Report AFK (for SPvP) and 5v5 brackets
I…I don’t understand at all what the content of your post has to do with the title.
Or why you’d even need to report someone as AFK in a tourny game considering you should be communicating with them enough to know they’re there anyways. It isn’t like you accidentally take a bot into a tourny. Unless I’m missing something?
Being able to report people AFK in SPvP, not TPvP. The types that just hang out in your base for 5 minutes. The games are short, so it’s very detrimental to have someone AFK on your team.
I am strongly on board with the smaller brackets for sPvP for the next reasons:
1) The tournaments are always played in teams of 5 players. Why adjust your playstyle to 8v8 games, when all the “real” games are played in smaller teams? Current sPvP matches and tournament matches are completely different from specs to traits and team dynamics. Practicing in 8v8 feels almost pointless when the dynamics are so different from tournament games.
2) 8v8, as Jerzor said, is way too zergy. Some professions are hit by this harder than others. Because of this you’re often forced to use amulets, runes, weapons and utility skills that give you more survivability, which alienates you even more from the 5v5 “correct” mechanics of the sPvP (check point 1).
3) 8v8 is very offputting for newer players. The combat situations often tend to be 1v2 or even 2v3 and there’s combat behind every corner. This is rarer, of course, when there are less people on the map. In 8v8 games is very hard to actually make sense of what’s really going on in the battlefield and also your actions don’t seem as rewarding. It is hard to see the difference you are making playing in these huge match ups and this really ruins the motivation to play.
4) Some maps don’t support 16 players that well. For instance the trebuchet in Kyhlo can easily get very irritating, when 1 player only spams it and two more defend it. This issue too wouldn’t get out of hand in 5v5 tourny-like play.
5) The community has already adapted “roles” in their tournament teams. Roles such as roamer, bunkerer and suicide node assaulter come to mind. For instance defending a node in tournament play is absolutely essential and meaningful, because you are almost never attacked by more than 2 players at a time. In hot join sPvP defending is less meaningful because it doesn’t matter if you defend or not; the 4-5 player zerg is eventually going to hit your node and you simply can’t defend against a mass like that.
People know this and the masses start to whirl around and around the map just capping the nodes on a pointless zerg fest.
Also implementing some sort of rated solo que for 5v5 sPvP would be amazing. People would actually play to get better and not just fool around pointlessly. What I’ve noticed from the current hot join games is, that the players don’t really even care bout the nodes, since there is nothing to lose.
This very morning I read a blog post about ArenaNET wanting to make GW2 a noteworthy e-sports game (don’t hate me for using the term – I don’t like it either :-)).
How is this going to happen, if a huge part of the pvp community isn’t even participating in the same PvP format than the more competitive one? For instance a game of DotA is always a game of DotA for casual players and pro players alike, and every DotA player can spectate world class teams fighting each other and relate, enjoy and get excited about the match. In the case that spectator mode is implemented: Why would a casual 8v8 hotjoin player care about a finale tournament match taking place, when he doesn’t have the option to play the game mode himself? Feels a little silly to me.
Long post. And it’s very, very late. Sorry for the typos and inconsistencies.