Guild Wars 2

Fatallion.5389:

I’m enjoying this pvp so much that I have to post something here. Was 1 pip away from diamond, I get teamed against classic legendary/amber duo, Blondiine and Wilhelmina Kane, and because i had few games long winstreak and my teammates just got worse and worse, it was basically no match at all. 2 pips lost. Then the next game, same legendary/amber duo against, this time even worse teammates. 1 pip lost. Then third game against this grandmother of abusers guild team, bunker+abuse meta was good as usual and yeah. There it goes, 1 pip lost.

I’m so happy that what once was PvP is now just Player versus Abuse, and Anet doesn’t even care. GG!

This is a good example of how the prediction system tries to balance division pips. There it calculates the average from both teams and a team with 3 rubies and 2 diamonds have higher average than 2 legend, diamond, sapphire and amber. Therefor the system calculates your loss as 2 pips because your team average is higher than the enemy teams average.

Evan Lesh.3295:

While each team average is attempted to be balanced, we still don’t want the spread on each team to be large either.

This creates a problem with the prediction system when it comes to teamq. As I said before this system seems to be made for soloq and it doesn’t work as well in teamq environment.

What comes to the match manipulation and carrying lower tier players to higher tiers for in-game gold or just for fun, it could be prevented by placing the players in a party to a same level than the highest player in a party. For example if legendary would que with amber player the system would calculate the amber as legend also.

Evan Lesh.3295:

The Ace.9105:

Snip

I’m not entirely following some of what you said, but I will say some things back to see if it helps:

Solo players each have a Glicko rating and a ladder position. Both are updated at the end of a match based on the results and values of the other team. The Glicko algorithm does not care about fair matches, it merely takes results of matches and updates ratings according the the outcome. As for Glicko vs Elo, they perform the exact same function for our purposes, but Glicko is more accurate.

Aside from this, we have our matchmaker. This is not part of the actual Glicko algorithm, but instead uses Glicko ratings along with ladder position and other metrics in a way that attempts to make fair matches. The way it does this can be seen on the wiki. While each team average is attempted to be balanced, we still don’t want the spread on each team to be large either.

The last part is the prediction. This is not actually part of matchmaking, but is part of our ladder formula. It is a very simplified approximation, meant for players to understand, that we use after the matchmaker has created a match with the most similar players it could find.

As for what changes would most improve leagues, you’ll have to wait for more info on that.

Okay I think I understand now. This league system is a visual indication of the prediction and ladder. Also you said you don’t want the spread to be too large but it’s kinda needed in a way. What I think is the true problem here is the scoring part of matchmaking. From wiki:

• During this phase each player is scored against every other player being considered for matchmaking. The metrics used during this phase include: rating, rank, party size, profession, ladder position, and dishonor. With each metric the system is looking for players that are as close as possible to the average of those already selected. The system also attempts to keep the number of duplicate professions to a minimum.

I have a feeling that there are too many factors in this. 6 different factors are making the match including ladder and mmr also so a total of 8 measurements makes our every match.

This system seems to be designed for soloq players but it malfunctions heavily in teamq when the system still calculates matches based on each individual player and their division. In leagues now we get matched against and with players in a party (2-5) more than we should.

Feel free to correct me cause this is just based on what I have noticed and read from wiki.

I’ve been wondering why glicko over elo. This is the answer according to wiki:

• Glicko was chosen over its main alternative, Elo. Like Elo, Glicko tracks MMR for each player and updates that rating over time as you play the game. Glicko’s main improvement over its predecessor is the inclusion of a ratings deviation (RD), which measures the reliability of the rating. By using RD, the matchmaking algorithm can compensate for players it has little or incomplete information about.

So basically this system is fair for new players. This is how matches are currently calculated in anets system:

• Ladder weight=“5“ – If present, each team’s average ladder is used for the calculation.
• Rank weight=“1“ – If present, each team’s average rank is used for the calculation.
• Rating weight=“0“ – If present, each team’s average effective rating (i.e. rating – deviation) is used for the calculation.

