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NA's Low Platinum population and its effect on PvP, also how to improve it


Chaith.8256

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So right now, outside of 3hrs of NA primetime, it's essentially a free for all between players from Gold1 to Legendary on NA.

There's a huge skill divide between players on the same teams in PvP, from off-meta specs at Gold1, and the players gaming every advantage available at a rating of 1750-1850. As a result, the purpose of rating is devalued, it's just a random free for all. This is your average simplified ranked queue:

Red Team:Player 1: 1804 (Duo Queued)Player 2: 1740 (Duo Queued)Player 3: 1500Player 4: 1400Player 5: 1400AVERAGE: 1569

Blue Team:Player 1: 1700Player 2: 1600Player 3: 1500Player 4: 1500 (Duo Queued)Player 5: 1450 (Duo Queued)AVERAGE: 1550

Glicko does a great job of making sure both teams have a really balanced matchmaking rating.

But what it does not take into account is what builds the super-outlier 1400-1450 rated players who get pulled in are using. If these players happen to be running ultra high risk specs, their team will have no chance. If these players happen to be running builds that are inherently hard to dispatch for high end players often using high kill speed pub-stomping builds, it's an instant win.

To put it in other words, the losing outcome is heavily focused on which team has the lower end player(s) running high risk/experimental builds. This is the main win/lose condition, and it's not curated at all by the matchmaker. From the perspective of all players in Platinum I've personally known, this is the main problem with PvP.

It's not super helpful to just bring problems to the table so I can list off many possible improvements off the top of my head. All the improvements will revolve around re-populating the pool of platinum quality players queuing at any given time, and create higher quality fights & matches. We really need to keep platinum players grinding queues at all hours in order to keep the match quality stable across all tiers - keeping 1400 rated players away from 1800 players is the goal that will restore the meaning of rating.

Incentives that kick in when completing a game at platinum, these could be combined or cherry picked, not all of these incentives at once of course.1.) Accelerated reward track progress & gold rewards.2.) Accelerated Byzantium chest pips.3.) Byzantium chest now includes a Black Lion Key.4.) Most importantly: Ascended Shards of Glory vendors added so players can spend this currency on a wider and more exotic array of skins & conveniences, even if the Ascended Shard cost was outrageously high - a grind fits the mission here. If you could just recycle any of the current game's rewards in exchange for Ascended Shards, the sky's the limit - you could even put a release cycle on older MaT Gizmos, infusions, black lion skins, with appropriately large costs of course, and I bet a large amount of the playerbase will grind PvP for it. The key to this idea would be to really make rare cosmetics extremely grindy, spanning months or more.

These are all just ideas off the top of my head. There is a lot of incentives that could be made to keep competent players on the ranked queue treadmill, which doesn't sound glamorous but would be infinitely better than suffering low-pop issues.

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yes, give me more gold please

ps. more ways to spend ascended shards please, filled all my char with mist trinkets and ascended gear, bought all pvp skins and made legendary, still have 5.5k shards sitting...i imagine people who played for the whole duration of HoT and PoF will have way more sitting

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I agree this is a problem, and I discuss my suggestion for a solution here: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/66261/opt-in-matchmaking-to-improve-the-quality-of-pvp

That being said, increased rewards would have very little impact on how often I play. I still play PvP because of the fun combat system and rare good match, not how pretty I look. I don't think I'm alone in this sentiment.

I won't argue against improving rewards for high level play, however, I'd consider what impacts it might have:

  • Higher in game rewards means less people paying for cosmetics.
  • The most profitable areas of the game will get the most development.
  • Increased reward may draw an influx of inexperienced PvErs, maybe only interested in learning enough to get the reward. PvP doesn't simply need more players, it needs more experienced players. Overall match quality may further deteriorate.
  • Increased interest in PvP could help revitalize the mode. Who knows?
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@Nakaido.4517 said:Why not increase rewards for gold rating, so it would attract a bigger pool of players who will play and you would have more people to match with? why increase the rewards for platinum when there is such a small pool of players in it?

