Guild Wars 2

TheQuickFox.3826:

DX11 (For Win7 users) and DX12 (For Win10 users) support would be nice for a small free performance boost.
Still, I think Guild Wars 2 looks utterly amazing in DX9.

No, it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be “free” by any stretch of the imagination, and also, it wouldn’t perform better to just “change to DX11”. Because that isn’t a thing.

If you make the same calls to the same API, performance would be … the same. If you change the calls made, it might change, but only if the previous API was less efficient and … generally not so much, unless you have a headily threaded client, which ANet do not have.

It’s like sticking a Porche body kit on a regular can, then wondering why it doesn’t suddenly go faster…

Drakz.7051:

The reason that people could do everything in any armour with any stats is because the game was originally very casual and was meant to be a “play your way” kind of game, now they seem to be going towards more of a roles style like the average mmo (Mostly for raids or fractals)

A clear example is raids, you basically have to min/max with people as specific roles to win and with the amount of players lower than before it will seem like a bigger majority want this kind of style.

No, you don’t. It helps, but it’s entirely possible to complete all content in the game – including the raids – without following the “meta” to the letter, despite what pug leaders would have you believe.

Look at how many class-stacking and low-member groups are clearing the content now.

PS: not to you, Draks, but to the earlier claims of wanting more “hardcore” content… Wildstar is ===> over there, and did exactly what you asked. Then tanked exactly as hard as everyone else said it would, because nobody really wants that “hardcore” content you describe, not even you. You are mistaken thanks to the rosy haze of memory.

Everything is good, solid, and can do any content. What is “fun” is really about you – for example, I love DD thief, necro, and ranger. I want to love Guardian because they lore appeals to me, but I just … can’t.

If you are not me, you will find my choices abhorrent, just as I can’t understand why anyone can play guard … but they do, and love it.

I’m leaning to condition ranger, though any ranger would work. My reasoning:

Having the pet, especially a tankier one, makes it much more forgiving than most professions. That’s a good start on that side.

One of the biggest contributors to “rotation” for ranger is using the trait that causes huge cooldown reduction when you swap weapons in combat, which in turn means more or less weapon-swap-on-cooldown, which changes the skills you use. No AA only, but AA is still good enough that you can get by with it if you are distracted.

Mobility is pretty solid, with a 25 percent boost in base, and 33% in the elite spec, with no conditions required. No teleport ala mesmer, but otherwise you are about as comfortable as it gets.

Stealth is available to you, which can sometimes be that big difference in getting around.

Ranger is honestly mostly a close-to-mid range fighter. The longbow is the only very long range option, and it’s actually not that great overall for most things. MH Sword or Axe, OH Axe or Torch, and you have zero to 600 range, and interesting play.

I used it at 79.5 for the free armor set. Then decided I didn’t like guard anyway, but that is another story.

Just burn it there – or sit on it until you want an alt for something and want to skip the old world again.

PS: or just destroy it. You are not obliged to use it.

The amount your rating changes is related as much to you confident the MMR system is of your ranking, as to what tier you are in. A player way up at the top of the ladder with a low “confidence” score will have big win/loss changes, and a player down in bronze who belongs there (hi!) with high confidence will only see small movements.

The reason higher players tend to see smaller movements is, in large part, because you have to be pretty good to stay up there, and that in turn means you win or lose as expected more often. That makes MMR confident you are placed right, so the changes are smaller…

Amaimon.7823:

Uvirith.9573:

>trying to greentext on GW2 forums
>mfw

It wasnt greentexting, it making bullets when you dont have a bullet symbol on your keyboard. I could change the, to numbers if your 4chan soul so desires? Just remember, not the whole world is 4chan, so not everything is greentext

PS: if you look at the help, you can use the star (“*”, shift-8) character for bullet lists.
Also, I laughed, because that was quoted text for more than twenty years before reddit, 4chan, and friends.

Sounds great, works terribly. It’s effectively a diablo style “this game I get this map”, which doesn’t really vary much, so it’s just “eh, today is this shape, huh”.

It’s only theory, but … “soft” spots where the magic can leak out into the normal world, like where the ley line events happened, etc. Possibly where Asura waypoints are built, too.