• Roster weight=“2“ - If present, each team’s maximum roster size is used for the calculation.

As you can see the rating weight is 0 so elo rating is disabled.

In elo you start at certain point for example rating 1500 and based on win you gain rating and based on lose you lose rating and it eventually balances itself to the correct mmr of a player when players play more games.

Now what anets glicko code does is trying to predict every match and trying to make it always balanced. This results the system being broken due the possibility to exploit the system with division ranks. At the moment anets glicko code doesn’t take the players individual skill level and match them against each other. The thing it tries to do is to balance the games between players in a way that teams would always be balanced not players. For example 1 amber, 1 emerald, 1 legend and 2 ruby players would face a team between ruby and sapphire.

Then glicko has it’s own mmr system that predicts the odds of winning. In this kind of team it would be 50/50 cause the teams are balanced according the system. When mmr comes in it wants to balance players ranks as close as possible or to players that are available at time. Some that have low mmr in legend queue with diamonds sometimes. When the system tries to balance players according to their mmr also it makes division system to match teams that have 5 diamond players against 2 legends + 3 diamond players. The odds of winning are calculated from divisions so in this case if 5 diamond player team would win it would mean that they can get more than 1 pips from winning the match. This feature was just forgotten and it’s a good indication of how anet thinks for their players. Basically anet saying kitten you to players. I guess they lost their creativity somewhere between the game and gemstore

So the main problem here seems to be that the game is not balanced around players individual skills. The solution could be to have the players individual rating calculated and match players with similar ratings against each other instead of team balancing.

(yeah it can be confusing to see players from different divisions at first when you queue your first matches and people are already in different divisions when your rating hasn’t been set but trust me, a blog post about this system would explain and the system would be improved much. The rating will balance games and divisions by itself after a while)

The thing that should also be remembered is to reset that rating when the next season begins so that in the next season the players can climb to their own ratings and divisions and not get stuck in low division because they already have high rating and they get legend matches in amber.

Ritt.3069:

Agemnon.4608:

MMR really isn’t compatible with leagues. There’s no way two top teams should face each other in amber at the start of a season but leagues should rather follow tournament rules somewhat. Ever notice in a tournament of any kind bigger skill gaps are found at the start? Good players eliminate weak ones (Good and weak being relative terms, an expert in chess may be weak compared to the international masters he’ll face at a tournament but still be very strong compared to most competitive players) early.

Leagues aren’t Swiss or knock out tournaments but elements can still be drawn from them. Instead of elimination you’d hit a wall when you reach your current skill level. So let’s say for example you have 86 ladder rank points and are better than 95% of other players. You would hit your wall somewhere around mid to high ruby where you’re paired with those of similar skill (and better, diamonds and legendaries would walk over you at that point but after they rank out you’d just have to worry about equals) until you improve.

I agree with this completely. I’ve been saying this for ages, but we should focus on using Divisions as the metric for matchmaking and let the matchmaking stabilize naturally as better players move to their respective Divisions. The same phenomenon can be seen in other games as well: the start of the season is always hectic, but it stabilizes over time as people progress forward.

A good post, +1.

Feel free to correct me Evan cause this is just based on what I have noticed and read from wiki.

I’ve been wondering why glicko over elo. This is the answer according to wiki:

• Glicko was chosen over its main alternative, Elo. Like Elo, Glicko tracks MMR for each player and updates that rating over time as you play the game. Glicko’s main improvement over its predecessor is the inclusion of a ratings deviation (RD), which measures the reliability of the rating. By using RD, the matchmaking algorithm can compensate for players it has little or incomplete information about.

So basically this system is fair for new players. This is how matches are currently calculated in anets system:

• Ladder weight=“5“ – If present, each team’s average ladder is used for the calculation.
• Rank weight=“1“ – If present, each team’s average rank is used for the calculation.
• Rating weight=“0“ – If present, each team’s average effective rating (i.e. rating – deviation) is used for the calculation.