Everyone would get more gold but it would fix nothing. GW2 Ranked queue will continue to be russian roulette until the plat population becomes sustainable.

The reason why we edit: mostly need our knowledgeable players to play way more, and also need to incentivize players to learn the mechanics and legitimately graduate to platinum is so that all-platinum games are able to happen, right now it's not uncommon for plat/legend players to crash largely gold tier games.

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100% agree with everything Chaith has already said. But let me shed some more light onto this topic. Hear me out, I think this may be rather important for his discussion concerning "Where the hell are the plat players?"

I've played with a lot of new guys over the years in voice chats. Here is the typical GW2 experience that I hear from most of these people:

  • They practice a bit in Unranked, get a feel for the game.
  • Run their first placements and tag in at around silver 3. They somewhat adapt quickly and begin playing around gold 1 consistently for their first 50 games or so.
  • They are only being put against maybe like gold 3s as their hard hitting opponents, so they may be losing but it isn't a roflstomping god-smack to the face, so the opponents feel contestable to them, and the new player is having fun learning how to breach the skill of those opponents. The game is fun to them.
  • The new players who care will eventually approach some guy with a plat badge and ask him how they can better play their class and what build is good. The ones who actually take the advice, usually immediately graduate into gold 2-3 range. Now they are really feeling like "They're getting something done. They're getting better at the game." And the journey of using these new discovered builds & job roles is amazingly fun when they are quickly learning how to surpass the players who once challenged them in gold 1 tier. They finish the season while hovering around bottom gold 3.
  • The next season begins and they've been 1v1ing practicing all off season. Now they're real fired up and ready to go. They slowly creep up into high gold, and it's fun. they can feel their personal skill increases, which is a pleasing thing to experience. Now they're finding themselves winning against some bottom platinum opponents but still losing to some, which they are having a hard time surmounting. But it's all within the realm of being "obtainable" and they are still having fun.
  • During that same season, they finally reach up into 1500 range for the very first time and they are super excited about it. It was quite the journey over the course of a season and a half of playing, 400 games or something, to have graduated from silver 3 to bottom plat 1. The very next game they queue, they are in a game with a top 20 duo against a top 20 duo. They immediately recognize that the difference between a 1500 and a 1700+ is much much larger than the difference between a 1300 and a 1500. During the 1300 to 1500 phase, why they were winning or losing was actually identifiable to them and they could set realistic goals for working to surpass their limitations. But while suddenly entering the 1500 to 1700+ phase, they become confused as to what is even happening in the match. They don't understand how players are killing them so fast. They don't understand what it even is they could do better or what they are doing wrong. They don't see any realistic goals to set for becoming better, aside from dedicating professional basement troll sweaty try hard levels of time invested, as if they were aiming to win a cash prize or something. <- And this is where the breaking point is, where people don't stick around.

The only people who stick around when meeting that 1500+ wall, are the ones who are strangely and manically obsessed with this game, which is definitely hindering the growth of the platinum community, and that goes back into what Chaith was original saying. There are two main reasons that I have viewed, that largely contribute to why most people don't stick around past 1500+

  1. It's just too damn sweaty. Most people are really turned off by maximum curb stomping in ways that they are completely helpless to prevent. People don't mind losing and being made to get better, that's where the fun is. But people really do not like going against the actual best players in the game, every other match they queue. During the 1300 to 1500 experience, a player has breathing room to progress from point A to point B to point C, ect ect. But when they hit 1500 to 1700+ phase, they pretty much have to ascend from point D to Z immediately, if they want to be mechanically functional in the match at all, and for most people they decide the investment is too much of a hassle to get involved in.
  2. And this is the BIGGER reasons why people leave - Once a person has touched plat badge, they then begin to feel like they deserve the plat badge. When they are unable to reobtain the plat badge, they seriously rage quit and do not come back. In the past 12 months, I've had SO MANY contacts disappear never to be seen again, many of them Warriors & Mesmers actually. And this usually promptly happens after a night of hearing someone complain in the discord after they've spammed 50 games and are unable to reobtain bottom plat. They just rage quit out of not being able to maintain some kind of social appearance within the community.

