PvP Discussion: Matchmaking and Leagues

[Marxx.5021]

@Crinn.7864 said:Currently the matchmaker will never put more than two of the same profession on the same team, and at least as far as I can tell will generally avoid duplicates when possible.

I also thought 2 of the same profession is the maximum. But today I got matched with 3 thiefs by the matchmaker in ranked.

[Noz.4650]

First, I'm sure you've considered restricting duplicate classes in the past. In just about every meta, at least 1 class was always amazing when stacked, leaving the team without the stack at a disadvantage. For example, in my experience the team with 2 scourges tends to win more than the team with only 1. There are other factors to this of course like if the stacked team has no firebrand and the other one does, etc. Also, for example, having more than 1 rev or 1 thief on your team makes the game not unwinnable but very hard. What's the reason behind never implementing class restriction, or is it still on the table?

Second, and I have no solution to this, is there a way to improve consistency of matchmaking at off hours? After around 10-11PM PST, queuing is just a big dice roll, win 6 points, lose 18.

Third, what I'm about to say is anecdotal data, but as a veteran PvP player my experience with the past couple systems has been really off. I used to maintain around 65% win rate for 2-3 years-ish before HoT. With every new system my win rate has gone down closer to 50%, now barely at 50%. I understand we're talking about vastly different systems, but ~15% win rate fluctuation seems like a lot. I'm definitely willing to attribute a few % win rate to me not playing as much as I used to, but that shouldn't account for 15%. Is there actually something there, like population decrease, that could contribute to such an inconsistency, or is this just working as intended?

[Ben Phongluangtham.1065]

@Smarazzinger.1403 said:1) Whats the reason for not make people start in bronze or silver divisions? I have the feeling that the majority of players are stuck in gold/plat and i think that silver/gold should be where the most of the population stay, plat is for great players and legend only for like the top 50 or so.

A new player starts in gold, since 1200 is considered an average player. But a new player has really high volatility, so they should get sorted really fast. (By the end of their placements)

2) Does the matchmaking take note of your teammates rating when it calculate the pips gain/loss? if no could it be so?Rating change is purely on your rating vs the average of your team. It does start to feel bad, since a high level player is almost always going to be playing against a team with a lower average rating. If our experiments with decreasing the range of players that you can be match with are successful (don't blow queue times by a large number), this will help.

[EgyptRaider.3946]

@Ben Phongluangtham.1065 said:

@EgyptRaider.3946 said:I was doubting whether to post this here or in rewards, but it's clearly related to leagues (but not matchmaking):

-could we have a bigger tab of our league history? I notice myself that I'm slowly progressing over the seasons, but it's sad to only see my last season :( (even just a tabel that tells: season X, Rank Y, and MMR Z, would be amazing!)

It would be cool, but currently would be a low priority item and I'm not sure how far back the data is kept. I can investigate.

Thanks for the reply! I can imagine most or some of the data isn't their anymore, but you know, it's never to late to start.

(In case it's lost: pretty sure I was legendary first three seasons... just saying)

[jcbroe.4329]

@huehuehueh.5106 said:If I understand the match making algorithm, you can get matche with players 300+/- your rating, can we get this number tighter to say 150? 300 is a whole division. Can player amulets be a factor in team building decisions?

Quoted to second this, at least the range.

There is no reason why the deviation should ever get that large if the goal is to create a competitive atmosphere with quality matches.

Especially because of where the large part of the community sits on the MMR spectrum, I'd speculate that this would mostly affect high rating queues with longer queue times, and while I don't want to presume and speak for the community; I think that those of us in the higher rating queues would prefer to wait for higher quality matches over making matches faster.

[Bow User Thing.1304]

Early on in this season, there was a night where Olrun and Jeffies we're queuing at the same time, and repeatedly got put on the same team(5+ games), one match even I got put on their team. Everyone of those game was basically a stomp.I just really don't think that the mmr is being balanced match wide for some reason.Even if one of my friends and me to queue at the same time, chances are we'll get on the same team and have a similar experience. While it's nice for climbing rating, I doubt it's fun being put on the other team at all.If the ui were something more like OW where it put up top team MMR vs team MMR, maybe I would believe it at least tried to balance it out, I just can't in its current state.

