Why no one likes playing ranked for rating.

Balance aside, because that's a whole different post, the fact of rating loss and gain discrepancy being so egregious is directly discouraging players at best, and enforcing a gambler's fallacy at worse (and most common). When the scenario of a loss's absolute value being greater than or equal to the value of two wins, this means that a 66% win rate is discouraged and the only way to move up the ladder is with at LEAST a 75% win rate. These numbers are arrived by 2 wins (which can have the value of 8, in my case) do just as much good as one loss (equaling -16 in my case) does. This is 2 wins out of 3, or a 66% win rate. If you win 3 times out of four (75%), this is the ONLY way to rise up on the board.

This isn't impossible, but highly improbable. Out of the three days this season has been out, I've seen at least 20 players in the top 5 lose rating as they play more. One of my friends were #1 and TWO LOSSES brought him down 70 rating. A popular twitch streamer lost 44 points in one game, and has a less than 75% win rate in the past 9 games and has lost rating because of this. When an unrealistic standard is enforced for god knows what reason, where it seems like playing LESS games is the most beneficial for you, guess what the player base will do? Play less games. The most awful fact of this is the fact that a 50% win rate will result in you being in bronze.

How can you ban and dishonor win-traders when you are creating an environment where their existence is almost necessitated?

All i want to do is play it for rating. But with afkers and people who dont really care cuz thear there for the pips and rewards for players to just spam games, it just ruins my rating experience.

i stated this months ago, the issue becomes when you are anywhere in the 1650-1700s queing up gonna be 100% one sided matches/hard to carry games.

I played 3 games last night on this account won 2 out of the 3 however only gaining 14-16 points per win but then losing 48 ....on my third match, at that moment i just called it a night and logged off. This happens to me ALL the time after the season is out and thats because of 2 issues.

1: NOT enough high rated players queuing up2: Low low low population in the Plat division.

On my alt account i was able to get easier games/high win chance when it was a freshly new account because it didn't know where to place me in terms of "mmr" however even now i'm running into the same issue as my main and thats strictly because of the 2 reasons listed above. A system like that makes it un-enjoyable for any plat 2+ player to spam games/keep "grinding" to get to the top. After getting every title besides the top 10 rewards i just stop focusing on the rating level over all and just follow my own rules when playing rank...

1:Play 2 rank games a day(if you win both keep playing till you lose once)2: If your in the top 25 Play 2 rank games every 3 days to hold/camp a spot on the leaderboard3: Keep track of your total games played/ win and lose ratio

everyone has their own set of rules but I usually do that and i end up somewhere in the leader-board on my main or alt account with 0 issues.

People need to stop thinking about the rating number as meaning anything, it really is just arbitrary, the cutoff's for the divisions are also arbitrary, bronze silver gold plat leg mean nothing. What matters is the order in which player ratings are they could make the new cutoff for silver 2000 so that everyone is bronze which while kinda dumb would have no impact on the leader board. Why I bring this up is that people solidly in the top 250 are disappointed that they need to win 60-70% of their matches just to maintain their rating, the thing is that everyone else around them is also winning 60-70% of their matches. They may be out performing the people they are going against in their games, however they are not necessarily doing any better than everyone around them on the leader board. Keep in mind that if you do the math, to get the 120 games required for leader board, one needs only spend about 2% of their time during the season playing ranked, so if we assume people don't play too much more than the minimum then on average there will only be 2-3 top 100 players playing at a given time. The rest of the spots in their matches will necessarily be filled with people from lower ratings, there is no getting around that. So the rating gain per win / rating loss per loss ratio is appropriate for these people. While -48 rating for that loss is harsh, the season is still extremely early, so volatility is still high, if you deserve the higher rating you will get back to it.

