Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone, here are my proposed changes for how to fix pvp. I don’t think I will hear many disagreements from the players, but the dev team won’t like it because it basically means they’ve done everything wrong up until now.

First I want to say, I love you pvp dev team. You want this game to be good so badly, but through what I can only assume are poor decisions on your part and not enough programming muscle from the company, it’s not working out. There are probably half-finished project notes strewn about your offices for stuff like custom arenas (remember when those were priority #1?) and ladder and micro-transactions, etc etc. I have been watching since day 1, and I have said since then that what you need is: matchmaking. Now you guys are starting to do it, but the player count is so low, it has a high chance to fail (“Why do I fight high rank ppl all the time???” asks a rank 9).

I propose a drastic plan to stop the hemorrhaging player-base, and grow your mmr system so it actually works and people can start to come back.

1. Temporarily Disable Hotjoin
2. Temporarily Disable 3-Round Tournies
3. Add Real Solo-Queue Tourny System
   • Add Button on Screen When In Mists To “Join Solo Now”

Your player base is all over the place. Focus on your core. People want to play and not get stomped. Hotjoin is “OK” but it is diverting what few people you have away from where they are needed most. A solo queue can easily give what most players want: instant action. It has the added benefit of being likely to give players the game experience at their level. Newbies won’t be overwhelmed by zergs of rank 30+ thieves and eles. Ranks 30+ people will be able to play games that are challenging but not impossible to win. It should allow winners to continue playing for as long as they keep winning (perhaps cap it at 3, or 5, or 10). Sure, people can leave in the middle of the game, and that sucks for other people, but as soon as they lose they can get back in with a full team.

There is no point in having a 3 round tourny that will never pop because everyone is doing 1 round. Why on earth is it still in the game. You don’t have the player base to accommodate it. It is a cool idea, yes, but you should have it be a “special” event that people schedule time for, so that everyone is ready for it and can do it at the same time (Automated Tournies GW1).

In the future, there are other things that can help greatly. In terms of GW1, the game has taken a giant step backward wrt separate servers that splinter the pvp population. A LFG tool can help, but it is no substitute for logging into the mists to see it packed with people all looking for players to form teams. Consider that people form opinions immediately based on what they see. Little numbers in a LFG tool (which doesn’t even exist yet) can’t compare.

I repeat, you are losing players daily. Cut your loses, close the wound, and focus what players you have into a proper experience that they can tell their friends about.

Good luck.

I’m surprised I’m not getting any support from players.
I guess there are so many hot-join heroes they don’t like the idea of shutting it down.

milo.6942:

I’m surprised I’m not getting any support from players.
I guess there are so many hot-join heroes they don’t like the idea of shutting it down.

People quit after this disheartening and disappointing patch. The devs listen. Just not instantly.

But yeah, they might give in and finally implement a separate solo queue/premade queue. Based on how they finally scrapped tourney tickets (thank god) and how “fast” they test and implement stuff, I’d say give them 6 more months to do this.

yes, hotjoin needs to be replaced by a true mmr solo queue.

ideally, hotjoin is shut down permanently when replaced by solo queue & Custom Servers would then provide the functionality of persistent servers that can be integrated into the community—no more need at all for hotjoin servers.

eg. if instead of “Server #116”, you have “Faeral’s House of Waffles”, so players always know where to get some good eats. this is why TF2 pub servers work & GW2 pub servers are trash. no consistency for community action.

Milo when Anvil Rock population is dropping you know that there is a problem.
peace and love

I also agree with milo. I haven’t been playing recently, partly because my work has ramped up, but also because it felt difficult to meet people playing pvp. I did mostly hotjoin at first hoping that I’d meet people who liked my play style and vice versa, but I was naive and stubborn with this expectation.

I also really like the development team at ArenaNet, and I practically bought the game because I wanted to see them succeed. They’ve really innovated and made PvE a more social experience, at least by MMO standards. The PvP on the otherhand seems to merely rely on preexisting friendships. If I had friends that pvp’d in this game, it would be a lot more fun (stating the obvious, I know).

Currently we really need to bootstrap the pvp community, and collapsing the spvp venues into one like the milo suggests seems worth considering.

Xmilo,

Is the game losing population because of poor match making or poor combat depth? I would say the latter.

I played counter strike even though I was matched against people of a wide variety of skill levels, but I didn’t mind that at all. I played LoL and received platinum elo but I didn’t really care about being put against a strong opponent. I actually find challenge fun. And it could only be fun because the depth in combat was there.

The combat depth that GW1 had isn’t in GW2, and I see this problem has more to do with the skills. GW1 was heavily based on building synergy between skills and other things. You could perform amazing feats by doing this, such as intentionally lowering one’s maximum Health Bar to 55 Health and casting protective spirit which says one cannot take more than 10% of his/her hp in a single hit. Thus, this build only takes 5.5 damage max and can nearly instantly be healed with HP regen, and this was called the 55 monk. Although this was a PvE farm build, you get the idea of how creative you could be in GW1 and how comboing was very powerful.

GW2 doesn’t really have this. Everything that keeps building the potential to do this gets nerfed (using Spectral Armor during Death Shroud for example). Every skill feels like an independent skill rather than a dependent skill to build synergy. I feel the depth and strategy in build making isn’t there anymore. I hope GW2 decides to implement some newer skills that were similar to ones in GW1.

It’s hard to imagine this game is even GW2 successor when GW1 had a fabulous PvP aspect from the very beginning.

I agree, Milo. BOUGHT this game because it was hyped as an eSport but I see absolutely nothing that reinforces that notion. This game company clearly has its priorities on the expansion so I am giving up on sPvP for now. At least they care about the PvE side of the game. I now consider sPvP to be similar to Keg Brawl, fun but nothing to get overly invested in to.