The matching has me quite suspicious lately as well.
I went through a 30 game losing streak (not purely, a few wins) in the past few days. It started to concern me because it wasn’t like that after I had placed. I was originally doing fine around 50/50 for my first 40 games. Then on the last game I played (during my losing streak) I had a disconnect on the enemy team. It was 5v4, should have been an easy win. We still ended up losing 350-500 but I had every top on my team. Max damage, most revives, most heal, most kills, everything. It was actually the first time I’ve earned this, but I typically always get 2-3 tops. I also have noticed that every time I lose a game, I lose 10 points, but every time I win I get 25+. This makes me further suspicious. Did they lie about the matching and leave in old or inappropriate considerations to bias particular players to a winning/losing side? I mean, how much gooder do I need to git?
I don’t think glicko is the problem. Something feels off with their matching system. I wouldn’t be surprised if next week I end up in a 30 game winstreak. Happened to me many times in every past season.
No it’s not, that’s not how Glicko2 works.
The boon is in a good place because it forces condition offenders to make choices. If they make the correct choices, they can get past the resistance. If they don’t, they fail and come here and complain that they shouldn’t be forced to choose correctly.
Is this where all the god-tier bronze ranked players hang out?
Should fix a lot of the current issues regarding alts and leader board manipulation.
You guys need to relax. It’s only day 1 and it dropped while most collages and universities are running finals week. There are going to be a lot of good/bad players running their placement rounds for another week or so. You will get unlucky but you will get lucky too.
Finally I can earn some respect for playing rev.
Maybe one day you will learn how much they don’t care.
I don’t see how sandbagging an s5 match will provide any benefit.
Engineer flamethrower and Gaze of Darkness. I’m sure there’s a bunch more but essentially the behavior is that if a target is just a few feet above or below, but mostly in front like while while chasing them up stairs or a shallow ramp (Coliseum), the skills have no affect. Flamethrower does not hit at all.
The benefit from communication that team chat provides never outweighs the disadvantage that comes from the time and effort it takes to write and read it. If you disagree, you may have a serious issue with your ego. The thought alone that you can coach someone during a match with a typed out sentence disqualifies you from coaching. If we want to use ESL players as an example, they review and analyze video. They don’t ever type as a method to coach each other during a match. If they did, it’s exactly why they lost.
This is like, pulling out your driver’s manual while rolling down the street.
Voip is the only beneficial form of communication.
(edited by SneakyTouchy.6043)
If more than one of the same class is detected on a team, all members on the team with the same class lose 5 % hp per second once the match starts. Zero affect on queue times.
I can’t agree with that. The top ESL teams all use comms. Communication is always a plus in any team game.
We’re talking about team chat, not voip. Comms coming from pugs are most often just distractions and nonsense. Only one out of a thousand comments will be “the engi is condi” or something very slightly usefull. The rest are all inflammatory insults and ego failures. Time was wasted to enter them, more time wasted for others to read, and once someone feels insulted over it, they stop thinking about their play and instead focus on how they might be able to retaliate.
So funny.
Nothing good ever came from chatting during a match except for opening split discussion prior to the game’s start.
A good player doesn’t waste their time reading chat. They’d already be doing what they’re supposed to be doing which means their eyes are on enemy/friendly movement.
A smart player wouldn’t think he’s going to suddenly fix an inexperienced player’s inexperience.
Chat is for venting and pretending to know something. You might as well be camping home the entire game if you’re going to start typing because you’ll be just as useless.
The game would probably be better off disabling it entirely once the match starts.
Regardless of the morality of giving up a hopeless game, there are some people who’ve performed rigorous testing of the report system with respect to players offering gold to throw matches.
Some repeated the same request a few hundred times and received reports from randoms and friends, including screenshot/video evidence sent to Arenanet’s ticket system reporting the manipulative behavior.
No consequences whatsoever, not even an email warning, came for those committing the offenses. The report functions were added simply to stop people from complaining on the forums.
You are more likely to be approached for offensive language.