[Marxx.5021]

Why do I have to loose MMR for a lost match when matched against player with more than 300 MMR difference?

[Ben Phongluangtham.1065]

@OriOri.8724 said:

@Cal Cohen.3527 said:

@Ario.8964 said:I guess my first question would be: Is there a way to tweak the current matchmaker to balance teams so that each individual player in a match is within 50 rating of the others? Cause the current one does some weird things to average out the mmr (Iasked a group I was playing with for ratings in one match just to check behavior and we had at the highest 1758 and at the lowest 1400 which I thought was incredibly bizarre).

We've talked internally about reducing the maximum rating range of the matchmaker, but the tradeoff is that queue times will increase. We will likely do some testing in unranked to see how much of an impact certain ranges have, and look to make some adjustment for ranked in the future. 50 rating might be an unrealistic goal, but I do think there's some adjustment that can be made here without blowing out queue times.

Now as far as matchmaking goes on alt classes, is it a possible idea to try and create a system with class specific mmr (or at least a grace period of 10-15 matches where you are matched at lower and slowly increasing mmr until you are back where your actual mmr is) to encourage players to try out new classes? (this can go in unranked if needed but at least from my experience, trying new classes is incredibly frustrating because you get placed in matched where you'd want to play your main and end up getting farmed pretty hard by a good deal of people in the match.)

And not to be "that guy" and bring this up but is there a possibility of a class lock upon entering a match and removal of class stacking from all pvp modes? I just know myself and many others are curious as far as if there was any discussion around the implementation of such a system or if other things were a priority thus leading to this not really being considered yet as matchmaking would be seriously impacted by a change like this.

These two ideas are tied together. We do actually track profession specific mmr, but it isn't currently used

because

we don't lock professions in queue. Without the character lock, players could queue on a profession with lower mmr, then swap to their main profession after the queue pops for easier wins. Some time ago we held a poll asking players if they would prefer using profession mmr and locking characters on queue, but it did not pass.

Could you not change it to be a two variable algorithm? It would queue people up for teams the same way now based on their overall MMR, but before it finalizes the teams, it checks again, but by using everyone's class based MMR. If the teams are rebalanced it tries to shuffle them around to get the team MMRs closer, relative to the classes everyone is queueing up on? >

Without class locking, this would probably lead to a lot of abuse.

[Anodic.6712]

Has there ever been thoughts of class locking or spec locking so there can't be two of the same class or elite spec on the same team?

[Jinks.2057]

@Ben Phongluangtham.1065 said:

@Meteor.3720 said:Also I'm sure it will be covered, but very much in favour of seeing rating at the end of a match (to put it before will I think be demoralising or lead to flaming of the lower players). Something like this was in season 1 where you could see the badges of players at the end of the match? Can it be brought back but this time with a specific numerical value?

Showing skill rating of your team members at the end of the match is something we already plan to do in the future.

It's good to see Anet engaging with the community here, but I would like to add that as a veteran player this is coming at a very late stage in the quality and life of the community. I really hope this isn't a one off and engagement will continue or I fear this won't do much for the game in the long term.

I actually feel the competitive team does a decent job in general of trying to engage on the forums. We definitely read them daily and I personally try to respond to post at least a couple times a week.

Speaking for myself, some of the things I look for when trying to determine whether to respond to a thread.

• Don't be toxic. Once a thread starts becoming toxic, it usually discourages me not to respond. Not because I have a thin skin, but because I either don't want to bring attention to a toxic thread or encourage additional toxicity.
• Don't post something like "Anet respond or else!" This pretty much guarantees I won't respond.
• Don't make a new post for something that has been discussed over and over.

I'm not trying to be toxic or anything, but your stance is the correct representation of the culture at Anet towards it's fanbase. With how things are currently I believe a change in culture is paramount inside Areanet in regards to it's players. The toxicity sucks and can be a pain to deal with, but most of it is because of Anet. You are your own worst enemy in this.

