Guild Wars 2

Evan and I got together and took another look at the data and have decided on some matchmaking changes.

We’re upping the minimum potentials filter setting from ‘1’ to ‘20’. This means the queue will have you wait when customizing a match for you until we have 20 or more potential player matches. We had this previously set to 1 to have matches start as quickly as possible.

We’re increasing the penalty for roster (read: party) size distance from ‘-100’ to ‘-500’. This means parties of different sizes are less likely to be matched.

We’re decreasing the penalty for ratings distance from ‘-25’ to ‘-5’. We found matches were already really close together and felt this penalty was too strict.

We’re increasing the penalty for duplicate professions from ‘-200’ to ‘-500’, and increasing the bonus for playing a unique (read: only one on team) from ‘100’ to ‘500’. Hopefully this will reduce the number of duplicate professions seen.

As always, let me know how this plays and if you can feel a difference.

Thanks.

Ithilwen.1529:

I have seen no evidence of consideration of team vs. solo. Skimming the matchmaking algorythim, I may have missed it. I was tired but didn’t see anything in the psuedocode that dealt with team size.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm#Pseudo-Code
Look for roster size and max roster size.

FOX.3582:

100% Agree…. 10 matches today vs 9 pre-mades… Lost 9 (ofcourse) -.-

This is why I asked the question. Player perception doesn’t always match the empirical evidence. I pulled up your match history since we launched the new servers.

5 vs 4+1
2 1+1+1 vs 2+1+1+1
1+1+1+1+1 vs 2+2+1
5 vs 4+1
5 vs 1
2+1+1+1 vs 1+1+1+1+1
5 vs 3+1+1
1+1+1+1+1 vs 4+1
5 vs 2+1+1+1
3+1+1 vs 2+1+1+1
1+1+1+1+1 vs 2+1+1+1
1+1+1+1+1 vs 1+1+1+1+1
2+1+1+1+1 vs 1+1+1+1+1
2+1+1+1 vs 1+1+1+1+1

Only 3 of those were matches that were stacked against you.
5 vs 1
1+1+1+1+1 vs 4+1
5 vs 2+1+1+1

I’m want to improve things so even those don’t happen, but sometimes things just don’t happen the way we perceive them to have happened.

Zuik.7158:

Justin ODell.9517:

Zuik.7158:

Aside from class/role composition and team size what are you currently using for matchmaking then?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm#Matchmaking

Okay, ty. Tbh I just wanted to know if our MMR is currently fixed or not.

Ranked arena is using whatever MMR you had before in team arena.

Zuik.7158:

Aside from class/role composition and team size what are you currently using for matchmaking then?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm#Matchmaking

Leaderboards and matchmaking aren’t related.

The new beta leaderboard starts the 16th.

Lopez.7369:

Didn’t ArenaNet say that the last team arena system evaluated for team size as well? It’s weird that this new check is being rolled out as if it’s completely new — unless it is new, because the developers were lying to the community before.

The old matchmaking did not evaluate for party/roster size at all, which is why we created solo arena.

You’re entitled to your opinion, but I don’t think it’s been a disaster, we just need to tweak the configs… which is something we expected would need to do. This is why the beta ladder will start the 16th, and not today.

We haven’t changed ‘Play Now’, we just renamed it. It’s even still running on the old servers.

It’s possible people are doing arenas instead of hot-join because they want to.

hihey.1075:

Darnis.4056:

hihey.1075:

It’s unranked

No. It’s Not.

I thought it appeared only on unranked…
My Bad if it doesn’t. Then it absolutely needs a fix :/

Technically, both are unranked right no because neither is going to the leaderboard. :P

Errant Venture.9371:

Just curious (and I hope I’m not being rude) how do those kind of syntax errors make it through multiple layers of QA?

Long story short, it’s my fault. We had bots and all that running and it was my job to validate that it was working as expected, I missed this.

Only caught the issue because I wrote a C++11 match simulator over the weekend and I was validating that it works identical to the real systems. May end up releasing the source code to that, which is why it can’t just reuse our existing C++ code.

Booms.2594:

yeah and what about 4 like some ppl posted..

4 is treated as 3, which has score reduced by 2 * scorePerCommonProfession.
3 is treated as 2, which has score reduced by 1 * scorePerCommonProfession.
2 is treated as 1, which has no score reduction.

