Guild Wars 2

https://competitive.guildwars2.com/en/news/upcoming-changes-for-pvp-league-season-two

This reads like this quarter’s intern wrote it.

It’s defensive, noncommittal, and hems and haws about your ‘data’ instead of reassuring us that you actually have a clue about the PvP gaming experience and what you’re supposed to do to make it a game fun to play, let alone competitive.

As we’ve mentioned previously, Ranked matchmaking in PvP during season two will now be based primarily on your current division placement and a predetermined “pip range” that extends from that spot.

There is an additional matchmaking change we’ll make that will affect a specific type of match-up:

Five-person premade groups will never be matched up against a group made up of five solo players.

Great, so I get matched up with pip farmers grinding matches instead of players who’ve played the game as long as I have. Definitely not what we asked for from match making.

Pro tip: perhaps try explaining how this change directly effects the mechanics and how it will address the specific issues it was intended for.

Obscure language is always intended to deceive. Your language is obscure. And the deception has been revealed thanks to Evan’s contribution that full-5 teams will still face 2-1-1-1 teams. It doesn’t matter if you intended to be deceptive, it’s being read as such at this point.

“Only 1% of all Ranked matches played in season one were a full five-person premade group vs. a group of five solo players, and even then, the win rate for those five solo player teams in those cases was consistently at or above 50% throughout the entire season.

I honestly don’t give a kitten about your data anymore. Please stop telling us about it. And stop trying to disprove our playing experience with it. At this point, no one has any confidence in your ability to read said data anyways.

What’s more worrying is that you clearly don’t understand the issue if you think it’s an acceptable improvement to change the match making from no longer allowing 5v1-1-1-1-1 to 5v2-1-1-1. I mean seriously? That’s the equivalent of not even making a change.

Win Streaks and Comebacks

If you’re concerned about no longer being able to earn multiple points off of victories, then have no fear—we’re bringing a win streak system to PvP Leagues for season two! Here’s how it’ll work:

After three consecutive wins, you’ll be awarded one additional pip for each subsequent win (including the match that you start a win streak on, too).
If you lose while on a win streak, your win streak status will reset to zero, and you’ll need to win three more matches in a row again in order to start up another win streak.
Win streaks don’t have a time limit to them, so if you log off while on a win streak and then log back in at any point later, you’ll still be on that win streak.
In addition to win streaks, we’re also going to be adding a system for comeback pips. If you find yourself on a particularly tough losing streak, then you’ll have a chance to gain an extra pip back as soon as you manage to break that streak. After three consecutive losses, you’ll be awarded one extra pip on your next win.

So while we’re still going to be subjected to 5v2-1-1-1, aka absurd mismatches, we’ll no longer be rewarded appropriately for winning the matches???

I’m sorry, WHAT?

Now you’ve not only NOT made improvements to the potential for mismatches, but you’ve removed any reason to try when you inevitably run into one. Brilliant.

We realize that the weeks following the end of season one have left a bit of a gap for players who wish to continue to queue for Ranked play. We share your eagerness to jump back into the fray as soon as possible, and we’re currently exploring some ideas for how future off-seasons will work. In the meantime, the countdown to the start of season two continues—so keep honing your skills and experimenting with new builds, and we’ll see you all on the battlefield soon!

Left a bit of a gap? There’s nothing to do! Ranked is the only reason to play PvP. You’ve turned the game off for a month. It doesn’t take an economics professor to understand that’s a poor business practice for an on-demand product.

I honestly have no confidence in anything ANet does at this point. The more they talk, the more inept they come off.

Right now I have zero interest in season 2. I suppose I should thank whoever wrote this amateur drivel for the heads up not to waste my time. Cheers.

Coelho Nat.4697:

I am on last tier of division 3, but is absolutely impossible to reach division 4. I win 1, but lose like 4 in a row. It started since the last patch.
I am not the best player in the world, just average. However, I noticed I am always being set to the weakest side over and over. I already tried to change classes, different times of the day, but nothing works. Since the last patch it is absolutely impossible to leave this tier. I am absolutely so tired of this. I just keep trying because of the achievement.

Match making is absurdly broken at the moment, and ANet has acknowledged as much. If the only reason you’re continuing to PvP is for the achievement then you’re in luck. You’re achievement progress will not be reset until the end of the year. So you’re more than welcome to take a break from the game, wait for ANet to sort out the match making and balance for next season, and then pick up where you left off with the achievement, but in a (hopefully) healthier league system.