• Roster weight=“2“ - If present, each team’s maximum roster size is used for the calculation.

As you can see the rating weight is 0 so elo rating is disabled.

In elo you start at certain point for example rating 1500 and based on win you gain rating and based on lose you lose rating and it eventually balances itself to the correct mmr of a player when players play more games.

Now what anets glicko code does is trying to predict every match and trying to make it always balanced. This results the system being broken due the possibility to exploit the system with division ranks. At the moment anets glicko code doesn’t take the players individual skill level and match them against each other. The thing it tries to do is to balance the games between players in a way that teams would always be balanced not players. For example 1 amber, 1 emerald, 1 legend and 2 ruby players would face a team between ruby and sapphire.

Then glicko has it’s own mmr system that predicts the odds of winning. In this kind of team it would be 50/50 cause the teams are balanced according the system. When mmr comes in it wants to balance players ranks as close as possible or to players that are available at time. Some that have low mmr in legend queue with diamonds sometimes. When the system tries to balance players according to their mmr also it makes division system to match teams that have 5 diamond players against 2 legends + 3 diamond players. The odds of winning are calculated from divisions so in this case if 5 diamond player team would win it would mean that they can get more than 1 pips from winning the match.

So the main problem here seems to be that the game is not balanced around players individual skills. The solution could be to have the players individual rating calculated and match players with similar ratings against each other instead of team balancing.

(yeah it can be confusing for the new players to see players from different divisions at first when you queue your first matches and people are already in different divisions when your rating hasn’t been set but trust me, a blog post or in-game mail about this system would explain and the system would be improved much. The rating will balance games and divisions by itself after a while)

The thing that should also be remembered is to reset that rating when the next season begins so that in the next season the players can climb to their own ratings and divisions and not get stuck in low division because they already have high rating and they get legend matches in amber.

What are you talking about?!? UA has 12s cd and it does less damage than rev autoattack on sword. Mesmer have similiar skill also blurred frenzy and has acces to alacrity so it has 4s cd and 2s evade. The only difference is that UA follows the target.

UA also has counterplay. For example rune of nightmare fear proc, shocking aura, stealth, slow makes this skill do no damage at all, standing next to a wall interrupts this skill and it also can clip revenant inside a wall and then slick shoes interrupts this skill.

UA isn’t a problem in high enough pvp level.

This is the same for every mmo ever. New expansion releases and it has something new and super cool. This was also the case with gw1. You needed some skills from every gw game. Then people who for some reason refuses to buy the expansion complain about being bad when they don’t have everything unlocked. Go buy the expansion!

Tell me a name of some team in high levels in some game who had only the core game without expansions.

Yes and no. Also some good players are stuck in their divisions because they get bad teammates constantly. The main problem tho is that it depends on your class. If you play bunker build it’s easier to carry a game. I would say that easiest carry builds would be scrapper, reaper, mesmer and ele. Everyone in legend atm couldn’t reach the division alone tho.

Matchmaking also makes some games unwinnable.

Yolomouse is this software where people can make custom cursors. For example neon green circle around gw2 cursor. This greatly enhances the visibility of the cursor since sometimes it’s almost impossible to spot the gw2 cursor due to it’s color.

Can I use this software in gw2 like some people already do?

Yolomouse is this software where people can make custom cursors. For example neon green circle around gw2 cursor. This greatly enhances the visibility of the cursor since sometimes it’s almost impossible to spot the gw2 cursor due to it’s color.

Can I use this software in gw2 like some people already do?

Ross Biddle.2367:

The Ace.9105:

Sorel.4870:

I agree. I think the skill would be much better if it was insta-cast, on a 75s CD. That would be on line with other skills like Arcane Shield.

So 75s cd increase, cast time instant, invuln next 3 attacks and 5s duration?

