Guild Wars 2

if it’s being talked about in EBay map chat, it’s to find out who it is and what guild they’re in, so we know who to contact to get them shunned and/or reported.

I’m sure EBay has some cheaters (every server does) but they don’t typically talk about it in /map or /team unless they are stupid.

-ken

your rating goes up if your score at the end of the week is better than expected. your rating goes down if your score is worse than expected. your “expected” score is calculated by comparing your rating with your opponent’s rating at the start of the week.

this is why you can lose a match and still gain rating, or win a match and still lose rating. if you were expected to win by a lot, but only win by a little, you will lose rating.

there are many more posts in this thread explaining it in more detail if you want to go back and find them.

-ken

if you saw large number of people coming through, and they did not appear at all surprised by it, it’s likely they have figured out a way to deliberately trigger the bug. that’s exploiting, and if you see it, report them.

-ken

you probably need to do a lot more than just let your borderlands fall. losing rating (and thereby getting lower-ranked opponents) is a lot easier under the new system that it was under the old system, but it’s still not trivial, and it requires your whole server to work together.

if you can’t get your whole server to commit to this plan, it’s probably not a good idea to pursue it at all. what server are you on, and which opponents would you prefer to face? I can run the numbers and tell you how much of a rating change you actually need to achieve this.

-ken

I thought I saw something in the most recent patch notes about this being fixed?

-ken

Luthan.5236:

Edit: Look at EU: http://mos.millenium.org/matchups
Baruch Bay not even 200 differene to the others in their matchup and almost 2 times the amount of score points.

this is exactly what the ratings would predict (or pretty close, at any rate). based on the rating difference, BB is expected to get 1.75 times the score of RS, and 1.64 times the score of AR. the fact that they are getting very close to the expected score is why mos.millenium.org shows that their rating is changing by only a small amount (+3.5 rating points). meanwhile, other servers are getting much larger rating changes because their actual score differs by a lot from what the ratings would predict.

if 1.5 times is your limit for “acceptable” matchups, then the target difference in rating should be about 125 rating points. any matchup where the servers differ by more than 125 points, you should expect the highest server to win by more than 1.5 times the score.

-ken

I like the sound of it, but I can’t help but think that there are servers where this would have the opposite effect: instead of making people more interested in WvW (specifically, in playing to win) we would have people who try to lose deliberately so they can farm the PvE world defense events.

-ken

haha, that’s simply ridiculous. what it makes you is a spy master, in a perfect situation to recruit people on other servers to spy for you.

-ken

one of the things to keep in mind is, the random factor is used only to set up a matchup ranking. the matches are then made by picking groups of 3 servers, starting at the top and working your way down. when the matchups are actually made, the sizes of the rating gaps are irrelevant.

this means there is no “hard cap” on how far apart ratings must be to make a matchup impossible. for example, if there were only 6 servers in NA, with ratings of 9990, 9980, 9970, 9960, 9950 and 100, the server with 100 rating points would get blown out every single week, no matter how far apart the ratings get. 3 out of the top 5 would get matched together, and the 2 left over would play the bottom server, and there is no amount of “rating gap” that would prevent it.

the only time a rating gap would prevent certain matchups from occurring is if the gap falls somewhere so there is an exact multiple of three servers above the gap, and an exact multiple of three servers below the gap. so if we had 12 servers with ratings 9990, 9980, 9970, 9960, 9950, 9940, 150, 140, 130, 120, 110, and 100, then the top 6 would always play each other, and the bottom 6 would always play each other, but there would never be a matchup with a bottom 6 server playing a top 6 server.

-ken

5th and 6th playing 12th could be very likely, if the ratings are all close together in that area of the rankings, because matchups are made on the basis of how close the ratings are, rather than strictly on the basis of ranking (which is how the old system did it).

in fact, the ratings are within a few hundred of each other, which isn’t exactly “close” but it’s not far either. as a result this kind of matchup isn’t especially likely (at the start of the match, CD had a 9.6% chance to get DB and a 16.6% chance to get FA — getting both of them had a very small likelihood and you simply got unlucky this week).

I ran some calculations and CD only had a 1.019% chance to draw DB and FA in a tier 3 match, 0.106% to get them in tier 2, and 0.056% to get them in tier 4. by comparison, “likely” matchups include things like T4:YB+EB (5.874%), T4:KN+EB (5.383%), T4:KN+YB (5.316%). the most likely T3 matchup for you was T3:Mag+SoS (2.283%).

