A question for the raid team: Do you play/research other MMOs raids to get idea for mechanics that would work in GW2?
Pretty much everyone on the raids team has raided at some point in time in other games. And really, you can get ideas from anything, not just specifically raid content. Sometimes all you need is more of a feeling or vibe you're trying to get and then you can build a mechanic from that.
I wonder if his apartment smells of rich mahogany...
He has many leather bound books.
A note about mystic coin prices. We’re continuing to monitor them but aren’t taking any action at this time. I know the question of the moment is: why increase supply of leather but not of mystic coins? Mystic coins are a currency that all players get in small quantities and then can sell to wealthy players who want to use them to craft aspirational or luxury items. Seen in that light it’s not inherently bad for them to be expensive, nor is it unnatural for them to increase in price as wealthy players continue to accumulate more wealth. We can measure their success more in terms of their use: are they actively traded between players and actively used? And the answer to those is a resounding yes. John will fill in some details. Mystic coins are doing their job. Having said all that, there are arguments on both sides, and I don’t mean to imply that there aren’t, but there isn’t a compelling case at this time that would make us go in and change the supply or sinks.
Mo
Looking at total sources and sinks of mystic coins, we've reached a stable state with sources being about 10% above sinks. Trading post prices also have reached an equilibrium even in the face of multiple manipulation attempts. Still, we're going to keep an eye on them to make sure the pattern remains stable in the long run.
On the topic of raids; are there any plans for practice versions of any sort? I've personally not raided but may be soon with some guildies, but I know a huge number of people who want to raid but just can't get easy access due to lack of experience and find it difficut to find teachers. There are many mentors out there, yes, but they can't help everyone and I feel an in-game method would help.
For example; WoW has a "pug" group version of raids with reduced rewards but is easier because pugs typically lack as much coordination as a dedicated team.
We don't have any plans for that at this time.
Will you release the patch as soon as it it ready or wait until the usual patch time?
Unfortunately, I can't speak to that, because it's not really in my wheelhouse. But, I can say that all relevant personnel have been working super hard on this since HQ's power came back on (at the latest), and continue to do so.
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The last couple days have been pretty bonkers.
/shrug... Shit Happens. Part of daily life. No control over the weathers. Stop being babies.
Skritt happens, indeed.
Oh hey, it's me.
I thought I'd just float on over to check out the party. I was like, 'Water you all doing, this craft seems overcapacity.' Then everyone just went Hamm! The hype seemed through the rafters.
*No devs were drowned in the making of this raft party.
So good. I have a new wallpaper.
The thing is people will always cheat, especially when it's for titles only a handful of players will get, and if your not gonna police the game mode then you shouldn't have limited titles and go back to how it was in season 1-4. Also there's no way to really report cheaters as the right click report function is quite useless outside of reporting gold sellers.
If you're in a PvP match, there are options for idle player and match manipulation. These were added not too long ago.
Evan Lesh ignored and denied it, and other season issues, until the last week of the Season. People told him week 1.
I'm glad they finally listened...but holy kitten did it take so long. Terrible turn around if this is going to be the practice for PvP development going forward.
Taking action against individual accounts is always a last resort. We absolutely have taken feedback into consideration and have built two systems during this season that will help prevent abuse in the future. The minimum games feature we even pushed early in a hotfix to remove some of the accounts from the leaderboard.
Evan, you write in the linked post:
I just checked and it takes on average 43 (+/- 10) games to hit minimum deviation.
Do you have any plans to allow deviation to increase again based on win/loss streaks in the next season? It doesn't feel like the system currently does that, and only shrinks the more you play.
The only plans for deviation at the moment are to prevent it from increasing over time.
The configuration seems to indicate the off-season ranked will be queue sizes of 1-5. IMO, these should be kept the same as the current ranked queue sizes, as 1-5 will most definitely result in a lot of premade teams steamrolling solo/duos, as it happens in unranked (which isn't fun to deal with), and doesn't contribute much to learning map rotations when you're constantly being steamrolled.
Will our visible skill rating continue to change off-season? Will Season 6's soft reset be based on that? Or will it be based on the rating we reached at the end of Season 5?
Off-season has it's own rating and the season 6 soft reset will be based on season 5 rating, not off-season like before.
One additional scoring parameter includes a bonus for balancing profession counts.
if team.count(profression) < otherTeam.count(profession):
score += config.professions.matching
You say you're balancing profession counts, but this pseudocode says that teams with different profession counts are better. So, if team A has N guardians and B has N-1 (or N-2...), that lineup is favored. Whereas if team A and team B each have 1 guardian, that lineup is not favored.
Seems to me that what you want instead is
if team.count(profression) == otherTeam.count(profession):
Edit: That code i linked is from the last 5 lines of the new pseudocode
That code is within a loop iteration where the potential roster has some number of the considered profession. If the roster is chosen, the end profession count for target team would be team.count(profession) + roster.count(profession). If the target team has less than the other team, then adding some number of matching professions would be favorable.
Looking at the pseudo code it seems the old matchmaking just put players on the team which had less people to make it a 5 person team ASAP and only considered the team rating rather than look at the ratings in detail for the matchup. The new one seems to look at the ratings of the entire matchup and tries to assign potentially fairer teams.
I know one thing they said they'd fix was the bug where teams were pre-rolled so if someone didn't accept, they just kept giving the team random players which meant the matchmaking was more and more skewed the more people didn't accept the queue pop.
You are correct on both points. It's as bad as it can look because the potentials list was already filtered on rating. The problem comes during off hours when the rating spread gets larger. Then the way that players are balanced onto teams matters a great deal more.
The substitution problem will be fixed at the same time for both the old and new matchmaker. I left substitutes out of the pseudo code to keep it simple.
Will the same algorithm be used for ranked queues in the future? Because it seems to me like a lot of irrelevant factors are taken into consideration to score rosters.
Assuming the matchmaker performs better (which it entirely should), it would be enabled for all queues.
As per this comment by Evan. Not explained in-thread precisely what changes are and sadly pseudo-code hurts my head.
This is a little snippet on the wiki that explains the main differences:
A new matchmaker has been written to solve some of the failings of the previous while maintaining a similar flow. This new matcher will score rosters against both teams and the entire match instead of only considering alternating target teams. This is most notable when scoring ratings as a roster's fit is based on how it will balance team ratings instead of just how close it is to the target team's rating. One additional scoring parameter includes a bonus for balancing profession counts.
Thanks for your post! I'll pass it along to the relevant people.
Wing 1 went live when I was in Thailand.
Wing 2 went live when I was in stuck in an English airport.
Wing 3 went live while I driving cross country and in the middle of the Arizona desert.
This time, I'm going to be in Mexico.
...Someday, there'll be a raid launch when I'm actually within range of my desktop...
Hey Cuedon, we're planning some upcoming releases, and it would really help to know the next time you'll be out of the country.
If I was to buy the Heart of Thorns Deluxe edition do I need to have the base GW2 game or does this include it?
HoT includes the base game.
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