Duo queue, Sapphire -> Legend:
http://i.imgur.com/tn1ZgUi.jpg
Solo queue, Amber -> Legend:
http://i.imgur.com/r0OpsET.jpg
Doesn’t really matter what the matchmaking system is. If you’re a good player you can usually prevail if you can carry hard enough and play around the mistakes of your team. The struggle is most definitely real at times, however. Sometimes you need to literally play like a god to win and sometimes even that’s not enough.
If you start late in the season, you’d be pairing with the games worst players until you hit legendary. Even by then, you still would only have a rare chance getting paired up against real skill. It wasn’t until I hit x3 that I started seeing pro-league players.
If anyone had started in the beginning keeping pace with the rest of the best, they would have fought through a 50/50 ratio all the way.
550 games played
279 games won
~51%
Anet made a heavy mistake with their pip/mmr crossover for the past 4 seasons that lead to a condition that created long queue times, poor representation of ranking, and poor matching. This lead to a decrease in overall pvp participation that furthered the problem.
Questioning which is better is an invalid question. We’re not here to choose between the two. If Anet holds true to their future attempt with season 5 to match based on MMR instead of pips, and allow pips to represent MMR, we will get shorter queue times and better matching at the same time.
Fighting guards as a thief is best with acrobat staff, just run the valk gimmick if your timing and mechanics need work.
I think if they toned down the survivability of other classes, particularly the DH, druid and scrapper, the necro wouldn’t have an issue.
I think a game mode that “needs” voice comm and complex multi player interaction doesn’t have much of a place in a public MMO…..
That’s a dead end argument. There’s neither a way nor a reason to fix it.
If you are actually better than 70% of the players, you will on average be matched with players who are worse. That means once you find a 50% win ratio spot, you will be doing most of the work for your team.
The first paragraph is right, but this part is incorrect. If you’re better than 70% of the players, you will on average be matched with other players that are also better than 70% of the players.
Nope. You are matched with all players within a pip range. All the players within that pip range have the full spectrum of player skill levels.
Lol. The necro GS reminds me a lot of the high damage ele skills in pvp. When you use them, your character first makes a loud announcement that they are using a skill, wait for all involved parties to acknowledge receipt of said announcement, and then slowly execute over a minute or two.
The accuracy of this statement LOL
If you play ele, you can /dance on point and make the enemies blow all their interrupt cooldowns.
They adjust a hidden personal score of yours that represents your likelihood to contribute towards a win. This score is used to even out the likelihood of a win between both teams. Over many games, this statistically allows the matching system to evaluate players. If you win, your value gets boosted slightly.
If you are actually better than 70% of the players, you will on average be matched with players who are worse. That means once you find a 50% win ratio spot, you will be doing most of the work for your team.
It is an unfair penalty, but not a punishment. Punishments are penalties handed to individuals who commit offenses. Playing well isn’t an offense. It is simply unfair that you are not rewarded for your progression by promotion to higher ranks over those who do not play as well.
There is going to be an attempt to fix this in Season 5, but your rank will represent your skill level. You won’t be awarded higher win rates.
From here on forward, it would be very unwise for anyone to place importance on win ratios unless they are strictly assigned to very specific 5 man teams. The evaluation system requires balance to evaluate and the consequence of that process should lead to a 50% win ratio on average for everyone who ques with randoms.
Can we have a filter that reduces how many times someone can make noise on the map? It’s really distracting when some doofus who thinks they know something dedicates their entire match time to pinging the map nonstop.
One noise per minute plz
Someone please gimme feedback on this. I really wish we had a win/loss reset in game. Maybe anet could sell us one through the gem store. Let evreryone reset their win/loss ratio, and then put it on display.
I am sure there are a few people like me who played PvP very casually but eventually started taking it seriously. Would love to see my stats now that I know what I am doing.
Win ratio doesn’t represent anything. It won’t vary far from 50% unless you’re the worst of the worst, the best of the best, or exploiting the algorithm.
If players like the games, they will throw u money. p2w never a good ideas.
If you like the game then buy it. Problem solved. If you don’t like it, you don’t belong here.
What would be the point? None of them hold any merit. Some of them were more based on luck than anything else.
