Grumbles about GvG matching system

OK, last night my guild fought a total of 6 battles. We won two, we lost four (not a good night for us). Over the course of the evening our rank oscillated wildly from 740 to over 2,000. The four matches we lost were ALL to top 500 guilds (two were top 200).

I suspect that, in a perfect world, my guild would belong somewhere low on the ladder, the 800s or 900s maybe. That's based just on a gut feeling on the matches we've faced, though, since almost every night we play we wind up facing far more top guilds than lower-ranked guilds, and they keep smacking us down.

I'm not whining about that: they're better players and deserved to win. What I AM whining about is why do we keep going up against them, far more often than we go against guilds of a similar rank to ours?

Rabble Rabble!

Lower ranked guilds play less frequently, while top ranked guilds play more? Thus when it tries to find a match it is most often a higher ranked guild? Just a theory.

lol i dont mind it too much. My only GvG so far, we played rank 67 guild. We were about 1004 And we did manage to make it last 15 mins!

I wouldn't always wanna end up like that though. Might be nice if you have the option when you arrange a GvG to either "quick battle" (i.e. battle anyone) or "optimum battle" (i.e. choose guilds within, say, 200 ranks of you either way). That way you'd still have a good chance of getting someone (399 other guilds to potentially be trying a gvg) but could still go against the better guilds when you wanted.

It already tries to locate a guild that's close in rating to your own first. If it can't find one within a certain time then it broadens the search.

True, but a slider marked at one end with "Take your time, I want a good match" and at the other end with "Hurry up, I want to PLAAAAYYYYYY!" would allow you to set the priority somewhat.

I think Epinephrine hit the mark. The system can't match you with a similarly ranked guild if none are playing. But hey... think of it as an opportunity to improve your play. I know, easy for me to say. I wouldn't like getting creamed by top guilds all the time either. :P

We faced BR (Black Rose Gaming, rank 9) before reset and made the match last 20 minutes vs their top 10 build, they were even dying at the start. But that was off-topic. Maybe it is because of the ladder reset. You can see that there aren't many guilds playing GVG at the moment (check ladder).

There simply aren't enough teams playing.

We generally go against about half top 100 teams and half just scrub stomps that last <10 minutes. I really don't like facing the bad teams because they lose too fast to effectively see why we are beating them so badly (who knows if they'd learn anything from that anyway) and getting pushed back to your guild lord in two minutes has got to be frusterating on morale. Unfortunately we don't have much we can do about it.

Last night we played about 85% upper tier teams and only smashed scrubs once. Other nights it has been the other way around. If we have more teams on both levels playing, this won't be happening. Sadly, that's not the case.

Competitive GvGing is difficult in a game like this, as common guilds (those "join now! we have hall and capes!" ones) get raped so quickly that no one wants to bother, and guilds that actually want to GvG usually are either very small and don't have the players for it all the time, or they just don't play often enough to be competitive.

Speaking as a scrub from the other side of the boot, it is indeed frustrating and troubling to guild morale. It helps matters when the stompers are polite and funny, and some of them even give us tips as they're creaming us. Others, who laugh and insult us, are...worse.

We're not morons, we do usually win against anyone off the ladder, and when we do we take the lessons we've learned from our own losses to be friendly and offer advice to the teams we're beating. It can only help in the long run, if it encourages them to keep playing and not give up in frustration.

But I know that we, for one, would dearly love the slider idea that would help ensure a closer match. I find I learn a lot more from drawn-out, evenly-matched battles than I do from stomps, no matter which side I'm on.

I really think it should take longer trying to find a team near your rank. I play in a top 100 guild and we spend over half of the night smashing guilds which is pointless for both sides. For the last couple weeks we have been trying new builds and fixing them up. It normally takes a good opponent to expose the problems with the build.

One tip for the lower ranked teams is try to play a more defensive build. Work on getting 3 monks that work well together and add in a 4th or even 5th character to help slow down the opponents damage. Therefore, the fight will be slower giving you a chance to see whats going on and what needs to be done to play better. Once you find yourself getting locked in stalemates you can try to slowly remove defense out.

Here's the solution to getting a match against a guild that is closer to your current rank, now it's going to cause you to wait longer for a match but it sounds like that's what you want to do. If you cancel the search for a worthy opponent before it gets to the time when it expands the search criteria(2:00 minute mark) and start over it will always only search for a guild within +/-100(200) of your guilds rank.