-ken

if you need more details about the bug itself there are multiple threads in the bug forum about it.

I’d be interested in knowing when we can expect a fix, too. This does have a bad effect on the blue team, and the new matchup system requires ratings to be correct, and that in turn requires matches to be fair.

-ken

ratings are actually relative. taken individually, a rating doesn’t tell you anything at all. but if you take the ratings for two servers and compare them, the difference between the ratings tells you how much stronger one server is than the other.

only the difference matters.

a server with a rating 200 higher than another server is expected to win by a certain amount. it doesn’t matter whether the ratings are 2200 and 2000, or 400 and 200. as a result, “extra” points in the rating pool don’t make any difference — the extra points will have a tendency to spread themselves out over all the servers, shifting every server up by about the same amount. you could also artificially take rating points out of the pool by subtracting the same number of rating points from every server, and none of the rating or ranking math would change (although there would be some impact on matchups).

artificially closing the gap is a bad idea, unless you want the 12-and-up servers to play the 13-and-under servers more often. but the reason the gap exists at all is because the 12-and-up servers are much stronger than the 13-and-under servers — any server rank 12 or higher could easily beat any server rank 13 or lower. such a matchup wouldn’t be fun for either side, so they should be made to happen less often, not more often.

in the current matchup system, the way you make a matchup happen less often is, you make the ratings farther apart. servers that have closer ratings will play each other more frequently, and servers that have ratings far apart will play each other rarely. if the ratings are far enough apart, some servers will never play each other at all (for example #1 would never play #24 — the ratings are simply too far apart to allow it to happen).

if you really want to reduce the rating gap, you need to reduce the ‘strength’ difference by weakening the higher-ranked servers, or strengthening the lower-ranked servers (or both). you can do this by changing the scoring system so that stronger servers play at some disadvantage (for example, make objectives worth fewer and fewer points the more of them you already hold, or make them harder to hold when you have lots of them by weakening walls/gates), or you can do it by encouraging (or forcing) the players to redistribute themselves more ‘fairly’ across all the servers.

-ken

the problem we had in the previous system was “artificial” rating gaps, and that the sizes of these gaps were not true indicators of the differences in server strength. these artificial gaps arose because of the relative rarity of matches played across tier boundaries, and the particular matchup system that only ever allowed rating points to flow up across a tier boundary but never down again.

“real” rating gaps that reflect real gaps in server strength are actually a good thing — in order to get good matchups, you want to avoid having very strong servers facing very weak ones, so it’s important that the ratings be decently accurate measures of server strength (at least, as long as you’re using rating to decide matchups).

under the new matchup system, a rating gap is a good indicator that the servers above the gap are consistently stronger than servers below the gap. the validity of the gap can be periodically verified by having a server above the gap play a server below the gap (and the randomization system helps to ensure that this kind of thing happens from time to time).

all that said, there is definitely a risk that we will see 2 tiers (1-12, and 13-24). if the gap between 12 and 13 gets big enough, randomization won’t allow matches that cross this gap to happen (there would be much less risk if the gap fell on a boundary that wasn’t a multiple of three — the fact that the number of servers on each side of the gap is an exact multiple of three is what makes this situation possible). you will know that this is happening if the number of matchups that cross this boundary get rarer and rarer, eventually stopping altogether. the way the randomization system works, natural tier boundaries will develop slowly, rather than suddenly. and if they occur, they can be “fixed” by adjusting the randomness parameters.

-ken

wvw players love a challenge to overcome.

pve players get all weepy when everything’s not just right.

-ken

so, I ran some numbers. AR is going into this week’s match with a starting rating of 1326. how much of a rating reduction is needed in order to get the kinds of matchups you want?

If AR’s rating drops to 1226 (and other servers all stay the same), these are the probabilities (expressed as percentage likelihood) of getting various opponents:
Anvil Rock (1226)
0.000270 Fort Aspenwood
0.084780 Maguuma
0.266620 Sea of Sorrows
2.165220 Kaineng
2.088880 Yak’s Bend
2.943800 Ehmry Bay
3.620770 Crystal Desert
22.955590 Borlis Pass
23.504640 Stormbluff Isle
21.060150 Darkhaven
20.725690 Isle of Janthir
20.432560 Northern Shiverpeaks
18.164080 Gate of Madness
16.173150 Henge of Denravi
14.889290 Devona’s Rest
14.477910 Sorrow’s Furnace
9.023700 Ferguson’s Crossing
7.422900 Eredon Terrace

note that SBI and BP would remain your most likely opponents (although the probabilities of getting them are much reduced).