If you take a look at the wiki the score penalty isn’t that high, and it was being made to have even less impact because of this bug.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm#Configuration_2

Tomorrow I’ll up the penalty when I get the bugged fixed, see if that set’s it right.

If it doesn’t work, I’ll also see about changing it to an exponential calculation.

Found a missing ‘+ 1’ (literally) in the matchmaking code. Will get this fixed soon.

In the mean time, it doesn’t factor in 2 of the same profession, only 3+.

I’m really curious as to how you guys are figuring out if the other team is a pre-made. We don’t tell you, and looking at the data there are very few party rosters compared to solo.

Is it just match quality being bad? Are you just recognizing player names?

style.6173:

1. The matchmaking. It is not good. Teams are unbalanced in terms of skill level.
2. Team vs pug. This seems to be happening a lot more than the past. I thought the whole intent of this was for solo people to play together and team people to play together.
3. Lack of solo only play. I’ve yet to see 5 pugs vs 5 pugs. In the old system, I saw that all of the time in solo queue (obviously) and probably 50-75% of the time in team queue.
4. Courtyard. Due to the team vs pug issue I mentioned before, it just snowballs quickly
5. Spirit watch/skyhammer. I did team queue in the past just so that I never saw those maps. Now they are forced on me. I have 2 options: play something that isn’t fun or get dishonor. Bad choices
6. Integrated leaderboards. Will benefit team players more than solo players. There is no way to avoid that. Integrated = bad.
7. On some characters (this one for example), I can’t even queue for maps. I need to log into a different account to even play. I get some error code

Hope that helps.

Thanks. Follow up questions. Anyone else feel free to answer as well.

1) Is this something you’ve noticed primarily in one arena vs the other?
2, 3) Are you willing to wait longer for a match if it greatly reduced the odds of this happening?
7) Does it only happen on just one account, or does it just happen more frequently on that account?

sendaf.8375:

If you have a team of 5 people, chances are they are organized. They cover each others builds and may be on TS together. Now this very organized build is facing 2 groups of 2 man teams and a solo player. Sure even if the 2 man groups are perfectly synchronized together, they don’t know whats going on with the other 3 people on their teams. The 5 man team has a huge advantage….

Not super experienced in TPVP so please correct me if this is wrong but this is how I see the problem at least….

We understand that perfectly, which is why the new system takes party size into consideration. How much it does this is configurable. It seems people want it to be stricter. I’m cool with making that change, I just don’t want jump the gun and knee jerk some values based on initial reactions that could be because by unknown expectations.

displacedTitan.6897:

You have to stop people Qing with 4 because its always going to be unfair and not fun for the solos.

That isn’t the only reason. It’s also harder to find a match for them because they can only be paired with solo players, where as solos can pair with 1111, 112, 22, 13, 4.

Wakani.1829:

Still having problems, still cant enter ranked arenas or unranked arenas unless im in a team of at least two.

My firewall is off, nothing is helping. please, give us some feedback on this issue its starting to get annoying ….

When you join as a party with other people… do you initiate the queue request, or does someone else do it and you just accept?

Katze.8904:

So i never did it but now im forced to do when i play ranked pvp.

If the community has some sort of consensus on this, we could try increasing the scoring penalty for mismatched party sizes.

Terrorsquad.2349:

Wasn’t it mentioned that classes will have a rating/ranking individually?

Both links should mention it. The wiki page should elaborate on it. If it doesn’t let me know and I’ll make a note to add the details.

Rusc.4978:

Do we know an approximate time for when it will be implemented?

No, I don’t believe we have anything currently planned. We’ll probably want to regroup and evaluate the current state of the servers before we decide.

Cava.7254:

and when do we get our rewards?

I still need to pull the data and then hand it over to others to verify. (Sorry, I’ve been busy today.) Then we have to send it to CS who will get to it as soon as they can.

In other words, I have no idea other than to say as soon as we can.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Is matchmaking currently turned on for the ranked arena? Was everyone’s MMR reset after this patch?

It is turned on. No MMR was not reset, but it looks like there may have been a bug migrating old data, causing some people to have default profession data. Still looking into it.

style.6173:

I never thought I’d say that I miss the old system, but wow. This new system was NOT ready for prime time. It is not fun.

Can you elaborate? We have plenty of things we can tweak to improve matchmaking now, so qualitative feedback is useful.

