ELO hell exists in GW2 PvP and it is caused by low population

[Elementalist Owner.7802]

In this post, I am going to explain why the matchmaking system is rigged against you if you are in the ~1450-1550 rating range.

We all know that GW2 is an extremely skill-based game, and thus the skill discrepancy between players can be astronomical. This has led to the existence of a small group of elite GW2 players who play the game at the very highest level. These are your MAT winners, your top 25 leaderboard spots, your former esports players... Going forward, we'll refer to this class of players as "the sweats." Sweats are in a league of their own, and are untouchable by the rest of the scene.

As the population dwindles, that small group of sweats has gotten smaller. It's gotten so small that outside of prime-time, there is a high chance that only one duo of sweats is queueing for PvP. In this scenario, the game isn't going to wait 2 hours until another sweat queues up. It's going to expand the search until it eventually finds the next highest rated player. This player may be 100 rating lower, and nowhere near as good as the sweat, but he will *always* be placed on the opposing team because the game is trying to create "balanced" matchups.

To demonstrate, let's walk through a scenario where 10 players are queueing for PvP:

1 and 2. Sweat duo (both 1600+)

3. 1520 <-- ELO hell

4. 1490 <-- ELO hell

5. 1450 <-- ELO hell

6. 1430

7. 1429

8. 1428

9. 1425

10. 1425

The matchmaking system is going to use these ratings try to create the most balanced match possible. People of the jury, would you like to see what the absolute most balanced match is?

TEAM 1:

1 and 2. Sweat duo (both 1600+)

8. 1428

9. 1425

10. 1425

TOTAL RATING: 7478

 

TEAM 2:

3. 1520 <-- ELO hell

4. 1490 <-- ELO hell

5. 1450 <-- ELO hell

6. 1430

7. 1429

TOTAL RATING:  7319

And that's it. Even when putting all of the next highest rated players against them, the sweaty team will still have 159 rating over the poor ELO hell bastards. There are just not enough sweats to create fair matchups.

 

Some possible solutions to this problem:

1. Remove duo queue in ranked - this would help the situation a lot, and honestly there's no good reason why duo queue should still exist. It's pretty much exclusively used by sweats

2. Put hard limits on the rating discrepancy between teams and/or individual players within a match - this would increase queue times, especially for sweats

3. Have the system stop trying to balance teams. Just find 10 players with the closest rating possible and then randomize the teams. - this would turn our previous scenario into a luck of the draw, but would at least stop punishing players for having higher rating

[magickthief.6492]

Those "high skill" players also play in ranked on throwaway smurf accounts, often in ways that ruin the competitiveness. If they are just "practicing" some even say "men, it's just my alt, idc about rating". Nothing will be competitive about games like gw2 with the ability to do this kind if stuff.

[Sarlan.7682]

deranked that season because i didnt care about my elo and wanted to try some niche kitten from usually 1600+ when i used tobbe really active and trying, what would be about 1.5k rn with current player counts to about 1.4k...was kinda funny seeing sinds duo with both having 1700 elo in my enemy team while my team had ratings between 1.4k and about 1500 :'D wouldnt call it elo hell though just dont play out of prime time and you should be fine

[Khalisto.5780]

the only wrong statement is that really good players are top 25, nowadays it's team usa and maybe 5 to 10 more players. Our last 2 gods of arena were gold 3 player that exploited the max of matchmaking, one even exposed by Naru on stream,  that he would go on alt account and try to q snipe ppl that were higher than him in leaderboards, playing a gold 1-2 account that would place him on this ppl team and he would just afk to make them lose 30+ pnts and have to play 6-7 matches to make up for that

 

Duo q is like 25% of the problem the other 75% or even higher is the unpunished afk fest that happens in lower elos making new players have the most awful experience possible, out of 10 games 6 have an afker in your team or not, 2 are against ppl 500 rating higher than you turning into a 500-25 matches and a lot of flame from gold 3 players calling you bot and wintrader you maybe get 2 good matches, it could be better or worse depending of the time you paying.

Edited August 30, 2023 by Khalisto.5780

[Khalisto.5780]

14 hours ago, Elementalist Owner.7802 said:

Some possible solutions to this problem:

1. Remove duo queue in ranked - this would help the situation a lot, and honestly there's no good reason why duo queue should still exist. It's pretty much exclusively used by sweats

2. Put hard limits on the rating discrepancy between teams and/or individual players within a match - this would increase queue times, especially for sweats

3. Have the system stop trying to balance teams. Just find 10 players with the closest rating possible and then randomize the teams. - this would turn our previous scenario into a luck of the draw, but would at least stop punishing players for having higher rating

And there's also the mirror comp stuff, let's say i'm at gold 2, and I'm the only one qing up as elementalist and grimjack is also playing, I will most likely be matched against grimjack cuz of that, sometime this mirror comp priority just goes bizarrely high.