What they should add is a title for someone who’s achieved champion status for all 9 classes.
The obvious reason is that a visible MMR would create elitism where everything below a certain rank would be excluded and this would go against anything they want to accomplish.
Excluded from what?
The whole point of competitive gameplay is to put elitists with elitists and beginners with beginners. If they want to accomplish something, they have to first pass the level they are at. There’s a reason you don’t see fat people competing as Olympic gymnasts. Those competitors climbed their ranks properly.
The problem (that we’re solving for S5) is that we’re currently searching for players close to your division to match you against. This means that the pool of players that we can pull from to create a match is much smaller than if we were using the entire pool of players. A player may have a high-enough MMR to put them in the top 100, but if they’re in Sapphire they’re only going to get matched with players that are in or around Sapphire. Season 5 will use the entire pool of players for creating matches – this should help the system create more balanced matches and improve queue times.
Are you also going to be tying MMR to Division in Season 5? I can see the proposed method working IF division was tied to MMR. However, if it isn’t, the division players end up in will literally be the result of RNG and grind.
The other alternative would be to alter pip gains/loss depending on a player’s MMR. The higher the MMR, the more pips they gain per win, and the less they lose on a loss.
The lower a player’s MMR, the less they gain on a win, and the more they lose on a loss.
I think you got it backward.
Higher you are, higher your risk.
Lower you are, higher your gain.
High skill players should proof they are really this.
Lower skill players need chance to show they are better.
To balance that, Anet give more MMR to lower win vs higher lost.
And they remove more MMR to higher lost vs lower win.
All the process should be —> transparent like it is in Overwatch.
Show all MMR and all “gain and lost” on it at the end of the match. All need to get calculated individually vs opponent team mmr avg.
No actually it’s not backwards, you’re just misunderstanding.
Yes low MMR should get a higher boost to MMR after a win. This is how it currently works and effectively predicts how much a player is going to contribute to a match.
What he’s saying is that during a win, the player with the low MMR should get few pips and the one with high MMR get more pips. This is a method for separating tiers by MMR.
Essentially this is how it would flow for an individual:
You have average MMR in your tier and you are playing 10 games. You get a lot of wins so your MMR goes up until it is higher on average than the rest of the players in that tier. Then you start getting additional pips for wins to help push you into the next tier.
In the next tier, you have the lowest MMR on average. If you lose a lot here, you will fall back to where you were and bounce back and forth between tiers. That means you are among people of the same skill level and you would stay there until you improve. If you instead were winning in this next tier, your MMR would increase more quickly because it was lower than average at the time.
After many many games, your tier will represent other players who have similar MMR scores. You will be very likely to be placed both with and against players who play similarly to yourself. You won’t have to worry about getting garbage on your team, nor be forced to play against anyone with an extreme skillset. Blowout matches will be much less common.
I agree. There are some classes that have very high negatability, where 80% of attacks towards them can be fully ignored. This allows them to play rotations instead of having to read their enemies or rely on careful timing of pressure. Playing as a guardian or engineer, I’m mostly untouchable. At times I can fend off 3 people continuously. I get access to 10 aegis candies every 30 seconds, that’s up to 10 blocks if I grab them all. If I take damage between blocks, the aegis break heals and undoes the damage (effectively blocking those attacks). If those attacks applied conditions, the aegis clears it. I still have f3, invulnerability, and 4 strong heals and condition cleaners among my utilities and I haven’t even gotten to the weapon skills yet.
1v3 come get some.
Because Gw2 doesn’t actually have ranked PvP, just a button with the word “ranked” on it. The colors and divisions simply represent luck and number of games played and have nothing to do with skill.
I disagree with a solo/duo split. Logically you’d have to inhibit all 4 man parties from participating in ranked, which makes no sense.
Instead, I would hope that season 5 brings better methods for statisticall analysis so that Anet can can come up with some measure for the average offset created by team communication, and then counter that offset through MMR matching.
The major argument I have is that a player who’s really savvy at analyzing the field and making the best tactical decision possible may end up running in circles around a rock with 3 enemies chasing the player the entire time, evading and blocking all damage.
