Guild Wars 2

I was reading this thread today, that made me finally create this topic (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Really-slow-leveling/first#post1481953).
Besides the original poster it is posts like these that really frustrate me and make me want to never visit this forum again:

Most people (including myself) need more than “it’s just fun” to play. Either give me skins, bragging rights, a new visual etc. (like a star for those who have map completion).
[…]
Loot, skins, rank/bragging rights are integral to the game. Without that I would never play no matter how much “fun” it is.

I hit level 10 and decided it wasn’t worth the time to pvp right now. When I finish my next legendary it might be. But for all the time invested to rank up, you don’t get anything you can use in the rest of the game. No gold, no karma, no laurels, no skins, no emotes, no thank you.

I’m not playing the same game as these guys! But I know this phenomenon too good… Let me tell you:

Warcraft 3 introduced me to competitive gaming. This game was the kitten back then, so quite a few of my friends in school played it, too. But why did we only play a few games together and why did they not know who Grubby (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Schenkhuizen) was? I was not playing the same game as these guys!
Warcraft 3 came with a powerful map editor that gave the community the ability to create unique maps with their own game mechanics. You might know DotA Allstars. For me these custom maps were too dumbed down. I didn’t like them too much… You have to understand, they stole my friends and potiential teammates and practice partners!
Some time ago a famous streamer (http://www.destiny.gg) predicted Starcraft 2 to be dead soon, as he noticed a drop in viewers on http://www.twitch.tv/. He said the game doesn’t cater enough to the casual gamers and one solution would be to make the custom maps system more like it was in the glorious days of Warcraft 3. He then stopped playing Starcraft 2 and switched over to League of Legends.
In Guild Wars 2 we could experience a huge drop in viewers, too. The streamers that pulled the highest viewer numbers for Guild Wars 2 are long gone. All of them streamed Diablo 3 before GW2. They now stream games like World of Warcraft PvE, Path of Exile, League of Legends, etc.. Obviously they cater to a certain audience. Maybe that let’s us see whether the PvP player and viewer base shrinked or wasn’t very big right from the start.
Esports is not for everyone. Just compare the viewer numbers for a major tournament in League of Legends with the number of active accounts. You will see that only a fraction of players is actually interested in the competetive side of this game. Now Guild Wars 2 got 300 viewers on http://www.twitch.tv/ and 440000 concurrent players. A trend is to be seen.

A game is esports relevant, if it got a high skill cap, because there needs to be room for the players to improve to overcome their opponents. That makes the game hard, because if you slack, you lose. I mentioned above that Starcraft 2 was criticized, because it is not casual friendly enough, that maybe it is just not fun, if you are not a highly competitive player. But fun just differentiates a good game from a bad game and is not relevant in the comparison between an esports game and a casual game (it is to be said that Starcraft 2 is actually awesome and the most fun you can have).
With a high skill cap comes acknowledgement for skill and hype for good play. The Guild Wars 2 community is missing this completly.
The majority of topics on this forum go like this: “How is this not OP?!” “When do you finally fix this Anet?!” In Starcraft 2 we call this “ladder anxiety”. It is easier to disregard the skill of others and make you own skill undebatable than to see how bad you really are.
The difference between the Starcraft 2 community and the Guild Wars 2 community is that in Starcraft 2 ladder anxiety posts are the minority, when in Guild Wars 2 they are the majority. I never read topics like: „I came up with this awesome strategy for Battle of Khylo!“ „Let me tell you how i decapped the node against this bunker guardian!“ It is quite typical for the community of an esports game to whine about balance, but it is also even more typical to discuss strategy and watch awesome play as if it was porn. Instead of exploring the possibilities, discussing map dependend strategy and how to counter certain playstyles, we get complains about how this game needs more game modes.
In all seriousness, it is hard for me to fathom how it is considered clever to say that it should not be possible to one shot other players, because that could scare new players away. Between all the balance whine this may seem diplomatic, but I consider it also a problem that so many people bought this game that actually don’t like to play it. Remember that it was hyped as a potential esports game.
The Guild Wars 2 community right now ist not made out of people that are here on purpose.

Wow, someone else with a background in competitive gaming that isnt limited to WoW and League of Notasgoodasdotaplayers that also has an extremely similar opinion as me in this subject? Wowowowo

You sir, are a champ. +1

Anyone that disagrees and thinks they are super pro probably has their “competitive” background in WoW or League of WorsethanHoN.

Good post.

Well my competitive gaming was from counter-strike 1.1 (yes the one that only had LAN, but don’t think anyone recalls it) and I have to say that I partially agree with your post. The part that I agree is about the trends in topics (“How is this not OP?!” “When do you finally fix this Anet?!”) and lack of competitive type topics (for example “A new strategy to counter X/Y cap”) and what it shows about the current state of the community.

Although I disagree with your minor point about the complaints for new modes – yes, most of the competitive games that are popular have only one mode, but usually has more modes for wider audience. For cs example: all comp are in de_ maps, that have 2 bombsytes and one team is attacking other is defending and you win either by destroying/defusing syte or killing all the enemies. But the game also has a hostage rescue, deathmatches, FFA, zombie mode, etc. that does not improve the competitive side of the game directly, but indirectly it has a great impact. GW2 Spvp is very basic and there are so many flaws, that I have hard time imagining how they can fulfill the e-sport mmorpg promise in the current state.