Can you define “attacks” for me? Or is it the oh so scary mirror blade mind rack combo you’re talking about. Because if so here’s a tip, dodge the mirror blade. Or if you stand outside of the well he’ll have to blink out to get you XD

Ba dum dum chrrrr

Maybe it’s the single boon strip on the third sword AA you’re worried about. Careful of the damage though, npc critters have been known to die from it XD

Ba dum dum chrrrr

Unless they’re bunker of course, then it’d take two AA chains to kill the same rabbit, good thing for continuium shift I guess! XD

Ba dum dum chrrrr

Thankyou, thankyou, thanks for comin’ out.

..three free attacks… rofl

I can’t reply anything to this xD. What is this guy talking about?

Sorel.4870:

I agree. I think the skill would be much better if it was insta-cast, on a 75s CD. That would be on line with other skills like Arcane Shield.

So 75s cd increase, cast time instant, invuln next 3 attacks and 5s duration?

More people are hitting the 50/50 threshold.

What I want is a system where you can progress based on your skill level and not based on what the code says is the best aka 50/50 win rate. Progressing through divisions would be the best choice without mmr so that your league tier and division would work as your mmr.

If this change happens we can finally see who are the players forming possible new pvp teams. Currently top tier players are the players playing in pro league already.

This change would also help learning because eventually that system would match you against same mmr opponents and it would be good for soloq also.

Good soloq players can form teams with other good soloq players.

Also guild ladder has to have seperate que. GvG is not guild vs premade/pugs.

Banish Enchantment Anet! Lower the number of confusion to 1 or make 3-5s cd! Also make people lose point contest while in mesmers evades!

The reason I am not gonna watch the pro league is that I stopped caring about pvp after anet failed so hard with the leagues and balance. There’s no reason to take pvp seriously anymore.

I wanna thank you for this awesome balanced in pvp with awesome matchmaking. I am actually so positively surprised that I would love to visit your office and tell you how much I appreciate this awesome pvp.

If visiting is not an option is there any email address where I could send my appreciation so that you anet would see my appreciation and I could be sure that you receive it? I prefer to get balance team lead email address and league devs emails. Thanks!

Tip: Check your camera settings. You have limited view.

Sorry anet you made us exploit your system. Crying won’t help, fixing might.

Wait until the 50/50 system kicks in.

Rosia.9145:

Leagues connected to mmr are just utter stupidity and I wanna personally meet person who got this idea. Not everyday you’ve got a chance to see someone that careless.
Even though I had lots of well-balanced matches, most of them was like: 5 randoms including me against 3/4/5-person premade.
It’s obvious that premades and solo should be seperated. But in addition mmr shouldn’t work with 50/50 rate. Before leagues I had ~80% win ratio, so I probably had high mmr. After getting smashed by premades I got stuck in emerald, my home for life.

I just wanna know HOW am I supposed to progress in solo que with win/loose pattern like this:

Exactly this.

ZachAttack.3957:

The Ace.9105:

That’s because many player has stopped playing solo and runs with their premade team only. Also a lot of people have quit the game/pvp when anet failed once again with these so called divisions.

That’s a pretty huge assumption you are making. “Failed yet again”. The fact that you don’t like it hardly qualifies it as a failed system. As it stands, it’s way better than the ranked system we had before. I’d also like to see some stats regarding “A lot of people have quit the game/pvp”.

I have played this game since launch and almost everytime people ask something anet fails to make it. There might have been 1 or 2 good updates but most of the time it’s dreams shattered by some stupid thing based on something about everyone gets everything and people have no time to play games.

Anet is a stubborn company that wants to do their own systems and stuff. A system that works in other game can’t be copied to gw2 and it must be made unique which often fails horribly. Sure they say they listen and sometimes they make some changes based on what people say but those are quite rare. QoL patches come to this game very slowly and there is still bugs from a long time ago that are still in the game.

Sometimes I really wonder if someone in anet really reads suggestions. If something sounds nice it must be discussed and used but usually it feels like that anet takes the shell of one idea and stuffs it with their own hard to understand system or something with cheesy mechanics that brings a tons of bugs into the game and we can’t know if those are ever fixed.

nacario.9417:

Pakkazull.6894:

It’s a stupid system with the way MMR and divisions are disconnected.