That’s no damage dealt, no damage received, little boons, no team support, no capping, and no map mechanic capturing, yet 1 person disabling 3 by tempting distraction is a very impacting contribution, perhaps the greatest thing a player can provide.
The only way to evaluate that kind of contribution is to add a new scoring mechanic entirely, to evaluate the number of extra enemies held in combat within some distance over time. When a player can fend off extra enemies, or even better, win 1v2 or 1v3 fights, this act should carry the heaviest weight of all. That level of pressure creates more momentum than anything, and momentum usually always allows the rest of the team to easily cap other points and retain control of them.
The only thing that makes this evaluation really difficult is that in a 1v2, if you don’t last long, then all you’re doing is just feeding, which has the opposite effect. You’d be giving momentum away.
A 50/50 split attempt is the only way to evaluate player contribution with matching that provides close matches. With other ratios, the MMR system will diverge and ranking will be invalid. Without MMR, the matching is random and match quality will be as poor as unranked. In order for ranking to be valid, rank has to represent the ability to contribute. No season as of yet has been able to do this. 8 year old mouse clickers have made their way to legendary.
If we base the matching pools on hidden MMR divisions instead of pip divisions, we should end up with closer matches. However the problem still remains that there is no valid ranking to display prestige. Until such a thing exist, there is no actual “ranking”. If such a thing won’t exist, it should be the bases for unranked gameplay and not be labeled as ranked because there’s simply no ranking involved. We need a ranking system.
A players success and rank should not be measured by wins. In fact, with a 50/50 split, sPvP as a whole should end all emphasis on tracking wins and losses. The stat itself has no meaning in a 50/50 system. Win ratios and win streaks mean nothing unless a system’s matching is truly random by nature.
Instead, success should be measured by MMR in a 50/50 system. A good representation is a pip scale, but there can’t be safety barriers, rebounds, winstreaks, or anything like its current mechanics. The pip would have to loosely or directly represent the the player’s MMR.
(edited by SneakyTouchy.6043)
Why would they alternate back and forth after 3 games? That’s a lot of pip loss. That’s 6 games for every 2 pips net gain each side, 90 games total. If they allowed one team to blow from the bottom of ruby all the way to diamond, that’s 15 games. They’d use the safety barrier of diamond to boost the other team. That’s 30 games total, no pip loss. Not only that, since the games are rigged, they’d probably blow through them very quickly and finish at least one division per night.
They should probably cut it from ranked if only exploiters are using it.
Is there any way to set a button to target nearest team member besides using the mouse? the “target nearest ally” seems to never have worked.
Nearest ally only targets NPCs
They should fix that
The way I see it, anet needs to either drop the pip system, or drop the MMR system. Either or.
Trying to use both for matchmaking is causing all sorts of issues, from longer queue times to divisions not being representitive of skill.
Either 1. Tie Division to MMR percentile, and just use MMR for matchmaking.
2. Remove MMR from matchmaking completely, and matchmake solely based on division/tier/pips.
I honestly do not understand why it is necessary to have two separate systems, and then have them both affect matchmaking. .
They could make a system that still uses both and still work. All they have to do is base the end match pip rewards on your MMR compared to others in the match and remove pip safety barriers. That way pips reflect MMR, therefore matching based on pips would be more like matching based on MMR, mimicking a single evaluation matching system rather than a dual conflicting system.
Overwatch is a great game for the strategically challenged. If you’re struggling in PvP, I’d recommend Overwatch to start with and then later you can move back up to Gw2. It’s great for building fundamental team-play awareness because there’s less focus on builds and more on positioning.
They would probably have to reword dailies to mitigate the bias for daily classes, but I agree. The league rule should be a ranked rule as well, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone disagree with this.
When it comes to matching, they are pulling players from a pool that’s simply too diverse. There’s no method towards organizing the playerbase for better matching because pips are rewarded based on wins, wins are based on 50% chance. There’s nothing in place to allow better players to move ahead of the lesser players.
For anyone who has an inflated MMR, their current chance to win will be slightly less than 50%. This means no progression even if their abilities are far beyond advanced.
