Cal Cohen.3527

> @bluri.2653 said:

> All good ideas, I hope you also polish the UI since it's incredibly hard to see and is a bit messy imo, also agree with Ario if theres no general way to open it up for the public eyes to see the AT's I think having a gw2 twitchstream or whatever streaming it would be awesome

UI improvements are in the works, and some of them will be shipping with the swiss system. The biggest issue with having a gw2 stream is that someone would have to be manning the spectator camera which we probably can't support for every daily tournament, but maybe it's something that we could do a few times a week. I can look into it, but no promises.

> @Vyrulisse.1246 said:

> Any thought to having tournaments where random teams are formed from a pool of players queuing or is the population not there for that?

This probably isn't something that we will do as tournaments are designed to be a place for organized team play. While it could be a potential idea for a one-off special tournament, the tournament code currently doesn't support this functionality and it's unlikely that we would do a significant rework for a single tournament.

> @Xuazinegueri.3592 said:

> And what about a spectate mode? At least for the monthly, please! It could help a lot to learn about rotate since it is harder than learn to play just your class...

Spectating isn't open to everyone because of a technical limitation: we can only have so many players in a pvp match (including spectators). We opened up spectator for partners with the idea that they could stream themselves spectating tournaments, and everyone else could "spectate" by watching these streams.

> @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.

This should be fixed now

Ranked win rates from last season on Coliseum:

Blue 50.7%

Red 49.3%

> @Darek.1836 said:

> I mean I was expecting it to be unchanged anyway, but that's because I know ArenaNet hates the PVP game mode and is lazy in general. Seriously though how do you change it for 3 different months then go ahead and just let it be the same lol. Please tell me theres a patch coming up that will make a new reward rather than the moon, cuz what's the point in unique rewards if after a year every other random player has it.

There's a new item for this month, it just didn't exist in the game until today's patch so we haven't been able to update the monthly reward. The new item is now visible in the tournament UI.

The fix for this is coming in the next release

> @"thorn heredarr.2108" said:

> hi ! i can't join pvp queue since yesterday, the " ranked" and "unranked" buttons just doesn't work... is it normal or is it a problem with my account ?

You should be able to queue now. Let me know if you're still having issues

> @"thorn heredarr.2108" said:

> hi ! i can't join pvp queue since yesterday, is it normal or is it a problem with my account ?

>

You should be able to queue now. Let me know if you're still having issues

We've made a change that should hopefully resolve the issues people are having. If anyone is still having trouble queuing let us know and we will continue to investigate.

To everyone still having problems: What behavior are you seeing when trying to queue?

Is there a particular error message that pops up?

Does the banner update to show that you're in Ranked, but has no indication of queue time?

Is the button just completely unresponsive?

Any additional info you can provide will help us debug the issue. Thanks

We're intentionally starting celestial stats a bit lower just as a precaution. If it underperforms we'll shave it upwards until it's in a good spot

No one replied, so we're on Blacktide right now

We moved our play on live session to Wednesdays, so we're double dipping this week.

Play on Live Trivia Question: When did Golem Rush week happen?

First to answer correctly with world name is where we play today! Starting in 10 minutes

Recent Winners! (sorry can't win again if on this list)

Maguuma

Jade Quarry

Seafarer's Rest

Vizunah Square

Ehmry Bay

We're looking into this

> @Spurnshadow.3678 said:

> I don't know what that means. Does that mean that you looked at every match where the lord was killed and deducted the 150 points so it wasn't a factor?

>

> BTW, I think the other culprit here is the match making system. A lot of folks are complaining that they're getting set up against teams with people a few medals higher than they are. There's apparently a large skill gap going on. This is apparently in favor of faster match making and class equality across teams. So, there's gonna be a lot of one team dominating in higher PvP matches. The larger cap circle can be more easily exploited by a good team. Yes, the better team will win on any other map, but they may not be able to dominate as much.

>

> I personally have been in many a match where there was nothing we could do, even taking the sides, because my team kept running into mid one at a time, couldn't kill anyone 1v1 on the sides, whatever. A more evenly skilled team won't have this issue. Foefire is just a clearer mirror on this issue.