Aside from all of the other problems that we could discuss, such as too much alt play in the top of the leaderboards, or all of the reasons that plat players have to milk 3 day decay times and avoid play, my point in bringing all of this up, is for Chaith's discussion concerning the lack of plat worthy opponents queueing. I believe that what we are looking at in terms of the biggest culprits preventing platinums from queueing frequently, are two things:

  1. There is almost a complete lack of platinum community growth, due to that wall of gtfo that I mentioned, that new players experience. And that ego rage when a player can't get that plat badge that they feel they deserve.
  2. Old platinum veterans all know that queueing is dangerous, and that once you've achieved a desired position, it is every bit advantageous to avoid play as much as possible, and only queue 1 game every 3 days, and only ever do it when it is safe to do so.

I mean, Ranked is currently designed to kill player incentive to queue past 1500. This is a serious problem to say the least.

So what can be done to fix these 2 outstanding problems? I dunno, you tell me. I'm just hear to point out what I've noticed to be the largest contributing factors as to why there is a serious lack of platinum worthy opponents in queue.

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@"Trevor Boyer.6524" said:100% agree with everything Chaith has already said. But let me shed some more light onto this topic. Hear me out, I think this may be rather important for his discussion concerning "Where the hell are the plat players?"

I've played with a lot of new guys over the years in voice chats. Here is the typical GW2 experience that I hear from most of these people:

  • They practice a bit in Unranked, get a feel for the game.
  • Run their first placements and tag in at around silver 3. They somewhat adapt quickly and begin playing around gold 1 consistently for their first 50 games or so.
  • They are only being put against maybe like gold 3s as their hard hitting opponents, so they may be losing but it isn't a roflstomping god-smack to the face, so the opponents feel contestable to them, and the new player is having fun learning how to breach the skill of those opponents. The game is fun to them.
  • The new players who care will eventually approach some guy with a plat badge and ask him how they can better play their class and what build is good. The ones who actually take the advice, usually immediately graduate into gold 2-3 range. Now they are really feeling like "They're getting something done. They're getting better at the game." And the journey of using these new discovered builds & job roles is amazingly fun when they are quickly learning how to surpass the players who once challenged them in gold 1 tier. They finish the season while hovering around bottom gold 3.
  • The next season begins and they've been 1v1ing practicing all off season. Now they're real fired up and ready to go. They slowly creep up into high gold, and it's fun. they can feel their personal skill increases, which is a pleasing thing to experience. Now they're finding themselves winning against some bottom platinum opponents but still losing to some, which they are having a hard time surmounting. But it's all within the realm of being "obtainable" and they are still having fun.
  • During that same season, they finally reach up into 1500 range for the very first time and they are super excited about it. It was quite the journey over the course of a season and a half of playing, 400 games or something, to have graduated from silver 3 to bottom plat 1. The very next game they queue, they are in a game with a top 20 duo against a top 20 duo. They immediately recognize that the difference between a 1500 and a 1700+ is much much larger than the difference between a 1300 and a 1500. During the 1300 to 1500 phase, why they were winning or losing was actually identifiable to them and they could set realistic goals for working to surpass their limitations. But while suddenly entering the 1500 to 1700+ phase, they become confused as to what is even happening in the match. They don't understand how players are killing them so fast. They don't understand what it even is they could do better or what they are doing wrong. They don't see any realistic goals to set for becoming better, aside from dedicating professional basement troll sweaty try hard levels of time invested, as if they were aiming to win a cash prize or something. <- And this is where the breaking point is, where people don't stick around.