The simple fact you fellas are making these threads confirms things are pretty bad. I support you guys making these threads to communicate to the community and I want to see GW2 PvP excel. I truly believe that a culture change is needed. I think more transparency is the only way to get things back on track. I want to see my skill rating & the rating of all players in the game. As it is now these are hidden and most players feel it's that way to hide things.

I believe you need to HIGHLY incentivize PvP from here on out. I want to see elite skins for PvP introduced that make the FashionWars 2 players drool. This will draw them in to PvP. You aren't getting new players so you have to get the PvE & WvW players involved.

Once you start getting a better amount of players in your MM then you need to fix your MM. While team average skill are withing 50pts of eachother we all know how fubar'd that is. One team could have a player who's top 10 with 4 bronze players vs a team with all gold. Who's gonna win? All players with in a match should be with in 100pts of eachother. You can expand that to 200 due to low pops queueing

As for leagues I say bring back the pro league. It gives ppl something to strive for. It gives everyone pride in their game. The only reason you didn't see HoT PvP pop die like PoF is b/c of pro league. Currently you can't watch the AT matches and that's BS. You need to fix your game to the point where you have an extremely easy time watching matches.

Thank You

[otto.5684]

@"Ben Phongluangtham.1065" said:This thread is to discussion matchmaking and league play. To kick off the thread, I wanted to talk a bit about the current state of the matchmaker.

In a recent random sample of 100,000 matches, we found that in approximately 95% of matches, the difference between the average skill rating of each team was less than 50 points. The matchmaker is doing a good job in most cases. Things get more problematic at the very low and very high skill ratings. Our change to duo queue for 1600+ ranked players is part of our efforts to address this. In addition to that modification, we’re working on some fine tuning on the matchmaker. Our simulation with the proposed changes extended the favorable difference ratio mentioned above from 95% to over 99% of matches. I can’t give you specific dates on when these changes go live, but we’ll be looking to trial them on the unranked queue somewhat soon™.

One thing to keep in mind is that just because the average skill rating of each team is close, that doesn’t mean you won’t have a blowout match. Some maps just tend to snowball, some players tend to give up when they get a bit behind, etc. This can lead to a blowout even if the average skill rating of each team was fairly close.

To be fair, I think GW2 match making is better than most MMOs.

If this difference in skill rating is small, then why would have blow out matches? This clearly means the how skill is "measured" is incorrect.

I do financial statements audit, and we consider the tolerable misstatement around 0.5%. Granted, match making system in GW2 is not as important, but 5% is pretty large margin of error. 1% would be okay, assuming it is "measured" correctly.

[Jariel.9274]

I'm glad that even this issue is getting attentioned. I have to say, in the former seasons I've experienced bad matchmaking, but in the latest ones (from 7 onwards) I have to agree with Ben, although there are some games that are total BlowOuts, and sometimes those games cost you a lot of points. I'm going to write down some suggestions that IMHO would improove matchmaking, but I don't know if they are viable due the PvP population.

1) Matching People with your skill level.

• I know that at the moment Matchmaking doesen't take in consideration the amount of the games you won or loss, and sadly that could be an issue. Sometimes, to prevent to find the same people over and over , the only smart solution is to have a break of 30mins/1hr so the Queue can refresh. My idea is take in consideration to add in the MM Algorithm the amount of games you won/loss and the amounts of games in general you played. Probabily this will generate longer Queues, but IF PEOPLE WANTS FAIR AND BALANCED MATCHMAKING have to sacrifice the time of waiting for the quality of the game. In summary, more variables to judge the individual skills of a player.

2) Separate the PLACEMENT QUEUES from the Main Queue.

• Alright, another touchy point over here. In general we assume that when you hit Rank 25 you have a clue of what happens around you in PvP. That's sadly wrong, people needs lots and lots of game before learning some mechanics. More than once I've had in a game people that tried PvP for their first time and what can you say to a guy like that? They have their right to play as well. Although, since now player without a rank gets matched with gold people (Average 1200) that can be a real thing, and affect the quality of the game. Maybe let's start the Average MMR from 900 instead of 1200?