Basically if the match ended with a score of 649-499 due to a last-second lord kill, this was counted as a 500-499 score for the purposes of score differential.

Matchmaking definitely has an impact on score differential, but it's also constant across all maps. Over a large sample any differences will be due to the maps themselves.

I probably should have mentioned that when looking at score differentials I made sure to normalize winning scores to 500 to avoid any additional disparity created by secondary mechanics, sorry for any confusion this caused!

Hey everyone,

I'm going to try to clarify a few things to address some of the concerns in this thread.

There are a lot of comments about Scourge here so I'll start with a reminder that the pvp team and balance team are separate teams. We can't speak for them so we usually won't comment on things that are directly related to skill balance. With that said, both the pvp and the balance teams do actively read the forums and we see all of the great feedback that you guys have given. We also chat with the balance team regularly, and although we can't communicate back to all of you here, your concerns are definitely being heard. Ideally we would like to see the balance discussions in their own threads, and keep threads like these more on-topic. Of course there will always be balance considerations when discussing map changes, but it should be more in the realm of 'this change is potentially concerning because of x build' and less of 'why even talk about this when there's balance to discuss'.

Moving back to the topic at hand, why even talk about Foefire changes right now? As Ben said in the original post, this is very much a 'thinking out loud' exercise. We talk about a bunch of different topics day to day, and this one in particular is pretty straightforward so we felt comfortable bringing it up here . Recently I was looking into the average score differentials on a per-map basis, and unsurprisingly Foefire has the biggest gap. As one of the most popular maps over the last 5 years, we've all had those games where the first teamfight at mid is lost and the subsequent 2-cap is never pressured. Personal anecdotes aren't a good reason to make changes, but the data certainly supports the idea that Foefire is the map that snowballs the hardest. Because Foefire is one of the most popular maps, we don't want to make any large sweeping changes that would significantly impact how the map plays, but we will certainly look at small tweaks that can mitigate some of the problems that the map has. For example, last year we adjusted the Waterfall to prevent players from being able to contest the point while LoSing at the same time. This is the type of change that has a positive impact without affecting the playstyle of the map.

I'll also clarify that there's no timetable on these (or any) changes that would be done to the map. Is it something that should wait given the amount of pressure that can currently be applied on a point? Probably, but we're more interested in what you think about the changes at a high level. Foefire definitely snowballs more, and this is something we would like to improve if possible. These are just a couple of ideas we've thrown around. The goal of this thread is to discuss any ideas that are out there. Feel free to chime in with whatever thoughts or other ideas you may have.

One last thought on the topic of point pressure: winning the fight is generally more important than keeping the point contested throughout the fight. This obviously isn't true 100% of the time (e.g.in a fight full of tanks that will drag on a long time, conceding a full cap is essentially the same as losing the fight entirely), but if you can concede a decap to avoid a ton of damage and follow up by winning the fight, this is an immensely better outcome than holding the fullcap a few more ticks and eventually losing the fight.

Apologies for the blob of text, and as always thanks for the great discussions.

> @bluri.2653 said:

> It was fixed earlier today but kitten up now again lmao

I suspect the issue is fixed in new instances of the lobby that have been spun up since the tournament ended, and still broken in the old instances. We'll look into what caused the issue in the first place tomorrow.

Probably an issue with the recurring schedule when we pushed it back a week. We'll get this resolved on monday; the correct date should be October 28, 2017

There definitely seems to be an issue with some of the statues moving. Is their appearance incorrect as well?

We have a fix for this internally that will be coming in a hotfix

> @veslarius.8425 said:

> I have been seeing a continuous error while looking at the spvp leaderboard. It shows players with lower rating in a spot that I should be sitting at. It's just 250 at the moment so it's not critical but if I grind down to top 100 or 25 an issue like this could become much more annoying. I have 3 screenshots showing the bug but can't see an option here to upload an image. Had anyone else noticed this issue?

This happens sometimes around the edge of the top 250 because you can only be posted to the leaderboard at the end of a game. So while you were not in the top 250 some of the players on the edge lost games pushing the bottom rating on the leaderboard lower than your current rating, but you won't be placed until you complete another game.

Alternatively you may not meet the minimum games requirement.