if AR’s rating drops to 1126, the probabilities change to:
Anvil Rock (1126)
0.000110 Fort Aspenwood
0.029320 Maguuma
0.090050 Sea of Sorrows
0.740110 Kaineng
0.717180 Yak’s Bend
0.993560 Ehmry Bay
1.225170 Crystal Desert
10.735660 Borlis Pass
11.762730 Stormbluff Isle
18.305830 Darkhaven
18.697150 Isle of Janthir
19.545680 Northern Shiverpeaks
20.549260 Gate of Madness
20.350590 Henge of Denravi
19.948870 Devona’s Rest
19.720120 Sorrow’s Furnace
18.284200 Ferguson’s Crossing
18.304410 Eredon Terrace

with -200, your most likely opponents would be GoM and HoD.

given that the new system makes it a lot easier to get rating changes (both up and down) maybe it’s not necessarily to sandbag to artificially get the “right” rating faster, especially since this week’s match looks like it’s going alright so far. maybe just enjoy the ride, wherever it takes you.

-ken

Sunspots.9861:

Snowreap.5174:

yes, arguably CD has a lot of reason to complain about their matchup.

TC, by comparison, has very little room to complain.

-ken

We all get that ken enjoys the new system and has appointed himself its primary defense attorney, but I think most people will agree we are tired of your terse, uninformed opinions expressed as if they are fact.

TC, a server that fought hard for months to build a great community on the foundation of good sportsmanship and fair competition, has plenty room to complain. This statement alone shows you have zero clue why the new system is failing. Educate yourself before attempting to educate others.

I know why the new system is failing — the new system has done nothing to address the root cause of the problem — massive server imbalances. there are 4 “tier 1” NA servers, and only 3 of them can play each other. the other always has to play a blowout match against much weaker opponents.

the existence of weaker opponents, and the need to play against them, isn’t caused by the new system, it’s caused by players transferring to stacked servers. as long as Anet allows players to choose the server they play on, without adjusting the wvw game mechanics to account for it, there will never be balance.

I understand that from where TC was sitting, the old system looked fine. in the glory days of the old system, there were 6 servers at the top. then SBI and KN collapsed leaving a void behind them. DB tried to fill that void, and had a couple of weeks of big wins against you. I don’t know what happened to change things, but suddenly DB looked like they were on the verge of collapse too. and then the new system took effect.

KN is a prime example of the problem — they became hugely stacked due to a ton of transfers and shot to the top very rapidly, pulling a ton of rating points up with them from the lower tiers. then when they collapsed, they didn’t bring any points back down with them (because the old system allowed points to flow up a tier boundary, but never down again). every time something like that happens (even when it happens on a smaller scale) it makes it harder and harder for the lower servers to move, because the available rating point pool slowly gets depleted.

the rating boundary between T1 and T2 was very small, and TC spent a lot of time at the top of T2, so I’m not surprised you didn’t see the problem it created in the lower tiers. DB shooting up to T2, then falling down again would have been a huge help to TC if you had decided to make a push for T1, but the old system made that kind of help harder and harder to come by.

-ken

CrassBippy.4619:

silence

I had lots to say about [Rekz], but I didn’t want to ruin the silence. now the moment is past.

-ken

yes, arguably CD has a lot of reason to complain about their matchup.

TC, by comparison, has very little room to complain.

-ken

these are interesting. would they be different kinds of siege that you drop using the same blueprint (so that the features are the same regardless of who is using it)? or would these be different kinds of abilities that you unlock by spending wxp rank points?

-ken

MikeB.3857:

What the?

SoS is getting dominated and will get dominated for the entire week. No chance winning or even coming close AND we are going to gain rank from it.

Bad system is bad.

SoS is gaining rank mostly from Maguuma, by the way. yes, SoS is doing better versus TC than expected, and they’re getting a little bit of ratings boost from there too.

but mostly SoS is going up because Mag is going down.

