Big Changes Coming to WvW Matchups

Basically, when you have a ladder for any kind of competition, all of the matchups don’t normally happen at the exact same time. You also normally have a pretty big group of entries in the ladder to choose from, which means that you’re matched with the closest opponent at the time the matchup is created. In the case of WvW, there are only 24 servers and the matchups all occur at the same time. To counter this, we’re going to partially randomize server matchups, with the exception being we won’t match servers against other servers whose rating falls outside of an acceptable range. This range will be determined by using your world’s rating and deviation (already listed on the leaderboards).

I think the kittenumptions that everyone is making are:

1) The current ratings of servers are valid. They are not because we are not getting enough varied match-ups to even generate valid data. Trying to judge the quality of a server based on their current rating is much like judging the quality of people’s Reddit posts by the average # of up-votes they get.

2) How big a spread will make a game a blowout? Is 400 rating points even a significant difference? Really its just a number with very little meaning right now. Once this system starts working (based on the math of the system the idea is that a rating +/- deviation is in fact an accurate measurement of the range of what their rating might be in a perfect world so this is technically the way this whole thing was supposed to work from the get go.

I don’t want to do all of the probability math right now, but with absurdly high certainty there will only be a small amount of randomization each week as in order for a situation like Kaineng moving up to T1 to occur, every server from Blackgate to Maguuma would have to roll a lower range number than Kaineng, and some of them would literally have to roll almost -100% while Kaineng rolls almost +100%. As the blog post stated, at the end of the day we are really just going to see a bit of nice slight subtle movement so that match-ups are less stale, and eventually ratings are more accurate.

Jon