Players who were previously in MMR hell, or had artificially low ratings, should have received enough of a boost to progress up to Ruby, but I predict their progress will probably end there once their rating settles.
Matching needs to stay 50/50 so that rating evaluation can still be accurate, but they need a pip distribution method that allows the better players to move up, even if they are still only winning half their games.
(edited by SneakyTouchy.6043)
DH = Druid
DH > All other things.
Ele > Chieftain
Ele = Svanir
Ele < All other things.
When you give people pips based on their expected contribution the players that are esteemed good are carried to high pips and people that are esteemed bad are barred to gain pips. However this gain is not happening because of their efforts/skills but the system. These kind of system will feel incredible unfair and people on the bad end of the scale will quit. So if you want to achieve faster ladder placements you need to apply your bonuses towards effort/skill. Winstreak bonuses are a good example because everyone can get winstreaks and it is tied to effort/skill.
Players on the bottom end of the scale would be there because of their lack of skill. There is no such thing as a progression method that satisfies prestige while allowing bad players to climb above good players. This is the natural order for a ranking system. People are supposed to fail. I highly doubt they will quit like you suspect. In fact, the real quitters are the players who thought this would be a serious ranking system and found out it instead worked your way.
In my system, matching within amber would be magnitudes easier and more enjoyable to play as a beginner compared to unranked. The matches would actually be fun. Quitting over being unable to progress would be a personal ego problem that nobody else should be forced to compensate for.
Having concern over those who are unsatisfied with the system because it highlighted their poor performance defeats the entire purpose of a ranking system. It becomes dishonorable and loses all competitive value. Those who are putting forth the effort aren’t being represented and that’s incredibly disrespectful.
Also if pips are meant to represent you rating wouldn’t it be more logical to give the best player the loss penalty and the worst player the win penalty because that’s how mmr works (a bad player winning gets a higher rating increase when winning against the same team then a good player and a good player losing gets a higher decrease then a bad player against the same team)?
No that’s backwards. The idea is to get pips to follow MMR, and let the MMR do the actual rating. Your MMR goes up the most when your team, despite an attempted 50/50 balance, ends up favoring the enemy. This means you may have been better than expected. If it continues to happen, your score gets bumped up incrementally over time. It works the same way in reverse as well, although typically in an MMR reset, you only move up from where you started.
If the matching pool is based on pips, and pips follow MMR by giving players with higher MMR more pips and takes more from those with the lowest, those players will be moved into brackets with other players who have similar MMR. If there were an MMR and pip reset for the 5th season, losing pips constantly shouldn’t be an issue. Your rank would simply get stuck until you improved.
Let’s say you start ranked and after a bit of a win/lose situation consisting mostly on losing you finally reach first streak of 2 victories but immediately afterwards you lose 2 because you lost and were the lowest in your team. This would be extremely demotivating and will be considered unfair. Why because the system is set up in a way that they need 3 victories for every loss to gain pips.
That’s invalid. In true ranking, better players rank above the worse. It would be unfair to allow someone without ability to pass those with. That may feel unfair to a player who doesn’t play well, but that’s just and expression of poor sportsmanship.
Sure giving only progress when they reach a +66% win rate while others with a win rate of +33% get progress is completely fair and those who don’t aggree with it are just people with poor sportmanship.
That mindset is also completely counter-intuitive towards a method that matches players based on similar skill levels as it would would allow terrible players to have a high rank and good players to have a low rank.
If good players have a poor rank then they simply didn’t win enough that’s all there is to it.
That makes no sense. That also creates an environment where everything is random and wins/losses have no meaning. Bad players fight against really good ones and get even further discouraged to continue playing. This is the problem we have right now.
No the problem we have now is that when players win they think they carried the match and when they lose, they think the match making gave them people who expect to be carried.
The current season is designed to maintain 50% win ratios. This is necessary in order to evaluate skill levels. As a number of games are played, the system adjusts your MMR number according to how likely your team was predicted to win. If you win or lose often, your rating will change. This is an important quality that S1 and S4 has, but neither did well at sorting the playerbase for better matching later on.