I was in a PUG that ended up matching against a top 200 guild in tombs this evening. We waited over 2 mins for GW to match us up with somebody. So yeah, I think it's more a matter of which groups are participating at the moment, more than anything else.

I agree with Epi.
It would seem to be that case. I've heard a lot of people grumbling and grrring about GvG match-ups. Maybe you should send a letter to Anet.

PS: Grats on Guild of the Week Epinephrine

Near as I can tell from what Anet has said about feature requests, that's exactly what I'm doing.

Amused, tombs doesnt group by rank/skill/type of group at all...

and as far as facing the better guilds, when you have no hope, as said, cancel restart at 2 minutes.

Tonight we lost all our matches because it was top teams every time! Its becoming no fun for guilds who know what they're doing and are decent players but are not hardcore pvpers. We're not the clueless first timers, we have quite a bit of practice, but its no fun getting stomped by top teams every battle!!

This new matching system is terrible. My guild is off the ladder, and for the past couple weeks, every guild battle we fight is against a ladder team, not just a ladder team, but under rank 100 teams. This is crazy, it doesnt give us a chance to improve, and doesnt give the high ranks a good challenge.

We never wait more than a minute, before we are thrown in with rank <100 guilds.

Wouldnt it be better with the old system, you may wait a few minutes and get paired with a guild your level, and have a fun match, or get thrown in to an un-winnable fight and WASTE MORE TIME than you would if you just waited in the old system.

and it was changed because people complained about waiting too long???? I'd rather wait 3 minutes and have a fair fight, than wait 30 seconds and then waste 10-15 minutes in a futile frustrating match, that will turn casual PvPers away from PvP altogether.

Something needs to be done ASAP

OK, this is getting ridiculous.

Tonight we played four matches. Four brutal losses. All four teams were ladder ranked, top 500 guilds. When we started our rank was 2,000-something. By the last match, it was 4,100, and we went up against a rank 69 team. We never waited longer than a minute for a match, most of them were instant.

Anet, if you're listening: you've really messed this one up. Our guild is pissed and disheartened, and fewer people are showing up to GvG nights - why should they spend their evening getting their asses whupped time and time again? It's getting more and more rare to fight a non-ladder guild the lower our ranking gets, and that seems outrageous.

It was better before they changed the matching system. Our guild was slowly improving, gradually working its way up the ladder, until we finally found ourselves in the top 1000 just before PvPx - then everything fell apart.

Anet, you're driving us away from PvP. And, since PvE in this game is relatively short until the next chapter, you're driving us away from the game - after you've ascended 3 characters, there's nothing to DO except PvP. You're losing us, and we can't be the only ones. Fix it.

Edit:
lol. I told my guildmates to bring their complaints to the forums - looks like they did!

In other words:

"OMG SOMEONE BESTED US! THIS SUCKS! WE WANT TO BE MATCHED WITH LOWER SKILLED PEOPLE BECAUSE IT'S FUN PWNING NOOBS"

The people on the ladder are there because they enjoy GvG and play regularly. The people not on the ladder usually don't play regularly and are less skilled. With the old system, the people higher on the ladder barely got regular matches, there was something like 1-2 battles happenning per session, if that. Great competition there.

Basically, yes. Many someones bested us, and it sucked. That's exactly what I'm saying. We're not asking to "pwn noobs," but just to fight against people of remotely similar abilities to ours - is that too much to ask? Are you saying there's no room in GW for beginners, only for the hardcore elite?

And if there are so many top-ranked guilds fighting GvG, as you say and as I see when I play, then why aren't they playing EACH OTHER, instead of US? Were we the only non-ladder team playing GvG in America tonight?

I know we're not the only ones unhappy with the system, and not just from this side of the equation. Some of the guilds that have beaten us have encouraged us to start threads just like this one to bring the problem to Anet's attention - they'd rather be playing other top guilds than fighting us, since the rewards are greater both in terms of rank and in satisfaction.

So if both the top guilds and the lower-ranked guilds are unhappy with the system, where does that leave us?

Talk about not trying to understand the problem or the fact that we are tiered of playing top end team while we are no where near those guilds. Not only it doesn't have anything to do with pwning anyone, as for playing for fun yea we are trying, but let me ask one thing.

You play lets say tennis for arguments sake here, you are an average amateur player, you join a league where you are told will be matched against players of your calibre in order to make it FUN, a month later you realize you played 90% of your matches against pro players and got pwned as you say almost every match.