The one complaint I do have with the rating system is that late season volatility stays too high. Even once you have reached the 120+ games played for the season, you still typically gain 8-12 points per win and lose 12-20 points per loss. So playing your last game of the season you could gain 12 points or lose 20 resulting in an approximate 32 point spread on what your final rating could be, which makes a huge difference in potential leader board ranking. Just looking off of last season on NA, the rating difference between the rank 10 person and the rank 25 person was only 25 point. In theory someone in the top 15 at the end of the season could have potentially played 1 more game and either hit top 10 if they won or dropped out of top 25 entirely for a loss. It simply gives too much importance to the late season games as a nice late season win streak can boost your rank a few dozen spots while a late season slump will knock you down dozens of spots as well. I would propose cutting back late season volatility so that by the end of the season a top 250 range player will only be gaining 2-3 rating per win but also only losing 3-5 so that your leader board ranking isn't changing by a dozen spots with every single game at the end of the season.

I was going to to start a new post this morning about this but you beat me to it.

My last placement match was a loss, -33 points. Next match another loss -33 points. Yet another Afk'r loss after that -18 points. From gold back to silver just like that. Very discouraging to keep playing ranked to have good matches, just to lose so much rating. This really made me just think that pip farming is the only reason to play ranked now, instead of for competition or even for FUN.

Actually I like people who ruin my placement games. Climbing to plat 1 again is easy, fast rewards gain before the fight to climb begins. Bronze - plat 1 is very easy to climb.

@Poelala.2830 said:Balance aside, because that's a whole different post, the fact of rating loss and gain discrepancy being so egregious is directly discouraging players

Losses are going to result in a large MMR drop if, and only if, you were predicted to win. A predicted loss will give a small MMR drop.

The scenario you describe: mostly winning matches you were predicted to win (small gain) and occasionally losing matches you were predicted to win (big loss) suggests you are at around the appropriate MMR, nothing more. (Though, ideally, it should be small in both directions, but ... it's early in the season, MMR hasn't settled yet, so you probably encounter better players working up to their own appropriate MMR more often than you will next week.)

This isn't impossible, but highly improbable. Out of the three days this season has been out, I've seen at least 20 players in the top 5 lose rating as they play more. One of my friends were #1 and TWO LOSSES brought him down 70 rating. A popular twitch streamer lost 44 points in one game, and has a less than 75% win rate in the past 9 games and has lost rating because of this.

In both cases, these players were expected to win that fight. They didn't, so they lost big, and their opponents gained big. The system adjusted expectations of them appropriately for the skill they, and their opponents, demonstrated.

When an unrealistic standard is enforced for god knows what reason, where it seems like playing LESS games is the most beneficial for you, guess what the player base will do? Play less games. The most awful fact of this is the fact that a 50% win rate will result in you being in bronze.

It really doesn't. It ends up sitting you at your MMR. The real one, not the one you imagine you deserve.

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@Poelala.2830 said:Balance aside, because that's a whole different post, the fact of rating loss and gain discrepancy being so egregious is directly discouraging players

This isn't impossible, but highly improbable. Out of the three days this season has been out, I've seen at least 20 players in the top 5 lose rating as they play more. One of my friends were #1 and TWO LOSSES brought him down 70 rating. A popular twitch streamer lost 44 points in one game, and has a less than 75% win rate in the past 9 games and has lost rating because of this.

When an unrealistic standard is enforced for god knows what reason, where it seems like playing LESS games is the most beneficial for you, guess what the player base will do? Play less games. The most awful fact of this is the fact that a 50% win rate will result in you being in bronze.

The expectations vastly outstrip reality in most cases, you're placed in a system with 4 other players of untested skill level and then you're expected to cover for all their mistakes while winning your fights

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@Poelala.2830 said:Balance aside, because that's a whole different post, the fact of rating loss and gain discrepancy being so egregious is directly discouraging players

This isn't impossible, but highly improbable. Out of the three days this season has been out, I've seen at least 20 players in the top 5 lose rating as they play more. One of my friends were #1 and TWO LOSSES brought him down 70 rating. A popular twitch streamer lost 44 points in one game, and has a less than 75% win rate in the past 9 games and has lost rating because of this.

