Guild Wars 2

I knew this was a possibility, and hinted at it in a previous post.

I can’t do much to prevent this, but this is something they can only do for so long before they are no longer queuing with each other because their MMR has diverged too far. They could still queue in the middle of the night, but then they’ll be limited by long queue times and an MMR that increases much slower.

Please report people that do this.

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

It sounds like Michael might be in what other games call “elo hell”. There isn’t much I can do to help, but he has a chance to escape once everyone’s MMR is reset.

We’re talking about ways to better introduce players into solo and team arena, and how to better place them on the curve. Yes, this includes possibly blocking entry until X number of games have been played. Yes, this includes making hot-join better resemble competitive play. No, none of this is set in stone so please do continue giving us your ideas and opinions.

Oblivion.8307:

Please stop accusing good players of syncing.

You’re right. I apologize, I shouldn’t accuse without sufficient evidence. I’ve updated my post to reflect that.

You were most likely dropping because more AFK players have been returning, reclaiming their previous position on the leaderboard.

I do agree that this is annoying, and we are going to change this.

Guard.6751:

How can someone with only 12 wins rank so high when the majority of the top 100 have over a 100 games played?

Careful planning that takes advantage of off-peak hours, queue syncing, and stacking. This shot his MMR up very high.

The good news is that they lost, twice. Which suggests to me the queue syncing they were taking advantage of is gone.

One of reasons they’re staying at the top is because their MMR was heavily inflated while matchmaking was broken and it takes a while to drop. The reset on the 29th will drop it much faster.

Michael.7382:

I ASK, WHY I AM MATCHED WITH PPL WHO ARE RANK 1 OR 7 OR FULL TEAM OF UNDER R20 THAN DON’T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT TOURNAMENT PLAY WHILE MYSELF BEING R50+ WITH 3.5K TOURNAMENTS AND 2.2K HOURS OF PVP PLAYED?

Your MMR is on the low end, which may be an accurate representation of your skill or you were hit by a bug that destroyed your MMR.

If it’s the latter, you should see an improvement after the MMR is reset on the 29th.

Legno.6548:

I’ve read all the devs answers on this matter, with decay, leaderboard position, MM, and others stuff. And ultimately I’ve come to agree with which the devs are saying: Actually the decay can’t be permanent and if it is changed to be permanent nothing will change from how the leaderbord work now.
For example a top 10 player or an entire team stop to play and decay to rank 800, when those team or players start to play again they will be matched against ppl with their actual rank, so to them will be too easy to retake their old position.

Imho the only way to fix definitely the leaderboard decay is to split the rating used into the MM and the leaderbord position itself, and made the decay slower but permanent.

Exactly right. We’re going to strike at this problem at its root.

Forsaker.9213:

Legit??

[img]http://img547.imageshack.us/img547/2819/vnvo.png[/img]

Some of this will go away after we reset MMRs for everyone. Many people at the top are only very high because of the syncing and stacking that went on before the matchmaking change. After the reset they won’t be able to get easy wins to inflate and maintain their leaderboard ranking.

The decay being temporary will still be an issue, but as I mentioned we have plans in place that will deal with that.

Blackjack.5621:

matchmaking for us:

we see other high ranked teams playing , try to queue when they are about to finish their game, then we are waiting 7 minutes, the other top 30 team gets q pop after they are 5 minutes in q, we get pop after 12 minutes for a 500-0 game every time.

This is in solo queue?

Blackjack.5621:

what does it mean, they have their mmr restored?

The MMR is a metric designed to reflect player skill as accurately as possible for the purpose of matching players together.

We also use it to determine leaderboard ranking. On the leaderboard we will deflate your MMR when you haven’t played for a while. The longer you haven’t played the further down it will go.

Since the MMR reflects skill we do not want to destroy that value, so we lower it on the leaderboards only. The next time you play your real MMR gets sent back to the leaderboard, overriding its local copy, which restores your position.

