Guild Wars 2

Hi,

after the first Test Season Feedback I released, I want to give again my feedback about this test season. Season is over and I want to say I really enjoyed this second test season, of course there are A LOT of improvements Anet can do (and we’ll talk about this), but In general I really liked this season. Some data, I played 267 games, the big majority in solo/duo. Ended in top500 with 146 pts. 154 wins, 113 Losses and Win rate of 57.68%.

A little summary of my arguments:

Ranked queue
Leaderboard
MatchMaking
Dishonor
Heart of the Mist
Rewards
Off-Season
Conclusions

Ranked Queue

The good: With only 1 queue, there is more people who join the same queue and it’s easier for matchmaking create good games (in theory)

The bad: At the same time there are solo player/duo player…full team who join the same queue, with different roster size, different skill level, different class stacking so it’s hard for the matchmaking to create balanced matches. Besides that, People with different behaviour, I mean people who normally join ranked queue with different rosters size (soloers, duo, who goes always in 3+) compete for the same leaderboard and final placement. There is no real place for a full team to have real practice because majority of times they’ll meet pug compositions and it won’t be fun for them and for the pug guys.

Suggestion: Guild leaderboard is coming so I think the best option is to create 2 (rated) queues, 1 only for full teams with Guild (=team) leaderboard and another for 1-4 roster size composition for a more “casual” experience. In this way people who hasn’t a full team can really enjoy gw2 pvp and new full teams can born.

Leaderboard

The good: Leaderboard has improved from the last leaderboard and from initial week, now you lose points many times if you don’t win so it’s a bit better than before.

The bad: it’s not enough because games played daily are always a huge variable, so it’s impossible to reach higher spots on the leaderboard if you don’t play 30/40games daily in average. Besides that, Like I said before, different roster size compete for the same leaderboard, so you have soloers who competes with half premade or full premade team and indeed if you go on 3 guys+ your win/rate is better than go solo. (basically always). 56/60 days are really too much for a single Season, probably 1 month is really better with more seasons during the year and not long off season breaks.

Suggestion: it’s not easy because it’s all linked to have only 1 ranked queue. So when you have different roster size to compete with the same leaderboard it’s really hard to find a good system. With the old mmr system + permanent decay you have people who go in 3+ with a big advantage and soloer punished, for this reason this game needs separate rated queues and a skill MMR based Leaderboard. If Anet wants to keep this system, they should introduce a CAP for total games during the Season or the competion is not fair. The introduction of leagues is really important too, in this way you can split people based on their MMR in different leagues (platinum, gold etc.) and you can have a promote system at the end of the Season and special rewards linked to every league.

Matchmaking

The good: better than the last season, I can say the majority of matches was decent but there are many exceptions. There is now a little time window where you can switch professions before the match starts, without losing automatically the match.

The bad: Many matches are imbalanced. Mainly because many times there are different roster size composition, like a premade 3+ on one side and all soloers on the other side or worst, a full premade, against all soloers/duo. It happened many time, I could predict the final match result better than odds system, only reading name players on both of sides and professions composition. Many times I scored points when I had odds not in my favour or I lost points in very equilibrated matches on paper, so I think there is some issue in team compositions and odds calculation.

Suggestion: As you see, queues, leaderboard and matchmaking are linked issues, I’d prefere 2 rated queues, in this way full team can play in their own queue and matchmaking will be helped. I’d really like a better team composition based on amulet like minimum 2 “bunker/support” amulets and the remain dps/pure condis, avoiding class stacks.

Dishonor

The good: in theory, we have (on paper) a system who punishes rage quitter and
people who leave the game. For my experience, I had really really rare 4vs5 in this Season.

The bad: this system is bugged and not active.

Suggestion: Introduce this system.

Heart of the Mist

The good: there is less chance to have a 4vs5 at beginning

The bad: This is one of the main issues of this season, probably the worst. To be stuck in the Mist during a queue time (usually 6 min+) is a terrible experience, the map is basically useless, there is nothing interesting to do or you can’t join hot join, custom arenas or other game maps. People tend to go afk during the queue time for this reason, so when you have a queue pop, can happen very often people don’t accept. For Streamers too, it’s really bad, because basically for the majority of streaming you see people stuck on the Mist doing nothing.

Suggestions: There are a lot of alternatives, you can improve HoTM with 1vs1/2vs2 Challenges for fun with a ticket system like pavillon, adding JP with check points or other interesting stuff. You can let people join from other maps, there is always a queue acceptation, you can add more time to queue acceptation (like 30 secs.) and reduce time from 2 min waiting. I think it’s really important Anet can do something in
this area with high priority.