3) Hard Reset of the MM every Season?

• Might be another touchy point, but at least will solve a bit the problem of the win trading which apparently seeming to be a thing. Or have different placing algorithm for each division, otherwise what's the point in having divisions if some players just aren't moving up and down at all?

4) Win/Lose Points at the end of the game.

• We all know that in Ranked we have to play our best, so we need to carry the less experienced players. Of course you manage to win 500 to 495 and after a won game you obtain only +5... It's a bit a slap in the face, don't you think? Same when you lose because you got a guy that has zero experience in PvP, was his first time in the game, you played your best to carry the game but nothing helped... And you get slapped in the face with -25. Is it fair? I don't know what suggestion I can write, because I'm not the smartest tool in the shed when we're talking about MATH, but in summary I'm suggesting a better alghorithm when it comes to assign the Rank Points, for a loss and for a win.

I don't know if TOP Stats should be counted in this equation, since there are some classes that they never get some and meanwhile they tried to carry an entire game (Look poor thieves).

[Crinn.7864]

@Marxx.5021 said:

@Crinn.7864 said:Currently the matchmaker will never put more than two of the same profession on the same team, and at least as far as I can tell will generally avoid duplicates when possible.

I also thought 2 of the same profession is the maximum. But today I got matched with 3 thiefs by the matchmaker in ranked.

One of them had to have switched before you loaded in/checked the board. The matchmaker will never allow two of the same to be placed in a match.

[Rufo.3716]

What irks me the most is losing rating due to match manipulators. Several times on an alternate account somebody would just afk run into the walls. I ended up going 2-8 (3 of these losses due to the same player) in the placement matches and being placed in low bronze. It seems like every time I work my way up to gold 3 I end up getting matched with obvious match manipulators, some who go as far as to even state that fact that they are doing it in chat. People can report all they want but the fact remains the rating loss is still there and you can't do anything to prevent it.

[Lithril Ashwalker.6230]

I want to state that this suggestion im about to...err...suggest is borederline disciplinary but at the same time related to matchmaking. If we have multiple different people reporting someone for match manipulation is there a way to ensure that we dont face and dont have them on our team to keep the matchmaking efficient and healthy? Throw in the Guild Wars 1 Dishonor style (they could log out and if they had an hour of dishonor at the time, they log in and it continues the timer from where it left off) Logging out is too easy for someone and they wont learn the lesson. The reason i mention dishonor is because it involves who we get matched with. We dont want to be matched with someone throwing matches or afking so if we can manage a way to prevent them in the matchmaking would be Applesauce!

[Maat.3940]

@Natto.5819 said:Matchmaking needs to take into account classes that are way stronger than others. Necro, Thief, and Warrior classes should have a stealth bonus rating to account for the fact that they're too strong. For example, if a player has a 1600 Rating, and plays his Necro, his effective Rating is 2000. That will help the matchmaking put together a more balanced opponent team.

yeah but think about it for a little bit...it's like punishing someone for playing a class. Not sure how fair it would be to punish people for playing a class. There are other ways to deal with OP classes other than putting plat, leg or gold scourges against bronze players because he/she deserves it for choosing that class. Also, not all scourges are skilled players and sometimes handing this class to some players is like giving a baby Excalibur and be expected to rule Camelot (for some reason this was the only example I could come up with :D) . So the presence of Scourges in ranked is not a punishable offence :)). Yes they are OP and annoying to deal but this subject falls into the whole balance debacle which we are not discussing rn.

[ButterPeanut.9746]

@"Lithril Ashwalker.6230" said:I want to state that this suggestion im about to...err...suggest is borederline disciplinary but at the same time related to matchmaking. If we have multiple different people reporting someone for match manipulation is there a way to ensure that we dont face and dont have them on our team to keep the matchmaking efficient and healthy? Throw in the Guild Wars 1 Dishonor style (they could log out and if they had an hour of dishonor at the time, they log in and it continues the timer from where it left off) Logging out is too easy for someone and they wont learn the lesson. The reason i mention dishonor is because it involves who we get matched with. We dont want to be matched with someone throwing matches or afking so if we can manage a way to prevent them in the matchmaking would be Applesauce!

