Guild Wars 2

This has got to be the most kittened mechanic. You start a match, play your guts out beat the other side..they rage quit and then you get thrown on the other side.
This just leads to me rage quitting and letting someone else feel just as good as i did.
Just let the match finish.
Every time i get auto balance, i just find another game.
Hope that works as intended.

…Hotjoin?

Remind me, does this happen in Ranked/SoloQ?

so if you’re playing 5on5 and 20 seconds into the match 3 of your guys leave… you’re totally fine with playing 2vs5 for the rest of the match?

that’s less frustrating to you then auto-balance? (which only enforces what fair minded players should be doing on their own anyway)

please move thread to rage forum

SoloQ is much better, one third of your games are 4:5 for most of their duration. ;D

Or if your loosing..you can just leave the match, wait for auto balance..then join winning side. Auto balance is Bork.

Monk Tank.5897:

This has got to be the most kittened mechanic. You start a match, play your guts out beat the other side..they rage quit and then you get thrown on the other side.
This just leads to me rage quitting and letting someone else feel just as good as i did.
Just let the match finish.
Every time i get auto balance, i just find another game.
Hope that works as intended.

Why? If you were in the winning team when autobalance changed you sides you still get points/rank/achievements as if you’ve won. When I’m in hotjoin I always choose to change sides when Autobalance kicks in, because no matter which team wins, I win. If people knew that maybe they wouldn’t rage quit once autobalance puts them on the other side and instead play…

Monk Tank.5897:

This has got to be the most kittened mechanic. You start a match, play your guts out beat the other side..they rage quit and then you get thrown on the other side.
This just leads to me rage quitting and letting someone else feel just as good as i did.
Just let the match finish.
Every time i get auto balance, i just find another game.
Hope that works as intended.

Everytime I get autobalanced, I’m super happy. Not only do I get a guaranteed win no matter what happens next in game (plus 25 progression for having autobalanced), I’m also on the side that is a lot more exciting to play on. Nothing’s more boring than zerging aorund in a group of 5, completely annihilating a group of 3 every time. So when the autobalancer is used to actually balnce the team, it’s only good stuff all around!

The thing that I find super annoying is people forcing autobalances by leaving the losing team just so they can proceed to join the winning team shortly after the forced autobalance. This just makes sure that the overstacked team stays overstacked, and defeats the purpose of the mechanism. In my opinion, this should be considered an exploit.

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

The thing that I find super annoying is people forcing autobalances by leaving the losing team just so they can proceed to join the winning team shortly after the forced autobalance. This just makes sure that the overstacked team stays overstacked, and defeats the purpose of the mechanism. In my opinion, this should be considered an exploit.

It *is* an exploit - it’s using game mechanics in an unintended way to gain something you otherwise couldn’t.

However... with the current state of hotjoin, in particular the rewards for it, there is *no point* in anyone joining the losing team partway through a match, if there’s even a small chance of getting on the winning team.

With no time-scaling (so you played for 8 minutes or whatever), winners get 500 rank points, 15s, and almost 1/5 of a track bar... while losers get 200 rank points, 10s, and a tiny sliver of track bar.

Play from the *start* of the match and you get 2/5 of 500 points.
Join partway through, and time-scaling (which is necessary to stop folks from farming by hopping to nearly-finished matches) reduces this to almost nothing - you maybe get 3-4 silver and no actual PvP progress to speak of.

It’s almost always a better strategy, if you ever want to rank up in PvP (which oddly enough some people do), to wait a minute and see if the 4v5 becomes a 3v5 and autobalance opens up a spot on the winning team. If this doesn’t happen quickly... roll to another server.

This means that 4v5s very frequently remain that way, for entire matches, dooming those people on the outnumbered team to barely any rewards for... having had quitters on their team? Having not realised that about 80% of winning hotjoin these days is making sure you join the team with the more skilled players?

Perma-4v5 is not fun to play, and people can’t really learn and improve if they’re outnumbered and getting ganked in every fight.

And in case anyone thinks that players are lucky to get *anything* from oh-so-casual hotjoin... I bet most of you are the same folks who believe (with some fair reasoning I’ll admit) that we should "ban newbies from ranked matches!"? So we should stop people without a certian rank from joining ranked play... and not let them rank up in the only area available to them. Yeah, that’s healthy for PvP.

Anyway, to the point: forcing autobalance is not the problem. It is a symptom of the problem, which is that entire matches can go by as 4v5s, and the longer they go on, the less likely another player is going to join... and the less chance there is of the team pulling it back. With 3-node 5v5 as the game mode, being outnumbered by 1 is incredibly damaging to your team’s chances.

We need to stop *this*, not punish people who don’t really enjoy getting stomped 2v1 repeatedly:

- make win/loss rewards equal, and slightly lower than current win rewards? Make it more about playing casually on a map than about which team wins - could go with like a 25 point bonus for winning or something iunno. Certainly make it better than 2/5 of win for a loss.

- stop people from choosing team. This could be done by not allowing people to join the match if they’ve spectated at all (and not letting folks see who was on which team before choosing). It could even just be done by instantly putting folks onto random teams when they clicked the ’play now’ button.

- implement some kind of autobalance or queueing system that didn’t allow teams to have uneven numbers. Game is a 5v4? Within 10s someone on the 5 gets made to sit out (probably with a volunteer option, and with all their time in this timeout counting towards rewards). They get brought back in as soon as there’s another player joining the other team. It could probably be gamed, but certainly not so much as the current mess.

