Guild Wars 2

Are any of the Dec 2nd changes going to apply to Hotjoin?

It would seem to me that one of the main reasons why the vast majority of the player base never ‘graduates’ to ranked matches, is the terrible experience they have had in hotjoin.

So long as dailies and PvP track rewards can be completed in hotjoin and the rewards for winning are greater – the current ‘meta’ of autobalance every 2 minutes will continue.

Possible solutions:
Award additional rank points every 5 or 10 seconds to the members of a team with fewer players.
Loss of rank points for leaving a game

Evan Lesh.3295:

There are no functional changes to custom arenas. However all match logic has be re-written from scratch, so any changes we do want to make will be easy.

Sorry but I’m slightly confused by this.

Are we talking about the same thing? Aren’t custom arenas ones you set up through tokens purchased with gold? I’m talking about the Hotjoin which will presumably fall into the ‘practice’ type after the changes – will ‘practice’ and ‘unranked’ arenas still award rank points and count towards pvp track rewards – If so nothing is going to be solved.

Please try randomly try logging in to a hotjoin match using the play now button and see how many times you have to click ‘play now’ before you find a match that is either in progress, or starts with the same number of players on each side.

If by chance you do find one, try playing and see how long into the game you get before someone leaves and you go into an autobalance freefall.

Surely this is where you need to start getting this aspect of the game right, at the bottom, where new players start.

Evan, I don’t remember reading whether or not the new “practice” mode will have the same swapping mechanic as hot join currently does. Is that going to be in there? (Note, not volunteering, but actively switching teams during a match)

Evan Lesh.3295:

‘Hotjoin’ is custom arenas. Some are player owned, some we own. ‘Practice’ is the same as ‘Play Now’ and is still ‘hotjoin’.

Thanks for the clarification.

As you managed to post a reply within a couple of hours, I presume you didn’t try to find a match with even numbers on each side.

Do you not consider my point that the number of players (as a percentage of those playing and spvp) playing hotjoin; or unranked matches as they will be called, vastly outnumbers those playing in ranked arenas and the only way to increase the numbers playing spvp for anything other than dailies or reward tracks is to fix the problems in the ‘practice’ arenas so that players are actually able to experience something that is about competitive play in a ‘fair’ environment and not just making sure you are on the team with the numeric advantage?