Rewards

The good: a little better than the last season, Anet enlarged the rewards until top500 and they introduced a progression system on mini Llama.

The bad: In general, rewards are poors. There is always a Glorious Hero’s armor for top 25 and mini llama for top500. Progression system on mini llama is interesting but you need a crazy amount of llamas (27+) to get the final version and the effort to get a mini llama for 2 months season and only for few hours in a organized tournament like ESL or other stuff is not balanced.

Suggestion: It’s the same of the previous feedback, a WWW reward system with tickets at the end of the season and a merchant where you can chose from a good amount of rewards with different ticket price. With a League system you can differentiate the ticket amount for each leagues or adding exclusive rewards for each league. In general, we need more exclusive pvp rewards.

Off-Season

The good: there is a break between Seasons, where people can go ranked without any stress to gain/lose leaderboard points and can use this break to improve.

The bad: ranked queue and unranked queue are basically the same in Off Season and it’s a waste of resources, because community tend to split in unranked and ranked without any real motivation. This leaderboard in off seasons is basically useless, it doesn’t help you to understand your improvements because is only grind based so the entire ranked queue is basically the same like unranked queue

Suggestion: Anet needs to differentiate better unranked and ranked queue in off season. With 2 ranked queue (1 for full team and 1 other for 1-4 compositions) and urnaked for 1-5 compositions, they could introduce the solo queue instead of 1-4 compositions and keep 1-5 composition only for unranked. Basically unranked 1-5, ranked, solo queue and full team. It’s only an example of course, but in general we need a better motivation to join ranked in off season.

Conclusions

The future of pvp scene is really interesting, a total profession rework is coming + elite specs with HoT, a new game mode (stronghold), a new leaderboard design (devs said many time this is not the final version) and the guild leaderboard.

Stronghold will be really important, so its placement in the queues is crucial. The majority of the people don’t want Stronghold in the same Conquest queue because are really different gamemodes, require different builds and different strategy. I Agree with this, it would be a huge mistake putting Stronghold with Conquest but at the same time Anet needs to be careful to not split too much the community (we need to consider that this new game mode will attract A LOT of new/old players)

With the new professions change there will be A LOT of fix to do to create a decent balance so I hope these fix will be fast (max 1-2 months and faster for totally broken stuff) and not 6 months long, it would be really bad for the game

This should be stickied and be the central thread for discussing Season 2.

Basically I agree with everything, very good feedback.

Great Feedback!

MarkPhilips.5169:

Heart of the Mist

adding JP with check points or other interesting stuff. You can let people join from other maps,

This!

I agree with alot of what you said.
Only thing for me is,that if it’s soloQ,then it should be purely SOLOQ. No premade of 2-5 in soloQ. Like the whole name should be,what it says it is…solo queue.

So if people are in teams sitting in Heart Of The Mists,matchmaking should never put those people in same team. You could say at the very least Matchmaking could put them on opposite sides,but if it’s a team of 5,where would other 3 go.

Anet make soloQ and teamQ again…which you already had it before. And let the queues be,what they say they are. Put premade of 2+ into team queue,if that is what they want and group premade of 2 + premade of 3 against full premade or something like that.

The issues with the MMR algorithm are much deeper than they appear and need to be discussed separately in a very “MMR algorithm” specific thread.

The only issues I see as game-breaking are these two: Leagues and divisions implemented inside the kitten game (not a separate website – feels insanely cheesy) – promised like a YEAR ago and the reason BLU left the entire PvP scene and game altogether; second is – stronghold in a same que as conquest (we want to feel like stronghold is a new game mode, not just another map which it isn’t!) – requires an entirely different setup, not only build-wise but class-wise. If these two are screwed, I’ll probably leave the game.

Amazing feedback, gj

i definitely +1 the solo / team queue suggestion. if i’m queuing solo, then i should be facing solo players, not teams of 2 or more on voicecomms. it only seems fair.

as for the leader boards, again +1. they are essentially based on wins, which is a team thing. imo, there should be two different leaderboads, one for team wins / losses, and another for solo accomplishments. ie, solo points made during a match, with extra points for Top Player awards. (and probably bonus points for wins, too)

i know this is redundant for me to say, but i’d really like to be able to see my other stats outside of a match. i’d like to be able to see how many points i’ve captured, how many kills i have, which top player awards i was given, etc. (i’m almost thinking that the solo leaderboards should be based on average points per match, instead of total points per season, unless everyone plays the exact same number of matches per season)

i would also suggest that on my PvP stats page, that “favorite arena” be changed to show which arena i vote for the most, NOT which arena i get stuck on the most. i really hate that it lists Favorite Arena (map) as the arena i actually hate the most, just because i get stuck there so often.