Tranassa.4968:

If you take the things u mentioned into account, to assign different MMR to players that are new to tpvp, woul this not smoth out the “center of the curve”?

The goal would be to have no noticeable change in the shape of curve, but still better place new players.

Tranassa.4968:

To clarify: MMR is the hidden value that determines the rank on the ladder?

Correct.

Tranassa.4968:

And maybe this should not only be done for new players, but also for players that are playing infrequently… But i guess this is not possible with the current system?!

The more we manipulate the MMR the less it can be used as a metric for skill, so we’d want to keep things like this to an absolute minimum.

Blackjack.5621:

What exactly did you do to the new leaderboard system that people are gaining ranks for losing, losing ranks for winning and other weird stuff or just jump around between % and higher ranks.

We’ve increased the decay and made it so it calculates hourly instead of daily.

Blackjack.5621:

I really wonder how I can lose ranks after winning 12x and half of the games vs top 100 or even top 30 teams while other players only have 5 wins from the last couple days and overtake me.You can argue they won versus more valuable opponents, but I can´t see it and honestly I don´t trust your system anymore so I would like some transparency on what is going on here.

This is most likely caused by players who haven’t played a while having their higher MMR restored. We know people want permanent decay, and we have plans that we should be sharing soon.

Blackjack.5621:

Why don´t you show actual rating points?

I’m not sure. Hopefully someone who has been on the team longer can explain it.

Blackjack.5621:

Why don´t you show match history?

That information isn’t saved in a way that is exposable through a web API.

Blackjack.5621:

even external pages like gwshack.info include more information than the leaderboard.

One our goals is to empower our users to do things like this, so I wouldn’t expect anything less as far as third party sites.

Blackjack.5621:

It´s really frustrating when you invest time in something and then you can´t understand the progress you made there, like there aren´t enough frustrating things already.

I completely understand. Many of us on the team are pushing for better and more timely sharing of information and plans.

As for the current leaderboards, the jumping around should settle down some after the reset coming up on the 29th.

As for the AFKers at the top, their free ride is over.

Acandis.3250:

New players should be placed in the 75% percentile or lower.

The problem with changing the default is all you end up doing is moving the center of the curve. We’ve been talking about other metrics we can use as a proxy for skill and game knowledge that we can use to then place players at starting MMR closer to their actual skill level. E.g. PvP rank, PvE level, achievement points, time played, etc..

Silentshoes.1805:

So the moral of the story is: "if you want your leaderboard rank to be as accurate as possible, only play at peak times, say, 4pm to 11pm CST in North America.

No, it’s more like “if you want your win/losses to stay around 50/50 then you should play during peak hours.”

Glicko2 can handle adjusting your MMR properly when you’re matched against players of different skill levels.

AshinDreidon.3861 is correct. This is probably due to a build that just went through.

I’ll keep an eye on it, but please let me know if it persists.

Silentshoes.1805:

The “off-peak” part I easily understand.

Concurrency is what I was missing.

Do you mean simultaneous queuing?

Ah, sorry. Yes, concurrency is the number of players playing at the same time.

Silentshoes.1805:

Justin ODell.9517:

Another component that can lead to a non 50/50 win ratio is when matchmaking has to give you a lower quality match because of off-peak concurrency.

What is “off-peak concurrency”?

Any concurrency outside the hours of the day when concurrency is at it’s highest.

Baldric.6781:

If you have a good matchmaking and plenty of playerbase yes, it’s close to 50/50, unless you get really bad or really good suddenly, or you are in the extreme. But 90% of players should have close 50/50 in the long run.

Baldric is exactly right. Another component that can lead to a non 50/50 win ratio is when matchmaking has to give you a lower quality match because of off-peak concurrency.

hooma.9642:

so when do u will show leaderboardrank in the scoreboard? i know it was already suggested a few times.. that would stop that constant qq about low or high rank players.