-ken

my point here is that there are 4 strong servers at the top of the rankings. any 3 out of these 4 will get a good matchup, but whatever server is left over is going to have to play against lower servers.

there are no good choices for #4 TC, if #1 BG, #2 SoR and #3 JQ are all playing each other. one of those top-4 servers is going to have to play against servers with dramatically lower ratings.

there are only 2 ways to fix this: get a bunch of people to leave TC (or one of the other top 4) so that there are only 3 servers at the top, who can just play each other over and over and over and over, or change the scoring system so that it’s not an automatic blowout when a top-4 server plays a non-top-4 server.

the problem is, the servers aren’t balanced. the reason the servers aren’t balanced is because people are free to play on whatever server they like. players need to be free to play where they like, so that they can play with their friends. but the freedom to move to the same server your friends are on is also the freedom to create stacked servers.

-ken

laokoko.7403:

So instead of TC fighting JQ which will give them some good fight. They are fighting like rank 10-15 server?

The deviation is too large.

#4 TC can’t fight #3 JQ, because #3 JQ is busy fighting #2 SoR and #1 BG.

instead, #4 TC is fighting #7 Mag and #8 SoS. #7 and #8 are not by any means rank 10-15.

btw, #4 TC can’t fight #5 DB and #6 FA, because #5 and #6 are busy this week giving #12 CD a chance to prove that it deserves to move up.

really, these are all reasonable matchups. look at some of the outcomes in EU if you want to find servers who have a real reason to complain.

-ken

looks like this is going to be a great matchup.

alas, I am vacationing and I only have my laptop with me. so watching live streams is as close as I’ll get to playing for a few days.

-ken

so, AR has gotten matched up against DH and HoD this week. this may or may not be a good thing if you’re trying to get your rating to go down. it’s a good thing if you can coordinate well and ensure that everyone sandbags. it’s a bad thing if this brings out your fairweathers to try to do well this week.

if AR wants to maintain their current rating of 1326, they need to get a score that’s 1.43 times as big as DH’s score, and 2.12 times as big as HoD’s score. to make the math easy, makes sure your own score is bigger by half than DH, and at least double HoD’s.

if AR wants to reduce their rating to 1100 (a bit over HoD’s 1088) or 1200 (a bit under DH’s 1215) they have to come in well under these par scores. I don’t have time to calculate right this moment how much under. maybe later.

edit: I just took a look at mos.millenium.org. if you want to end up with a rating in the neighborhood of HoD’s, keep doing exactly what you’re doing now, because you’re well on target at the rate you’re going. then next week you should be getting the same kinds of matchups HoD has been getting, which may be a perfect fit for your small-group playstyle and current lower population.

-ken

the purpose of lower-ranked servers playing a higher-ranked server is not so that the lower servers can improve themselves. although if they’re smart they’ll take the opportunity to do so.

the purpose of “outlier” matches is to give the outlier server the opportunity to prove that they are over-rated (if they are the highest) or that they are under-rated (if they are the lowest).

the old matchup system made it hard to prove that you belonged in a higher or lower tier without many wins or losses in your current tier. the new matchup system allows you to play servers outside your tier more often, which allows your rating to move up or down (as appropriate) faster.

the downside to this is that sometimes you’ll play a higher or lower server even though your rating is fine as it is and doesn’t need to move. this is especially common in NA servers where the ratings are now getting close to “correct”, but in EU we are still seeing a lot of big rating swings so clearly there’s a lot of movement still happening there.

-ken

this would probably work well to allow the #1 and #3 servers to team up on #2, too.

it’s a good thing we no longer have free transfers — otherwise I could easily see a mega-guild like goon squad abusing this to stack 2 higher-ranked servers to grief the smallest one.

-ken

also, make sure that it was actually a player attacking you, rather than a mesmer clone. it’s really easy for a mesmer clone to end up on the inside of a gate.

-ken

so I ran the numbers; this particular matchup had a probability of only 0.266%. about a quarter of one percent chance.

that sounds small, but last week’s winning lottery numbers had an even lower chance of happening, and yet they came up anyway.

-ken

this matchup was incredibly unlikely, but it is possible. FSP had individual probabilities of 3.36% to get WSR, and 3.63% to get BT. the probability of getting both is tiny (but I don’t have time to calculate it right this minute).

-ken

Capoeira can look like combat when it’s actually dance. and of course it can look like dance when it’s actually combat. sometimes even the mods can’t tell the difference.

-ken

Vena.8436:

I Deschain I.4623:

As ColinJohanson said, “with [the] new WvW rank reward chests you’re going to be getting a lot more Ecto!” Oh wait…

Before patch:
> zero ecto
After patch:
> some ecto

By mathematics, the change has led to me acquiring infinity percent more ecto.

apparently this is bugged. you were only supposed to get “a lot” more ecto. infinity is far too big an increase. sounds like ArenaNet needs to reduce the drop rate slightly.