But yes, removing duo q would help a lot, i bet suddenly the sweaty players (at least on their main accounts) would just vanish from offhours and stack at prime time

it's also pretty obvious matchmaking should be putting 500 rating apart players in the same match within 5 min qs

tbh ppl 1350 or lower should be locked at their own bracket to stop them playing against high rated players, but the game as it stands right now it would probably result in both groups not finding a match

[Khalisto.5780]

16 hours ago, magickthief.6492 said:

Those "high skill" players also play in ranked on throwaway smurf accounts, often in ways that ruin the competitiveness. If they are just "practicing" some even say "men, it's just my alt, idc about rating". Nothing will be competitive about games like gw2 with the ability to do this kind if stuff.

that's one thing we can't stop in all this mess

 

[Bazsi.2734]

We went from "let's do e-sports"(2015) to "eww sPvP how about literally anything else"(2018) so fast it's not even funny. Most of us just did not notice it at first - the playerbase took years to decay. But those who expect a-net to step in and do something: they did not care for PvP 5 years ago, back when the scene was competetive and very much alive. They will not care now. It's over.

[Dickinson.7368]

Idk if there's ELO hell.
But i know that there pre-mades and solo's, we been saying it for years now that pre-mades give too massive of an advantage/mess up the matchmaking and need to be disabled in ranked, but a-net don't give a kitten about SPvP. And unfortunately no, making sure that both teams have a premade is not a solution, since either team can have a smurf boosting someone.
"What stop them from just playing boosted persons account then?" The fact that boosting as smurf is apparently allowed, while playing someone's else toon is not.

As for those who don't see an issue with current ranking/MM cause they are "high" ranked.
Make a new account and record/upload on youtube all your matches while playing exclusively solo, i'm sure that any high ranked player will not have any issue getting back to "where they belong" and will prove everyone who complain about MM wrong once and for all. :)

[Saiyan.1704]

You forgot that a new account's first few games of Placements will automatically be in a game of Plat1+. So there's a chance you will get a player who's never touched PvP going up against tryhards. It's why you see a huge stack of sweaty players on one team while the other side has 1 or 2 plat players with 3 other newbies.

[shion.2084]

To be fair, I've seen some pro folks doing solo Q because they're saying that doing duo gives them worse games.  Essentially they can't compensate for getting the bottom 3 players because range varies so much that those bottom 3 are silvers and 2 pros can't hold 5 norms.  I actually saw Naru running solo a couple of times this year, and grim if I recall.  He was having a bad day and was a bit tilted... AFK'd my game.  

[Khalisto.5780]

16 hours ago, shion.2084 said:

To be fair, I've seen some pro folks doing solo Q because they're saying that doing duo gives them worse games.  Essentially they can't compensate for getting the bottom 3 players because range varies so much that those bottom 3 are silvers and 2 pros can't hold 5 norms.  I actually saw Naru running solo a couple of times this year, and grim if I recall.  He was having a bad day and was a bit tilted... AFK'd my game.  

it depends what you aiming for, if you just going to q maybe that's the case, but if you going for matchmaking manipulation duo q is absolutely broken, try to watch any NA stream around 12 hours after/before reset (not good with time zones), if you duo q at this time and q dodge maybe the other single high rated duo you almost sure to be matched against a full team of s3/g1 players, even if your teammates are a bit worse than the enemy you 100-0 them by just looking at them, or you can easily bunk 1v3 if you playing something a bit more tanky while your dps friend wrecks the other 2 ou 3 player elsewhere on the map.

[toorichforyou.6743]

alot of these pvpers play the game mode because they suck balls at wvw

 

[Saiyan.1704]

7 hours ago, toorichforyou.6743 said:

alot of these pvpers play the game mode because they suck balls at wvw

 

That's a huge reach... it's WvW... blob vs blob no matter how coordinated one Captain's school of random fish is, it's still a blob vs blob. You're literally comparing apples vs 50 grapes on a table.

[toorichforyou.6743]

1 hour ago, Saiyan.1704 said:

That's a huge reach... it's WvW... blob vs blob no matter how coordinated one Captain's school of random fish is, it's still a blob vs blob. You're literally comparing apples vs 50 grapes on a table.

comparing solo roaming

 

[Lucentfir.7430]

4 hours ago, toorichforyou.6743 said:

comparing solo roaming

 

As a roamer, I can say it's a lot of build crafting and problem solving(having to push yourself an extra layer to fight some bs) in small scale 1-3 man while also testing your endurance for tolerating ebola denizens. A majority of the spvp only players are sheltered from the horrors of the roaming scene.