When an unrealistic standard is enforced for god knows what reason, where it seems like playing LESS games is the most beneficial for you, guess what the player base will do? Play less games. The most awful fact of this is the fact that a 50% win rate will result in you being in bronze.

This would make a lot more sense if I have EVER experienced a win that gave me more points than my median loss in points. Wins are always a lower value than the absolute value of losses.Edit: Guess what? I WAS the one that caused said popular streamer to lose that match. You can check twitch. I only gained 12 rating from that game.

@SlippyCheeze.5483 I have screenshots of games where I lost 500-77 and lost 17 points right next to games I lost 500-470 and lost 17 points. I clearly had the better team in the second one. Why did this not affect how much I lost?

@Poelala.2830 said:

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@Poelala.2830 said:Balance aside, because that's a whole different post, the fact of rating loss and gain discrepancy being so egregious is directly discouraging players

This isn't impossible, but highly improbable. Out of the three days this season has been out, I've seen at least 20 players in the top 5 lose rating as they play more. One of my friends were #1 and TWO LOSSES brought him down 70 rating. A popular twitch streamer lost 44 points in one game, and has a less than 75% win rate in the past 9 games and has lost rating because of this.

When an unrealistic standard is enforced for god knows what reason, where it seems like playing LESS games is the most beneficial for you, guess what the player base will do? Play less games. The most awful fact of this is the fact that a 50% win rate will result in you being in bronze.

Because Like i stated above once your in the 1600s+ no mater what side of the team you are in....you are usually the highest player on both sides, which ends up with you losing a high amount of rating if you lose. It doesn't matter which team.....i been on winning streaks of 14+ games in plat 2 and highest i gotten after 30 games total played was usually around 12-14 rating, and after that long nice win streak i started losing 8 games back to back with 18-24 rating per game lost. Your telling me out of those 8 loses straight i was suppose to win each and every one of those games lol? How does the system not recognize a player losing streak/rating level after such a major lost?

Majority of these post are from solid rated players who been through enough struggles to warn everyone/anet about the major issue with why the rating system isn't good for high level players..... why do you think everyone at the end of the season starts to win trade ? Even high end top tier "pro" players struggle/been caught cheating in some sort of way to increase there rating....

P.s Not directing any insult or anything toward you just speaking in general about this topic /last few comments that were made in this post.

@Arheundel.6451 said:

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@"Poelala.2830" said:Balance aside, because that's a whole different post, the fact of rating loss and gain discrepancy being so egregious is directly discouraging players

This isn't impossible, but highly improbable. Out of the three days this season has been out, I've seen at least 20 players in the top 5 lose rating as they play more. One of my friends were #1 and TWO LOSSES brought him down 70 rating. A popular twitch streamer lost 44 points in one game, and has a less than 75% win rate in the past 9 games and has lost rating because of this.

When an unrealistic standard is enforced for god knows what reason, where it seems like playing LESS games is the most beneficial for you, guess what the player base will do? Play less games. The most awful fact of this is the fact that a 50% win rate will result in you being in bronze.

Their MMR should be quite close to yours; it is tested the same way that yours is. Would you say that your being placed on the team represented someone of "untested skill level" being added, forcing the other four players to cover for your mistakes?

If not, and I bet you wouldn't, then it seems a little unfair to characterize only other players that way since, I'd guess, you are not the one-and-only competent player. :)

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@Arheundel.6451 said:

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@"Poelala.2830" said:Balance aside, because that's a whole different post, the fact of rating loss and gain discrepancy being so egregious is directly discouraging players

This isn't impossible, but highly improbable. Out of the three days this season has been out, I've seen at least 20 players in the top 5 lose rating as they play more. One of my friends were #1 and TWO LOSSES brought him down 70 rating. A popular twitch streamer lost 44 points in one game, and has a less than 75% win rate in the past 9 games and has lost rating because of this.

