Ranked PVP improvements

[Firebeard.1746]

1) flatten the reward structure, almost completely -> make gold and ascended shards even for all chests (not backloaded at the end of the tier), all chests are the same # of pips. In the last few seasons I've actually participated in, the end of the season becomes atrocious in terms of matchmaker balance. I THINK the explanation for this is anyone targeting legendary armor stops just after persimmon because Amaranth has the worst shards/pips ratio in addition to needing an inordinate number of pips, so there's almost no point in continuing to play if you don't think you can squeeze in that last chest sequence of 150 pips. Sure, the marks and the warlords chests need to be spaced out, but the other rewards should be flattened so someone can feel like they can actually earn something the last week or two depending on how active they are.

Why I think this, based on this season (I have noticed other seasons as well): My win rate was around 40-50% this season until the last few days when I won literally one match out of a whole screen's worth of history. Most of the matches I've played hadn't been terrible until the last 2-3 days (I think there was better participation at the beginning of this season). 2 of those matches I didn't have rank taken away (which really doesn't mean much. I don't care about my rank. I care about my pips/wins for achieves/leggies, the people literally wasted my time and I wasn't reimbursed at all), at least 2 of the other matches had thieves that were literally not capping or assisting and hanging around. It's not like I got stupid randomly over the last few days. The matches are more lopsided, for whatever reason and that's a problem.

2) Use bots to balance the matchmaker. Constantly throwing plat players at bronze all the time isn't going to keep players playing, and population isn't the best right now. It's okay to let the wolves feed every now and then, but the matchmaker should isolate players between tiers using bots to try to preserve population by not letting win rates of bottom players tank too much. Partition based on tier, fill with bots that don't suck. Also, does it really make sense for plat players to get all these extra pips feeding on noobs on ultra short matches while they cannibalize the player base? Like that's not a lot of effort (especially with all the queue dodging at the top). Also, adding bots to the mix allows there to be more than 1 match going on at once, which means rigging/botting from players to manipulate matches gets harder.

3) For the love of all that is holy, require players to have purchased the most recent expansion in order to participate in ranked games. Without this, there's 0 economic damage to somoeone for getting their bot banned. It should hurt when someone is found.

I'm sure people won't like #2 especially, but something needs to be done to put the game mode on life support so the population can actually grow.

[Multicolorhipster.9751]

Pips are bad for Ranked in general, they should be moved to unranked and/or given solely as a reward for winning in Ranked instead of just showing up. Giving people more rewards from the moment they start a season; even for doing absolutely nothing, encourages toxic and even forbidden behavior like botting, pip-farming, and afking.

I don't think using bots as filler for the bad matchmaking is necessarily a good idea either. There's no sort of ai capable of completing objectives, and if there were, they'd probably end up being worse than actual bad players. Since bad players already massively inflate good player's rating; if they were just replaced by bots, then the result would be even worse rating inflation and less competition at the higher levels.

An easier solution would just be not letting matchmaking reach low enough to where a silver gets matched with a plat to begin with. If the population being low is too much of an issue, maybe more should be done to ensure different kinds of people are playing and having fun rather than just the very top <1% of players.

That's essentially what Ranked is right now, is just a playground for a handful of top players to farm bots and pip-farmers. There is practically no middle-tier. It shouldn't come as a big shocker that anyone who might want to play a Ranked gamemode for a sense of competition has long since departed from that clown fiesta.

[Ovark.2514]

@Multicolorhipster.9751 said:Pips are bad for Ranked in general, they should be moved to unranked and/or given solely as a reward for winning in Ranked instead of just showing up. Giving people more rewards from the moment they start a season; even for doing absolutely nothing, encourages toxic and even forbidden behavior like botting, pip-farming, and afking.

This. Competitive play should be completely divorced from achievement/rewards/casual play. Half measures don't cut it here. Slowly but surly acquiring pips should be doable in unranked or HJ; while in ranked, pips should be awarded at the end of a season and be based on ranking.

[Firebeard.1746]

@Ovark.2514 said:

@Multicolorhipster.9751 said:Pips are bad for Ranked in general, they should be moved to unranked and/or given solely as a reward for winning in Ranked instead of just showing up. Giving people more rewards from the moment they start a season; even for doing absolutely nothing, encourages toxic and even forbidden behavior like botting, pip-farming, and afking.

This. Competitive play should be completely divorced from achievement/rewards/casual play. Half measures don't cut it here. Slowly but surly acquiring pips should be doable in unranked or HJ; while in ranked, pips should be awarded at the end of a season and be based on ranking.

I like the idea of being able to do achievements outside of ranked. My only issue with no pips for losses is people who are trying constantly getting put in bad matchups, which is the case now, and part of the reason we're having trouble keeping people. Perhaps, basing it off of damage/healing/capping or some formula of the 3 would make more sense. That way, you're still rewarded for actively participating and trying to win, but you're not completely punished by this bogus matchmaker either.

@Multicolorhipster.9751 said:I don't think using bots as filler for the bad matchmaking is necessarily a good idea either. There's no sort of ai capable of completing objectives, and if there were, they'd probably end up being worse than actual bad players. Since bad players already massively inflate good player's rating; if they were just replaced by bots, then the result would be even worse rating inflation and less competition at the higher levels.

I don't believe the part about AI is true at all. This is actually what blizzard is doing to help their overpopulated Horde faction actually be able to PVP. Also, starcraft and dota AIS can beat humans, as long as the bots & human players are evenly matched, it's still human vs human. the bots should cancel each other out.