Not a bad idea. I’ll bring it up with the team. It might be confusing though because there is already a “Rank” on the leaderboards.

Tranassa.4968:

Justin ODell.9517:

Watching your rosters. So far you’re being put into reasonable matches based on your MMR.

Could you please check my roster too, the last hours i had a HORRIBLE gaming experience! Im Constantly in teams with two ppl beiing r20, while the opponent team has 2 ppl with r50 The r50’s just farm the 20’s and the result is something like a 3 vs 5! Thats no fun for me

I add 2 example srceenshots, one showing me loosing, one showing me winning, same problem on both screenshots. But since an hour im always on the loosing side

Help or just any kind of comment would be much appreciated!

EDIT: And I’m dropping, no im falling, in rating like a stone! I dont know why i drop in rating if i’m obviously in the team that is worse. Would be nice if you could look into this too

I don’t know what to tell you. I can’t see all your matches, but the latest ones have all been very even as far as MMR is concerned.

Please keep in mind that Rank != Skill.

We’ve included a few changes that we suspect will help, but don’t yet have metrics on how successful those changes have been.

That said, we have plans to resolve this issue as part of a pretty significant refactor and restructure that we’re well into, but that won’t be ready by year’s end.

Welcome back. Apparently you’ve been gone quite a while.

Flumek.9043:

In perfect theory, if matchmaking put you against EQUAL opponents , would everyone have/be very close to a 50/50 win ratio in the long run ?

No, even assuming a very large population with abundant skill range coverage, a portion of the difference comes from a player raising/lowering their rating from the default starting position. It takes a while for your MMR to settle.

felivear.1536:

Just curious, what was the issue people experienced?

You can thank Evan for finding and fixing it quickly.

felivear.1536:

I don’t understand their philosophy on decay disappearing after you play a game. It makes no sense.

We’re going to be changing this, but you’ll have to wait for the details. :/

cymerdown.4103:

Josh Davis.6015:

We have increased the rate at which someone decays on the leaderboard. We were hoping to observe the change for a few days before making any sort of announcement, but you guys are too clever for that.

Justin has also changed the decay to update every hour, rather than one a day, so you should see movement happen a bit more often.

Let us know what you think!

Wait… every hour? So like if I don’t play for an hour, I’ll start decaying? Or you mean like if I don’t play for a week (or whatever the real minimum interval for decay to start is), the exact hour that 1 week since I last played hits, the decay will start?

Yes, after two hours it will start to decay but the decay is so low that you shouldn’t see any changes in such a short amount of time. It also ramps up the longer it’s been since the last time you played.

Acandis.3250:

I find it hard to believe that getting matched against really low ranks.

Well, you’re right on the curve where we stick new players.

We’ve talked about putting the default MMR to a lower number, might be something we want to do for the upcoming MMR/leaderboard reset.

A lot of interesting discussion on this topic.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/The-pros-of-8v8/

Let us know what you think.
http://strawpoll.me/696382

Acandis.3250:

Nice matchmaking…
jk, nothing changed. it still sucks.

Watching your rosters. So far you’re being put into reasonable matches based on your MMR.

Actually, half our hot joins are setup to be 5v5, but due to a bug discovered today the 8v8 matches are being preferred incorrectly.

We’re talking about this internally, and we may be able to get this changed as soon as the 26th.

The reign of the candy corn is coming to an end!

This Tuesday we’ll be removing the Halloween rewards and replacing them with double match win reward chests.

I strongly suggest you take advantage of this while you can.

Mrbig.8019:

They need to take measures NOW.

We do have a long-range plan that I think you will be happy with. The news should be released soon, but I don’t know exactly when. (So frustrating!!! )

Lordrosicky.5813:

Are you making decay permanent too? This needs to happen.

This build does not include any changes to decay, but should make decay much more effective by eliminating sync queuing.

Gamn.4296:

A mix of highest and lowest rank doesn’t sound good to me. It is frustrating to play against good teams with one or two players lost on the map, not knowing what to do.

