Holinka Weighs In On Matchmaking Woes
by JR Cook - 10 years ago show comments
PVP Designer Brian “Don’t Ask Me When S15 Ends” Holinka took to Twitter to explain the current weirdness taking place with PVP matchmaking in WoW. Mainly, it took the form of this brief review of how ratings work:
https://twitter.com/holinka/status/450054551278600192
https://twitter.com/holinka/status/450054984600526848
https://twitter.com/holinka/status/450055362733801472
https://twitter.com/holinka/status/450055648219103232
https://twitter.com/holinka/status/450055896996253696
https://twitter.com/holinka/status/450056271547219968
For context, note CM Daxxari’s post on the forums yesterday:
We recently implemented a hotfix to address a bug that allowed Personal Ratings to exceed Matchmaking Rating. As a result, some players may notice that they do not gain or lose Personal Rating in the wake of a match. As more matches are played, these ratings will normalize and converge to the correct rating, and Personal Rating will then rise or drop accordingly.
In the meantime, we will continue to monitor the situation and make further adjustments if necessary.
The outcry from the PVP community seems to be taking a couple different forms: you have folks complaining that winning games now isn’t improving their rating (because their PR/Current Rating was artificially inflated by the bug in 5.4.7, and since the hotfix, they’re getting no visible rating increase), while you’ve also got folks saying that the ladders should flat-out be reset in order to level the playing field once again.
Suffice it to say that no solution is really perfect: resetting the ladders, even when S15 is still pretty new, has the chance of wiping progress for people who haven’t been able to acquire gear yet, while people who have been able to get the gear as a result of the bug artificially messing with their rating might have an unfair advantage during the rest of the season. However, removing S15 gear from those players feels too punishing given that they have done nothing consciously wrong. It’s a tight spot.
While the hotfix seems to have mitigated the problem of Current Ratings getting out of control, it’s not clear if Blizzard is going to take any kind of more drastic solution, up to and including a ladder reset. Watch this space.