Will you still think it's fun, does it really give you the opportunity to get better when you can't even return a service?.... please I think in the end you like pwning noobs as you say.

We are not complaining of a few mismatches, but that most our battles in that last two weeks have been mismatched and here is the break down encase you still don't get it.

Guilds played in the last two weeks:

Ugly Ducklings - rank 192 - lost
Negative Zero - rank 7 (were 42 when we played) - lost
Shameful Spirits - rank 195 - lost
Knights of the High - Rank in the 2000 - won
Happy Hellion Netwo - unranked - won
Lan Tron - rank around 1400 - won
Veiled Kindred - rank 344 - lost
Earth above us - rank 1100 - won
Guided by voices - rank 745 - won
Rage Quit - rank 118 - lost
GWonline - rank 231 - lost
Moa Birds - rank 71 - lost
Drak Romains of Hat - rank 461 - lost
Vendictive Fear - rank 306 - lost
Savior of Souls - rank 46 - lost

Can you can see a pattern here, considering we only briefly made it to a little over 700 and that was right after beating Guided by voices, after that we slipped back to 1 900 before we even played the last five matches.

Not only will this problem make many lower calibre guilds step away from gvg and if your honest you will also admit that this is taking away the legitimacy of the ladder. As it stands many top guilds are also complaining of those mismatches and in the end it becomes a game of which guild has more time to camp the hall and beat up on noobs.

Just look at the ladder and you can already see it affected, you have guilds in the top 20 who have played almost a hundred matches more than others, yet have just a few points over a guild right under then on the ladder with less then half the matches. Considering that they probably faced lower end teams in most the matches. You can figure out that they have around 80 to 120 points of rating (if not more) that they got from beating those unranked guilds is that really the ladder you want?

Anet needs to do something about this and soon.

Unik

It is a simple issue of timing. If there are no compareable guild doing GvG at that moment the server needs to expand its potential oppenent list - aka much higher or lower than your rank.

Second, even if there are people playing around your rank, they may already entered the battle or not ready yet.

To ensure yourself competative battles *most* of the time is to

1. Play during peak hours. Stop playing late at night. Only hardcore elite and new to GW play at this time. Neither of which you will want. Friday evenings and weekend afternoons ensure you have a larger pool to play.

2. When 'Waiting for a Worthy oppenent' count 30 seconds or less and cancel. Keep doing this until you get an oppenent arrangement in less than 30 seconds.
It is better to wait than force the issue. You would wait 15 minutes until your monk is ready to fight, I suggest doing the same about 'Worthy Opponent' to protect you rank.


FOR ANET

ADD THE UNRANKED RANDOM BATTLES PLEASE!!!!

People can smash their heads against each other without the fear of rank destruction.

Its that simple. Look at Starcraft.

I don't see anyone here asking to "pwn noobs". All we are asking for is a system of fairness, where guilds battle guilds of closer rank. It would make for more interesting and competitive battles for all.

I do agree with your observations to why we always get matched up with guilds that aren’t even close to our rank, that I have no problem with.

As for your playing hour’s solution, our guild is mostly made of people from the west coast time zone, so playing earlier is somewhat not an option, as for weekends well it doesn’t seem to suit the guild either.

My point is simply that Anet cannot expect to have casual players, turn around and change their RL schedules around in order to be able to gvg in a game, simply doesn’t make sense.

Regarding the cancelling trick, well you may be surprised on that one, but we did do that cancelling thing for at least two nights and ended up sitting in the hall for 30 minutes for battles that way, look how it worked well for us…

Even if it would have worked, doesn’t just this bring us back to the old matching system where top end guilds complained of waiting for ever for a match and why they changed the matching system? I mean basically this just transfers the wait on casual players, but now even worst doesn’t even guarantee us that we will face a guild remotely close to our rank.

At least with the prior system all guilds faced the same potential waiting time and the same hope of facing a truly *worthy opponent*.

I do agree that unranked random battles would help, but this would be a nice addition, not a solution.

Maybe they can come up with something to fix this, but for now I can only think that instead of changing the matching system in order to shorten the waiting time, Anet should have concentrated in doing a better job promoting the pvp game. Wetter by pure promotion or by game updates, anything to attract more guilds, because in the end wasn’t that the real problem.

Instead they decided that they would take the guilds they had. Hey! They are already waiting right?... and match them up together at the expense of unbalanced matches, the equivalent of a band aid on a broken leg if you ask me.

