#1 - Oct. 20, 2013, 4:30 a.m.
I thought a quick summary of my experience might highlight issues with the game and leaderboards. I’ve played around 2000 tPvP matches (Solo Q and Team Q combined) exclusively. When Solo Q first started, I decided to test as many extreme builds and found myself in the bottom 20%. Before then, I was consistently a top 500 Team Q player.
Observations:
- I rollercoastered between 35% to 75% for a long time, feeling unable to affect the outcome of matches even when I was playing my best . The usual culprit? This range is filled with 4v5s and games with one or two bad teammates. My guess is bad teammates are often a result of new players starting at 50% and/or getting a lucky start. Conquer mode and current game balance are such that unfavorable odds are extremely difficult to surmount. This range has high volatility and gravity towards the center of the bell curve, and unfortunately, it’s mostly artificial due to 4v5s. Once you reach certain rating %s, the outcome is decidedly more deterministic.
- Tweener builds don’t really cut it in Solo Q format, because they take more coordination. If you want to affect the outcome in a game with strangers, you either run faceroll glass or bunker.
- Matchmaking at the top is broken. The best 5 will get matched against 5 scrubs for the majority of matches. I’m pretty sure everyone in the top 200 knows this as fact. Consider that when I hit <500, my win % was somewhere around 53%. My win % is now 60%… this is with hundreds of games weighted against my win%! I didn’t get better; the matchmaking system gave me easier matchups.
- Players don’t start to get “good” until the top 200 (consider how many of these are dual or inactive accounts). I say this as objectively as possible and trying not to be elitist. This is just an unfortunate reality of the state of PvP atm. Matches at rating >500 still regularly have both teams ignoring Stillness at 11:30, both Tranq and Still at 8:30, getting Svanir kill-stolen in the beginning, or still unsure about how to efficiently stomp classes. This unfortunate reality is also why 95% of forum posts are noise.
- As a corollary to the above points, Solo Q is much less frustrating after passing certain %s (I also suspect that there are certain “bad matchup” boundaries one has to pass to get bumped up to the next deviation group).
- There are clearly better times to play if you want favorable matchups. Matches in early mornings or late nights have a high % of being 5 top vs. 5 scrubs due to the small PvP population.
- Queue times for me are now 7-10 min, likely either because of my rating or the population. [edit to add this bullet]
I guess my concluding statement is, “How can this not be a frustrating experience for the majority of players?”
Please read my former thread:
https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/pvp/pvp/Open-Alpha-Dishonor-Math-Leaderboard-Rtngs/ (thumbs up to testing grounds, but unsure why other simpler fixes are taking so long)
