Guild Wars 2

I see a lot of posts from people with lots of pvp experience posting here, so I thought I might share my experience because I think ArenaNet has to cater to some degree to players like me.

I never played any pvp before GW12. I started playing GW2 at the very end of 2012. It was several months before I tried WvW. That was my first experience against other players, and mostly I got killed. But I really liked it and spent many hours playing it and eventually got good at roaming.

After more than a year in WvW, I decided to try pvp. I really didn’t know how it worked, and I accidentally played a ranked match as my first match. I told my teammates, and basically they were very unhappy. I left pvp for more than a year.

I started playing a little bit of pvp mostly to test out some build ideas. I played in the stronghold betas and actually found them pretty fun. Eventually I realized that pvp was the best way to get Crucible of Eternity tokens and runes of the nightmare, so I cautiously went back into unranked pvp. Nobody yelled at me, and it was actually pretty fun.

And then I realized that, because borderland roaming in my tier of WvW right now is not very active, I was having more fun playing pvp than wvw. I had played over 180 unranked matches with a win rate just under 60% and had gotten myself to rank 35 and it still wasn’t until just last night that I thought I would go ahead and give the ranked matches a try.

We lost the first match, but it wasn’t a blowout. I can’t say exactly why we lost. I think the other team was better at getting numbers to where the fight was happening. But nobody complained or criticized on our team. I tried another ranked match, and we won a close game. I was really happy to get that one amber pip!

I still have a lot of work to do to improve (an old dude struggling with an 18-button mouse is not a thing of beauty), but I’m enjoying pvp and not as worried any more about letting my team down. Playing in amber (in my two-game sample) is putting me against people that seem to be around my level.

So my point in this long post is that, for me, GW2 pvp and the leagues have been a success. I’ve gone from a non-pvp’er to preferring this as my primary game mode right now. In no way am I trying to say that everything about balance and the way the pvp leagues are set up is great for everyone, but I thought it was only fair to share a perspective that was a little different than all the other threads.