[Flowki.7194]

Im not buying the next expantion becuase of the awefull matchmaking, and slow balance. I still can't beleive that soulbeast didn't even get a mention in the last patch, but then I realised that the only playerbase left now is FOTM players, necro, mesmer and warrior mains. So, if its one of those classes/specs that is doing toxic things.. the dwindling playerbase defends it. Especially the fotm players.. still thinking rank even remotely reflects true skill level, 80% of representation now is necro/soulbest/mesmer. So much for gw2 being the pillar of spec diversity.

 

Oh you dodged the soulbeasts 30k burst? here... have... some chrono 30k burst instead. Thats ranked now.. and by the looks of it, it only gets worse the higher you get with duo+match manipulation.

 

I have been on these forums enough now to see enough complaints on the matchmaking system, if they don't do anything about this in the next patch then I don't see how sPVP continues. It has lost a hell of alot of players just in the short time I have played, and the new expantion didnt attract more. They need to look at MMR caps now, for real. I can put up with some busted specs since the best players won't be in my games, nor will the worse.

Edited September 1, 2023 by Flowki.7194

[Yerlock.4678]

On 8/29/2023 at 5:24 PM, Elementalist Owner.7802 said:

In this post, I am going to explain why the matchmaking system is rigged against you if you are in the ~1450-1550 rating range.

We all know that GW2 is an extremely skill-based game, and thus the skill discrepancy between players can be astronomical. This has led to the existence of a small group of elite GW2 players who play the game at the very highest level. These are your MAT winners, your top 25 leaderboard spots, your former esports players... Going forward, we'll refer to this class of players as "the sweats." Sweats are in a league of their own, and are untouchable by the rest of the scene.

As the population dwindles, that small group of sweats has gotten smaller. It's gotten so small that outside of prime-time, there is a high chance that only one duo of sweats is queueing for PvP. In this scenario, the game isn't going to wait 2 hours until another sweat queues up. It's going to expand the search until it eventually finds the next highest rated player. This player may be 100 rating lower, and nowhere near as good as the sweat, but he will *always* be placed on the opposing team because the game is trying to create "balanced" matchups.

To demonstrate, let's walk through a scenario where 10 players are queueing for PvP:

1 and 2. Sweat duo (both 1600+)

3. 1520 <-- ELO hell

4. 1490 <-- ELO hell

5. 1450 <-- ELO hell

6. 1430

7. 1429

8. 1428

9. 1425

10. 1425

The matchmaking system is going to use these ratings try to create the most balanced match possible. People of the jury, would you like to see what the absolute most balanced match is?

TEAM 1:

1 and 2. Sweat duo (both 1600+)

8. 1428

9. 1425

10. 1425

TOTAL RATING: 7478

 

TEAM 2:

3. 1520 <-- ELO hell

4. 1490 <-- ELO hell

5. 1450 <-- ELO hell

6. 1430

7. 1429

TOTAL RATING:  7319

And that's it. Even when putting all of the next highest rated players against them, the sweaty team will still have 159 rating over the poor ELO hell bastards. There are just not enough sweats to create fair matchups.

 

Some possible solutions to this problem:

1. Remove duo queue in ranked - this would help the situation a lot, and honestly there's no good reason why duo queue should still exist. It's pretty much exclusively used by sweats

2. Put hard limits on the rating discrepancy between teams and/or individual players within a match - this would increase queue times, especially for sweats

3. Have the system stop trying to balance teams. Just find 10 players with the closest rating possible and then randomize the teams. - this would turn our previous scenario into a luck of the draw, but would at least stop punishing players for having higher rating

This is 100% correct and on point. ELO hell DOES exist in this game and it's a massive problem, due in part to the low population and the way the matchmaker works. Effectively there is a pitfall between Gold 3/ low Plat 1 players, and top end sweaty players. It's a sort of "no man's land" that pushes you away from progressing up the ladder because the matchmaker doesn't ever factor in progression.  It only cares about "fairness".

But duo's intuitively allow sweaty players to tilt the scale and make it to where matches are always in their favor. This is not cognitive bias, this is a massive problem that prevents otherwise good players from climbing the leaderboards because they aren't god-tier sweaty. This is bad for competition and only creates cartels. And as the MATs have shown we already have enough cartels in this game...

 

Just get rid of the duo system. It's the same problem of having 5 man premades in ranked but of only less size. It's tarnishing ranked and creating a vacuum between good players and great ones, and it's making matches still lopsided in favor of the sweaty duo's. 

Edited September 1, 2023 by gmmg.9210

[Silinsar.6298]

3 hours ago, Lucentfir.7430 said:

A majority of the spvp only players are sheltered from the horrors of the roaming scene.