That’s usually what this sort of thing means in US English.

No opinion on the griefing, but definitely: I tried this for a moment, then just gave up and did other things that day. That adventure is awful with more than one or two other players.

Just as a side note, today I ran through two complete DS meta cycles, and left while a third was running. All with good leadership, etc. So, uh, the US is doing the meta routinely…

If you have completed the HoT masteries, XP rewards spirit shards. It would also make it faster to earn XP for the new masteries in this living story.

That said, I can’t see the point of it myself, but I’d guess those were the intended reasons – and perhaps as a helper for new players to fill out mastery bars to catch up?

Do you mean that yellow circle around the outside? That’s an “edge of the effect” indicator. Perhaps it was added after you last played.

Are you certain that the first two are not caused by one of the options to assist in landing attacks on your tab-targetting target? It certainly sounds like they could be.

note: you should almost instantly get an automated response email confirming that the ticket was received. If you did not, check your spam folder, etc, and if still nothing try again.

(instantly, as in, like, five minutes or so.)

Yeah, it’s pretty clear that those are the point that is the problem here, by now – and that also explains why other users (for example, me) don’t have it, because our traffic doesn’t cross that pain in the neck node.

You should lean on your ISP to lean on those companies and fix the problem. It’s not very effective, but it’s about the only thing that might work.

(Well, unless someone knows a network engineer employed at one of them, and wants to call in a favor.)

Typhaeon.8145:

It’s entirely possible to credit Arenanet for their storytelling, or world design, and fault them for their lackadaisical optimization work. Sure, they released a 64-bit client to address memory management issues, but they’re a big-time developer in the MMO scene. Why is it so difficult for them to implement DX12, CPU multicore instruction handling & GPU multithreading into their engine?

You just wrote “Why is it so difficult for them to implement an entirely new client from scratch”, though not in the same words.

Which is to say: the complexity of the two is identical. (and before you ask why that is, because those things you listed there are, whee, the hardest problems to grapple with in programming.)

Typhaeon.8145:

Being unwilling to hire competent engineers & US-educated developers to give this cash cow of a game the most baseline of optimizations smacks of minimum-effort rentier behavior to me. But that may be NCSoft’s corruption encouraging that philosophy, since they murdered my other favorite, perfectly profitable MMO game series for no reason.

I assure you that “US-educated” and “competent” have zero relationship in this sentence of yours: US-educated developers can be compentent, or not, and non-US developers can be competant or not. The two are essentially unrelated.

Honestly, though, given your views, I’d suggest you, also, just leave. It’s not going to get better, as NCSoft will not be magically uninvolved ever again.

I wish you luck finding a game you enjoy elsewhere.

Typhaeon.8145:

It’s both NCSoft’s and the ISPs’ fault for not talking to each other to negotiate better CDN optimization for their users’ traffic to the servers – or ponying up the cash for CDNs, in NCSoft’s case.

O_o you know that between the ISP and NCSoft sit somewhere between three and six other companies, all of which just move packets around, right? They don’t directly connect together.

Also, a CDN would not solve the problem here, because they can distribute static content, but they can’t exactly solve issues with getting interactive traffic back and forth between a users computer and the server.

You might want to reconsider your comments in light of your actual knowledge in future.

Contact customer service using the ticket feature.

It’s worth noting that player behaviour is to cluster on specific “popular” servers, so as a rule of thumb you should go for the biggest and/or most famous server if at all possible.

Manual efforts (like “full” servers) can help with this some, but at the end of the day it’s impossible to get an MMO playerbase to balance evenly without forcing it.

hackks.3687:

I’d agree except that until we can see everyone else’s stats for comparison there is no way to tell by why margin you had top stats. It could’ve been by 1 pt or 1 million pts.

We need a real scoreboard in addition to finding the right way to gauge individual contributions

Note that this has been tried in other games, and it ends up increasing the kitten factor of PvP chat, but not player skill. It’s a better idea to just have a decent MMR algorithm, which thankfully GW2 uses.