When an unrealistic standard is enforced for god knows what reason, where it seems like playing LESS games is the most beneficial for you, guess what the player base will do? Play less games. The most awful fact of this is the fact that a 50% win rate will result in you being in bronze.

One game I was salty enough after a 500-<100 game and I actually added them all and waited to see what their MMR was. Out of all of them, there was only one person with an MMR higher than gold 1. I was plat 2.

@Poelala.2830 said:@"SlippyCheeze.5483" I have screenshots of games where I lost 500-77 and lost 17 points right next to games I lost 500-470 and lost 17 points. I clearly had the better team in the second one. Why did this not affect how much I lost?

Because GLICKO2 doesn't take into account how close the game was, just the expectation (eg: are you predicted to win or lose) and the boolean "win/lose" result. That, in turn, comes from the ELO heritage of the system, which comes from real world work on the systems by people who are experts in the area, who I guess determined that the degree of win or loss wasn't ultimately necessary to account for in order to get good results.

I am not arguing that GLICKO2 is the best possible system, even though it is close to the best publicly documented system available at this time, but rather, that it is not as bad as some of the claims made here indicate. Microsoft have their system which is apparently better at handling random group matches, though I'm unable to find much work published studying how effective it actually is.

I am absolutely confident that there is plenty of fame, and glory, and a PhD thesis waiting out there for someone who studies in the area. Probably plenty of high pay jobs at game studios shortly to follow, because I'm sure ANet would love to do better ... as long as there is as rigorous a definition of what better is, and how it works, as their current system. :)

@Poelala.2830 said:

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@Arheundel.6451 said:

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@Poelala.2830 said:Balance aside, because that's a whole different post, the fact of rating loss and gain discrepancy being so egregious is directly discouraging players

This isn't impossible, but highly improbable. Out of the three days this season has been out, I've seen at least 20 players in the top 5 lose rating as they play more. One of my friends were #1 and TWO LOSSES brought him down 70 rating. A popular twitch streamer lost 44 points in one game, and has a less than 75% win rate in the past 9 games and has lost rating because of this.

When an unrealistic standard is enforced for god knows what reason, where it seems like playing LESS games is the most beneficial for you, guess what the player base will do? Play less games. The most awful fact of this is the fact that a 50% win rate will result in you being in bronze.

The matchmaker will accept worse compositions in order to keep a reasonable upper bound on queue time. Was that both sides in gold1, or just yours? It'll also consider "one great player, four ok players" on each side a reasonable-ish choice. Not ideal, but better than the other choices that might be available, when it can't get an ideal match.

The other thing to remember is that this is a statistical system, just like a whole bunch of other things. Any individual match could be completely stupid; the goal is that as you play 10, or 20, or 30 matches the final result of all of them is something close to the correct MMR. Individual outliers don't have that strong an effect in the overall picture.

Just like you can probably flip 10 heads in a row much faster than you think, but 100 is gonna be ... challenging. :)

I completely agree this is a huge problem. The system league of legends and Starcraft 2 have is great for encouraging players to queue as often as they would like to. This would be ideal but I dunno if Anet wants to spend the time and money to implement such a system.

At the very least the elo should be changed based on population. The population affects total amount of games played which affects the average elo across the board.

I'm not 100% sure about this but I believe as a player and the player base plays more and more games the less you need a 75% win rate to climb and the more you just need a 66% win rate to climb. Even after a long time that 66% needed win rate declines to 65%, 64%, etc. Because 2 wins will begin to give you more points than 1 loss. I don't know if this will ever happen with the population as low as it is in NA which is why maybe the ELO algorythm could be slightly adjusted to not scale in this manner. Which may result in far too many legendary players but at least there will be legendary rank players and a less discouraging elo system.

I am not sure if I got this right, but: Please don't introduce a system where you get ranked higher the more you play. Didn't we hate that in the first seasons?