What I’d like to know is if the top guilds are as tired of fighting 2-3k ranked guilds for a +1 rating point as we are of fighting matches that at best can offer us a very slim chance that we won’t get run over in just a few minutes?

As things stand, I would suggest all guilds out there that are facing the same constant problem as we are to simply leave the fight as it starts, not going to change the outcome anyhow and pretty much does the same to the ladder legitimacy.

If we all start doing that on a regular basis Anet will have to react, at least I would think or hope, if not good news for those top 100-200 guilds that have time play a lot of battles.

Unik

You all seem to take notice of your own rank and the rank of the opposing team. But these two numbers doesn't have anything directly to do about if you get matched against eachother. It's purely based on your rating, nothing else. Since this is still the beginning of the ladder season and everyones rating is still close to 1000, low and high ranked teams get matched together more easely. Later in the season it will get more and more difficult to find opponents, but they will be closer to your own rank.

If you compare the ladder now with the ladder as it ended last season, you will notice that now only 6 teams has above 1500 rating, last season it was 100.

I am not saying it works fine the way it works now, just saying that it should get better along the way. Furthermore, since matches are so fast, and there is no downtime between them, you should be able to find some good matches from time to time.

I've learned what it means when people say the system matches by RATING, and not by RANK. In the first two minutes of "worthy opponent," it looks for someone with +/- 200 RATING points of you. Rank is irrelevant. After that, it expands the search in both directions. Quitting the search at :30 and at 1:59 makes no difference in who it's looking for.

Not that it makes much difference anyway. I went back and looked over our last 10 matches, of which 8 were against top 500 guilds - the other two were against unrated first-timers. In each case, yes, the opposing guild was within 200 rating points of us.

But what the heck kind of system is it when a guild of rank 4,100 is considered "on par" with a guild of rank 64? That means, according to MY understanding of the system, that over 4,000 guilds are within 200 points of each other in terms of rating. Helluva spread.

If this is a result of the ladder reset combined with the change in the matching system, I'm sure there are many guilds having the same experience as mine, and I'm sure most of them don't have thick enough skins to keep coming back and getting stomped time and time again. They probably have stopped playing, which only makes it more likely, the next time we play, that we'll again be matched against a top guild. Enough brutal losses in a row, and I'm sure our morale will sink to a point where not enough will show up on GvG nights to make a team, and we'll have to join those who have also given up.

I call it a shame.

Edit: Jak o beat me to the punch. Sorry for redundancy.

i have had the complete opposite problem. when we started gvging again after the reset, we faced nothing but guilds with ratings of under 1100. for our first 15 matches this was the case and those games were just sooooo boring. so yes unik, the answer is yes, we are incredibly tired of facing low ranked guilds and getting only +1 rating from them. all of my guildies were groaning and there was no point to the games because we really didnt get much rating from them. they were just kind of wastes of time for too little rating. it truly is annoying and some of our members even apologize to these lower ranked guilds because we do understand that it really isnt fair.

Yesterday we spent about 20 minutes getting a group Togheter.
Spent another 40 Minutes looking for battle
and what do we get after 40 minutes?

http://img467.imageshack.us/my.php?image=asfd4qf.jpg

us vs some no name rank 700 guild.
match takes 10 minutes.
we get +2?
enter mission
awaiting worthy opponent
wait a little over an hour
who do we get?
some unranked team that we roll.
then we get pissed for the night gaining a total rating change of
+3!



so my point is
basically theres like no guilds gvging at peak times.
so and considering how close the ladder spread i mean rank 50 is 1260 rating? so a guild in their first gvg could be facing a rank 50 team.
but as the season continues that spread will grow and soon things will even out.

trust me its not fun waiting 40 minutes then afcing some horrible team you roll in 5 minutes. its a waste of time for both sides.
But before you start whining about how unfair matches are, you have to realize teams wait 40-50 minutes a match then face your guild probably dont want to be there either.

Yea I agree with most of your logic and would have to say that the spread between top end and unranked guilds should be a lot bigger. Yes the qualifying season started recently, but honestly enough matches have been played now and this situation should have stoped a while back.

As for, *before you start whinning about how unfair matches are...*

Well I would suggest that if you find these matches ridiculous also, you should maybe complain about it also instead of telling someone who is not to because it's like that for both sides.

Really what's your argument here?