I like all the suggestions but I really really support the heart of the mist changes, we want to be able to do something entertaining or beneficial to our player while waiting in queue!!

Excellent feedback. Pretty much agree on everything here, but especially on the rated queue. Full 5 & pug queues need to be different, with full 5 rated Q giving better slightly better rewards (or perhaps let that be the only rated queue).

Also, implement the dishonor system.

I think they should remove solo from ranked. Solo players should first get a team in spvp LFG before joining ranked. Unranked could still accept solo registers. This would force more commitment from all players from start and allow them more time to plan a strategy by playing together a number of matches. Today I have a feeling that players are training in rank, and the fact they don’t see how they are penalized encourages that. In SSFIV it hurts when you see your points taken away when loosing to a lower ranked opponent.

MarkPhilips.5169:

Heart of the Mist

The good: there is less chance to have a 4vs5 at beginning

The bad: This is one of the main issues of this season, probably the worst. To be stuck in the Mist during a queue time (usually 6 min+) is a terrible experience, the map is basically useless, there is nothing interesting to do or you can’t join hot join, custom arenas or other game maps. People tend to go afk during the queue time for this reason, so when you have a queue pop, can happen very often people don’t accept. For Streamers too, it’s really bad, because basically for the majority of streaming you see people stuck on the Mist doing nothing.

Suggestions: There are a lot of alternatives, you can improve HoTM with 1vs1/2vs2 Challenges for fun with a ticket system like pavillon, adding JP with check points or other interesting stuff. You can let people join from other maps, there is always a queue acceptation, you can add more time to queue acceptation (like 30 secs.) and reduce time from 2 min waiting. I think it’s really important Anet can do something in
this area with high priority.

I + the challenges or minigame idea. I don’t like the join from any map idea because it could increase the number of players too much and include even more casual players.

Very Very Very bad thing PVP DAILY PROFESSION WIN!
Except this everything is more or less fine !!!

Just allow people to duel in a designed area, problem solved. Improve your 1v1 skills while waiting for queue ! win/win

Marciolegal.3461:

I think they should remove solo from ranked. Solo players should first get a team in spvp LFG before joining ranked. Unranked could still accept solo registers. This would force more commitment from all players from start and allow them more time to plan a strategy by playing together a number of matches. Today I have a feeling that players are training in rank, and the fact they don’t see how they are penalized encourages that. In SSFIV it hurts when you see your points taken away when loosing to a lower ranked opponent.

Thats terrible if people were forced to join a full team or not be able to play rated most people that currently play rated solo or in less then a full group would just stop playing. You can’t “force” people to do anything.

I think Marciolegal.3461 wants to definitely kill the game lol….

Think about it… If there are so many players going solo, it wouldn’t be hard to gather in a team by looking at the LFG lists. I think it would be more fun and would reduce hate. Otherwise, if you couldn’t get a team you could always go unranked.
Really, I don’t want people looking to play “relaxed”=doesn’t matter – in my team in a ranked match. At least they should be wiling to do their best for the team, and looking for a team would be the least effort to demonstrate the person is interested.

brannigan.9831:

Marciolegal.3461:

I think they should remove solo from ranked. Solo players should first get a team in spvp LFG before joining ranked. Unranked could still accept solo registers. This would force more commitment from all players from start and allow them more time to plan a strategy by playing together a number of matches. Today I have a feeling that players are training in rank, and the fact they don’t see how they are penalized encourages that. In SSFIV it hurts when you see your points taken away when loosing to a lower ranked opponent.

Thats terrible if people were forced to join a full team or not be able to play rated most people that currently play rated solo or in less then a full group would just stop playing. You can’t “force” people to do anything.

Yeah, but you’re trying to force ANet to find a solution that may not exist… I mean, they’re ppl and the game’s great and almost free.

I found the leaderboard unsatisfying. I am not a very good player. My winrate dipped as low as 34%, and then rose back up to 48% by the end of the season. (Total around 130 games.)

I estimate I was winning at a 60% clip or better as I pulled it back up. Did I get better? Or did I only win more because I was matched against other scrubs? It was embarrassing to see myself ranked in the 93%ile with a losing record, while guildmates I know to be much better players were far below.