Granted there  are a few absolutely delusional individuals in WvW, I've found sPvP'ers much more unsatisfying to deal with on average due to frequently inciting in-team conflict, giving up instantly when not being ahead for half a minute and generally taking themselves far too seriously. My block list remains empty when I'm roaming, I can't say the same for sPvP. And some WvW roamers are a joy to talk / interact with.

Edited September 1, 2023 by Silinsar.6298

[Flowki.7194]

10 minutes ago, Silinsar.6298 said:

Granted there  are a few absolutely delusional individuals in WvW, I've found sPvP much more unsatisfying to deal with on average due to frequently inciting in-team conflict, giving up instantly when not being ahead for half a minute and generally taking themselves far too seriously. My block list remains empty when I'm roaming, I can't say the same for sPvP. And some WvW roamers are a joy to talk / interact with.

Thats the problem, many players treat sPVP (a TEAM based mode) as their personal 1v1 arena. They could go unranked, they could go wvw, but no.. they have to be selfish, and destroy any essense of team work by going far all game, or taking on 1v2s to prove themselves as some god. This makes playing support an absolute no no. I recently lost like 12 games in a row on support.. swap to chrono and all of a sudden winning 9 games in a row. That is the unfortunate state of sPVP, you have to play a burst spec that can kill something solo, becuase leaning on your team increasingly handicaps you the further you do it (full support worse of all). Its shocking that spvp has been left to rot into that state, where the avg game now is won on who is the best at pressing 4 burst buttons the fastest.

 

Just a few games ago it was practivally a mirror match, 2 soulbeasts each team, 2 mesmers, a scrapper and a willbender. All of them are essentailly 20k+ burst with 4 buttons. Ironically it was the closest match of the day, by far, which highlights the issue.

Edited September 1, 2023 by Flowki.7194

[draxynnic.3719]

On 8/31/2023 at 3:11 AM, Dickinson.7368 said:

As for those who don't see an issue with current ranking/MM cause they are "high" ranked.
Make a new account and record/upload on youtube all your matches while playing exclusively solo, i'm sure that any high ranked player will not have any issue getting back to "where they belong" and will prove everyone who complain about MM wrong once and for all. 🙂

It's been done, but it was a few years ago and the person who did it was probably the best mesmer in the game at the time.

1 hour ago, Silinsar.6298 said:

Granted there  are a few absolutely delusional individuals in WvW, I've found sPvP'ers much more unsatisfying to deal with on average due to frequently inciting in-team conflict, giving up instantly when not being ahead for half a minute and generally taking themselves far too seriously. My block list remains empty when I'm roaming, I can't say the same for sPvP. And some WvW roamers are a joy to talk / interact with.

I've seen games won from 300 points behind, and I've seen games won when the enemy was at 499 points for at least half a minute, but once someone starts ragging on their own team, it's usually over even if you were ahead when the rage starts. (Yes, I've had that happen.) There are times when I'm pretty sure the rager is deliberately throwing and the rage is just an effort to deflect suspicion.

[toorichforyou.6743]

6 hours ago, Silinsar.6298 said:

Granted there  are a few absolutely delusional individuals in WvW, I've found sPvP'ers much more unsatisfying to deal with on average due to frequently inciting in-team conflict, giving up instantly when not being ahead for half a minute and generally taking themselves far too seriously. My block list remains empty when I'm roaming, I can't say the same for sPvP. And some WvW roamers are a joy to talk / interact with.

dont forget to mention the win trading as well. lots of these top players in spvp just trade wins. theres a reason they cling on to the dead game mode. 

a literal circle jerk. 

[Shagie.7612]

8 hours ago, Silinsar.6298 said:

My block list remains empty when I'm roaming, I can't say the same for sPvP. And some WvW roamers are a joy to talk / interact with.

every single time i've gone out and roamed in wvw in the last year or so i've been whispered multiple times and told i'm hacking

roaming's a joke, wvw players aren't good, it's just that cele exists lol

[Silinsar.6298]

40 minutes ago, Shagie.7612 said:

every single time i've gone out and roamed in wvw in the last year or so i've been whispered multiple times and told i'm hacking

roaming's a joke, wvw players aren't good, it's just that cele exists lol

Most aren't very experienced, just like in sPvP really. You have to consider though that you meet the whole range of players in WvW, because there's no matchmaking based on individual performance. The challenge is usually not the same number of similarly skilled opponents (that's why people meet up to duel / GvG) but navigating the map, fighting outnumbered and making a difference where you can.

Edited September 2, 2023 by Silinsar.6298

[MilkyTea.9042]

God has cast us out from sPvParadise and into elo hell due to the original sin brought on by Team USA, who ate from the forbidden tree known as Wintradedrasil in the Garden of Monthly AT.

[Okhu.7948]

Every ELO is hell because no matter where you go in rankings there is low IQ sociopaths trying to make the rest of the people playing miserable.