This would be pretty easy to abuse to force the matchmaker to make you be on better/worse teams. I don't think any "Don't let me play with X player" is a realistic option for any matchmaking system. The solution (not needed in this thread) is to improve disciplinary actions for those people so they don't play at all, not that legal/good players can select them to not be in their matches.

[Cynz.9437]

1. Can it be done that there is limit to rank range wenn MM puts teams together to prevent things like silver vs legend/plat (which is a thing btw)?

2. Can rank gain/loss system consider teammates rating and not just personal rating vs avg rating of enemy team? Problem is, wenn you have low ranked teammates and face a team with maybe 1-2 low ranked teammates and some good players, you will lose and you will lose a lot of points as well. Same thing wenn you win - system doesn't know that you had to hardcarry. Combined with wonky MM in higher ratings it happens a lot and gets very frustrating. Anyone in plat+ knows what i mean.

3. The placements need adjustements. 2 seasons in a row i landed in low gold just to farm inexperienced players to plat. I don't think they enjoyed it tbh and for me it was boring grind. I assume reason is because i don't play between seasons but i am not sure.

4. Please consider match outcome by points loss. If match was close, player shouldn't lose as many points - this would encourage players to play to the end. A lot of matches ae winnable but players give up early since there is not enough difference between close match and simply lost match.

Sry for errors, posting on phone T_TAlso thanks for opening discussions.

[Ben Phongluangtham.1065]

@Cynz.9437 said:

1. Can it be done that there is limit to rank range wenn MM puts teams together to prevent things like silver vs legend/plat (which is a thing btw)?

Yes, it's possible, and we're already planning to test this out in unranked. We just have to be really careful we don't blow up queue times.

2. Can rank gain/loss system consider teammates rating and not just personal rating vs avg rating of enemy team? Problem is, wenn you have low ranked teammates and face a team with maybe 1-2 low ranked teammates and some good players, you will lose and you will lose a lot of points as well. Same thing wenn you win - system doesn't know that you had to hardcarry. Combined with wonky MM in higher ratings it happens a lot and gets very frustrating. Anyone in plat+ knows what i mean.

It's a common request, but doing that breaks glicko. The better solution, I feel, is what you talk about in point 1, where the rating deviation on the team is decreased.

3. The placements need adjustements. 2 seasons in a row i landed in low gold just to farm inexperienced players to plat. I don't think they enjoyed it tbh and for me it was boring grind. I assume reason is because i don't play between seasons but i am not sure.

We don't have any current plans to adjust our current soft reset between seasons. Feedback on this seems kind of all over the place.

4. Please consider match outcome by points loss. If match was close, player shouldn't lose as many points - this would encourage players to play to the end. A lot of matches ae winnable but players give up early since there is not enough difference between close match and simply lost match.

In order for this to not be broken, we'd have to also not give as much rating increase for winning a close match. How do people feel about this?

[huehuehueh.5106]

@Rufo.3716 said:What irks me the most is losing rating due to match manipulators. Several times on an alternate account somebody would just afk run into the walls. I ended up going 2-8 (3 of these losses due to the same player) in the placement matches and being placed in low bronze. It seems like every time I work my way up to gold 3 I end up getting matched with obvious match manipulators, some who go as far as to even state that fact that they are doing it in chat. People can report all they want but the fact remains the rating loss is still there and you can't do anything to prevent it.

This is actually a big problem, as far as I can tell there is no repercussions for afking in a match / not leaving spawn / match manipulating. I have seen legendary players do this, I have seen players load in and not like a player they are paired with an intentionally throw, even though there are 3 other innocent players on the team. This is especially volatile in placement matches where dcs or throws can mess up your placements and can send you to a whole lower division.