Agemnon.4608:

The common denominator is you.

Let’s get something straight. You are 1 player out of 10 on the map. That means at best you have a 10% impact on the match and its outcome. If you’re wildly mismatched, then perhaps you could have more impact – for better or worse. But your logic is beyond fail.

Take your common denominator and shove it back where you pulled it from.

So… ANet’s response to the bunker meta they created is… to remove the bunkers? You’re removing an entire role from your only competitive game mode? You’re going to shift the core of the game’s mechanics and game play in order to accommodate your overturned elite specs, which are getting nuked and not just nerfed?

All this is going to accomplish is to send the balance pendulum swinging wildly in the other direction. None of this will improve the game play. It will simply create a whole new batch of problems.

L2ProblemSolve, ANet.

The build will be useless as soon as burst builds re-enter the meta. No need to change it.

How about just use statistics and the match score, and throw out the “hey I did good they gave me random arbitrary points!” nonsense.

I don’t think anyone is claiming that standing on a point whilst neglecting the rest of the map is a strong strategy. They’re merely pointing out that the game does not reward certain aspects of the game play that are integral to winning strategies, and that it can mislead players.

Stop nit picking and learn to think for yourself. Just because you received a reward for something doesn’t mean it was the proper or optimal choice for achieving the main objective. Lab rats can manage to understand this. You can, too.

Currently this isn’t how the system works but I’m curious if this is the expectation from the player base. Currently you can have any MMR in any of the divisions so long as you win enough games to complete the division requirements.

The question is though, do the players feel this is appropriate or would they rather have divisions represent MMR?

Keep in mind that using divisions to represent MMR would likely require uncoupling the meta achievement from divisions, resetting MMR in some capacity at the start of each season, as well as allowing division loss through losing matches/pips.

Just curious what the people think. Let’s hear what you got

Good luck explaining that to ANet. We’ve been trying since launch.

My hypothesis is that no one at ANet has done anything competitive since their parents packed up the T-ball set.

CooloutAC.3451:

This so feels like a case of carebears wanting to think they are better players then they really are. People lose, peoples suck, thats life. And thats no reason to hide stats or pretend they don’t matter. Most people into sports will still love to play, and most people will still consider winning the match most important.

Wtf are you even saying?

Stop trolling or get better at it.

CooloutAC.3451:

MithranArkanere.8957:

Score doesn’t matter because it doesn’t consider defense, support and assists.

With only a fraction of the factors that determine victory showing in personal score, the number shown there is mostly inconsequential.

Thats like saying goal scores in basketball don’t matter, because it doesn’t consider things like blocks, steals and assists…. Do you see how jealous nerd that sounds?

They post stats of all players that include their Assists, Steals, Blocks, Turnovers, etc.

Yes. Only because it’s been 3+ years and they haven’t been able to come up with a way to make stacking less toxic.

ANet has been aware of the break in logic between their personal scoring and how the game is actually played since launch. They have made no move to change it. The whole score board is just bad. We should be able to see all the statistical information that we see at the end of the match for every player on the map and we should be able to check it live. One thing I’ve always kinda laughed at was that the big tournaments have basically no scoreboard, no index of performance for any of the players or teams, let alone the matches themselves. It makes me laugh that people worry about balance effecting “Esports status” yet ANet hasn’t even figured out how to present it to viewers in a logical fashion like pretty much every sport does, not just the electronic variety, and that includes highlighting player statistics live.

nearlight.3064:

What is rotation? I constantly hear this term mentioned by casters, my rabbit rank teammates, and even pro players. But when I watch Phantaram play, he just goes far.

Rotations in Guild Wars 2 PvP are what you might call “troop movements”. It’s the movement of your teammates from a position of value to another in an effort to support a teammate, or pressure the opposing team.

For instance, after winning a mid fight it’s typical for the losing side to push towards a different objective, i.e. your home node. Your teammate defending home calls the number of enemies inbound to his objective, and your teammates wrapping up at mid send an equivalent number, plus an additional player (the +1) to support and maintain control of the objective. That is to say, you rotate players from one point to another point.

What Phantaram is doing is a very specific tactic that is part of a greater strategy based on denying points (objectives and scoring) to your enemy, while keeping heavy pressure on the enemy. It takes strong individual skill, as well strong team coordination and communication to pull off. Which means it’s not ideal for pugs to try to execute.

