What you were expecting to happen, and what actually happened:
I was expecting our guild to have a reasonable chance fighting in Guild Wars. Tigerclaw is rank 36. We got matched against:
Heartwork (rank 6)
Na Rasslabone Luna (rank 8)
Sons of Greed (rank 12)
Plus one other guild I can’t remember right now, probably due to all the concussions.
Since there apparently seems to be some lack of understanding what those ranks mean, fighting a rank 6 guild as rank 36 guild is like jumping in front of a truck going at full speed and trying to stop it just with hands outstretched. Please consider having current matching ranges reviewed by someone remotely familiar with the game.
Thank you Fourdottwoone, you have perfectly summed up the situation for the current Matchmaking disaster, and your image is an excellent illustration of what we also experienced on XBox during this GW and surely many others. We are ranked towards the end of the top 40, and we had to face the number 2 and number 14 guilds in the GW world ranking. And at the end of each of these days, we were in the same state as your photo, we were totally crushed. Where is the logic?? Where is the fun for our players?? How many more months will this bug be active?? And potentially we lost the chance to try to win 2x 35 gold marks over these two days, if we had been able to fight against opponents of similar level, as was the rule in the old GW, our guild was therefore deprived of 2100 gold marks (subject to victories). And since the beginning of the new GW, no compensation has been given to the guilds that suffer this fate every GW weekend. The Devs’ ears are currently closed and their eyes are blindfolded for now. Waiting for better days and awareness
Guys you do all realise that gems rankings are based on trophies, gained over ten years.
That’s why rankings never change.
There is a possibility that a guild ranked 100, can gain more trophies in a week than a top ten guild.
Also as trophies are based over the whole time, then no guild can really ever catch a top ten.
So GWs is based on how well your guild fights, not based on trophies,Gow rankings or anything else.
I’m in a rank 74 guild, I have every troop except PvP Mythics, and chrys.
And I smash all players in any top ten guild in PvP.
And I’m 4 years old in game , IV never been in a higher guild.
If you lose, you lose. No excuses are really plausible.
When you take in all evidence.
You might want to read up on the official Guild Wars Reloaded postings. Rankings were changed to be based on an ELO system, somewhat similar to chess, to better represent guild strength. Unfortunately, the matching algorithm doesn’t take those rankings properly into account. First it picked guilds too close together in rank, ultimately requiring some guilds to fight themselves. Now it seems to pick guilds way too far apart, throwing guilds the ELO system considers “very strong” against guilds the ELO system considers “very much weaker”.
Congratulations. I’m sure there’s some PvP related thread which might be interested in your PvP experience. It doesn’t really contribute to this bug report about Guild Wars algorithms.
I said gems rankings, not GW rankings.
There are 2 leagues in GOW
One based of years of accumulatiom, and the GWs one.
I did say gems and not GWs in my op.
You mention 2 rankings, one of 6 and one of 36, in my GWs league. I couldn’t see 30 places higher or lower.
So your using GOW rankings to base your information on and not GWs rankings.
There’s a lot of people getting heated mentioning rankings, yet seem to be using the GoWs ones.
Which have no correlation to the GWs ones.
It’s like basing the football club world championship that just happened and saying Chelsea are the best in the world, even tho there not even the best in England.
Different competitions, different events have different rankings. You have to disregard all other competitions.
On the leaderboard in GW, if you click on “View Top” you can see the top 20 or 30 guilds. (Can’t remember exactly how many.)
We are rank 34 for trophies. We experienced a similar thing to OPs. We were against guilds that were much more GW forward than we have ever been.
I know there is a new ranking system, but I’m pretty sure we would’ve been B2 or maybe B3 this GW (according the the previous ranking system) and our guild was usually B5 or maybe B4 if we had a good war. The matching is definitely messed up.
No, I’m quite obviously basing my information on Guild Wars rankings. It would make little sense to talk about some other rankings from somewhere else in the game when discussing the Guild Wars ELO system.
Our guild was ranked in the 80’s I think. Half the guilds we fought were so far above or below us they weren’t even on the GW rankings list we could see. Hard to tell where they fell as there was no way to select the guild and see their GW rank (another QOL improvement they should have added before GW launched).
We would prefer to face off against guilds closer to our rank. Say no more than 20 ranks above or below us, at our rank. Obviously as you go higher, that should get tighter and lower down the ranks it can get wider but you should still be able to see the guild you’re playing against on the rankings.
I suspect they might be using a hidden bracket system instead of ELO score for matching purposes. Like, #1 - #5 can only fight each other, #6 - #50 can only fight each other, #51 - #500 can only fight each other, and so on, with any match within such a bracket being possible. Which would quite naturally result in a frustrating experience when your guild is located close to the bracket border. If that is the case, it would be interesting to know what the overall bracket configuration currently looks like and which options exist to modify it.
I think the ELO range being so far off on the top end is an aggravating factor.
With the very top of the ELO rankings hundreds of points apart followed by comparatively tighter going down the stack, it makes dozens of points seem incredibly fair to a matchmaking system warped by the very ends of the bell curve.
Under “normal” circumstances, it would take ~ 50 games for an ELO to settle so a year+ at current pacing. I believe the initial ELO also compounded this so it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if it’s 2-3 years (or more) before things truly settle.
It’s also a bit of a Catch-22. Scrap the trophy-based rankings? You punished teams at random for having out of whack matchups and that has ties to the cash shop. Increase the variance in the K rating of the ELO? Wild swings that would exacerbate the previous issue. Tighten the matchmaking? You’ll have too many guilds going 2/2 and the gap to the top of the ELO ranks will never close. Change the matchmaking to leaderboard positions? You have the above issues PLUS walkovers for anyone facing the guilds that opt out since the ELO erosion for opting out is so small.