I think the report for match manipulation or idle should automatically give people stacking dishonor but have a credibility meter associated with the players who do the reporting, false reporters will not carry any weight but x number of credible players who accurately report but seldomly report will generate stacking dishonor for the player (letting the community regulate itself) (false reports will stack dishonor on yourself). Anet can tell based on chat logs and peoples duration spent in the spawn location. If that is not doable maybe end of season adjustments can be made like was done in the past with confirmed abusers.

Why is map chat enabled for the enemy team at all in ranked play, why are you able to whisper the enemy team, why are names even enabled (it should be "ranger 1", "warrior 2") so people can not hold game to game grudges or biases. Take the identity out of matches and all we are left with is a how that player performed, which is all we should be judging them on.

It is exponentially easier for a single player to throw a match than it is for a single player to spend the effort to win a match. Matches where there was a verified thrower should give 0 rating change and should be retroactively tallied. I am a firm believer that there is much more honorable players in the game than dishonorable, I think the system should be designed so the community can regulate itself and reverse this balance of power.

[dragonkain.3984]

Quoting my own old post:

Solution to whole horrible and repulsive matchmaking is to value player skill not by wins/losses in a kitten team game like all team game developers do BUT BASED ON PERSONAL STATS, like kills/deaths/assists and other game-specific stats and give them rating based on those only for each specific profession.

That was there would be no reason to be toxic because you'll be the only one to blame for your own bad performance (in some games teammates may negatively impact it however but not in gw2)

Also it would remove broken meta classses and any need to play only kitten necro+guardians because leaderboards will be separate for each class.

^^^

My bet is devs will ignore this and will keep the teammate-hating, meta-based mm system however xD

[Cynz.9437]

@Ben Phongluangtham.1065 said:

@Cynz.9437 said:

4. Please consider match outcome by points loss. If match was close, player lose as many points - this would encourage players to play to the end. A lot of matches ae winnable but players give up early since there is not enough difference between close match and simply lost match.

In order for this to not be broken, we'd have to also not give as much rating increase for winning a close match. How do people feel about this?

Probably would need poll for this. I personally wouldn't mind.

As far as point 2 goes: how much of an adjustment are we talking about here? You say 50 ranks is too restrictive but anything beyond 50 will cause same +5 -13 situation we see today.

[Ben Phongluangtham.1065]

@Cynz.9437 said:

@Ben Phongluangtham.1065 said:

@Cynz.9437 said:

4. Please consider match outcome by points loss. If match was close, player lose as many points - this would encourage players to play to the end. A lot of matches ae winnable but players give up early since there is not enough difference between close match and simply lost match.

In order for this to not be broken, we'd have to also not give as much rating increase for winning a close match. How do people feel about this?

Probably would need poll for this. I personally wouldn't mind.

As far as point 2 goes: how much of an adjustment are we talking about here? You say 50 ranks is too restrictive but anything beyond 50 will cause same +5 -13 situation we see today.

We just don't know yet. It's going to require some trial and error. But if its something like 50, legendary players and bottom bronze players will never get to play, so it's not going to be that restrictive. We're never going to solve that problem of +5, -13 completely. But I'm hoping we can get it better.

[Xillllix.3485]

Personally when you removed team queue I lost interest. I'm playing a mmo to play with my friends, not to get placed with randoms I never practiced with.

[Reikou.7068]

My question is less about matchmaking itself, and more about how MMR gains/losses are calculated

Why is MMR gain or loss calculated as Personal MMR vs Opposing Team Average instead of Team Average vs Opposing Team Average?

The current system would make sense if there was absolutely no matchmaking, and matches were put together randomly in a completely random arena.

However, this game has matchmaking, and attempts to put "even" teams together.

With the current situation, the lowest rated player on a team who plays the worst and gets carried the hardest stands to gain the most, and lose the least. Where the highest rated member of a team who has to bust his ass stands to lose the most and gain the least. Everyone else in between is either on one end or the other end o this spectrum.

Please make MMR gains/losses calculated based purely on team MMR.