I constantly ask this question when Solo Quing and as far as I’ve found the consensus reason for going far is “winning mid is too hard” because “all the enemies are there”

No Walking.6349:

Score DOES matter. The higher your score, the more you’ve contributed to the match. The more player’s you’ve killed, decaps and caps you’ve gotten, buffs you’ve captured. I’m sorry but anyone who says score doesn’t matter is full of it, and needs to play better.

Your personal score does not matter. It won’t win you the match, it won’t even factor into the final outcome. The only score that matters is the team score, which decides if you win or lose.

Ask yourself this: How is it that my team scores the most points? Is it kills? Is it capturing objectives? Is it maximizing the secondary objectives?

Answer: none of them. you win by holding capture points. Which is also something you don’t receive a personal score for. Which is why your personal does not matter.

Pretty sure this is how you end up on an FBI watch list these days

Sube Dai.8496:

That’s the 50% win rate part of the algorithm. Did you lose any pips? Probably not because the system assumed you would lose.

It’s still crap tho…

Of course I lost. Why else would I post about it?

Kevin.4209:

This is just how matchmaking in any game works, there’s an element of randomness in order to secure timely matches. The enemy team on average should have the same skill level as your team, if your teammates are worse than you, than the other team will (roughly) be a weighted average of your skill and your teammates skill level. There is no problem here.

If they were equal skill they wouldn’t have lost the first game by blow out. The match maker should not be pulling from the same group of players for successive matches, all this does is successively stack the odds against players by continually moving them into groups with lower and lower rated players.

Also, I don’t consider the status quo to be a good reason to keep doing anything, much like you’re answer suggests.

Why are you putting me on their team in the very next match? I beat them for a reason.

Fix the match making. There needs to be more deviation than this.

Thank you

Oh don’t get me wrong, bunker scrapper has lots of team utility. The reason I suggest opting for the build I suggested is so that you can reliably set up and burn down targets without having to rely too much on your teammates who might be struggling just to land any damage of consequence in this heavy bunker meta. It’s much more damage oriented which is something I find I need instead of a pure bunker when my team is struggling to win fights.

I suggest doing away with the pure bunker scrapper build and get more involved in the team fights. Often times lately when I’m getting teams line the ones you’re describing I find the best approach is to hold their hand through the whole match. Call targets for them. Call rezze’s for them. Secure stomps because they won’t. Rotate to support them so they don’t feed an enemy point. Etc etc I use an HGH rifle/nade/elixirs scrapper build for this. It’s not meta but it’s not far from it and definitely effective for solo Q

We don’t want PvE’rs. We tried that and they don’t want to play the game competitively. We want the PvP’rs back. The ones who are interested in winning more than grinding or farming PvE rewards.

Teamwork beats solo play every time. Every time.

Winning the fight will always win you the point. Winning the point will not always win you the fight.

Defending a point is not limited to standing on said point

It factors your teams MMR and the final score to determine pip gain/loss. Win by 200 pts against a team rated higher than yours and get 2 pips. You were on the losing end. Not that difficult.

People really need to stop worrying about who queued with who. Evrryone plays the same game no matter who you queue with.

Meh. Most of them are unnecessary to the bulk of classes and builds you’d use at any time in PvP. The core ones are the most widely used anyways. This sounds like someone trying to role Viper Rev and finding out its not totally free to win in PvP.

StickerHappy.8052:

Bottom line: “A settler amuler SHOULD not Outdamage a Marauder Amulet if he is using 0 conditions”

That’s not what was tested by OP or an accurate assessment of what mechanics were in play, or even how the roles function.

If this is how you’re assessing things then no wonder you’re feeling frustrated in PvP.

No, I’m not defending Revs or anything else. But this whole thread is just wrong and not helping anything.

1- there aren’t enough teams to warrant a separate queue.
2- 5 bads that queued together or 5 bads that queue alone. What’s the difference? 5 in a team doesn’t automatically make it an awesome premade.
3- how else do you get the 2 and 3 pip wins?

Why in the world would you expect a high risk/high reward build to stand there and trade autos with a class built for survivability? That’s not how you play that role. At all.

Revenant is a touchy subject in PvP currently. Pay no mind and move on with your life.

I think a better question would be: is ANet OK with so many whiny kittenes playing their game?