-ken

spawn camping really isn’t necessary. rating changes are made on the basis of score, and score comes essentially from 2 things: PPT ticks and sentry/dolyak kills.

you can maintain PPT for your side, and prevent enemies from getting any points for sentry/dolyak kills, without spawn camping, if you choose to do so. but spawn camping is probably the easiest way because it gives you the smallest number of places to guard.

if you have a big enough population, you should be able to guard things effectively without needing to spawn camp.

-ken

I’ve posted an updated set of matchup probabilities for any who are interested:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/matchups/Who-would-you-like-to-face-next-week/2309243

-ken

updated probabilities using this morning’s scores. probably not very different from the values posted Wednesday, although these were from bigger runs (1 billion trials) so the result should have a bit more accuracy.

-ken

I had a dream last night but I can’t remember what it was.

not sure if I’ll have time to post newer numbers closer to the start of the next match. this week’s match, combined with real life, has kept me very busy.

I sincerely hope we get easier servers next week; I need a rest.

-ken

Luthan.5236:

This is giving me a nice amount of badges. Especially if we get funny situations like:
Our zerg going into an enemy tower(empty)… enemy zerg rushing in behind us. We cap. Doors closed. Enemy can’t get out and we controll the walls. Nice farming. Lol.

the problem with this is, you only get to kill them once that way.

if you leave the doors open, and don’t cap but simply wait inside, you can kill them as they come in, then keep killing them every time they come back, until they figure out what you’re doing and organize themselves.

-ken

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/WvW-Dolyak-s-don-t-spawn

Xinthai.6175:

The probability for a JQ/SoR/BG match again next week is over 50%.

right now it looks like 40.7% for SoR+BG+JQ. other likely matchups:

15.5% SoR BG TC
8.6% SoR JQ TC
7.2% SoR BG DB
3.9% SoR JQ DB
2.6% SoR DB FA

all other matchup pairings for SoR have less than a 2% probability.

here are the top single-server probabilities for SoR:

66.8% BG
55.9% JQ
30.3% TC
20.0% DB
10.2% FA

-ken

Kruzis.7419:

Sactum of Rall finally had their chance for once, when IRON joined our server, but now Jade Quarry and Blackgate have teamed up against Sactum of Rall. And we are going to get kicked out of tier 1, because one server cannot take down two servers combined. Who thinks Arena Net should stop this problem?

you are not going to get kicked out of tier 1, unless you continue to lose matches for several more weeks.

if you start getting close to dropping to the #4 ranking (the closest thing that remains to the old “tiers”) try teaming up with another server to take down the top dog. what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

-ken

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/WvW-Dolyak-s-don-t-spawn

seems like it’s happening for many blue teams.

-ken

here are the current probabilities of getting each opponent, based on the rating outcomes from the current scores.

I’m not posting the probabilities for getting specific pairs of opponents because for most purposes it’s just not that useful.

-ken

the bottom line is, having handicaps would be an improvement over the system as it is now. it might not be the best possible improvement, but I would definitely take it.

handicaps and rating both give (mostly) the same information mathematically. arguably, rating is more “accurate” because it can more easily handle things like yak and sentry kills without a lot of extra bookkeeping, but handicap may be more “understandable” to the players, some of whom are, unfortunately, not the brightest bulbs.

that might actually be a key advantage for displaying “par” scores (or handicaps) instead of showing rating changes. by showing rating, inevitably there’s going to be at least one loser. but with “par” scores that don’t include dolyak and sentry kills, any points from those activities will be bonus points that could potentially allow all three servers to beat their “expected” scores. in our modern “ribbons for everyone, just for participating” society this may not be a bad thing.

the actual rating changes would still count everything of course, exactly as they do now. and the detail-minded among us can continue to track rating the way we do now. a lot of us are perfectly able to kitten our performance using the tools we already have.

the question is, is there something that can be done to help the people who currently are not able to effectively kitten their performance, and who are getting discouraged too easily because the one performance measure they see is telling them that they are bad and they should go home?

-ken

edit: by “kitten” I mean a completely different six-letter word that means “Evaluate or estimate the nature, ability, or quality of”, or “Calculate or estimate the price or value of”. puzzling out exactly what word that might be is left as an exercise for the reader.

Hickeroar.9734:

Snowreap.5174:

DB isn’t a bad place to go if you’re trying to find a server that has good non-NA coverage, but you don’t want to end up on a server with so much NA coverage that your own contribution is meaningless.