The only people who stick around when meeting that 1500+ wall, are the ones who are strangely and manically obsessed with this game, which is definitely hindering the growth of the platinum community, and that goes back into what Chaith was original saying. There are two main reasons that I have viewed, that largely contribute to why most people don't stick around past 1500+

  1. It's just too kitten sweaty. Most people are really turned off by maximum curb stomping in ways that they are completely helpless to prevent. People don't mind losing and being made to get better, that's where the fun is. But people really do not like going against the actual best players in the game, every other match they queue. During the 1300 to 1500 experience, a player has breathing room to progress from point A to point B to point C, ect ect. But when they hit 1500 to 1700+ phase, they pretty much have to ascend from point D to Z immediately, if they want to be mechanically functional in the match at all, and for most people they decide the investment is too much of a hassle to get involved in.
  2. And this is the BIGGER reasons why people leave - Once a person has touched plat badge, they then begin to feel like they deserve the plat badge. When they are unable to reobtain the plat badge, they seriously rage quit and do not come back. In the past 12 months, I've had SO MANY contacts disappear never to be seen again, many of them Warriors & Mesmers actually. And this usually promptly happens after a night of hearing someone complain in the discord after they've spammed 50 games and are unable to reobtain bottom plat. They just rage quit out of not being able to maintain some kind of social appearance within the community.

Aside from all of the other problems that we could discuss, such as too much alt play in the top of the leaderboards, or all of the reasons that plat players have to milk 3 day decay times and avoid play, my point in bringing all of this up, is for Chaith's discussion concerning the lack of plat worthy opponents queueing. I believe that what we are looking at in terms of the biggest culprits preventing platinums from queueing frequently, are two things:

  1. There is almost a complete lack of platinum community growth, due to that wall of gtfo that I mentioned, that new players experience. And that ego rage when a player can't get that plat badge that they feel they deserve.
  2. Old platinum veterans all know that queueing is dangerous, and that once you've achieved a desired position, it is every bit advantageous to avoid play as much as possible, and only queue 1 game every 3 days, and only ever do it when it is safe to do so.

I mean, Ranked is currently designed to kill player incentive to queue past 1500. This is a serious problem to say the least.

So what can be done to fix these 2 outstanding problems? I dunno, you tell me. I'm just hear to point out what I've noticed to be the largest contributing factors as to why there is a serious lack of platinum worthy opponents in queue.

This simply is not true. The difference between 1,500 and 1,300 is huge. Difference between 1,500 and 1,700 not so much. 1,300 is like 40th percentile. P1 is like 85-90 percentile. If you are already in the top 10 percent fighting top 20 players is doable. I still think that top 50 should never be matched against anyone below P2, but I don’t think we have enough players for that without a que taking 15 minutes plus.

Based on what the OP had, team 2 is at an advantage. If team 1,400 2 players play at that level, they will be demolished when the other team lowest player is like 70th percentile. Duel leg players can carry against gold. You cannot carry against P1-P2 players.

I really wish the match making is based on percentile and not rating. In gold the difference in rating is small but the difference in skill is large. P1 and above is the exact opposite. The difference in ratings is large, but the difference in skill is small. And P2 and above, minuscule.

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@Chaith.8256 said:So right now, outside of 3hrs of NA primetime, it's essentially a free for all between players from Gold1 to Legendary on NA.

There's a huge skill divide between players on the same teams in PvP, from off-meta specs at Gold1, and the players gaming every advantage available at a rating of 1750-1850. As a result, the purpose of rating is devalued, it's just a random free for all. This is your average simplified ranked queue:

Red Team:Player 1: 1804 (Duo Queued)Player 2: 1740 (Duo Queued)Player 3: 1500Player 4: 1400Player 5: 1400AVERAGE: 1569

Blue Team:Player 1: 1700Player 2: 1600Player 3: 1500Player 4: 1500 (Duo Queued)Player 5: 1450 (Duo Queued)AVERAGE: 1550

Glicko does a great job of making sure both teams have a really balanced matchmaking rating.

But what it does not take into account is what builds the super-outlier 1400-1450 rated players who get pulled in are using. If these players happen to be running ultra high risk specs, their team will have no chance. If these players happen to be running builds that are inherently hard to dispatch for high end players often using high kill speed pub-stomping builds, it's an instant win.

To put it in other words, the losing outcome is heavily focused on which team has the lower end player(s) running high risk/experimental builds. This is the main win/lose condition, and it's not curated at all by the matchmaker. From the perspective of all players in Platinum I've personally known, this is the main problem with PvP.