The leaderboard seems to be primarily an attendance record, and that’s not very useful feedback for me.

If that’s what Anet wants it to be, okay, fine, I’m on the outside looking in. I can accept that. But I’d like to see statistical measures applied to make a player’s relative skill and success much more important.

Number of games does have a role to play. People who understand statistics better than I do know that the confidence in a measure increases as the number of data points increases. So we don’t want to see someone who’s 9-1 (only 10 played) atop the leader board, but SURELY after 130 matches we can agree that I’m not an above-average player.

I’d like some metric, whether a public leaderboard or not, that shows me if I, personally, am improving.

Evan Lesh.3295:

This is great feedback. Thank you.

I can’t speak to any direct action items, but your concerns seem to line up with all the other feedback we’ve seen.

I’ll be forwarding this thread to the right people.

Thx Evan, i’m glad this topic can be useful

MarkPhilips.5169:

Heart of the Mist

The bad: This is one of the main issues of this season, probably the worst. To be stuck in the Mist during a queue time (usually 6 min+) is a terrible experience, the map is basically useless, there is nothing interesting to do or you can’t join hot join, custom arenas or other game maps. People tend to go afk during the queue time for this reason, so when you have a queue pop, can happen very often people don’t accept. For Streamers too, it’s really bad, because basically for the majority of streaming you see people stuck on the Mist doing nothing.

I completely agree. HotM is a terribly unfinished zone and I learned to dislike it even more for every second I had to spend in there. Even for just AFKing it is very aesthetically unpleasing. I suggest a complete makeover. Give us more than just ruins. It is the mists; I want different islands I can stay on, activities, something to keep me busy, something beautiful. When we did not have to stay in HotM, I had a small place in Metrica where I would lie and sleep, while AFKing, because it was much more pleasant there.

MarkPhilips.5169:

Rewards

The good: a little better than the last season, Anet enlarged the rewards until top500 and they introduced a progression system on mini Llama.

The bad: In general, rewards are poors. There is always a Glorious Hero’s armor for top 25 and mini llama for top500. Progression system on mini llama is interesting but you need a crazy amount of llamas (27+) to get the final version and the effort to get a mini llama for 2 months season and only for few hours in a organized tournament like ESL or other stuff is not balanced.

I agree again. I was of course happy with my mini llama, and I treasure him very much, but that was not 2 months’ worth of work. Top 250 should’ve had 3 llamas to get to the next tier. The fact that you can participate in a small tournament for half an hour and win the same reward as I got after 2 months really gets to me.

I will say I enjoyed it though and I am happy you are learning. It was a fun experience but I have to stress this: I will personally not be participating in another ladder season again if these two issues are not addressed, somehow

These are on point with your topics, but what about the “forgotten” section of sPvP known as hotjoin. Unfortunately thrown to the wayside in favor of these “seasons”

I’ve seen many good points on a reddit thread about some system that should be in place to make it a more enjoyable experience overall.

One such feature being the addition of an in-match queue for team joining, to prevent uneven teams. Example: The match is 2v2, and players are in spectator, someone tries to join red, and is placed in the red queue, and will not join into the match until someone also queues for blue team (or hits Random)

Also changes need to be made for spectator mode and the game’s autobalance systems to prevent exploit and griefing. Spectator mode needs to be locked to players who choose to be in spectator mode (aka, they hit the Spectator button at any time during the match) until the end of the current match.

I also (my own opinion) think that they need a better system in place for when players hit the practice button as well, to try and prevent them from being placed into blowout matches, and matches that are near ending.

My disapproval of current Hotjoin/Practice systems can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDJzFSZgOwg

And some good links for the topic can be viewed here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/352va0/hotjoins_are_the_first_thing_a_new_pvp_player/

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Stop-putting-me-back-into-the-same-match/first#post5001650

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Auto-Balance-merged/first#post4822950

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Needed-PvP-Tutorial-for-New-Players/first#post4794526

Just because no one “cares” about Hotjoin doesn’t mean it should be ignored, it CAN be a good experience, it just needs a little help, just like the rest of sPvP

Great feedback overall. I think you’re right on the money with most of the suggestions.

Options. It’s what we have; it’s what Anet has at their disposal. I’m very optimistic in that we’ll have a competitive, and addicting, leaderboard system in no time. Section: Leaderboard +1

MarkPhilips, thank you for your effort to summarize the thoughts of the majority of the PvP community. Excellent feedback.

Sergo.2867:

I’d like some metric, whether a public leaderboard or not, that shows me if I, personally, am improving.

