Guild Wars 2

I had a lot of expectations for GW2 (mostly PvP since it’s what I like best) and followed it, pre-ordered and was in the beta. However, when the game came out, aside from the combat that felt a bit clunky and maybe too limited to always repeating the same combo more or less in the same order (the individual skill cap felt low and it was obvious that this game is more about team work), the number one thing that killed it for me was that I couldn’t even PvP with my friend.

I just can’t understand why it was impossible to join instanced PvP with one friend (I’m not talking about tournaments, 5v5s and such, merely the basic PvP). It just tossed us randomly into different games. Sometimes we’d manage to get on the same time and as soon as the battleground ends, it’d split us again in a new one.

I’ve been hesitant about reinstalling GW2 since I reformatted my computer and have been thinking about maybe giving it a second chance. So I want to know if there’s still no way to PvP with a friend for fun and all that you can do is PvE or maybe world PvP at one point. Also, you end up with cool looking armors but people are still just running around looking ugly all in red or blue in organized PvP?

you can turn off team colours in settings if you want to remove the whole Red vs Blue vibe, i did.

in regard to what you call ‘basic pvp’, which is i assume hotjoin (practice) i have two things to say.
firstly if you are in a party with your friend and he joins a game you can right click on their name to join them.
secondly, i would actually not recommend you play much hotjoin. it’s nice for warming up and build testing, but players swap sides all the time and often play for kills only (i will sit at spawn changing my build in hotjoin etc). unranked is a much better place to get real pvp practice, as opposed to soley mechanical practice.

good luck.

EDIT
if you are talking about Edge of the Mists, or EotM for short you need to be on wvw servers that are the same colour in wvw, then join a party to enter the same instance. if you are not in the same instance you can right click on your friends name in party to change to theirs. however if you are not the same colour you will be on opposing sides. the only way to solve that issue is to transfer to the same server, or to wait untill Saturday when the servers reset and colours change.

Or you’re doing hot join?

You should go to unranked to play with your friend if you’re still new.

What’s unranked? I don’t remember the modes, I just remember talking to a barbarian and having a list of 50 different battlegrounds and us trying to time ourselves to enter the same one and hope that we’d be on the same team or that there’d be room on the other team to switch together.

You can join with just two people in unranked and the other spots will be filled with other players?

NeoSoul.4198:

What’s unranked? I don’t remember the modes, I just remember talking to a barbarian and having a list of 50 different battlegrounds and us trying to time ourselves to enter the same one and hope that we’d be on the same team or that there’d be room on the other team to switch together.

You can join with just two people in unranked and the other spots will be filled with other players?

When you’re in heart of the mists just press the swords at the top of the screen and it brings up the pvp menu. You don’t need to talk to anyone.

There’s a server browser for hotjoin, simply both select the same server and team and you’re good to go.

Practice Arena

Practice Arenas, also known as custom arenas or hot-join, use a game selection system which allows players to join a game based on map and available space. In this arena, players can join matches already in progress, so the number of active players can change over the course of the match as people join or leave. The game tries to keep teams even by changing a player’s team if one team has two or more players than the other.

Many server-created matches with generic match settings are available. Additional matches can be created with a Custom Arena Starter Kit, allowing players to customize the settings.

Custom Arena Starter Kit — Used to create a new PvP Custom Arena with 30 days of play time. Double-click to open the “Create Custom Arena” panel.
Custom Arena Time Tokens — Used to add one day of time to a Custom Arena. Used from your Custom Arena management panel or double-click while playing in any Custom Arena to add time to that arena.

Unranked and Ranked Arena

Unranked and ranked arenas are more competitive game modes. Each arena consists of teams of 5 versus 5, and players can queue for a game while alone or while in a group. PvP Builds are locked after the match has started. All queued players are prompted to accept the match before it can start. Once all 10 players are ready, a map will be selected through a vote and the match will begin.

Matchmaking

The PvP matchmaking algorithm is the Glicko2 matchmaking rating (MMR) and helps match players with other players with similar skill levels.
The metrics used during matchmaking include: rating, rank, party size, profession, ladder position, and dishonor.
Players can search for parties for Custom Arenas and Team Arenas in categories in the Looking For Group tool.

Auto-Balance

Games will no longer autobalance after one team has reached 80% of the maximum score if the game ends by score.
Games will no longer autobalance when within two minutes of the end of the game if the game ends by time.
Autobalance functionality has been updated to give a new volunteer bonus to any players who volunteer for balancing, as well as giving any players balanced the winner bonus. When volunteers are lacking, random selection will be used.

- Taken from GW2 Wiki: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Structured_PvP

And addition to this about playing with friends, in Unranked and Ranked if you team up with a buddy but join unranked or ranked you will be partied up with 3 more players. If you wanna play with a friend in Practice you enable so you can see (Dont remember exactly) notices, when a goup member joins an Practice PvP instance it will say ’Player name has joined “PvP server ###” ’ Just click on the red text and you will join the same server.

Looks like you haven’t played for a while, there has been a lot of changes.

You can easily play with your friend(s) now in spvp, just group with them and select the “play” option in the spvp game selector, this will queue you in the “unranked” game mode. This is now the base mode, all games are 5vs5 and its a lot of fun.

The old Hotjoin mode is totally different now, its called “practice” and due to various changes the mode has been completely destroyed- do not play it, trust me.

Armor and weapon skins have also been overhauled. You can now wear whatever you want into spvp (no armor/weapon stats are applied of course).

You can also now level through spvp and get gold and other rewards that you can use in other areas of the game.

However, it sounds to me as if you had some misconceptions about the game from the start, because as far as I can remember you could always join spvp with friends, even in hotjoin, you just had to manually select the same room/server.

In terms of skill- although it is a team based game, it also has a high individual skill cap compared to other mmo pvp. Different classes and different builds within a class play very differently though, some are more active/skill based than others.