Guild Wars 2

playandchill.3908:

Dear Anet,

What are you waiting to improve it?.

Dear playandchill.3908,

First off, thank you for taking the time to write to us. In answer to your question, we aren’t waiting. We have been improving PvP and will continue to improve it even more, it just takes time.

We understand your frustration, and rest assured we feel the same way about the time it takes to roll out changes.

Best regards,
Justin O’Dell
Server Programmer
PvP Team
ArenaNet

Aereniel.7356:

Concurrent to rolling out the MMR fixes, please do a reset of the soloQ leaderboards.

This would require resetting everyone’s MMR, which is something we could do, but I’m not sure is something we’d want to do.

Aereniel.7356:

Also consider starting new people at a lower MMR

This is something we’ve been talking about for multiple reasons. I don’t recall if its something we’re doing soon though.

Aereniel.7356:

Oh, and fix decay so that 11-0 people don’t stay up top forever.

The decay seems fine to me, the problem is that they’ re taking advantage of the decay reset by playing every so often. Sit tight for news about how we will make this problem go away.

The balance changes are being done by the Skills and Combat team. The rewards are being done by the PvP team.

I believe we are getting close to revealing more details about the reward changes, but I’m not certain about when that will be.

The solo arena roster shuffling should be in the next update (11/12) unless we find a critical bug and have to back out the change. This change should eliminate the sync queuing, and do a great deal toward preventing lopsided matchups.

More significant changes to matchmaking will come sometime next year, and I’ve already been told I can write-up a blog post and start a conversation with you guys, so keep an eye out for that.

Quickfoot Katana.8642:

Anet give Justin a god kitten promotion.

I can’t take credit for this one, but thanks. You should send any thanks to Dylan for getting it out that quickly.

But… but then I won’t have a bunch of fans because I’m one of the only devs on my server!

I would definitely like to see this done, but it requires some back-end server work. If I could only clone myself.

Your right, it is broken right now. Dylan is currently working on fixing it ASAP

Blackjack.5621:

linked the same issue a couple of times without reply :<
happened to one of my mates 4 month ago

Did you post it in the bugs sub-forum? We’re not always looking here for bugs, but we do have people watching there.

That does seem strange. I’ll look into it.

Neon.8651:

Do I expect people to sit around and wait for a full year for a matchmaking implementation that should have been implemented from the get-go?

I’m not going to feel bad if someone moves on to something else, each person is going to do what they feel is in their own interest. One of the great things about our game is that you’re always free to come back and try things out at any time.

If you’re asking if we feel pressured to get these changes out to you as quickly as possible, then I would say yes and no. Yes, we definitely want to see the game improve sooner rather than later. No, we do not feel pressured to release before the changes are ready. Personally, I can’t wait to share the changes I’ve been working on with you guys.

Neon.8651:

Does the public perception of our PVP development staff seem positive or negative?

I know it can often seem negative here on the forums at times, but we do get positive feedback as well. My biggest concern is that the more constructive members here will be drowned out by people venting their, often valid, frustrations and concerns in less productive ways.

Littlefeather.8623:

You ever heard of syncing que?

Should be practically impossible once the matchmaking changes I’ve talked about make it your way. Purposely losing a match will still be a concern, but it will always be a concern.

hooma.9642:

cant or dont want? i think its more the second.

Can’t.

Sorry I didn’t have time to respond to this earlier today, but it should be resolved.

If this happens again, please post a bug report here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs

Sorry guys. This change had to be pushed back due to a bug, and will not be included in the next PvP drop.

I hope to have the problem resolved and include this fix in the following drop.

We’re getting the fix for these issues to you as quickly as we can.

The additional matchmaking improvements go beyond what has been discussed here, and will take longer to implement.

Should be working now. Please let us know if this is still an issue for you.

Blizt.3086:

Why do I sense a great deal of sarcasm from you…?

I regret if it came across that way. I was trying to include as many possible side-issues, alternatives, etc. that I could think of to spark more discussion.

We really do value your opinions and find the ideas discussed here useful.

For example, just last week I’ve spent some time trying to figure out how easy/difficult it would be to pull in users from the yolo queue to fill in the missing spots., which was not part of the original technical design.

I know someone here will probably think less of me for admitting that oversight, but I think it’s more important to show that we take you seriously.

That sucks!

We’re talking internally about how to better improve our handling of leavers, while also looking for technical problems that could be causing problems as well.