@Phantaram.4816 said:I completely agree this is a huge problem. The system league of legends and Starcraft 2 have is great for encouraging players to queue as often as they would like to. This would be ideal but I dunno if Anet wants to spend the time and money to implement such a system.

So, fun fact time:

• LoL uses ELO, the predecessor to GLICKO-2, which doesn't account for uncertainty, so is prone to even broader swings than GW2 is.
• Starcraft 2 uses something akin to GLICKO-2, which is the same thing that GW2 does.

At the very least the elo should be changed based on population. The population affects total amount of games played which affects the average elo across the board.

ELO is an algorithm for adjusting the MMR of players, not a score in and of itself. It seems like you meant the MMR -- the outcome of using the ELO (or GLICKO-2) algorithm to compute per-player scores -- from the way you discuss it, and any further comment is based on that understanding.

I'm not 100% sure about this but I believe as a player and the player base plays more and more games the less you need a 75% win rate to climb and the more you just need a 66% win rate to climb. Even after a long time that 66% needed win rate declines to 65%, 64%, etc. Because 2 wins will begin to give you more points than 1 loss.

All the algorithms mentioned require a 51 percent win rate to climb. (Actually, a 50 point 1 percent, but the rate of climb is rather slow at that point. Anyway, point is, you stay absolutely still with a 50 percent win rate, climb if it is at all above that, and drop if it is at all below that.)

The cited 75, 66, etc, percent win rates are based on people observing and counting unexpected losses and expected wins as the only types of match they are involved in. If that assumption is true, then yes, win rates substantially higher than 50 percent are required. To date, though, we have plenty of assertion, and nobody who has, for example, provided the long history showing a bias toward those two types compared to the (expected) balance of them all.

Unfortunately, while the technology exists to get access to this data, nothing out there seems to do so in a way that could be used to determine if there is a bias. The API only returns the last ten matches, so it needs to be quite frequently polled, and to be able to produce statistically significant results, to have access to many accounts -- ideally thousands, but at least a few hundred.

Another thing that people almost never bring up but is certainly a part of why people feel they lose more rating per loss than they gain per win is how 4v5's are handled. As it currently stands the winning team gains as much rating as they would in a clean 5v5 while the losing team does not lose rating (aside from the player that dc'd). This means that everytime a 4v5 occurs, significantly more rating is gained on average than is lost, in theory a clean 5v5 game would on average have as much rating gained by the winning team as lost by the losing team, however if this was the case when 4v5's are factored in this would result in a global rating inflation since games will either be adding net rating per player (4v5) or keeping a steady flow (5v5). The system attempts to keep players ratings in a bell-curve with a specific average value most likely somewhere around low gold or high silver, to keep this value there cannot be rating inflation which means the rating per loss in clean 5v5's must be greater than the gain on average to make up for the excess rating generated by 4v5's.

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@Phantaram.4816 said:I completely agree this is a huge problem. The system league of legends and Starcraft 2 have is great for encouraging players to queue as often as they would like to. This would be ideal but I dunno if Anet wants to spend the time and money to implement such a system.

• LoL uses ELO, the predecessor to GLICKO-2, which doesn't account for uncertainty, so is prone to even broader swings than GW2 is.
• Starcraft 2 uses something akin to GLICKO-2, which is the same thing that GW2 does.

At the very least the elo should be changed based on population. The population affects total amount of games played which affects the average elo across the board.

I'm not 100% sure about this but I believe as a player and the player base plays more and more games the less you need a 75% win rate to climb and the more you just need a 66% win rate to climb. Even after a long time that 66% needed win rate declines to 65%, 64%, etc. Because 2 wins will begin to give you more points than 1 loss.

Issue with the TWO games you mention compared to Gw2 is 1 major factor....

Major Fact:1: Gw2 DOES not have the amount of players LoL or Starcraft has when it comes to queing up for RANK matches.

Plat division is WAY to SMALL and because of that glicko isn't the BEST for top tier players. With almost everything you mention i agree to extent.