If pip rewards were reactive towards your expected personal contribution based on rating, then your pip level would represent your rating. If the matchmaking system groups people together of similar pip levels, then player skill levels within a match will be closer together. This is what S2 and S3 did right, the problem was, without 50/50 distribution in matching for those seasons, the MMR ratings themselves were inaccurate, leading some to MMR hell and also pulling toxic individuals with little to contribute all the way up to legendary.
It is possible to make a system that uses the best of both systems. That’s all I’m asking for. It requires that people not be protected from losing rank.
Look issue is not amount of games its just people doing Daily in RANKED and playing classes they not familiar with much. Second problem is 0 teamplay and basics every match I lost was cause Human errors.
A proper ranking system would help sort out the players who don’t take things seriously. Toxicity is another issue, a personal behavioral problem. Proper ranking again would probably help reduce that in higher ranks but it will always be present.
If we took necro wells and dropped all their cooldowns to 5s, we could call them symbols too.
Let’s say you start ranked and after a bit of a win/lose situation consisting mostly on losing you finally reach first streak of 2 victories but immediately afterwards you lose 2 because you lost and were the lowest in your team. This would be extremely demotivating and will be considered unfair. Why because the system is set up in a way that they need 3 victories for every loss to gain pips.
That’s invalid. In true ranking, better players rank above the worse. It would be unfair to allow someone without ability to pass those with. That may feel unfair to a player who doesn’t play well, but that’s just and expression of poor sportsmanship.
That mindset is also completely counter-intuitive towards a method that matches players based on similar skill levels as it would would allow terrible players to have a high rank and good players to have a low rank. That makes no sense. That also creates an environment where everything is random and wins/losses have no meaning. Bad players fight against really good ones and get even further discouraged to continue playing. This is the problem we have right now.
“Removing pip safeties” – only if you start taking individual scores into consideration.. like top player won’t lose a pip … otherwise it is too much dependent on your team.
It wouldn’t matter because that’s only considering one game. If you don’t belong in the previous division, simply play more games.
(edited by SneakyTouchy.6043)
That’s the entire problem, the entire system is set that the low mmr players get less pips for victories and lose more for losses while high mmr players get more for wins and lose less for victory. So low mmr players will experience an extrememly unfair competion because the system is preventing them from gaining pips
I’m not sure where you’re coming from. All I’m saying is that if a player has too many pips for their skill level, the player should lose those pips. The logic behind my design says the only circumstance where they would lose more pips for losing a match is if their pip value was much higher than other players with the same MMR. It’s better to match players together who have similar MMR, so there needs to be some form of counter-inflation caused my match manipulation or pre-mades. Season 1 and 4 didn’t do that. Season 2 and 3 sorta did, but were unfairly biased towards win/loss streaks.
(edited by SneakyTouchy.6043)
So let me get me straight, if a player is dumped in a match which he is bound to win he gets more pips? If a player is bound to lose in a match he lose more pips? How will that motivate people at the bottom to get better?
People are motivated to get better when they play with others at their level and learn skills that help them progress. It’s only natural for people who start something competitive to begin at the bottom and work their way up.
It’s true that fair competition can drive people away, but nothing like that of an unfair competition.
There are ways to create a system where matching creates close matches, queue times are low, and pips represent your skill level. If developed well, the possibility of a separate 5 man team ranking game mode existing without disrupting Q time issues could become a reality.
The major problem is that Anet wanted to create a system where mouse clickers could climb ranks and earn their achievements. They then damaged that system by throwing newbs into these MMR hell things that didn’t give them the option anyways. As result, we have a system that was designed for them, trolled for them, and caused major damage to the parts of the community who value prestige and competitive gameplay. They literally gave the finger to every type of SoloQ player one way or another within each season. Damage is occurring continuously. I recommend that Anet attempt to repair these issues as soon as possible.