DB has “OK” NA coverage, but they’re definitely not stacked there. Certainly nothing like TC is at the moment. Moving ~200 players over was by no means a meaningless contribution.

yes, this is what I meant. sorry, I worded it badly. I should have said, if you want to move to a server with good non-NA coverage, but you don’t want to be somewhere where your NA contribution would be meaningless, then DB is a good choice."

-ken

I don’t mind a new commander displaying their tag if they’re actively trying to command (or learn to).

but I do expect commanders to comply with a few simple rules:

1. turn off your tag if a more experienced commander requests it — too many tags on the map can be detrimental if pugs don’t end up where they’re needed.

2. turn off your tag if you’re not doing something that actually requires people to be able to find you (i.e. turn it off if all you’re doing is killing centaurs or skritt in a borderland).

the fact that you spent 100g to get a commander tag is not a good justification for having it turned on at stupid times.

-ken

DB isn’t a bad place to go if you’re trying to find a server that has good non-NA coverage, but you don’t want to end up on a server with so much NA coverage that your own contribution is meaningless.

if you’re sick of logging on every day to discover that you’ve lost everything overnight (or while you were at work, or whatever) it’s completely understandable to contemplate a move elsewhere.

it’s not something I’d want for myself, of course, but I can totally see why others might move to DB.

-ken

the new matchup system will allow you to move to your new “proper” ranking much more quickly than the old system would have, so I don’t think ArenaNet will need (or more to the point, want) to make any manual adjustments.

it’s kind of late in the current match to make a big adjustment, but if you can tell me what server you think you’d be competitive with, I’ll tell you what you need to do scorewise to match your rating to theirs.

-ken

Eviator.9746:

So in summary, an Ebay player says SoS sucks because SoS can lose its entire BL during NA primetime, and that would never happen to Ebay. So specific DB guilds take note of that remark and take over Ebay’s BL during NA primetime, because a #5 server really should be able to take over a #12’s BL on a whim, shouldn’t they? But Ebay doesn’t suck, it’s just that it’s patch day and there’s new content, so Ebay can’t be bothered to defend. And when #5 DB points out that Ebay did in fact lose their BL during NA primetime, DB is not only a bunch of chest-thumpers, but idiots and bad players because they have the numbers to out-zerg the #12 server. Oh and you’re better because you can do more with fewer players (unverified). Do I have all that right?

Oh, is that what you were doing? Bad luck with the timing, then. You can’t really blame us for misinterpreting a golem rush within 3 minutes of the servers coming back up after patching. We really did think you were trying to avoid our prime time crew and sneak in before we could all get back on. At least, I did. I don’t know about the rest of our server.

Truthfully, it wasn’t a good night for us. Apparently we lost a lot of stuff during the day and had only recently gotten it back, so most of our homeland was paper. We were doing pretty well getting stuff back and getting things upgraded, then we all got booted out of WvW for another patch, which cost us some players and bugged our workers so upgrades wouldn’t build, and we ended up losing everything again. When I logged off a few hours later we had gotten garrison and bay back and were upgrading them (again). I just checked gwstats.net and it looks like we got hills back as well, although arguably it’s no longer “prime time” at this point.

It’s certainly true that when the conditions are right, Ehmry Bay’s prime time crew is beatable. But I’m inclined to say you got lucky this time, and when we finally got our act back together we were able to start pushing you out again.

I think it would have been a much better demonstration if you had pushed us out of our homeland under more normal conditions. It’s possible you could have, but tonight’s unusual circumstances leave a lot of room for debate. I kind of suspect that we haven’t been seeing your full prime time crew (I seem to recall seeing some posts that a lot of your players were taking a break) and it’s bad luck that the night they decide to come back a bunch of our own players are off doing who-knows-what.

-ken

are the [ALS] who are already on Dragonbrand just scouting then? we’ve seen them on DB already (EB is playing DB and SoS this week).

-ken

I think handicapping would be good, used in combination with the current matchup system. I think the current matchup system does a reasonably good job of choosing opponents (but not a perfect job, certainly), but it does not do a good job of communicating to players how well they are doing relative to how well they were expected to do.

It is necessary for people to play “outlier” matches from time to time in order for the system to be able to choose good matchups more often. but we need to find a way to ensure that these “outlier” matches are just as fun as the “close” matches, and a handicap system might achieve that.

-ken