This change won’t do anything new to match you against people far from your MMR, whether they are higher or lower. However, just as it works currently, you may be matched with people further away from you if you or they have been been waiting a significant amount of time.

What this change will do is better arrange into teams the players that you are matched against.

I should note the current leaderboards are ranked by your Glicko2 skill rating, not the number of games you played. I hope with this change players will be able to settle into their accurate skill range relatively quickly by providing matches that are more fair.

Part of the reason we were willing to reset the MMR and leaderboards was to gather data on how such a reset would affect how ratings change over time, which may be relevant to PvP seasons and whether or not we choose to have them.

brannigan.9831:

The shark has already been jumped.

Kitten that kittening shark! I’m gonna go all Illusionary Whaler on it!

I feel what you guys are saying. We’re putting together a puzzle, and that puzzle isn’t complete. Some of you see where we are so far and say our pieces are wrong. I say no one piece by itself is going to complete this puzzle.

Maybe I’m more optimistic because I can see more pieces than you guys (which is a shame), or maybe because I have a better idea what the completed puzzle is going to look like.

Either way, my personal mission is to make GW2 PvP the best it kitten can be, and no shark or troll is going to slow me down!

tichorum.2415:

This leaderboard MMR system is bad itself. My whole team was like 15, 16, 20, 21, and 23. We won like 5 matches and they ALL moved up aside from me (who was 21 before the move) who moved down to 22 because our guy that was 23 replaced me at 21.

That makes no sense at all.

I’ll make a point of doing a full audit of our Glicko2 implementation.

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

Could you just have two options:

- Put me into the next match (assuming common sense requirements, no rank 5 in a rank 60 match) (You Only Queue Once button :P)
- I’ll wait, put me into a suitable match

That’s a very reasonable suggestion, I’ve added it to my notes.

@garethh.3518 – I don’t agree with you as far as something being a flop, but I will say that the progress we’ve made so far is only part of the puzzle that we need to complete before we can consider PvP to be successful.

For more context, I’m interested in improving matches beyond just finding players near your MMR. This includes doing things like preferring a better spread of professions and builds, matching people with dishonor with other people with dishonor, grouping people by rank or play style, etc…

These things can sound like a good idea, but can also cause you to wait in the queue longer. I want to know much longer than typical MMR pairing you’d be willing to wait. We can compensate for that wait by doing things like shutting off extra filters if you’ve been waiting, or adjusting the scoring weight by wait time.

Better quality can mean what ever you want. E.g. only one or two warriors at most.

If you have an opinion on what a good match should look like, please share it.

Asuka Shikinami.5462:

I really feel particle effects being over the top are holding back viewers.

Many of us have the same opinion, though I’m not sure which team has that as a work item, and at what priority.

Hi guys, I thought I’d try this out as an unofficial poll.

http://strawpoll.me/659515

Obsidia.5127:

I am bringing this up again as ArenaNet clearly don’t understand how much of a problem it is.

We do, and we’re approaching the problem from multiple angles.

In the long run we’re planning on doing something very similar to your suggestion. However, while conceptually simple, it is not so simple of a change that we can include it as a hot fix.

Personally, I think we can get there.

It’s awesome that each day I get to help move things a little bit closer to that goal than the day before.

Absinth.6917:

So why not reset everyone?

I brought this up at our Monday morning meeting, and it’s on the table.

tichorum.2415:

1) What the new reward system will consist of
2) When the new reward system will be released

1) I don’t know. I’m busy writing servers, I haven’t read up on all the latest details. I’m also not sure if we are ready to discuss the details yet.
2) See #1. I don’t know if we’re rolling it out in phases or as one big drop.

dDuff.3860:

Is there any plans on implementing “check” system to prevent 4v5 matches?

In the long(er) run, very likely. In the short run we’re looking at ways to improve the situation, and speculatively been searching for bugs that may be related.