The Wings
One of the biggest issues for many on the bottom end is concern over how they are supposed to earn the achievements. Anet’s solution was pip safety barriers. All that was necessary was to reach Ruby each season, a fairly easy task with enough luck as the safety barriers were plentiful up to this point. These barriers however prevented players from losing ranks. While allowing them to complete achievements related to crossing divisions, it distorted the placement of players in the appropriate matching brackets, the result being a major decline in matching quality.
To resolve this issue, it would be best to replace the achievement calling for division crossing to something based on a large number of games won (or played). The effort required would be the same. The type of player who would have reached this achievement would have been the same. The change allows better placement for higher quality matching while simultaneously permitting progression towards their achievements on the side.
The other option is to give wings prestige and say screw those complainers. They don’t play well, therefore don’t deserve the wings. The consideration at that point is moral, but I do personally think that giving such an item the requirement of skill on top of dedication may be inappropriate, especially now that so many have achieved the wings without actual skill. There’s room for more prestigious rewards in the future. The black star next to the name being one of them would be more than enough to satisfy me, but there’s nothing to say that 2017 won’t provide a new back piece for players who actually achieve high ranking. For now, I think it’s nice that there’s a back piece that stands for the dedication and endurance of all the suffering caused by these ridiculous matching systems.
Ranking Barriers
The next major issue is that ranks don’t represent player skill. This is a major deterrent to competitive gamers. The ranked system deserves engaging gameplay and accurate prestige within the ranks, all of which has been sacrificed to provide wings to the majority. That sacrifice has cost the community a large chunk of population and support and it needs to be corrected. The longer Anet waits to admit mistake and fix the issue, the more will be sacrificed until it is done.
As mentioned before, the critical part that needs to go is the pip safety barrier. They exist at every pip for amber, every tier for emerald and sapphire, and at every division break beyond. Players need to be able to fall back so they can play among people at their skill level. If they can’t, the chances they will have complete kitten s on their team, or super elite rapists on the enemy team, is going to be much higher. With the barriers in place, MMR tanking will always be a thing, paying the enemy to forfeit will be sustainable, and the mathematical evaluation of player skill will drown in errors. This can all be fixed by removing the barriers.
Ranking Placement
Another critical point is the rate of which players reach a pip value that represents their current ability. This value needs to move fast enough to keep pace with balance passes, and fast enough to reflect short term progress. Maybe a player decides to stop using combat cam. They need to be able to see progress because of it within 10 games.
As it stands, I think the MMR system works fairly well and works at an appropriate pace. All we need is a system that moves pips along with the MMR standing so I propose we change the way pips are rewarded.
Since it isn’t reasonable to base pip rewards on personal score within a match, I instead propose we base it on personal MMR. That means, of the spread of players currently in a match, you will either have the highest MMR, the lowest, or be somewhere in the middle. If you have the highest and win, you get extra pips. If you have the lowest and lose, you lose extra pips. It’s that simple really. It will push you into a bracket where players have similar rating values. Players who are too high for their division will move down so they don’t frustrate players in higher divisions. The same works for league players who log in to their alt accounts. It will also cause the number of pips you have to represent your rating.
In order for these changes to work, there will be an additional change required: That there be no divisions beyond legendary. No X2 X3 etc… Without an upper barrier, division ranking would have no meaning. There would also be no cap to prevent pip matchmaking spreads to reach too far. Queue times would expand or reach a point where matching is no longer optional.
Abuse
I’ve tried hard to consider in what possible ways these adjustments could lead to abuse. What happens if a pro league player duoQ’s with a vegetable? The best I can consider here is using a system that I believe is already in place. As a party, the MMR of the top player is considered to match the lower. Their party MMR is inflated as a result, causing the matching to put the better players on the enemy team. In that situation, the vegetable now has the lowest MMR, meaning a win results in the minimum rate of progression. The Pro-leaguer gets a large reward, placing him into more advanced brackets with his vegetable. I think the current system does well to disincentivize using vegetables for progression, or making a business out
of carrying vegetables to the iron throne.
Season 4
As we have it now, the player base is divided among 3 separate divisions, all of which each include the full spectrum of player skill levels and have little to no method of separation. People don’t want to play, populations are low, matching is now a mess and Q times are high because of it.