ZombieSlayeR.8702:

Ivakis Solo.4807:

I main Thief in PvP and the only thing I can complain about Guardians is the traps, and more specific the one that pulls you. That is very annoying otherwise they are not such a big problem. In my opinion Necros with all of their pets are much more annoying.

Necs are more annoying than Guards to a teef … did i miss sth ? :^)

Which classes are the most painful depend deeply on what part of the MMR tree you sit in, and how well you know how to counter them. Each person has different experiences.

Personally, I find ranger vs necro less annoying than ranger vs warrior right now, because I need to learn how to anti-warrior better.

Scykosix.7836:

Nilkemia.8507:

Pifil.5193:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Seems like you could really benefit from traiting or slotting a condition clear, then, eh?

I’ve noticed that conditions can be reapplied.

This. Conditions can be applied at a much faster rate then you can cleanse them, even if you build with such a thing in mind.

Of course, the only uses PvP has are reward tracks and dailies.

Ehm and how is that a bad thing? Do you want a conidition spec not EVER being able to kill someone just because he uses some sort of condi cleanse trait/skill?

That ^^^^^. Also, y’know, this isn’t a game of “one thing and only one thing.”

Slot a condition clear. Back it with either an immunity, a disengage, or some form of pressure back to the condi person, so they don’t have the ability to just stand there and condition you back up again.

I mean, it’s not like there are no zero-cooldown condition sources, but getting stacks like that is usually not free, or even close to it. Sensible timing of one or two condition clears would significantly reduce damage taken, allowing your healing and “fight or flight” to deal with the situation.

That is, if you want to argue that conditions are stronger than power, sure, maybe that’s reasonable, bring some proof. If you just want to whine that you died to conditions, maybe it is time to consider things that help you, like condition clears, vit focused gear to give you a bigger buffer against them, more self-heals, or even bigger things like the overall approach you and your team take in the match.

You can stop speculating, and go read the details of exactly what it does over on the wiki, if you want

Anyway, uh, what you are talking about with the smaller or larger movements is actually the effect of the “uncertainty” part of the gliko-2 score, and of the match outcome prediction.

This is what actually makes gliko-2 better than ELO, because it means that when your win or less better matches the predicted win or loss (eg: it predicts the outcome correctly more often) your MMR is closer to perfect, so you should move less far from it.

The more you beat your head against the edges of the system, such as pairing very-high and very-low MMR players, and forcing matchmaking to place them together, the more likely that quirks will be shown, but at heart it isn’t /wrong/ that different players in the same match move different amounts.

Also, you need to look at way more than one match for any of this to make any real difference. MMR is a statistical thing, so a single sample out of a whole sequence of events and predictions can be way, way out of whack without breaking the overall outcome.

You probably want to tell us why you think WoW PvP is bad, because if you don’t it is gonna be very, very much a case of “well, I am fine with this”, then you come back and, dang, you hate the pants off it … because WoW PvP would be fine with me too.

To the specific questions: pvp is good right now, but QQ is high because this season the changed your rank (bronze, silver, gold, etc) from “wins move you up, nothing moves you down” to “reflects your actual skill, by way of MMR”.

Which means a bunch of people who were “legendary” rank are now … not. They are not happy about this. (The MMR system is approximately the same as what WoW uses, FWIW.)

Lots of people are having fun. Addition of top tier armor rewards to ranked pvp mean there are a lot of new players in it, which has the good and bad you would expect of that, but of course, that’s all down in the bottom of the MMR pool for the most part – just as it should be. Gonna mean an infusion of people who decide PvP is fun and stick around though.

Balance happens between seasons, four to six times a year, plus the occasional emergency fix. It’s fast enough that you don’t get change every week, but you do get it before things get too out of hand if someone works out a clever but unintended strategy.

All the classes are competitive right up until you get to the very tip-top of PvP, and even there it’s reasonably spread. Plenty of people will tell you that X is overpowered or underpowered or cheese, but the value of X is “anything”, and all the descriptors applied to all the classes. Which is a sign of generally good balance.

Also, people QQ about MMR being wrong but, as noted, this is because their skill rather than play time is being reflected in ranking for the first time. Actual gameplay is usually pretty good, and you get matchups that rapidly converge on competitive.