I don’t think the ELO design went beyond “we need an initial ranking” and now they’ve painted themselves in a corner.
How about. A cup rounds instead of a league.
Random match ups.
Losers go out.
Do it over 7 days.
The final being Sunday.
This way, you can also reward properly.
Completely random match ups, just like the FA cup in the UK.
And rewards can go up in value, starting from Monday.
Monday losers 50 gems, 50 dragonite
Tuesday losers 100 and 100
Wednesday losers 200 gems 100 dragonite 4 random deeds
Thursday same as above, plus add another reward. And so on, for the next 3 days
Yes I’m just putting random rewards, but this would work. And more fun, a knockout competition.
Just to add, also a nice little GWs winners badge, for the ones that won, on there guild page, or under there name.
And add a star, ever GWs cup final win.
Just like, European cup winners get stars under there badges, ino this is over the head of our American brothers, sorry.
So in the 3rd Guild Wars, it matched us strictly with a lot of top of the new old Leaderboard based on Trophies.
Then it adjusted the standings to move the trophy based, but less GW based guilds downwards.
In the 4th Guild Wars, it matched us with a lot of guilds not near us in GW Leaderboard standing, but they were putting up more points than.. usual? is there a usual by a 4th Guild Wars?
There’s something going on in the background matching based on activity rate and that doesn’t quite match the current leaderboard movements and positions at this time. Kinda also doesn’t help that participation =/= skill level..
Edit: It doesn’t help Blighted Lands GW was a complete Garbage quality Kingdom, so it’s going to skew the results even more abnormally than usual, since a lot of people didn’t play the way they normally would or might have even skipped playing.
We haven’t made any changes to the matchmaking since… this?
The only more recent change released was a fix to the ELO scoring for the Leaderboard
A couple of GW weekends ago now, we adjusted the matchmaking so no Guilds should face a duplicate opponent over the duration of a weekend, also there were brackets/buckets with no opponents, so this caused repeat opponents and repeated AI Guild opponents.
Believe this was done by merging some brackets that had fewer than 20 opponents in them,
Again, this was done a while ago and not between last GW and this GW.
Like Ron has suggested, Guild Wars is still new. This is like the 4th weekend, so it will take time for the dust to settle on the Leaderboard placement, everyone falling into their suitable bracket/bucket and inactive Guilds to be pushed out completely from their initial Trophy placement from when the leaderboard was made.
With that, I understand no one has time to wait months or over a year, to feel like they are being placed where they should or face the correct opponents at last - I know some people have good Guild Wars weeks when they are - it’s something I had noted from before Guild Wars went live again, so I’ll try and follow up anything I can on this.
As I had mentioned in the ELO thread, I can’t always take a dev’s time, every instance Guild Wars acts in a way we don’t anticipate or don’t possibly agree with. I’ll always follow up on what I can, and be looking for bugs.
Saved posting this till I had first confirmed that no, there were no data changes I missed from last Guild Wars to this one.. or even recently since the matchmaking changes I had shared
This isn’t about dust needing time to settle. Consider these two scenarios:
1.) The #50 guild is matched against the #51 guild. The #50 guild gets utterly steamrolled, because the #51 guild is currently still climbing to its proper place and will eventually end up as #1 guild. That’s okay, the matching algorithm tried to set up a fair match based on the data it had available.
2.) The #50 guild is matched against the #1 guild. The #50 guild gets utterly steamrolled, like it should be when facing a #1 guild. That’s not okay, the matching algorithm set up an excessively unfair match based on the data it had available.
We currently have the second scenario. It won’t magically go away, no matter how long it gets ignored. The matching algorithm has to pick guilds perceived somewhat equal in power, which could be either based on ELO rating or on rank. The pairings we are actually seeing are all over the place.
I hear where you’re coming from, but let’s imagine a situation where a B1 GW quality guild (or a more recently established but coordinated guild) had a fairly low trophy count, and was therefore given a lower starting ELO than their skill/coordination warranted.
In this case if they are limited to only nearby matches, they will likely win, but their ELO gains will be very small and it will take a long time to get a significantly higher ELO.
So by giving a lower ranked opponent a chance of making an upset (v what the ELO system expects) it also gives them a chance to climb the ranks more quickly. If they lose, then they should not lose many ELO points (as it was the expected outcome).
The issue becomes if a Guild is given all much higher level opponents, then it’s not fair, as they become discouraged and lose rewards.
Perhaps it’s hard to program these match-ups, but throwing an idea out there….would be that every 4-day Guild War any Guild below ELO rank #25 should be given:
one ‘upset’ opportunity (where they battle one opponent 20-30 above in terms of ELO ranking)
one opponent which is a lower guild trying to upset them (ie 20-30 below them),
one being in the 10 ELO rankings above them; and
one in the 10 ELO rankings below.
For the top #25 ELO ranking guilds…..1 lower guild trying to upset them, and the other three battles in that band of top 25.
I’d say the main issue is a low ELO guild getting paired with a high ELO guild without wanting to. This will almost always result in the low ELO guild not fighting at all, because it’s just a miserable experience. And if it’s guaranteed to happen once each GW, it will just end up driving guilds away entirely.
What if there were two ways to register instead? “Register for fair pairing” and “register for a challenge”? The challenge option would always attempt to pair you with a much higher ranked guild. That avoids the issue of a lower ranked guild getting an impossible match forced on them, if the challenging guild overestimates their ability it’s their own fault.
