ArenaNet:Guild Wars 2 suggestions/GvG (or general PvP?) group matching

GvG/general PvP group matching (Discussion)
I just read a complaint in a forum that Guild Wars PvP is too much elitist, i.e. you need to have a lot of experience and knowledge about the game to be able to accomplish anything in PvP. As a consequence, many people find it hard to start PvP, as they dont get into groups, preventing them from gaining the experience required.

An option to counter this would be to match teams according to their strength. In GvG this would mean matching Guilds not according to their Guild rank but on the stats of the players present in a given group. This would require keeping track of the strength of a player in some way, e.g. recording both the number of played and won GvG matches.

As a result, a GvG team with 6 players from around rank 1000 and two top50-guests would face stronger opponents than the same team with two guests who have never played gvg before. In general the system would provide a more fair matching of groups while lowering the barrier for new players to start in a specific pvp mode while lacking experience and knowledge (which usually can only be obtained by playing in that specific mode).

Guild rating gain/loss could be modified by the deviation of team strength to guild rank (which is the same as calculate the rating change based on the strength of the teams instead of the guild ratings). A guild with a team consisting of the same 8 players every time would have its guild rank equal to their average strength and would gain the normal ELO-based rating change. However, if 8 top10-players form a new guild (starting with rating 1000) the system would try to match them with another top10-team, and rating change would be if both teams would play in their original guilds, i.e. the smurf guild would not gain the high rating change it gets now because of the rating difference of the guilds, but only the small amound based on the average-player-rating).

If the same smurf guild with top10-players would play against a guild with the same rating, however truly consisting of players who never played gvg before, the smurf guild wouldnt gain any rating at their (most likely) win against the completly unexperienced team), however the unexperienced guild would get a large rating boost.


 * Why this is a good idea
 * Matches teams with same player strength
 * Would counter the common problem of players wanting to start Pvp, but are not able to get into groups because of their lack of experience
 * Reduces smurfing
 * Allows guilds to play GvG with teams of different strength and to "educate" unexperienced players


 * Why it may not work out
 * Smurfing with different accounts may counter this
 * Requires a sufficient number of active Pvp teams to work
 * Smurfing, and then intentionally losing would allow one to have whatever stats one wanted.