Unik

Thanks for expressing your side of the coin, banishd. I think it helps, both to let us know what it's like on the other side of the flag stand, and to let Anet know there's an issue. Assuming they're reading this (anyone else feel like this support system is like shouting into the void?)

Both sides are clearly unhappy with the situation, and it seems the biggest problem to all of it is that there are not enough guilds GvG'ing at the moment. I'd be very curious to see the stats. But the bottom line is that if a thing isn't fun, people won't do it - and currently, GvG is not much fun for anybody, so fewer and fewer people are doing it. Without more participation, the ladder won't spread out, and it looks like the whole thing will just stagnate.

I don't know the solution. I think the whole "guesting" system they introduced was to make it easier for guilds to get teams together to GvG, but that hasn't fixed much, it seems. Maybe guild alliances would change things, mix it up and make it easier for folks to play together.

But with very little in the way of incentives and a whole lot in the way of obstacles, I don't see this problem going away anytime soon.

'Guild Wars' is the name of the game and one would assume that GvG would be the pinnacle of the PvP side of things. However, my own (limited!) experience of GvG led me to appreciate the yawning gulf between the good teams and the bad ones. (http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...ad.php?t=66425 if you want to know how NOT to GvG!).

One area of that thread that was not heavily discussed has been addressed here - how the teams are matched up. It certainly does seem that there are a limited number of guilds taking part in GvG, much less than I would have imagined. I see a number of reasons for this, one of which is the minimal requirements needed to start a guild. There must be a *huge* number of very small guilds who do not have sufficient members to participate in GvG, even if they were all on together. God knows, my own guild struggles to get 8 on a time who are willing to spend a couple of hours being wiped out by top 100 teams.

As I see it ( trollers, flamers and nasty people in general - this is my personal opinion) there are a number of options that could be taken to improve the situation.

a) Increase the requirements needed to make a guild in the first place. Fewer guilds should equal an increase in the number of members per guild, and who know - maybe more available to GvG.

b) Reduce the number of players in a team. Yes, your team can be 50% henchmen as it stands, but surely the idea is to fight real people? Why require teams of 8? Why not 6?

c) Introduce a league system rather than a ranking system. Division 1 guilds would not then play against people like me, to the benefit of both. Yes, it would take longer to match teams, and maybe sometimes there would be no suitable opposition but when there was, it would be much more interesting. I have no idea how many divisions would be required as I have no idea how many guilds actually play GvG, but lets take a stab at it. Four?

Division 1 - Master
Division 2 - Expert
Division 3 - Seasoned
Division 4 - Novice

Under normal circumstances guilds would play someone in their own division and maybe have promotion/demotion done on a monthly basis? Who knows, you could even have something similar to Cup events, where entrants would be matched on a random basis for those who want to try their hand at taking down the better teams.

Whatever action Anet take, I personally feel that as it stands GvG has a very limited appeal due to all the reasons posted above. Which is a pity, as 'Guild Wars' would imply that it is for everyone.

I've read this thread with interest. Before the reset we were 1088 for our rating, and rank was ~1700, then slowly slipped to close to 2000. That's because we didn't play for a few weeks with having troubles getting enough players on at any one time. We had even won the last 7 of 8. We felt we were gaining momentum.

However, since the reset the few times we did play, we were absolutely humiliated. The teams were FAR better than what we had been playing before.

I hope that this evens out, because it is not worth playing if one is going against the real uber teams.

We did learn a few things though, so it wasn't all lost. We learned a bit on how these good teams shut down our spells. They were awesome.

In all honesty, I love the spell status bar when playing PvE, but on PvP, they were able to shut down every spell my elementalist tried to cast save a few. And this was done while I was not even in their line of sight. I do think it a bit unfair that people behind a stone wall should know what I'm doing, but oh well.... I gotta deal with it, lol

You seem to miss the point that it is the beginning of the ladder season. The Guild System needs time to settle down. Ranked teams won't start being paired against team of equal skill-level till the Guild Ladder settles down, and this could take as much as 2 more weeks.. Give it time, and it will work out.