As for rewards and progression, hopefully we’ll have something to share soon.

hooma.9642:

oh well justin, here is the whole problem in anets patch politic. i can understand somethings take longer to implement then others. but hold them back to release a full stack at once is stupid if u know how urgent it is.

In this case it’s because they are part of back-end server changes that can’t be released piecemeal.

Urejt.5648:

I think system MMR should give first player to team A, then second player to team B. Third player to team A, and thourth to team B.

Doing this biases the outcome in favor of team A.

Alternatives, ordering players from 0 to 9 by rating:

Less bias
0 3 4 7 8
1 2 5 6 9

slightly less bias
0 9 2 7 4
1 8 3 6 5

Lux.7169:

Why not the weapon skins? Why do we get jipped with pve mats we don’t want. Give us skins instead of forcing us to pve or buy gems.

Reply hazy, ask again later…

XGhoul.7426:

If this is a sign of future reward schemes.. O.O.

No, this was a temporary change because many people were asking for holiday rewards.

No, not a bug.

Please share your feedback if you would like this changed, or not.

Iplaytokill.1674:

Sometime next YEAR?

I know, it sucks. They will be coming along with a lot of backend changes and improvements that need to be completed and then thoroughly vetted.

This should be fixed in the next PvP drop, which may be next month, not sure.

We’ve got even more substantial matchmaking improvements on the radar, but those won’t make it in until sometime next year.

Tab targeting now prioritizes players over NPCs (including minions; mesmer clones are an exception) and champions over everything else.

My reading of the patch note suggests that you’ll still tab through NPCs, preference is just given to players.

Are you expecting it to cycle only through players?

Either way, I’ll pass this along to the team to double check it’s working as intended.

hooma.9642:

how about downtime before the patch? is it possible to reduce? waiting 1-3 hours to get the patch is ….

Sorry, yes, this should reduce that downtime.

kirito.4138:

Justin ODell.9517:

I’m usually up for solo arena if anyone cares to join me.

Sure. Are we “Queue Syncing” into solo arena?

;)

I’ve been looking into this, and I hope to have something in the next PvP drop that will reduce the downtime after a build.

The change is a non-trivial risk so may not be ready in time.

I play Mesmer (Flux) and Engineer (Latch).

I’m usually up for solo arena if anyone cares to join me.

Edit: Join me in team arena, of course. :P

Looks like you got hit by the game update today.

Looking into why it recorded it as a loss.

Volrath.1473:

Busy?! doing what?! too you guys 4 long month to come up with close to nothing balance wise, you only made it worse…

I love you guys

I’m busy ensuring there are no game-breaking bugs.

Busy, busy. Here are relevant links.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Solo-queue-is-really-balanced/2996835

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Solo-queue-is-really-balanced/first#post2997381

Hey, what can I say? I’m not a designer. ;P

I really like this idea! Just sent an email to the team about it.

If we did remove ranks, we would probably give our players something to show off their achievement.

Farming not withstanding, we understand that many of our players have done a lot and we would never intentionally do anything to undermine that.

Hmm, maybe this is a good opportunity to get your feedback on the issue.

Do we freeze everything or do we throw everyone back into their team spawns and keep the gates locked?

Do we add a time window for how long a game can remain paused?

Tournaments are often run on a schedule, do we keep the game clock running while the game is paused so the game will still end around the same time?

If the player comes back, do we just resume the action or do we restart the match?

What do we do when we have to give up on waiting for the player to reconnect?

How do we handle trolls that disconnect on purpose?

Do we count a disconnect as part of dishonor?

Do we disable progression and rewards for a game that doesn’t finish because of a disconnect?

Do custom arena owners want to be able to pause through a command?

Lets hear your ideas. Try to come at the problem from more than one angle.

Guts.4967:

It’s quite easy in fact…

Actually, it’s not easy. If it were, I can guarantee you that I would have already implemented it myself. We LOVE easy changes that improve quality of life for our players. (Maximum payoff for minimum effort. :P)

This is definitely something we want to do, but it’s at a lower priority than what we are currently working on. I know that isn’t what you want to hear, but it’s how we have to approach these sort of things.

Hey guys, Josh (of SAB fame) offered some really good tips in another sub-forum. Since they were buried on page 20 I figured it would be a good idea to post a link to them here.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Collaborative-Development/page/20#post3007420

Does anyone else have any similar advice for us developers? What ways we can make collaborating easier for you? What things are we already doing that you enjoy? What would you like to see more of?