I would call that a work around to a poor queue system for a woefully talentless player population

They mad cuz haters gotta hate. Like this guy^

As I understand it the longer your queue goes past the average time the more potential for deviation in player ratings you get through the roster. So the longer the queue time goes theoretically your odds of facing a lower or higher rated opponent goes up. Cancelling and restarting however does not guarantee you will avoid that match though. It has more to do with whoever else is in the queue at that particular time.

Please stop feeding this troll

Cole.3824:

That is a repulsive level of entitlement.

Keep it as it is Anet.

Pimsley.3681:

My MMR is so high that I actually caught the dragon

This one actually made me laugh

I don’t get it. It’s Unranked Skyhammer. Who gives a kitten what your MMR is in Unranked?

yeah Hambow never had teleports

It’s been this bad for a while. You just weren’t aware of how bad because you didn’t have a visual aid reminding you how many losses you’ve had tonight, or needed to actually win before.

Yep, the worst bunker meta we’ve had so far, and that’s necessitated by the ridiculous amounts of stupid-easy damage that has made it’s way into the game.

There is a huge difference between standing on/near a point and standing in the spawn. Most obviously the player’s location.

The bigger issue is: you cannot win the game without holding points. It is integral to the game play, so why isn’t that contribution reflected in the personal score?

Don’t even get me started on the value of secondary mechanics.

This is not new either. This has been discussed since release.

Moa Transform hard-counters Minion Necros

Seems to me that there needs to be diminishing returns on how many games you can play in a particular period of time. Getting to Ruby within the first few days seems extreme and someone should probably take a shower and maybe go for a walk.

Israel.7056:

The solution to this problem seems obvious to me. Before a match begins the game should tell you exactly what you stand to gain or lose and allow for a certain number of points that will guarantee that you keep however many pips you already have. So for example, you queue into PZ and you’re expected to lose you can keep your pips if your team scores over 100 points.

I disagree. By informing players of the handicap you change the objective of the game substantially. Teams will then try to only win ‘the handicap’, and not win the game.

And if they did that, I’d never get my 2-pip wins. And I like my 2-pip wins
I just don’t like having so many so frequently.

And to be honest, I have no issue playing against the likes of PZ or Abjured. I have issue with the teammates the matchmaker thinks I can play against them with.

Losing Pips is honestly how it should work. It’s the rating system that’s FUBAR

The scoring in this game has never accurately reflected how you actually play the game.

I wish they’d open their eyes to that fact.

I don’t mind if it’s supposed to take a long time. I’m not really interested in the grind. I don’t even care about the loot or the back piece. It’s nice to have as a tertiary game alongside the pvp matches themselves but that’s about it.

What I’m struggling with is how the match making seems to be working against me. Particularly being matched against teams I’m not expected to beat, as well as being paired with teams that I had just beaten handily. For me it seems there should be enough deviation in rating after that match for me to not be paired with them immediately following the match, which apparently isn’t the case. That strikes me as being at odds with the league progression and the point of the game.

So I haven’t played a whole ton since the leagues launched. I just completed the first division last night. I queued for all of them solo. Through the course of completing the division though I had at least 3 match ups that I apparently wasn’t supposed to win, yet did, giving me 2 pips each. I stopped to consider that for a moment: 3 out of 15 wins I wasn’t supposed to win. That seems a little high for the sample size. I’m pretty sure there were some other matches I wasn’t supposed to win, and certainly didn’t. This seems odd to me though that I would be placed in so many match ups I’m not expected to win, yet I’m supposed to accumulate wins/pips to progress in the game. Odd.

What really boggles my mind though is that now that I’m in the second tier I can now lose pips. And that’s totally fine. That’s how it should work IMO. But, the following scenario is what I’m having a hard time resolving. I queue up for my first 2nd division match and win handily. Yay 1 pip! The next match I am then paired with 4 of the 5 players I just beat badly and we go on to lose handily to players I would consider at my skill level but clearly well above that of my teammates. By-bye 1 pip. Now that wouldn’t be a big deal if it were a rare occurrence, but this happens on a regular basis and has done so for a long time.

So I’m looking at my 50% win rate, the lopsided match ups that the match maker thinks I shouldn’t win, and then the fact that I get paired with players I just beat the crap out of and I’m wondering why I should even bother trying to get another pip, let alone complete another division. How is this supposed to work?

I already have three 2-pip wins just getting through the first tier. That seems like too many lopsided match ups considering it only takes 15 wins to get through the first tier.

I like a challenge, but I’m starting to feel like the match maker is kittening with me.