An update from the originator of the complaint, who now feels somewhat sheepish:

Tonight between 7 and 10 PST we fought four battles, to four consecutive victories. Two of them were flawless. The first three matches were to guilds of rank ~4,000, and were easy victories. The fourth was to a guild of rank ~250, and we were resigned to another pummeling - we actually DID win, through a combination of extreme luck and one mistake on their part - they pushed us back to the hall and stood in the courtyard taking out our defenses without leaving a man behind, and one of us snuck out and took most of them out with our treb. Even then, we didn't really deserve to win: apparently their vent server crashed shortly after the treb incident and one of their players dropped. And even THEN, it was an extremely close match that lasted nearly an hour.

(Side note: one of the nice ones on their team said they had seen this thread during the match. If you're reading this, please know that we know we didn't truly earn that victory - but we relish it nonetheless. And how do you come to have such a combination of politeness and jerkitude on one team? I would hate to play with some of your team-mates.)

So we wound up the night 21 rating points ahead of where we were before Monday's humiliating stomp-fest. I don't know why we faced the guilds we did tonight and not Monday, but I'm grateful for the way it worked out: it restored guild morale and interest in GvG. I also know that we learned far, far more and had way more fun in the hour-long match than we did in any of the previous victories, so I understand a bit of what the people in the top guilds have posted here.

Maybe it's a function of the ladder starting to even out. Maybe we were just lucky tonight and unlucky on Monday. I know we weren't alone in our experience of getting smashed that night, and I was worried that another night like that one would have eliminated sufficient interest to keep trying - it could still happen, there's no guarantee that the next few guild nights won't be filled with hopelessly lopsided matches. But to those of you going through the same thing we've been going through, I ask you to take heart and keep playing - that way, hopefully, we can still play each other in between getting stomped by the big guns.

You have to realize that even at Peak times, theres maybe 10-20 Guilds GvGing at a time.
Also You can only play the same team once every 4 matches.
So if The Ladder was Divided, it would make the waiting game even longer.
I mean already, we're waiting 30-40 minutes for a match, Get rid of the Lower Calibur Guilds and what , 1-2 hour waits for matches??
I honestly think that its fine how it is, except for a few things on matching, but honestly i can say that while it might not be fun for a rank 900 team to face a top 10 team, It is good for the rakn 900 team because even if you do get massacred, You can watch their players and skills and poisitioning and see why they are so succesful, and that will lead to you being a better player.

man, if there was unranked random gvg, when you actually got up the sauce to go ladder you would get owned so hard you would cry.

After starting this whole thread, I've learned a lot about how the system works and have come to forgive it somewhat, and understand the troubles the top guilds have with waiting forever for matches. If there were to be divisions, I'd say only have two and have one of them be for the first 3 or 4 games a guild ever plays, so they can get their feet wet, and for guilds with very, very low rankings (say, after 4,000 you just stop HAVING rank?).

Primarily, though, I still think that at the top of the ladder season the algorithm should start with a smaller window than +/- 200 rating, and move to incrementally larger windows every 30 seconds or so, to help ensure that even in a young ladder, guilds of roughly equivalent rating are more likely to be matched up.

It would also work better if there were more guilds playing, certainly, so I think it's in Anet's interest (as far as GvG is concerned) to add some incentives to make people want to play (I mean, we don't even get any sort of fame for GvG - what's that about?) and remove some obstacles (ie, guild alliances to make it easier for small guilds to get enough people together to make a team).

Thanks again to everyone who has provided the thoughtful posts that have helped me understand how this thing works. It helps ease the frustration.

You are in a competition pool. You have to face good guilds at some point. Might as well try and find ways to beat them now because you will have to at some point if you want to be #1. The road to the top goes through them.

If you want to be good at pvp you can't keep facing people equal to your ability. You have to face those better then you so you can learn. You get no lesson from teams that are your equal.

I know what you're saying, but I would debate this. If the other team were EXACTLY like us, then sure, we wouldn't learn anything, but when we say "our equal" we mean of roughly equivalent skill, but surely they would bring different skills and techniques to the table, and it would be our challenge to decipher them and counter them. Really good teams can do this almost instantly, but it takes practice.

It's a balancing act between learning and keeping up morale. If we face nothing but humiliating matches, we TRY to keep the "learning" hat on and see what they're doing so we can try it ourselves, but sometimes the matches go by so fast it's tough, and although we understand the predicament it is difficult to keep the guild from getting depressed on a losing streak.

We've fought dozens of matches on this ladder and the last, and I can speak for the whole guild when I say that win or lose, by far the most satisfying and productive matches were ones where we were roughly of the same skill level as our opponent. It is those games we look for, and it is those games where we grow the most: they are long, challenging and amazingly fun.