DR has a rift leading outward from it.

OriOri.8724:

I disagree that this is just a “maybe” like you insist. ANet has stealthily acknowledged that the rate of acquisition of new MC into the game was too low for a long time, that’s why they have slowly been introducing more ways to obtain them. Even as recently as the Nightmare Fractal release they were introduing new ways to acquire MC, so obviously ANet agreed on at least some level that the rate of acquisition of MC versus how many are needed for crafting individual skins is off. Another one or two new trickles like that may very well be enough, maybe ANet thinks that right now its enough. But they have added these new sources recently, so they do agree at least in part that acquisition vs spending MC was off.

It’s pretty clear from our exchanges that we disagree.

That is a good point about the rate of inflow changes, though. I don’t think it significantly changes my view, but I’ll think further about it.

If it does, though, I feel like it also bumps your view, in the sense that ANet are clearly doing something about the inflow rate already.

DoctorDing.5890:

One of the things I’m not keen on in modern gaming is the expectation that everyone will be using google, wiki and youtube to figure out what to do in the game. It’s fine to have that option but it should be possible to work out almost everything in the game without resorting to that stuff. There could be NPCs in each zone who can give you the lowdown if you ask them: what, where, when, who? It’s not just HoT stuff either. The first time I had a world boss on my daily list I zoned in to the map and, um, no clue. Those timer sites should be unnecessary.

They are unnecessary: you could ask in map chat, and see if anyone else knew where to go, or you could wander around and try and find it, or you could follow the “event” guide tool that is built in to the UI.

This is really, really just “can I have the help given by google and the wiki, but in the form of an in-game NPC”. Would you be happier if the web browser was built in, like it is in The Secret World, so you don’t have to alt-tab for this?

…aaaand not gonna happen. You can have more than enough characters on a single account to achieve anything reasonable, so this is really just asking to be able to have multiple login rewards and/or per-account daily things, drops, etc on a single account by paying extra money for it.

Which is way more P2W than I think anyone really wants to see.

Alec B.8905:

the classes themselves are balanced skill wise, but the damage output both condition related and physical are off the charts due to HoT e-specs.
The other issue with the game is how people are able to build to be absolute tanks and still put out damage even though they are built to tank. same thing with heal specs. then the actual power spec just gets over powered by the skills.
Anet has made it to where people can just spam skills and get easy damage instead of having to set up combos.

…and, of course, nobody else is smart enough to have noticed that and, IDK, adapted to using those same builds to counter this.

I mean, it’s one hundred percent more likely that all the people working metabattle, etc, missed this whole problem than, say, you are just not as great a player as you think, and /that’s/ why you keep on dying so much.

who want blood.8765:

completed Diessa plateau again …got another charge, 17 maps no key and counting ><

Don’t hate me for being pretty, or getting six keys in the last third of map completion with my most recent round. RNG is RNG. Uh, I doubt that it is biased toward the higher level maps, but I did seem to get more of them in higher level maps.

OTOH, I also left those to last, so shrug

FWIW, Ember Bay and Bloodstone Fen have mechanically similar ascended rings with different names, which is why I held my nose and ground through the stupid rubies to get my second vipers…

Astralporing.1957:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

ANet (including Smith) have said there’s a huge supply not on the market. I’m not sure why you think it’s likely we’re running low on them.

I didn’t say we’re running low now. I said we’re going to run low eventually.
We’re not running on current supply, but on reserves. Reserves do not last unless they can be resupplied at a sufficient rate. And, in case of MCs, we (the players) lack any ability to influence that rate, because their supply sources are tighly controlled and limited.

Sure, and eventually Mr Smith, or other parts of ANet, may have to do something. If, and only if, you are right in your assessment that we are running on a large reserve being slowly sold by players.

I posit that, in fact, we are running on what is essentially a stable inflow vs outflow, as the number of legendaries and other consumers of MCs is not the issue, but rather, player demand for those items is – and the number of players motivated enough to build a legendary is smaller than the number of players receiving mystic coins each month through login rewards.