[BadHealer.3608]

@Multicolorhipster.9751 said:Pips are bad for Ranked in general, [...] given solely as a reward for winning in Ranked instead of just showing up.Once you get 20 games in a row with 1 player constantly disconection (at least he wasn't afk so I would also drop in rank) you may think different. It would really increase the toxicity, if you wouldn't get anything for playing your best, dragging eveyone with you and still fail at 4xx:500.

We already have the blame game for lost games, what will happen if you lose 499:500?

[Luthan.5236]

The most important thing: Ratings should not reset.

There is no way to justify a huge reset (well for some people that are a lot away from 1200 ... the exceptionally good and bad ones it might be huge) ... skill does not change that much suddenly. Even with balancing patches. Always super bad matches the first few days after resets because everyone needs to do placements to get to a somewhat correct rating. (Which probably is not even correct if he had a loss/win streak placing him too high or too low and needs the real balanced matchs to normalize towards his real rating.)

[Multicolorhipster.9751]

@BadHealer.3608 said:Once you get 20 games in a row with 1 player constantly disconection (at least he wasn't afk so I would also drop in rank) you may think different. It would really increase the toxicity, if you wouldn't get anything for playing your best, dragging eveyone with you and still fail at 4xx:500.

We already have the blame game for lost games, what will happen if you lose 499:500?

Maybe the pips should have never been there in the first place. If you've ever played Ranked in almost every other game ever outside Gw2, then you'd know that there's either...A) (And also most commonly) No extra rewards at allB ) Rewards, but only for actually winningor C)(Like @Ovark.2514 said and which is also a pretty good idea) Rewards at the end of the season based on your actual performance during said season.

It's Ranked and it's meant to be competitive. The real reward is supposed to come from seeing where you end up in the competitive ladder and being able to win against other similarly ranked people trying to do the same thing.

Anyone who loses sight of that isn't playing their best, they're playing for some arbitrary reward which they get even if they don't win, try, or even play at all for that matter.

[realviizz.4982]

@"Multicolorhipster.9751" said:

It's Ranked and it's meant to be competitive. The real reward is supposed to come from seeing where you end up in the competitive ladder and being able to win against other similarly ranked people trying to do the same thing.Yes, it's meant to be competitive. After some point it isn't anymore. If they wanna improve ranked PvP they should start actually banning or caring about wintrading people/people queueing against their alts. That would probably remove one of the bigger issues I see in higher ranks, because I don't really assume that someone going 82/25 is a normal occasion. There's a dude on EU who pushes 4 of his 5 characters to legendary with this method (I think currently it's only 3). Every season. It's just that nobody seems to really give a damn.Personally I'm not in the Rank-range to ever play with any of those people, as I'm simply not good enough. Doesn't mean they should get away with it though, especially not multiple times.In the end it is only a "minor" issue anyway and doesn't really concern 99,99% of the PvP playerbase.

[Multicolorhipster.9751]

@"realviizz.4982" said:Yes, it's meant to be competitive. After some point it isn't anymore. If they wanna improve ranked PvP they should start actually banning or caring about wintrading people/people queueing against their alts. That would probably remove one of the bigger issues I see in higher ranks, because I don't really assume that someone going 82/25 is a normal occasion. There's a dude on EU who pushes 4 of his 5 characters to legendary with this method (I think currently it's only 3). Every season. It's just that nobody seems to really give a kitten.In the end it is only a "minor" issue anyway and doesn't really concern 99,99% of the PvP playerbase.

I totally agree, and I think this is a way bigger issue when it comes to ruining competition because it's not competitive when the focus is on cheating the matchmaker rather than just playing.

That's usually how they 'wintrade' since DuoQ, so it's not really wintrading; just match manipulation. It's an intricate metagame that uses everything from DuoQ, Class Swapping, Queue-dodging, any out-of-game technique basically to manipulate who goes on what team in all their games.

That number is pretty on the money because; granted, most people don't stoop to doing such things, but the fact that a very small handful of top players are able has serious repercussions especially on anyone who actually wants to compete on a fair ladder. If someone wanted to play to actually compete; not caring about jingle key rewards like pips, then the fact that most the big winners every season are playing the matchmaker would knock the wind out of their sails.

Personally I'm not in the Rank-range to ever play with any of those people, as I'm simply not good enough. Doesn't mean they should get away with it though, especially not multiple times.

All that being said, this isn't right. Unless you're ~below silver3, there's always a fair chance you can be matched with these people. If you get queue-sniped, then that's unfortunate, but what I see more commonly is really low-rated people being thrown into games with Legendary DuoQ's just to make up for the disparity in rating to population.

It's common sense. There's only a few legendary players every season, and when they queue together there's a very low chance they'll ever be matched against another legend, especially if they actively try not to be. The matchmaker in this game is designed to get people into games ASAP, and after ~5 minutes of searching for an even match it will start to search lower and lower.

This commonly leads to a Legendary DuoQ being matched against low-mid level plats and high level golds. Terrible matchmaking really.To compensate for the incoming blowout match, the matchmaker will throw very low rated players onto the team of the DuoQ in an attempt to balance them out. It hardly works, and the proof is in the pudding. If it worked, those top players wouldn't have such high winrates sometimes across multiple alts.

Really good topic though, and much more of a problem than adding bots and extra do-nothing rewards to Ranked. ?