Could it be cuz the playerbase is to small? The potential higher one get, the longer queues.

Well anet surely isn’t giving much space for pvp to improve and grow if they implement broken systems like this. This system just makes people turn away.

Keeping matches even well yes kinda. It would be just better if divisions would do the balance and you’d reach your own league rank and have even matches there and even chance to improve while facing harder opponents step by step.

Imagine if that 50/50 happens to you in first sapphire division. You are not getting into a team by saying “I am sapphire 1. I have played 6k games.”. This 50/50 bs is destroying the idea of that league patch next to your name and making it useless like your pvp rank.

You’ll be eventually reach the level of 50/50. I had 90% wins before i hit that mark in sapphire 5. Then you understand what i mean.

If you get a wts winning team you should be able to reach legendary. Anet said it’s easy.

Absconditus.6804:

I think people forget that the 50/50 is actually meant to apply to both teams and that it’s supposed to be a tossup on who will win. It’s not 60/40, it’s supposed to be 50/50, as best as it can match you, to create even and balanced matches where either side can win. That’s good, that’s exciting. But that won’t happen when it doesn’t separate Solo- and Group Queue, as grouped players has a massive advantage on completely random teams.

It also doesn’t help that a premade can take one-two really low MMR players and as a result drop their total down to face (potentially) lesser skilled players (—this needs a fix, as it should check the highest MMR player(s) to factor in how much their average would be across 5 players of similar MMR, and ignore the lower MMR players completely in the calculation).

No but also the thing that this system we have now wants you to climb up tiers but at the same time you have 50/50 chance of winning games. The balancing side should come from the tier system instead.

I actually think now that tanking mmr is the only solution for this problem since division matchmaking doesn’t mean anything unless anet removes the 50/50 w/l from the game.

The system forced ppl to lose their minds so not really.

You can’t do that. If you don’t rage you’ll end up to a mental hospital. Anet wants you to rage or get a team.

That’s because many player has stopped playing solo and runs with their premade team only. Also a lot of people have quit the game/pvp when anet failed once again with these so called divisions.

Rude language is what anet ordered by giving us broken system. It’s like they wanted this secretly.

PvP player base was dying for a soloq that works and for a system where teams face other teams. Not a system where premades farm pugs and there’s no way to play solo. Also if you are forming a team how can you know who you consider good enough players to invite to your team for pro league and esl? Good indication is division system but now you can only win if you have a good enough team so there’s no way of getting into one if you solo.

You are getting to it don’t worry.

kitten no! Hell no! kittening kitten i won a match and got 2 pips >:[[[[[[ kittening ready to lose matches again.

Where is the part where the 50/50 w/l doesn’t apply?

It happened again. I won a guild team and gain 2 pips and now this is the second match in a row i lose and now i lost 2 pips.

Have you ever noticed when you have a win streak or win a good opponents that next matches you play are total bs with hot join players?

the 50/50 w/l is very much alive there after they reworked the system a while back and sorry for being bad if i try to stop teammates running into 2v4 fights.

Plz fix the system and remove the mmr from matchmaking. I have won guild teams a few times now and earned 2 pips but it cause my mmr to jump. I am now in a cycle where i now lose more matches than i win. When i win i get 2 pips and my mmr jumps and i lose the next 3 matches. Don’t give me that i checked your match history and you got a huge win streak blah blah blah bs. THAT’S NOT HOW LEAGUE WORKS!!! IF YOU GET STUCK WITH 50/50 MMR IN THE MIDDLE OF A SYSTEM THAT GIVES YOU 1 POINT FOR WINNING AND 1 FOR LOSING HOW ARE YOU SUPPOSE TO ADVANCE??? Well okay maybe if i bought a smurf account i could rise above my main account in division tiers. Clever way to make more money tho i’ll give you that.