Time will prove one of us right, but that is the future. Reacting now to solve a ‘maybe’ isn’t the best strategy, especially when the evidence we have at hand is that right now the market is healthy enough to absorb a significant effort to game it, through the bulk purchase of many coins.

Linthenius.3704:

Thanks a ton for the bags. Guess i’ll start working on tailoring so I can make my own in the future.

FWIW, bags have a fixed minimum price as their require a material only available from a vendor at a fixed gold cost. (eg: 20 slot = one 10g rune of holding.)

Purchasing the least expensive 20 slot “general purpose” bags on the trading post reflects the cost of manufacture, and not much more. Typical savings are around 20 silver for making rather than buying.

I’d suggest you would do better, as a rule of thumb, to simply sell materials that you gather on the TP using the insta-sell price, and then purchase bags.

http://dulfy.net/2015/10/25/gw2-verdant-brinks-hero-points-guide/ documents the hero points in VB, and also which of them are soloable – in the sense of “you can walk up and take them”, not “yah, I totally solod the champ!”.

There are similar guides for AB, and the following two maps, but you don’t need them since you get ten points per commune and will finish your elite spec before you finish the easy AB stuff.

Use this to grab the mastery points as well, while you are there, if you don’t have enough glidering yet.

NikeEU.7690:

People should realize the mechanics of the fight are intrinsically linked to dps. How many green circles are vg does a speed clear guild have to deal with? 5 or 6. How many does a mediocre pug have to deal with? 8 or 9? 10?? How many orbs does a speed clear guild have to clear at gorseval? 1 or 2? How many does a mediocre pug have yo clear? 5 or 6?

How long do the healers in a speed clear guild have to go into turbo heal mode when sabetha and karde are alive together? 20 seconds? How long does a mediocre pug have yo deal with that pressure? 45 seconds?

How many shoots does a speed clear guild have to eat to kill slothadaur? 3. How many does a mediocre pug have to eat? 5 or 6?

I could go on. But you get the point hopefully. Good dps makes the mechanics easier. Raiding 101.

Sure, higher DPS helps move through mechanics faster, but … fun fact: speed clear is not what the raid is tuned for. It’s tuned to be achievable by people who don’t know the mechanics, don’t have the “optimal” composition for speed clearing, and do deal with all those extra rounds of the mechanics.

The same thing is true of the overall kill as of the individual phases: unless your problem is that you run out of healing within two percent of the phase end, every single time, and are doing the mechanics correctly … DPS from the “optimal” class vs the next twenty best is not your real problem.

steelheart.7386:

RandomNameDude.8263:

Ninski.5680:

i dont think the number of games played is the problem its the placement rating system, they need to cap it at Gold and not allow players to go 10-0 and be at 2150 rating, They also should make it so you need at least 50 games played in order to be eligible for rewards in the top 250 on the leaderboard, I think that would be a pretty fair system.

^ This

Even if they did that you would still have people playing a small amount of games and playing sparingly to protect there rating. That’s bad. They need to encourage a large but not onerous amount of games played to be in the top rankings. 50 games seems way to low over two months. There is some lucky involved the more games played it would seem to me the truer the results. I think 150-300 games played falling in that range I would be perfectly fine with to be rank in the 250 at the end. 50 not so much.

You, uh, might be better off arguing for faster “reward” MMR decay, or slower recovery, or requiring more than one game to stave off decay starting, than for a fixed number. That would achieve exactly the same thing, but would also be self-adjusting to a much greater degree than a fixed number of games.

Seems like you could really benefit from traiting or slotting a condition clear, then, eh?

Medex.1504:

Well this went a litle of topic from my starting point … but I do get it what u mean … but still if the ranking is set and divided in divisions it should work … so higer tier players should not play vs lower ranks and then … well kitten them for lossing a match.

If your opposite team is higher MMR than you the system will predict a loss — possibly as much as “almost certain loss” — and will not reduce your MMR significantly for losing. It will, however, give you a huge MMR boost if you win, because that was extremely unlikely.

TL;DR version is: the size of your rating change is tied to a variable in the MMR system that reflects how confident the algorithm is about your MMR reflecting your real skill.

When the change got smaller that shows the confidence increased – basically, the MMR system was correctly predicting your win or loss correctly more often, so it knows that you are at closer to your exact MMR than you were before.