I may be stepping on a landmine here, but are you saying custom arena and hot jobs are what you are expecting to be random?

Hey guys. I really like some the ideas in here. Some of you definitely got us talking about how to make things smoother.

I’ve got this thread bookmarked so I can come back to it.

One thing I would suggest you keep in mind is that some of our users don’t even lift, and will troll any system that can hurt others.

felivear.1536:

Do you do programming on all aspects of the game or is your primary focus with the PvP team? And +1.. love the response.

I’m part of the PvP team, and any benefit my work has to the rest of the game is purely coincidental.

So what would you like to see?

A “ready” button that appears before the match is created, and if someone doesn’t hit it within some time-window the match is aborted and both teams are returned to the queue? Perhaps the non-responding players kick out of the team, or kicked out of the entire queue?

One way would be to check your heartbeat every so often with a “are you still here” button, but that would be kind of annoying. It also doesn’t address the players who leave because they don’t like the team they are paired with.

We could just ramp up the dishonor system.

I know the team has their own thoughts on this, but I’d really like to see if someone here can come up with something awesome.

evilapprentice.6379:

Why was this a possibility at all?

I understand where you are coming from, it’s frustrating, it bothers me as a player and bothers me even more as a developer. The upcoming changes should significantly improve things, but either way we will continue working to improve the experience.

Brutal Arts.6307:

Does that refer to the following balance patch on the 15th of October or does this refer to some in house as of yet to be determined date?

Sorry for the confusion, I was not referring to the skills and balance patch, but a drop some time after that. I do not know if we have a strong date for that or not.

Krayiss.4926:

Could you explain the process of how hard it would be to server program a PTR and test MMR?

A public test realm is something on our radar, and many of us would like to see it, but it’s far beyond the scope of the SPvP team.

evilapprentice.6379:

… can we have an explanation as to why this is just happening now?

It can happen for a lot of reasons, and I honestly don’t know exactly what happened here.

Speculating, it’s possible the 5th user that dropped was a very highly rated player. This can confuse the match maker because the average skill rating of the red team (adjusted for the time each team has been waiting in the queue) could be very near the average rating for the blue team.

Improving match making to include parameters beyond just skill rating is on our radar.

ahuba.6430:

So why isnt the decay permanent? Why, if I play just one game i get right back to the place i was.

For a few reasons, some of which are technical.

From a design perspective, and I’m not a designer so take this with a grain of salt, we want to encourage players to keep playing. If a player has to leave for a while, for whatever reason, we don’t want them to feel punished when they come back.

Making the rating decay permanent would also distort match making because the rating decay would be impossible to keep in sync with the player’s skill.

We’re trying hard to not give this issue a half measure, so we’re opting to do something more than patching this one issue. This is going to take time, but hopefully we’ll be able to give you more details soon.

We’re working on this right now. Hopefully it will be available in the next PvP drop.

One thing to keep in mind is we perform matching based on a Glicko v2 rating, not player rank. So even though higher ranked players also tend to have a higher rating, it isn’t always the case.

@Cheri Wolf
I wrote a simulator to test several different ways of solving the problem, one of which is the way you suggested, so I’m glad we’re on the same page.

While that method improved things it also tends to weigh the match in favor of the first team. The current iteration we’re working on now is very similar, but greatly reduces the bias.

Krayiss.4926:

Azshene played 1 game since Solo Q release and hes #1 and your telling us you increased decay LOL COME ON

Actually, the last time Azshene played was on the 3rd of October. You can view the last time a field changed on the leaderboard. Just hover over it and a tooltip will pop up.

It frustrates us as well when we see people that don’t play often at the top of the list. We’re definitely agree that needs to change, so now is a really good time to keep those ideas coming.

We’ve actually increased the decay multiple times now, but have been purposely making small adjustments for at least two reasons.

1) So we don’t overshoot. The last thing we want to do is punish our players for not having the time to play every day.

2) The change is retroactive, so the changes are very visible to people tracking their ranking. We don’t want to give the wrong impression to a player when their rating changes for seemingly unknown or confusing reasons.

We’re looking into ways of improving the leaderboards, so please continue offering us your ideas. In the mean-time, I’ll bring up increasing the decay with the team.