It's not super helpful to just bring problems to the table so I can list off many possible solutions off the top of my head. All the solutions will revolve around re-populating the pool of platinum quality players queuing at any given time, and create higher quality fights & matches. We really need to keep platinum players grinding queues at all hours in order to keep the match quality stable across all tiers - keeping 1400 rated players away from 1800 players is the goal that will restore the meaning of rating.

Incentives that kick in when completing a game at platinum, these could be combined or cherry picked, not all of these incentives at once of course.1.) Accelerated reward track progress & gold rewards.2.) Accelerated Byzantium chest pips.3.) Byzantium chest now includes a Black Lion Key.4.) Most importantly: Ascended Shards of Glory vendors added so players can spend this currency on a wider and more exotic array of skins & conveniences, even if the Ascended Shard cost was outrageously high - a grind fits the mission here. If you could just recycle any of the current game's rewards in exchange for Ascended Shards, the sky's the limit - you could even put a release cycle on older MaT Gizmos, infusions, black lion skins, with appropriately large costs of course, and I bet a large amount of the playerbase will grind PvP for it. The key to this idea would be to really make rare cosmetics extremely grindy, spanning months or more.

These are all just ideas off the top of my head. There is a lot of incentives that could be made to keep competent players on the ranked queue treadmill, which doesn't sound glamorous but would be infinitely better than suffering low-pop issues.

I think it could be fixed by doing two things:Tighten up the match maker's limit on rating differential.Make automated tournaments count towards rating gain/loss.

I'd also rework the automated tournaments so they were more of a king of the hill type format. Any team could join at any time. If they win, they go against another team that won. The two teams with the longest streaks play each other.

Whenever I'm at a rating that is consistently getting relentless legend titles in my matches I switch to a build I haven't played before so I can get my rating back down. I don't think you can incentivise casual players enough to want to queue into that type of match.

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This is about population. Better ingame rewards would help but not enough. Sure - Anet could do more to attract players of all skill levels. I just think there is a lack of commitment and money to do something that would really make a difference for PvP.

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First off, a terrible player running a good build is still a terrible player, and will get farmed regardless. Secondly, your grand idea to "fix it" is just adding more rewards? Do you honestly think that's going to attract people outside the game who aren't playing currently? Who would look at ranked conquest right now regardless of rewards and say "Wow that looks fun" Every single player myself included can only play for so long before getting stage 4 terminal cancer from the amount of aids that we encounter from terrible team mates. The only way ranked conquest is getting any better is with a few thousand players so the matchmaking can actually do its job properly.

No player on the outside looking in is going to look at a old game mode and be "Oh look gw2 conquest is giving away more shinies, let me hop in! :D", it has to be a new game mode, something fresh, something you can market from a-net's end. You can't market 7+ year old decayed rotting meat, sprinkle some rewards on top and expect people to eat it.

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I think every single one of you is missing the mark on matchmaking. The reason that pvp has low population, including plat division is because of the flawed matchmaking system. There is no "fixing" anything, this thing doesn't work. I see Glicko, and these ELO-based systems used in games all the time which were really meant for chess. These algorithms FAIL in team-based games like this one. Progression in this system always winds up being a grindfest and a chore for the sake of forcing a 50/50 winrate on everyone and keeping things "balanced". It pretty much just encourages addictive and tryhard behavior, not to mention burnout from playing so many games for so little gain. Progression is at a snail's pace. If you manage to get any sort of momentum in winning streaks, the system constantly stacks better opponents on you each match. With such slow progress, the way to really go up the ladder is hope for RNG to help you out. That being said, you all hit the nail on the head on plat players' incentive. What incentive is there once you reach plat? Getting up there wasn't easy in the first place! You don't want to jeopardize that do you?! Is it any wonder that plats either stop playing, wintrade or engage in whatever desperate shenanigans just for the sake of maintaining rank?

