas because it’s a non-negligible cost to run. I don’t know if we ever expected this to be a major way to monetize PvP.

This isn’t my area so I’m probably wrong. :P

We will be changing this. Expect news soon-ish. (I honestly don’t know exactly when.)

The recent change to decay was to make the current system a bit more appealing to a broader audience.

hooma.9642:

whats with ppl who switch profession?

We know when you do this already.

hooma.9642:

btw im playing in the most time 2-6 gmt at night, so i dont want wait longer than now.. already long enough to wait 30mins

We could factor in concurrency to selectively disable some matchmaking rules, we can also disable them by max or average wait time.

Smiley.5376:

Justin ODell.9517:

As a Messer, I love that my clones are cluttering up your UI and annoying you.

Dear Justin,

Please take some of the suggestions in this thread more serious. I understand this isn’t a matter of life and death but some people(including myself) suggested some nice improvements that could probably be easily implemented.

Cheers

I do take them serious, but this one isn’t a server programming issue. So don’t take my attempt at humor as a serious reason why we wouldn’t change this.

This discussion is a pretty good example of why I’ve been suggesting we factor in play style and profile information into matchmaking as well.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could say how serious you were about competition and be matched accordingly? I want to make that happen.

hooma.9642:

so instead implementing a report function, that actual works and places dishonor if enough of teamplayers had report them u think its better for all players at night to suffer by 2 trolls?

We’re working with custom support to get additional reporting functionality. Adding a stack of dishonor for being reported isn’t off the table either.

Romek.4201:

justin – dont let players with same ip go in same matchup

fixed

No. We have lots of players that share the same external IP. E.g. colleges, homes with routers, etc.