Terrorsquad.2349:

a) Still top 1000, maybe 2000 now?
b) When is it coming out?
c) The ‘old’ Leaderboard stops working now? Or does it continue ‘till new LB is out?
d) Will it be so (since each of your class has it’s own MMR) that there are going to be multiple Leaderboards?
e) Any links/info about the Leaderboard matter you can provide?

a) I’m not sure what cap we’ll place on the leaderboard. John will probably make that call, but I expect it will be 1000 again.
b) Unless something goes wrong, it should be available when the beta season starts on the 16th.
c) The old leaderboard data is there but no longer being updated, and will remain on the website until we replace it with the beta leaderboard.
d) No. MMR has nothing to do with the leaderboard anymore.
e) http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/finding-the-perfect-match/

Nettle.9025:

Just want to chime in that I’ve had 3 4v5s in 4 games, and each time my team’s 5th came in late saying the queue wouldn’t let them in. By that time it didn’t matter because the game was too far gone. I haven’t personally had a problem though.

If this happens again, can you make note of the time and send me a message?

Rusc.4978:

Forgive me, Justin, but I’m a little confused. The patch notes are written in a way that implies Dishonor did get implemented, but your response in this thread indicates that it did not, and it does not seem to be in game.

What is currently going on with the Dishonor system?

The patch notes indicate the change to dishonor, not the current configuration state of dishonor.

Booms.2594:

im having the exact same issue on darek.1836

Looks like that account was able to get into a match…

Kaotic.1723:

if i use my other account i can play perfectly fine.

Is Kaotic.1723 the account having issues?

Demus.4571:

My first match (and the only one I’ve been able to do this far without getting the “queue aborted” nonsense) started as a 4v5 for my team and then turned into a 5v4.

Sorry, my fault. I had a crashing bug with a trivial fix. Got it out as fast as possible. :\

Danne.1542:

Literally nothing happens when I try to soloQ. I just hear the click sound but nothing more.

Does the animation play and wipe into a larger arena button/panel?

Niz.9235:

Keeps giving me the “unable to access log-in server” when i try to do ranked or unranked pvp its only been doing it since the patch dropped.

That doesn’t sound related to PvP (as PvP doesn’t have log-in servers outside the regular GW2 servers.)

Can you post something in this forum or create a support ticket?
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs

grins.6475:

…

Now?

You good now, Scheherezade.7162?

You should be fixed now @grins.6475!

Sorry, you just had some leftover data from the bug that was causing the servers to crash earlier.

Sorry about that, had a bug, It’s fixed, should be fine now.

Let me know how that works out for you.

What, you guys have never seen combined zero-based alternating length encoded binary optimized for ascii text?

001 031 300 201 111 000
105 310 010 302 000 010
520 022 101 100 100 110
000 110 305 200 220 000
021 011 021 100 100 102
111 210 510 301 111 111
205 130 010 211 103 051
030 102 205 130 011 201
300 100 100 102 251 515

Am I doing this right?

It’s late… and I can’t make sense of your Morse code.
- — — – - – - – — —?

uberkingkong.8041:

…

We’re doing this because even though I consider myself perfect and incapable of writing bugs, I don’t have much empirical evidence to back that up.

On the off chance I messed up, it’s better that other people don’t get punished for it.

DiogoSilva.7089:

And that is clearly a problem with the new system. Instead of offering motivation for a DC player to log back into the game and try to push a victory, it does the opposite. It effectively tells them to screw up. In other words, temporary 4v5 situations turn into full time 4v5 matches. It makes an existing problem worse.

We’re aware of that, and we’ve discussed alternatives. Right now we’re more focusing on nuking the 4v5 issue.

Also, if you come back you will still receive reward track, etc. awards.

Saiyan.1704:

He can join the game. It’s just an automatic -3 (loss) for him.

-3 to -1. Depending on their odds of victory.

Arty.1738:

The real abuse could be done in the following way:
1) get your mmr really low before ladder season start by intentional losses or whatever
2) once the season start play one game to win, then one game to lose with 400-499 points and so on
3) become #1 in ladder

Glicko2 will up your volatility if you do this, causing your MMR to more rise quickly. It may even overshoot and place you higher than you should be.

In other words, you can’t do it for long, and you may suffer later.

If it does become an issue, we can just disable off season MMR updates.

uberkingkong.8041:

Ya think I found my MMR sweetspot?

Redacting your screenshots is good practice from a privacy standpoint, but it makes it a lot harder to confirm and diagnose your matchmaking issue.