You're all also not talking about the community. Like or not, we as a community have done more to ruin this game than ANet ever did. Every day that I play this game I see disgusting behavior from people in-game, veterans and new players alike. Especially veterans. Wintrading, throwing matches if you don't get your pony, immaturity, it's disgusting. We need to stop looking the other way trying to sweep it under the rug and stop blaming ANet all the time for pvp. Like it or not, little things like behavior drive people away. It's going to take more than bans to fix that problem, it's going to take collective effort to call out shenanigans when you see them. Now I ask, how in this community are willing to DO that instead of protecting your rating...I'm guessing not many...

You're all also not being realistic. This game is EIGHT years old. It will never reach the heights it once did, that time is past. The whole "esports" push from this community helped kill it.

Now, suggestions. At this stage of the game, I don't think there's much to do other than blow up the matchmaking system and replace it with full random matchmaking along with the old win/loss-based system. Yes, it's full random but at least you're not restricted by the old algorithm. Now to prevent grinding, just cap the amount of ranked games that count toward the leaderboard each day. (We'll say 10 games, for example) That means that you get only 10 ranked matches a day to climb the leaderboard. Yeah, you can play more games...they just won't count! You don't like that, you can go pound sand! That is the fairest option that I can think of for all. Second, keep this balance path. The current balance is among the best that I've seen in a long time, though there are issues.

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@"Trevor Boyer.6524" said:100% agree with everything Chaith has already said. But let me shed some more light onto this topic. Hear me out, I think this may be rather important for his discussion concerning "Where the hell are the plat players?"

I've played with a lot of new guys over the years in voice chats. Here is the typical GW2 experience that I hear from most of these people:

  • They practice a bit in Unranked, get a feel for the game.
  • Run their first placements and tag in at around silver 3. They somewhat adapt quickly and begin playing around gold 1 consistently for their first 50 games or so.
  • They are only being put against maybe like gold 3s as their hard hitting opponents, so they may be losing but it isn't a roflstomping god-smack to the face, so the opponents feel contestable to them, and the new player is having fun learning how to breach the skill of those opponents. The game is fun to them.
  • The new players who care will eventually approach some guy with a plat badge and ask him how they can better play their class and what build is good. The ones who actually take the advice, usually immediately graduate into gold 2-3 range. Now they are really feeling like "They're getting something done. They're getting better at the game." And the journey of using these new discovered builds & job roles is amazingly fun when they are quickly learning how to surpass the players who once challenged them in gold 1 tier. They finish the season while hovering around bottom gold 3.
  • The next season begins and they've been 1v1ing practicing all off season. Now they're real fired up and ready to go. They slowly creep up into high gold, and it's fun. they can feel their personal skill increases, which is a pleasing thing to experience. Now they're finding themselves winning against some bottom platinum opponents but still losing to some, which they are having a hard time surmounting. But it's all within the realm of being "obtainable" and they are still having fun.
  • During that same season, they finally reach up into 1500 range for the very first time and they are super excited about it. It was quite the journey over the course of a season and a half of playing, 400 games or something, to have graduated from silver 3 to bottom plat 1. The very next game they queue, they are in a game with a top 20 duo against a top 20 duo. They immediately recognize that the difference between a 1500 and a 1700+ is much much larger than the difference between a 1300 and a 1500. During the 1300 to 1500 phase, why they were winning or losing was actually identifiable to them and they could set realistic goals for working to surpass their limitations. But while suddenly entering the 1500 to 1700+ phase, they become confused as to what is even happening in the match. They don't understand how players are killing them so fast. They don't understand what it even is they could do better or what they are doing wrong. They don't see any realistic goals to set for becoming better, aside from dedicating professional basement troll sweaty try hard levels of time invested, as if they were aiming to win a cash prize or something. <- And this is where the breaking point is, where people don't stick around.

