Guild Wars 2

Good afternoon everyone… This is gonna be a long read, so be prepared.

I will make a short disclaimer first – I am not a top PvP player, I only started about last year around this time, and became absorbed by PvP only from November till now. My arguments are mostly based on the sentiment I recieved from the community itself, and loosely on my own experience. However, I do ask you to read through it all to get at least some idea of what I mean.
With this being said, lets start:

The last few days I have seen several debates of which the players within this subcommunity talk about “Rewards” – Not too recently, I was also in one. There is however a common misunderstanding between two groups who have different views about “Rewards”.

One of the rewards being Goods – Mostly items, gold and other obtainable ware that help you progress throughout the game

The other rewards being Incentives – Can be goods as well, but are unique in a sense. See these rewards as tokens of an achievement.

The Goods are what you are able to obtain now – you do a reward track and you get several items that help you progress your characters – This being gear, gold, weapons, armour, crafting materials and even levels. The progression however is mostly tied to PvE itself – Just recently gold rewards became somewhat more fruitful since you can “easily” pay your own arena now. Before this, the cost was really great, and you had to literally make it quite an ordeal collecting the gold for said Arena.
Before I will give a saying about these rewards, I will explain the Incentives.

What I meant with Incentives are rewards not per se larger than the items you recieve from the reward tracks. Incentives are long term goals, rewarding in something unique such as titles, finishers and maybe even somewhat more considered rare skins.
True incentives are sadly gone, and I will explain in a second.

First is Titles
My mid thirties were not too long ago – a simple matter of months, and I still remember looking with respect to people running around with a “Ransacker” “Marauder” or the somewhat more rare “Ravager”. I knew these people had put more time into this game and I knew they had at least vastly more experience than me. It was exciting battling one, and it didn’t feel awfull being killed by one.
And now look at this
I am one of many now, and what is worse, it does not mean anything to be a “Legendary Champion”. I have had occasions where I was easily able to shut down another Legendary Champion, while in another match, I was the one getting shut down completely. The latter are the people who I looked up to, but it became too hard to distinguish them from your Average Joe such as me.
The recognition for more potent players is gone in terms of titles – I get, and at the same time do not get this. For newer players it means they do not have to worry about those titles too much, since they do not show a specific level of play, however on the flip side, those who worked hard to get the titles that showed off prestige are lumped up with people like me!
You can argue that there are people who still have to become rank 80 and have something to work for, but does who have reached it have nothing to accomplish anymore in terms of these “Rewards”

Gear
What a strange topic this is – Gear in PvP was and is nothing but skins. However, not too long ago, the skins you wore in PvP represented a level of play. Those who had spent a lot of time in PvP were running around sets, only obtained by a certain rank (Last thing I could obtain was whisperer, so that is mostly still fresh on my mind). You also had those who knew this and ran around in “New” gear to throw the players off for a second. The unification of PvE and PvP gear kind of threw this away.
While not a bad change per se, prestige of gear does not exist. One could argue a legendary is, but honestly, that is not prestigious in the world of PvP since, up untill recently, you could not obtain it solely by playing PvP. This is also the reason why some PvP-ers are somewhat more toxic towards those who run around with a Legendary, because their prestige is taken away, whilst the “prestigious” PvE item is here to stay.
Don’t get me wrong, personally I think it is stupid to attack someone verbally for having a shiny, though this might also probably be because my legendary is nothing more than The Moot which I personally do not use in PvP much since my Guardian has a Canthan look about him.
In closure about gear, people are upset that the time they spent on getting specific sets to show off their level of play. The Backpack was an excelent idea of reintroducing gear towards some kind of PvP reward, if only it wasn’t so easy to obtain.

Looking at the current two, you can maybe tell something similar to them. I’ll explain: Both do not incentivise you to get better in the game. You can literally lose your way up to rank 80 with relative ease (Trust me, someone in my guild is doing so as we speak) and gear holds no real value. Let’s get into it some more.

Other rewards people from a competitive scene want is Recognition. Titles, gear – these things used to show your level, but that is actually not enough. I mean for teams who do their very best to get to the top, to be recognized by the community as a team that does incredible well!
Mind you, the ones here on the forums are but a small group of those who actually play. Just the other day, I was with a bunch of randoms against “I love Lunch” – A teammate and I knew who they were, and after someone from our team had a DC, we knew it was lost. One other pug got mad at us for him being at a 3v1, whilst we had no points, and thus we had to tell him who we were up against, and why the odds were far from our favour.
This is however a problem both within the current system of the Leaderboards, as you cannot distinguish your team from others on that, and just the lack of attention Anet gives to teams trying hard. Remember This Plaque for instance? Yea, I wonder why you never heard of it…
In all honesty, Mistpedia does way more work than Anet trying to get this teams known within the community, and it is a kitten shame, because it is putting a lot of teams off to play and get better (Also because they do not even have to get better to completely crush most teams, which is also an issue)

So going full circle, the “Rewards” obtained from the tracks are not the “Rewards” the PvP-crowd has asked for. If you are wondering why people on here say that they are not rewarded, then it means that they are not incentified to played. They are not challenged, because honestly, aside from the ESL weeklies there is not much to achieve within the game anymore. The “Goods” you get from the reward tracks are things you can obtain everywhere, and might be a good way for PvE players to think that they are rewarded in PvP, but within a competitive mindset they fall short.

It is a shame that I cannot find the thread on a short notice, but there was someone proposing “Higher Tier Titles” for classes. Now you got “Champion [Class]”, make it so that you can work upto “Legendary [Class]” – a reward for 1000 wins on said class. This would be a small boost for some players to actually try and do their best again, and for players such as me to once more look up to people who deserved these titles fair and square. Of course, a lot has to be done to incentify top teams to play again. Some good insights can be found in interviews between teams on Jebro’s Channel – and I do ask everyone to check those out.

Yeh, you are right, and you are not the first one to be right. Sad thing is that we cant do much about all this. Someone decided that it wasnt worth to invest into pvp, thus they let it there, throwing in some new map now and then.

Recently they did this BIG pvp patch, that involved lots of changes, but with this patch they just made pvp more similar to pve without actually adding much more new content to pvp.
More than a feature/content patch it was a restyling patch. It probably brought more ppl into pvp, but didnt do much for those that already were involved into pvp.
The only good thing i noticed was a bit of meta shift, with less condition spam builds around, but we still got so many old issues here, like afk-to-win builds, first of all the new turret engi quickly followed by minion masters.