I did some research and testing and the best way to climb the divisions with your current account is not tossing games but waiting that people get past you and you get your new win streak if you had one earlier. This brings up the other problem. You might not have a win streak for a few days because you have your mmr in tier system. I understand that this system is for the new players but it makes more damage than good when higher mmr players are spending more time against and with new players.

Let’s assume that the following players are high mmr players and half of them are pro league players.

These guys would face same mmr opponents from the beginning of the leagues in amber which is approx 50/50 in matchmaking (most of the high mmr players have a winrate of 55%-60%). These guys would face each other in queue constantly in amber. This system forces them to do 3 things if they want to advance to their own division.

• First thing is to group up and this is the thing that happened and is still happening. Make premades and win matches. This causes them eventually have 2h queues until enough people reaches their level or until they face each other all the time.

• Second thing is to wait. This makes those people who want to advance fast go out of your way so that hey can get easier matches against the highest mmr people in amber which is very different from diamond/legendary mmr.

• Third thing is to get a new account. This is the most efficient way to climb currently due to the mmr in divisions. If you buy a new account you don’t have a mmr and you face the lowest possible mmr opponents due to the divisions at first. At the end of the division you face the highest possible mmr of that division before you get to the other division and you are against the lowest mmr of that division. Top players could easily skip the matches and advance to diamond/legendary to show their real level in Guild Wars 2 surprisingly fast if we assume that there are people in diamond/legendary at some point of the season.

The system itself seems to be fine in a way and after a while but the thing that’s a bit off is that people can’t be in their own divisions fast enough. For this system to work properly it needs people to advance to their own divisions. If people have this 50/50 matchmaking system the advancing happens too slow. The only thing I would do is the mmr reset for each season. Every other competitive game does mmr reset for each season, why is there no mmr reset in Guild Wars 2?

The other thing i wanted to talk about is gvg. We have this amazing guild ladder showing rating and rank and it’s awesome. There’s only 1 but. Where is the gvg? Guild teams are facing pugs/premades instead of teams from the guild ladder. I played Guild Wars 1 and I don’t remember facing random arena pugs or team arena teams in guild vs guild matches. This is the weirdest thing so far I’ve seen in Guild Wars 2. The guild ladder should ignore the divisions/mmr and use only guild rating for matchmaking.

At least the system could make it so that guild teams are always forced against other guild teams in 3v3, 4v4 and 5v5 based on their guild rating and rank and the rest of the players in 3v3 and 4v4 are picked by their division rank. Also make guild teams start at certain rating and then set the rating and rank based on that first match. This is only better for balance and it creates a real competition between guilds as well as practice for the pro leagues.

Don’t question my godly keybinds!

So i guess that this only means that i am a god and that they have to match me against esl premades. Afterall i haven’t even played that much after the league patch.

Waiting for the invitation to the best pro league team.

Full oRNG premade all of a sudden. All the other matches were fine but then i get this. Is this a way for anet to stop ppl from rising divisions too fast and prevent them for getting rewards too fast?

How is this related to divisions?

You could also disable allow skill retargeting cause it makes you unable to stomp your foe if you don’t target the foe you are stomping.

So can somene explain me why this is happening?

This just happened. Can you defend this balance anet?

What i have seen so far is that there isn’t guild ladder based on guild vs guild matches. Am i correct?

Mmr reset for leagues or the removal of mmr affecting matchmaking would have fixed this issue for many players.

Evan Lesh.3295:

I would wait longer than 3 days and at least until after we enable decay before making a judgement on how the team leaderboard will settle out. It is not our intention that a single team of players has the time to possibly keep that many entries at the top of the leaderboard.

Could a system where guild teams fight only against guild teams be better than the current system? It would show the actual rankings of guild teams and make it more gvg.

I don’t see the point if i play in a guild team and i am not facing other guild teams. We want to have a competition instead of farming pugs/premades. This system is not fun for us and it’s not fun for them.