The only people who stick around when meeting that 1500+ wall, are the ones who are strangely and manically obsessed with this game, which is definitely hindering the growth of the platinum community, and that goes back into what Chaith was original saying. There are two main reasons that I have viewed, that largely contribute to why most people don't stick around past 1500+

  1. It's just too kitten sweaty. Most people are really turned off by maximum curb stomping in ways that they are completely helpless to prevent. People don't mind losing and being made to get better, that's where the fun is. But people really do not like going against the actual best players in the game, every other match they queue. During the 1300 to 1500 experience, a player has breathing room to progress from point A to point B to point C, ect ect. But when they hit 1500 to 1700+ phase, they pretty much have to ascend from point D to Z immediately, if they want to be mechanically functional in the match at all, and for most people they decide the investment is too much of a hassle to get involved in.
  2. And this is the BIGGER reasons why people leave - Once a person has touched plat badge, they then begin to feel like they deserve the plat badge. When they are unable to reobtain the plat badge, they seriously rage quit and do not come back. In the past 12 months, I've had SO MANY contacts disappear never to be seen again, many of them Warriors & Mesmers actually. And this usually promptly happens after a night of hearing someone complain in the discord after they've spammed 50 games and are unable to reobtain bottom plat. They just rage quit out of not being able to maintain some kind of social appearance within the community.

Aside from all of the other problems that we could discuss, such as too much alt play in the top of the leaderboards, or all of the reasons that plat players have to milk 3 day decay times and avoid play, my point in bringing all of this up, is for Chaith's discussion concerning the lack of plat worthy opponents queueing. I believe that what we are looking at in terms of the biggest culprits preventing platinums from queueing frequently, are two things:

  1. There is almost a complete lack of platinum community growth, due to that wall of gtfo that I mentioned, that new players experience. And that ego rage when a player can't get that plat badge that they feel they deserve.
  2. Old platinum veterans all know that queueing is dangerous, and that once you've achieved a desired position, it is every bit advantageous to avoid play as much as possible, and only queue 1 game every 3 days, and only ever do it when it is safe to do so.

I mean, Ranked is currently designed to kill player incentive to queue past 1500. This is a serious problem to say the least.

So what can be done to fix these 2 outstanding problems? I dunno, you tell me. I'm just hear to point out what I've noticed to be the largest contributing factors as to why there is a serious lack of platinum worthy opponents in queue.

that was a while ago when you actually had to be high gold to face plat players. Now it happens when you reach around 1400 and you face far better players than 1500 ones. I had zenyus and some engi alt account in my team at 1400 ish, they were top 2 and 3 att.

Then the new player come to forums to check out what's happening and he find out about alts, wintrade and dodging. So the once excited player now know he has to dodge prolly to dodge 2 duos (1 top 50 duo, and the other plat duo also dodging the top duo) in order the get a match that his level of skill could actually impact the match instead the 50% game of having the duo in your team or the other.

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I think you've got a solid read on how the matchmaker works, but I don't think giving out more freebie rewards is the way to increase the mid-level plat1&plat2 population.

Putting in even more participation awards is only going to attract more people from PvE towards the bottom tiers, who play; not to actually compete, but just solely to farm the Ranked rewards. There is no competition, no incentive to actually get good. It is just any other farm.

The mid-tier is still going to be the absolute worst, being trapped between two extremes:One which doesn't care about Ranked at all, and only wants to farm the rewards.And one which is so overly invested in their rating, that all their time is devoted to stomping and farming that bottom tier, thus inflating their rating to numbers that just feel hopeless to compete against. Moreso when you consider the means... I mean you listed a Legendary DuoQ up against a Plat1+G3 DuoQ as an example. Surely I can't be the only one who finds that kind of matchmaking scenario highly unimpressive, and also common.

Here's an idea: Split the queues into Teams/Solos. Give people options, and keep the matchmaking competitive. Give people a reason to want to get better, and the hope that doing so is even possible.

A Legendary DuoQ being matched against teams like that is a total failure, and it happens all the time; if there's even a DuoQ on the other team to contest it at all.

The rewards could still be changed. I'm not opposed to the idea, I just don't think it will do much to help the mid-tier population at all.

@"Drennon.7190" said:Very good ideas. The current match making is not fun for people on either side of the spectrum. Get stomped or having to carry all game are both frustrating positions to be in.

Also, weren't you the same one who made this: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/101610/the-legendary-amulet-was-a-mistake ?Is it okay when the grind is pips that you get for doing absolutely nothing, but wrong when its an ammy that actually requires you to win games?