Yes. This. Please. It’s very important. Really.

Trevor Boyer.6524:

The issues with the MMR algorithm are much deeper than they appear and need to be discussed separately in a very “MMR algorithm” specific thread.

Making sure the right people see it

Never before in any game do you win 10, then lose 10, then win 10, then lose 10, so on and so forth. After awhile it really feels like the server is “allowing you” to win or “flagging you” for losses. At this point I feel that a true RNG of ques, similar to hotjoin, with absolutely no MMR algorithm would actually be a better non-existent system than what is being used now.

Also:

• Bring back Solo Que, make it ranked only
• Make Team Que ranked only
• Make hotjoin/practice what unranked is now Make practice function exactly how unranked works now. Leave all the hotjoin/practice functions like team swapping for custom arenas.

This would essentially funnel all hotjoiners and practicers in to unranked and then leave the competitive leaderboard warriors to solo “non TS style play” and coordinated team “TS savy play”, their choice. It needs to happen, make it happen.

It is a good post, but I don’t see anything extraordinary in it, many similar have been made (I did a similar post, see my signature, weeks ago) and multiple posts on this forum have been discussing those various issues extensively.

But at least OP got some attentions from the dev which is a good thing.

Sergo.2867:

I’d like some metric, whether a public leaderboard or not, that shows me if I, personally, am improving.

What would be amazing, is if they changed the end-game scoreboard into something similar to what League has recently done with “match grades”

Where it would tally up and record all the data from your match, give you a A/B/C/D -/+ ranking and a brief overview of what you did and didn’t do. Unfortunately it can only really record stats the game can recognize, so it can’t grade you on point rotations etc.

Something like: # (personal stat)/ % (team wide stat)

Damage Dealt: #/%
Kill Participation: #/%
Healing Done: #/%
Points Captured: #/%
Points Defended: #/%
Teammate Resurrections: #/%
Enemy Rallies: #/%

So depending on the stats, if for example, you had low damage, but high point defense, the game would recognize it and know what you are doing in the match. But if you have low damage, and high enemy rallies, the game would know you need to work on positioning and teamfights etc.

It would be really tricky, but after alot of tweaking it could be made to work.

The problem is that Anet don’t seem to like to TRY things out and see how they work in real environments with players, I think if it doesn’t look good on paper, then they just won’t even try at all, and are seemingly afraid to take those risks (which is why we are seeing less and less “features”) regardless of their initial “pushing the boundaries of MMOs” banter, they have fallen back onto the traditional way of doing things, and are seeing less creativity and functionality.

About my arguments, I wanted to be focused on Season Arguments, on what especially influenced ranked matches but I Agree there is more stuff to talk about.
I also played different games in unranked and ranked with other accounts (low rank and with only few games in ranked/unranked) and I found a really difference situation with more low mmr players in my team and against (with my main account I get matched basically always against high mmr players so this issue isn’t really strong).Most of all the general feeling is like hot join (or worst), where people zerg without any clue or people literally explode in a teamfight, creating rally bot situations or quickly, outnumbered fights for the entire match.
So I think many players need more clues and more practice zone to improve their skill level in teamfight, movements, coordination etc.

In this forum we had many suggestions to improve this aspect, for example:

- Stats and score improvements: this is an important part, score player system we have now it doesn’t help to understand your performance in the game, and sadly, many times can be a wrong way to read your performance or your team performance. This is because the actual system fits well for a deathmatch game but not for conquest/stronghold match, so a rework is really necessary. Basically we need more useful stats at the end of the match to understand better personal/team performance in a conquest/stronghold scenario.

- Kill spam chat and mini map improvement: add for example a dynamic counter to count how many people are involved in a fight and rework the kill spam chat above the mini map with more useful infos (like timer, only deaths and respawn, better UI)

- 1v1 and 2vs2 zone: This could be perfect to introduce a practice zone in HotM while in queue, so people can improve their skill in a 1vs1 situation or in a small teamfight. Custom Arena are decent for this but you can’t join CA while in queue and in general there is an autoclick war to try to join quickly the spot in a 1vs1 or 2vs2 CA (for this reason a queue system it would be necessary). In general I think HoTM should be a map where people can really improve conquest and stronghold aspects (now it’s really bad for this).

- Tips in game: a simple option (you can disable it) where you can find common tips&suggestions ingame to avoid common mistakes (very useful for new players): like be careful to enemy thief when you try to kill a beast on forest and don’t kill beast at beginning, don’t cap a node with 2+ people, don’t let your teammates outnumbered etc.