In order to raise your MMR you now need to raise your actual skill, since you have reached the level that accurately reflects how well you play compared to other players.

msalakka.4653:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

This is not the right way to bring the issue to the attention of ANet support. See https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Reporting

If you can’t use the in-game reporting options, you could consider the email reporting option to request they look into this. In-game reporting is the best way though.

The in-game report tool doesn’t do a kitten thing. It’s just a dialog window with an OK button without an action assigned to it.

Respectfully, if you actually believe that I’d strongly suggest you abandon this game and go somewhere else instead. If that were actually the case – that it was a placebo to silence player complaints – it would be reasonable to assume that the rest of the system was equally player-hostile.

Why anyone would subject themselves to that is beyond me.

coro.3176:

The Elite spec balance issue has been discussed since HoT, but as far as I know the devs have been silent on it. It’s weird because you know they must be reading these comments. They reply on other topics, and “HoT powercreep” has got to be the most common phrase on the forums. It kind of makes you wonder if it is really a conspiracy to sell expansions.

Devs and CS people often read, but rarely reply, to forum posts and comments. This is pretty much standard across the industry.

Anyway, you can be absolutely confident that in-class balance is watched and adjusted for, just like cross-class balance is. For example, Necro Axe got a boost because it was rarely used in the game. That is exactly to adjust for imbalance within the class.

Dofty.9814:

- My last 10 games, I have won 6 and lost 4. Yet my rating went lower than before these 10 games. How does MMR works and how is it able to contribute to dunk me lower than I was before given the fact I won more games than I lost?

Your MMR goes down when you lose a game that you were expected to win, and goes up when you win a game you were expected to lose. What that result says is that you are winning games you were expected to win, but also losing games you were expected to win.

Which means that your current MMR is higher than your actual skill level, and you are seeing the correction to have it more accurately reflect your real skill.

Dofty.9814:

- Is it publicly available how the MMR is been calculated? If so, what is the maths/algorythm behind it?

Short version is that it is Gliko-2; long version is that the wiki has an extremely detailed explanation, including pseudocode and numbers

Notably: this is similar to the TrueSkill algorithm used in XBox matching, extensively studied, standard, and an improvement over ELO as it accounts for how confident the game can be about your MMR being accurate.

Dofty.9814:

- I am dunked in the Bronze, the last 8 days I have a Win/Loss ratio of 6:4 and yet I seem to remain my 950 score. Is there any advice to get out of Bronze? Besides winning more games than losing.

There are two things that influence your “reward” MMR: decay, if you don’t play for a while, and your skill. Of those, only the second influences your “real” MMR, which is used to select who you play with.

So, no, there is nothing other than “improve your skill” that will move you out of Bronze.

Dofty.9814:

- How does one coop with a team that is not communicating at start. Questions such as ‘Hi Team, who takes close’ remain unanswered.

Observe behaviour, and fill in gaps. Also, give direction, which may be followed despite a lack of response. Beyond that, you can’t.

(uh, don’t mean to be rude, but if you are down in bronze, also consider that perhaps the other players think your advice is bad, or question is silly, and ignore it rather than saying something rude, or something that may invite rudeness in response.)

Dofty.9814:

- How does one coop with players just grinding the Ascended Gear? The quality of these players is often far beyond any kind off imagination.

The ones that are just cheating their way in by being AFK, report them. The ones who are trying … shrug, and accept that if your MMR places you with them, your skill level is similar to theirs.

Dofty.9814:

- Will Bronze – eventually – get rid of PvE Players, so Bronze becomes a real bracket?

If you are a better player than those PvE players doing PvP for rewards you will move above them. That may still be in bronze, or it may be in a higher tier, but either way your MMR will be above theirs because, hey, you play better.

Dofty.9814:

- How come we cannot queue with 5 people? It’s a team-oriented game, one cannot do much without a team, team communication etcetera. If there would be a PvP mode where your skills – no matter the win or loss – would give you rating, then it would make sense that one is solo queue’ing. If I end up with 4 (or 3, if I would duo-queue) players who are not willing/able to cooperate as a team, their skills basically have impact on my score. On my rating. That doesn’t make quite sense to me. Is there somebody able to explain this quite ‘odd’ decision?