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@TallBarr.2184 said:

@TeqkOneStylez.8047 said:Imo I think conquest should just be over as a main gamemode for ranked in favor of a mode that supports teams of 2 or 3 at most where you can full premade and not have to worry about Pug lottery.

yEah because allowing full premade against randoms wont kill whats left of the playerbase.. lul.

Actually it would help divide divisional play again. With 3v3s you could take:

  • (1800 1800) 1550 1500 1450 vs. (1750 1700) 1650 1600 1400
  • And turn it into
  • server 1:1800 1800 1500 vs. 1750 1700 1650 - server 2: match two: 1600 1400 vs. 1550 1500 and only waiting on 2 more players

If you've never messed around doing it before, 3v3 conquest kind of feels better/makes more sense than 5v5. Queue times would also decrease.

IF ranked was 3v3 and they left ATs for 5v5, that might actually work surprisingly well. I think a 3v3 beta off season would certainly be worth a test at the least. And they should allow full 3 man premades.

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@Chaith.8256 said:

@Multicolorhipster.9751 said:I think you've got a solid read on how the matchmaker works, but I don't think giving out more freebie rewards is the way to increase the mid-level plat1&plat2 population.

I've thought off that, the many example perks I suggested are unlockable at higher ratings, not freebies for new players.

See this is what I dont get about this system, many competitive things in life do not happen like what happens in this game. People that are in the top percentage get put ahead of the rest of the pack and all the people that didnt do well can start further back. So every season you get an advantage to your placements where as many other competitive things you would be handicapped and placed back not pushed ahead. Now I'm not saying that the top percent dont belong were they are placed but the advantage you gain for being placed higher to start with mean it takes less matches each time to keep your rating. So if you have duo queued or even five man queued in previous seasons you dont need to work as hard to get up the leaderboard!

This is an issue and why alot of people dont actually climb the leaderboard that well. Rewarding higher players for playing more often doesnt make the lower population climb up the leaderboard all that does is force more people to cheat or exploit the current matchmaking system to get these higher rated benefits.

Decay is a big reason to why higher ranked players need to keep playing the game mode and does nothing to help the low tier rated players climb the leaderboard, maybe forcing stricter decay on higher rated players and not so much on lower tiers is the only way to make sure platinum+ rated players have to continue playing the leaderboards.

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@Trigr.6481 said:First off, a terrible player running a good build is still a terrible player, and will get farmed regardless.

The concept is kill speed. It does matter, ask any top25 high end duo who knows how to carry. You aren't up to date on how these matches with top10 players go. It's a world of difference if someone's 1400 rated tank core Ranger or Prot Holo is losing even a handful of 1v1s - a 1400 Berserker or Chrono is going to give up 10+ deaths against a duo queue rated at 1750, and it'll be like a 4v5.

These are all just ideas off the top of my head. There is a lot of incentives that could be made to keep competent players on the ranked queue treadmill,

@Trigr.6481 said:Secondly, your grand idea to "fix it" is just adding more rewards?

Toxic. Yes, exactly as stated, MY "GRAND" IDEA, THE ONLY GOOD IDEA. /s. As you can see, I just said my rattled off list of suggestions are not exhaustive. What d'ya want me to do, theorycraft for an hour so you can sit on your butt & nitpick more lol

@Trigr.6481 said:The only way ranked conquest is getting any better is with a few thousand players so the matchmaking can actually do its job properly.

Agreed. How do you think the matchmaker can do it's job? A healthy population. We're on the same page, more like I'm thinking about the next step.

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@skillze.7689 said:Decay is a big reason to why higher ranked players need to keep playing the game mode and does nothing to help the low tier rated players climb the leaderboard, maybe forcing stricter decay on higher rated players and not so much on lower tiers is the only way to make sure platinum+ rated players have to continue playing the leaderboards.

Yeah totally sounds good. Decay starting to kick in faster at Platinum's 1500+ is totally not a bad idea to keep that demographic queuing a bit more.

Platinum players are also not just the top percentage. With a healthier population like EU, you're nowhere in the top 250 with just a Platinum badge.

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