Speculating, and assuming this is solo arena from the RP reward, it looks like you were hit by the critical flaw in the current matchmaking.

The current matchmaking was designed for tournaments, not one off games, so it works by forming teams and then matches them against other teams. Jumper X and Sushijr’s team likely had a high MMR forcing them to wait in the queue for a longer amount of time. This kicked in the fail-safes that slowly widened the range of rosters we tried matched against them. Even worse, if there were no other high MMR players, their team would be filled with lower MMR players, lowering their mean MMR, dropping the range even further. Your team was the first that fit the now expanded (and possibly lower) search range. Since it was solo arena, and assuming this sshot is after the change, it tried to shuffle the players between the teams. Unfortunately, no matter how you shuffle that deck, one team will always get 3 players from the higher team. Often that doesn’t matter, but for high MMR teams that have been waiting, it can matter a lot. If the sshot is from before that change, you were just SoL.

Lucky for us all, after Dec 2nd, we’ll be using the new servers and matchmaking which doesn’t work like this at all. I can’t begin to say how happy this makes me. Seeing so many having a hard time because of MM has been a driving force over the last year.

Also, lucky for me, after Dec 2nd, I’ll have much better tools that will let me see your match history, and a lot more, so I can stop speculating and start knowing.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

…

What about multiple people getting dishonor in a single match?
Do we cycle through? Do we show all at once? Do we extend the countdown? A lot of people leave the match asap as well, I’m worried that can make exploiting easier by removing the number of voices. :/

I liked the idea of an accumulating disconnection timer. Doesn’t matter how many times you disconnect, if the total time is >= N you get dishonor. You could even do it in stages, or several iterations… e.g. you could get a single stack every 15s, etc.. The deserter loss could even be split off to a different N amount.

The biggest obstacle is messing this to players in a way that’s clear.

Why would someone do this? This would be pretty trivial for the servers to detect.

Please report anyone trying to sell wins.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

Rieselle.5079:

How about if we make it up to your teammates?

- If you disconnect, you will get Dishonor.
- However, at the end of the match, your teammates get a popup box that allows them to vote to end your Dishonor instantly, if the majority choose to do so.

—> At the very least, you’re dishonoured until the match ends. So there’s no time saved by quitting under any circumstance.

—> You’re playing with friends. They know that you wouldn’t abandon them deliberately. They want you back in their party and ready to fight the next match, so they vote to end your dishonor.

—> You’re playing with randoms. However, you manage to log back in and play well enough that they forgive you for DC’ing. They vote for you.

—> You’re playing with a bad net connection. You find a group of nice people and explain your situation to them, and PVP with them. They vote for you.

—> You’re a jerk and people hate you. You DC, possibly deliberately, possibly accidentally. Your teammates feel you deserve it, so they don’t vote for you. Commence abusive PMs.

So I think letting the teammates decide is a good thing. They are they ones best placed to decide whether your DC has ruined their game or not.

i think this will be a good compromise?

justin, please take a look? O_O

I’ll pass it along, but it looks potentially exploitable to me…. not necessarily with what we currently have, but with what others have been suggesting for other issues.

Personally, I’d really like to see an honor system. Have high honor, maybe we’re more lenient with certain punishments. Everyone hate you? Enjoy your 3 month ban for queue dodging. OK, maybe that’s a bit absurd. Plus, ever time someone got Skyhammer, my account would get another batch of demerits. :P

I just wanted to pop here and add that if dishonor for dc becomes a problem like many fear, we can simply reduce or disable that dishonor penalty until the feature gets patched.

This is something new the servers are able to do now… yay! :P

Winning always awards at least one point. Losers will follow the regular ladder point rules.

Lopez.7369:

Amstel Steel.2058:

All I see is a partial RNG voting system on top of another weighted RNG system that is a solution to an atypical conquest map. Also, Dishonor makes no sense the way I read it. If a player get’s disconnected that player cannot return to the match until the dishonor is up which guarantees every 4v5 to remain a 4v5 with no option to resign the match. Honestly, just allow the d/c player to reenter the match within a grace period. Ready Button that brings a bank and whatever was else gets an honorable mention.

I think the person who disconnects will be able to rejoin, but they won’t be able to queue in the match after.

Lopez.7369 is correct. Also, the dishonor timeout starts counting down right away, so it will likely be gone before you finish the match.