Players desired it. There was a question about what to try, and this season this is the result of the community and developers figuring out what to experiment with.

Ultimately, a premade team is stronger – I think a dev said about 30-40 percent more likely to win – than a random team, all else including individual player skill on both sides being identical.

This is a hard, hard problem to solve. You could factor in an adjustment to MMR like that, so premade 5s with an MMR of 1000 play against random players with MMR 1350, or that 5v5 is always premades, but … neither is great, for various reasons including queue times, especially as you get to the top end.

Anyway, all that aside, the team you are placed with doesn’t make that much of a difference. Remember that your team has 4 slots for players of random skill, including the AFKers or PvE baddies, while the other team has 5 slots.

That gives you a five percent better chance of the other team being the one punished by having a bad player on it than your team. (If, of course, we assume you are unfairly being placed below your actual MMR due to other players on your team. If not, the odds are even, or even favor the other team if you are over-ranked in MMR )

SolarDragon.7063:

I’ve been duo queueing with a friend and we’ve been reliably getting teams that are completely terrible, does duo queue then automatically give you the worst players available or something?

Nope. The game system uses the MMR of you two the same as it does the rest of the players to find a matchup that it believes is comprised of ten players of approximately equal skill.

For a duo queue that means, to some degree, that it accepts a greater degree of error for you two than it would for a solo queue player, if your MMRs are vastly different. That’s mandatory to put you in the same match – someone is gonna be mismatched somewhat.

…but, really, if you are being placed only with terrible players the horrible truth is that … your skill level is comparable to theirs. Sorry.

There have been a number of ANet comments to the effect that this is a bug, and they intend to fix it.

It’s worth noting that TrueSkill tries to do the same thing that Gliko does in terms of the uncertainty factor in MMR changes. So, uh, while it’s not wrong, it’s also not exactly a revolutionary suggestion in a game that already does that.

Technically TrueSkill is patented so Gliko isn’t exactly the same, but the mathematical underpinnings are similar; just the methods to reach the conclusion differ slightly.

Both do better than ELO for matchmaking.

Fun MMR fact: the size of the gain or loss is based on how confident the algorithm is about your MMR matching your actual skill. As you move closer to the “correct” MMR you will experience two things:

• your MMR changes will get smaller and smaller
  * more matches will end up 495:500

…which is desirable, because that’s closer and closer to balanced. For queue time reasons you are unlikely to ever sit exactly at the correct MMR, but you will stay close enough.

A close match doesn’t change how confident the MMR system should be able having accurately predicted your personal skill level, and you probably don’t want it to be since it would make it more dependent on the performance of other players rather than your own skill.

TBH, my answer would be: GW2 PvP could do with slowing down some. Neither power or condition damage is inherently unreasonable, and they are balanced enough, but both of them suffer some from the “burst down fast” model that so much of the PvP game depends on.

Decay only changes your “visible” or “reward” MMR, not your actual matchmaking, which uses the undecayed version. So inside this season it behaves as you would hope.

For next season, you should not care what the initial MMR is – once you have played 10 games it will have moved pretty close to the correct MMR, and by the time you hit 100 games played it’s gonna be on point.

Starting everyone at 0, or 350, or a random number, or via placement matches, or by using the same “real” or “reward” MMR as the previous season, will have pretty much zero effect on anyone who actually plays PvP after the first few hours.

Artaz.3819:

It’s impossible to move up/down with the current MMR in ranks and I don’t see myself as playing in PvP all that much with a couple of matches here and there.

The larger the movements in your MMR after a match, positive or negative, the less certain the game is of your true rank. As the movements get smaller, the more you have found the correct level for your actual skill compared to the other players in PvP.

That means that, yes, you will eventually find it very difficult to move your MMR up or down because – guess what – it now accurately reflects your skill, so in order to change it you need to improve (or reduce, I guess, enjoy that hammer to the forehead) your own skill level.

Good luck with that. (or, I guess, just don’t PvP and know that your skill and thus your MMR will not change.)