“For the past year, Arenanet has been patting themselves on the back for building GW2’s PvP, ignoring how players feel about the state of the game and seemingly pretending that the competitive scene is healthy, when it is not.
Despite reassurances that PvP was a major focus in the studio, at launch it lacked basic features needed for it to be successful as a competitive game. After half a year of waiting, we got the absolute minimum needed for the competitive scene to even exist: private servers, spectator mode, leaderboards. Despite the immense value of a replay system to competitive games, the developers said they had no plans to implement it, because shoutcasting is esports and we should just be happy to watch it live.
They patted themselves on the back and told us to look at everything they’ve done for us. We can have esports now! And all was well for a short while: teams were getting back together, BLU and Grouch started shoutcasting, a competitive scene looked like it was growing. Players still wanted to see some changes, suggestions were made, top players posted on the forums, but rarely did Arenanet respond.
As a side note, during this time, the State of the Game stream was happening each month. Developers would sit down with select high-level players on a stream and discuss the current condition of PvP. It was a great opportunity for Arenanet to connect with the community, but instead it ended up being a joke. Future plans were never discussed, just small balance changes that players might see. It was repeatedly cut short because the developers apparently had better things to do than talk to us about their game.
Then the Dhuumfire patch hit. In and of itself, the patch wasn’t bad. It made one of the worst PvP classes viable, while laying groundwork for the other terrible class, Warrior, to become viable as well. What Arenanet ignored, however, was how it affected the scene.
The meta shifted from high burst to heavy condition AOE. Arenanet cannot be held at fault for this, they do not have a crystal ball to predict how the players will respond to any changes they make. However, their failure to try and correct the harm this meta has done to the game and the competitive scene has been the driving force for many players to leave.
The current meta is not fun for players. It’s 100% crowd control and condition damage. Most teams are running spirit rangers and dhuumfire/terror necromancers, which are incredibly low skill but also incredibly powerful. Strategy has devolved to putting a spirit ranger on home or far, a bunker on mid, and just roaming with spamming as much as possible. Mesmers can’t handle conditions, so they are not run and there are no clutch portal plays. There are no high skill elementalists pulling off amazing combo chains. Even engineers are disappearing because there are stronger classes that are easier to play. No Teldo-style nodefighting.
And thus, the current meta is even worse for spectators. There is nothing to watch but a bunch of players running at each other until only one team’s players are left. There is nothing visual about condition spam. Nothing to see, nothing to watch, no entertainment. While competitive players have been making posts on the forums about how awful the current meta is for them, shoutcasters have been making posts about how it is even worse for them and their viewers. And they are right.
No responses from Arenanet. Not one single post acknowledging that anything is amiss.
Then comes the train wreck that was the PAX invitational. They announced it with short notice, so teams could not adequately plan or prepare. They decided to run the qualifiers at the same time as LCS and the International, so stream viewership was poor. Somewhere communication broke down between Arenanet, the tournament organizers at Mistleague, and the teams playing, resulting in Team Curse getting disqualified. This meant Car Crash would be going, after their players went on a massive, immature, and unprofessional rant on the forums about having to play a Best of 5 against Curse in the qualifiers despite that being the rules they agreed to.
The PAX game itself was underwhelming, it was put on the tail end of big PvE and WvW announcements, but Arenanet said nothing about PvP.
We want communication from Arenanet. Players feel ignored, and the PvP community is falling apart because of it. For over a year now Arenanet has refused to take us seriously, they have refused to acknowledge that anything is wrong, and every day we have to sit there and watch them congratulate themselves on developing their amazing eSport while Solo Queue is dying, Team Queue is dead, top players are leaving at an alarming rate, and pretty much everyone is unhappy with the current state of affairs.
And then there’s the terrible PvP rewards. But that would take another whole post to go through."