Forcing autobalance feels unfair if you’ve worked hard to be winning, sure... but in most cases, you’ve kinda not. You’ve been outnumbering your foes for a significant period and their team’s not going to get anyone new to help out.

Well, if you join onto the winning team later, no, you don’t get the full 500 points. Of course it is more profitable to join the winning team, but it kind of sucks that the only strategy in hotjoin is to get an early headstart and then outnumber the other team until the end.
(That being said, every now and then I have been in balanced hotjoin matches that were head-to-head and very much fun to play. It happens – it just happens less and less as people get better at circumventing the mechanisms that were put in place to ensure balanced teams.)

- make win/loss rewards equal, and slightly lower than current win rewards? Make it more about playing casually on a map than about which team wins – could go with like a 25 point bonus for winning or something iunno. Certainly make it better than 2/5 of win for a loss.
- stop people from choosing team. This could be done by not allowing people to join the match if they’ve spectated at all (and not letting folks see who was on which team before choosing). It could even just be done by instantly putting folks onto random teams when they clicked the ’play now’ button.
- implement some kind of autobalance or queueing system that didn’t allow teams to have uneven numbers. Game is a 5v4? Within 10s someone on the 5 gets made to sit out (probably with a volunteer option, and with all their time in this timeout counting towards rewards). They get brought back in as soon as there’s another player joining the other team. It could probably be gamed, but certainly not so much as the current mess.
Forcing autobalance feels unfair if you’ve worked hard to be winning, sure… but in most cases, you’ve kinda not. You’ve been outnumbering your foes for a significant period and their team’s not going to get anyone new to help out.

Well, can’t disagree with your conclusions, there.

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

Well, if you join onto the winning team later, no, you don’t get the full 500 points. Of course it is more profitable to join the winning team, but it kind of sucks that the only strategy in hotjoin is to get an early headstart and then outnumber the other team until the end.

It’s not ‘the only strategy’, but it’s… very clear that an awful lot of people play by it. Watch teams at the start of a hotjoin match, and usually one of them will have an extra player. When someone joins the other team? Boom! Instantly, team #1 gets its extra player again. People can and do skill-stack and it’s ridiculous and stupid and terrible, for what’s meant to be casual, low-stakes, fun-introduction-to-PvP matches.

And aye you don’t get the full 500 if you join the winning team partway through… but in the time it takes to earn 50 rank points from time on a losing team, you’d’ve ‘earned’ have 125 from being on the winning team (assuming time scaling is linear; I don’t really know). It’s worth several minutes of waiting to get a spot on the winning team, rather than join the losing team, if you wish to maximise rewards.

And that’s not even taking into account that when the winning team is properly dominating, it can be pretty hard to score even that one kill or decap that’s needed to qualify for loot after the match. Huzzah.

(That being said, every now and then I have been in balanced hotjoin matches that were head-to-head and very much fun to play. It happens – it just happens less and less as people get better at circumventing the mechanisms that were put in place to ensure balanced teams.)

Oh aye it’s still definitely posible to get entire games that are at least somewhat evenly balanced skill-wise and in which one team doesn’t outnumber the other.

I wouldn’t say that people ‘circumventing the mechanisms’ is the problem, though; again, it’s a symptom of unbalanced matches, that people will so readily force autobalance when stuck on a 4v5 team.
In a match that gets 5 players on each team for the start… it’s not possible to switch teams. It’s only possible to force autobalance if already outnumbered. Since the autobalance system only kicks in when one team is ahead on numbers by 2+ players, it’s possible to play entire matches while outnumbered without it coming into effect.
This is terrible.

never understood the concept of leaving a fight even if losing.. especially when its a fight in an imaginary world for imaginary fame and imaginary loot.

What part of your Ego tells you to swap teams ?
Or is it the 5 extra copper you get for winning?

I truly don’t get it.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

never understood the concept of leaving a fight even if losing.. especially when its a fight in an imaginary world for imaginary fame and imaginary loot.

What part of your Ego tells you to swap teams ?
Or is it the 5 extra copper you get for winning?

I truly don’t get it.

Some people want their shiny loot boxes (or armor skins or whatever) as fast as possible, and/or have less time to play the game, and therefore try to maximize (reward track progress)/(time spent). I get it. (Like poster said above, sometimes when you join the losing team you will have a hard time to even cap one thing or get one kill to qualify for LOSING points at all.)

Some players just enjoy beating the hell out of others a whole lot more than being beaten bloody by the overstacked team. I get that, too.

Some people need quick wins for “Monthly PvP wins”. Some people want to max their stomping or kills achievements. Some people want rank asap because they want the Tiger finisher so badly. I get all of those.

What really should set in is an internal conflict between “I want instant gratification” and “everybody else is here to have fun, too” – a moral dilemma. What kittenes me off is that “Stop qq, it’s only hotjoin”, like it is okay in hotjoin to play in the ost selfish way, has been used to much that almost the entire community has started believing it.

And while I tried for the longest time to be fair and honorable in hotjoin and always join the understacked team, there are strings of losing one match after the other, and it gets to me. And then I think, who am I putting myself through this for? Stackers who reap reward after reward for their anti-social gaming? And sometimes I have enough and join the team that is slightly ahead in points or holds more cap points or whatever. Or mess around on farming servers – at least I don’t get in other people’s way that way. Let’s say I go through phases.