I'd be happy if my teammates actually had ratings. One game late last season (I had played about 150 matches), did not go well and the ranting and raving commenced. It came out that two of our teammates were not yet even finished placement -- they had played three games. I guess in that case rating is based on the previous season but that seems...wrong.

@Eddbopkins.2630 said:All i want to do is play it for rating. But with afkers and people who dont really care cuz thear there for the pips and rewards for players to just spam games, it just ruins my rating experience.

The other side of this is:

All i want to do is play it for PIPS. But with ragers and people who really care cuz thear there for the ranks and rewards for players to just spam games, it just ruins my fun experience.

I think we can all agree this is a silly system to mash everyone together like this, as I said in another thread it's like signing up to a motocross event in pairs to win but your friend shows up on a push bike because it's more fun.

@Gwaihir.1745 said:Actually I like people who ruin my placement games. Climbing to plat 1 again is easy, fast rewards gain before the fight to climb begins. Bronze - plat 1 is very easy to climb.

I call bullshit. The more I play PvP over the seasons, the more I begin to realize the importance of the placement matches, they are literally the 10 most important games you will play all season because getting significantly higher from where you were placed is incredibly difficult unless you were literally boosted and ended up with like 200 rating more than you really should have, then you will probably fall quickly down the divisions.

This is probably because with the small population of PvP whether you're high Gold 2 or Plat 1 doesn't really matter, you'll end up in the same matchmaking pool. So as far as the MM system is concerned, a G2 player playing with Plat 1 players is playing within his skill level, ergo he will maintain ~50% winrate which you cannot climb with. For reference I placed in Plat 1-2 and stayed there the past two seasons with a ~50% winrate (positive). This season I had terrible placements including DC's, afkers, some meme builds, went 5-5 and was placed in Gold 2. Guess what? It's a 50% winrate again with around 65-70 matches already played this season and it's basically impossible to climb back to Plat. Every time I make gains I get hit with a 5 game loss streak.

@zoopop.5630 said:

@SlippyCheeze.5483 said:

@Phantaram.4816 said:I completely agree this is a huge problem. The system league of legends and Starcraft 2 have is great for encouraging players to queue as often as they would like to. This would be ideal but I dunno if Anet wants to spend the time and money to implement such a system.

• LoL uses ELO, the predecessor to GLICKO-2, which doesn't account for uncertainty, so is prone to even broader swings than GW2 is.
• Starcraft 2 uses something akin to GLICKO-2, which is the same thing that GW2 does.

At the very least the elo should be changed based on population. The population affects total amount of games played which affects the average elo across the board.

I'm not 100% sure about this but I believe as a player and the player base plays more and more games the less you need a 75% win rate to climb and the more you just need a 66% win rate to climb. Even after a long time that 66% needed win rate declines to 65%, 64%, etc. Because 2 wins will begin to give you more points than 1 loss.

Hey, could be, but ... what would be better? Like, I'm genuinely interested if there is a better option out there for small player count games. In my poking around, I have not found one, and since GLICKO-2 and ELO both scale down to, like, 60-ish player chess clubs and stuff like that, I figured it wouldn't be a big deal, but I don't know for sure.

PS: @Phantaram.4816 was the one who brought them up, I was just responding to them describing the MMR in those games as using a better algorithm, when it is basically the exact same algorithm that GW2 does...

@Deimos.4263 said:I'd be happy if my teammates actually had ratings. One game late last season (I had played about 150 matches), did not go well and the ranting and raving commenced. It came out that two of our teammates were not yet even finished placement -- they had played three games. I guess in that case rating is based on the previous season but that seems...wrong.

Yeah, personally I'd be in favor of just resetting all the MMRs to either zero, or something like 800 / 1000. It really won't slow down the migration to the correct location by very much at all, but shrug if they were good last season, which the GW2 policy means would have a high MMR during placement, it is a surprise they are not equally good this time around.

Maybe that ban wave for shared accounts really did count for something. ;)