Also – why do people nowadays compare many different games to lol? Do you think that if this game was not free it would be as popular as it is now? Since that is the only thing in my opinion that makes it as massively played as it is now.

If gw2 were free not much would change. The pvp just isn’t fun enough

I play the PvP for how fun it is, and to show off a bit doing /rank in PvE. And I’m happy that its hard to get rank. It gives you respect when your playing PvP. When your rank 50+ people will like you even though they dont know you, when your level 50+ in PvE people dont even care about you.

My competitive background comes from Warcraft 3, DotA, and League of Legends. I can assure you one thing that all these games had that made me want to play them—a ladder.

I agree with what you have to say in terms of people need to share more information with strats and plays like it was watching porn, but at the same time even if you are a winner or a good player that just wins all the time you are doing it for nothing. We know nothing about who are truly the best players or who the best teams really are because there is nothing that proves any of this kitten. There is lack of motivation to improve yourself on this game. I could jump right back into League of Legends and know exactly where I stand and how I can climb up the ladder. In Gw2 what ladder is there to climb? How pointless is it to try to prove myself if it doesnt mean kitten through QPs?

You bring up good points, and I am a fair optimist in this game. I have made some long winded posts about similar subject matters. At this stage in the game it becomes nut up or shut up for GW2. With games like SC2 and LoL games like this can be left in the dust of the esports scene. This is 2013, and if you have a pvp community comprised of 300 people from NA and EU servers combined playing spvp then you better have some gods of marketing behind your desks because 300 people isnt enough to get anywhere near esports level nowadays.

I know a lot of people pvpers that will leave very soon unless things get straight on ANet’s side of things. From the thousands of pvpers in the first few weeks we are now down to a few hundred. This game’s time is going to run out soon if kitten doesnt get done.

That’s as raw as I can put it, and this is coming from someone who you could say is here “on purpose”. Because before leaving league for GW2 I was in the top 200 players in the NA ladder for that game. I enjoy this game, but the way it is developed with this infrastructure is beyond frustrating. Players will only take so much, and there is a time bomb on this game.

The most important incentive to get better is missing from a game tagged as esports. Sad really…

Unfortunately I’m one of those players who’s here not on purpose… I guess?
I wanted to like the spvp, my background is fairly old with Q, Q2, Q3, UT, UT2K, CS and WoW arena being my first non-FPS competitive gaming experience. The biggest thing I hold out hope for is that there will actually be an emphasis on PvP, instead of PvCircle which I (and many other players apparently) find extremely boring and tedious to play, much less watch.

This is highly entertaining footage of PZ:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/4-Vs-Zerg-Video-WvW

Tournament player vs circle gameplay though is boring as hell.

Zoose.6257:

The most important incentive to get better is missing from a game tagged as esports. Sad really…

Counter Strike and Quake didn’t have a ladder, i think. And I would say the most important incentive to get better is competition and to get competition you need a community that consists of players that are interested in competition.
Someone could actually organize a ladder like this: Every team that wants to participate has to sign up with a team email address. The organizer will then create a list of all participants. Now if two teams happen to meet in a paid tournament they will both screenshot the score screen and both send it with their team email address to the organizer to verify the score. The winning team will get points depending on the rank of the team it beat. For instance if you beat rank 1 on the ladder you get the most points, if you beat the last rank you will get the least points. That is because it is quite random not only IF you meet participants, but also WHICH participants you meet. The ladder will stabalize when the season is long enough.

But I actually don’t want to discuss the lack of features. Obviously the idea above would be much easier to realize if we already had private servers. But I think it is quite silly to discuss how good or bad the developers did their job. If we gave them our money, it was apparently good enough.
I want to talk about this community that seems so different from the communities of the big esports games. I see people that are too lazy to learn the game, too lazy to overcome their weaknesses, too lazy to go deep into strategy. People that constantly whine about classes and abilities that are too stronk and demand sweets on halloween, presents on christmas, a new game mode every few months; these are not the people that want to know how bad they really are and how to improve. They won’t acknowledge the skill of the players that put work into the game. They bought this game, when Diablo 3 got boring and they will move on to Path of Exile when they get bored again.

Thing is XIII those games you mention had a way for 3rd party leagues to be created, in gw2 its significantly harder to do.

Your suggestion is quite good but atm most teams are just pugs of good players from disbanded teams or teams of 3-4 with fill ins. Plus with matchmaking it can get hard to sync queue. At the end of the day even if a system was put into place and working by the community, I think it needs a way to be viewable by the public. I for one would love to watch these matches but the only way would be from player perspectives and not every player can record/upload.

You could try setting up games in 8v8 servers and have extra’s fill the spaces. They’d have to wear something to make them stand out or stand in places that they wont get in the way so that they dont confuse players. Messy but do-able. Maybe have 3 people who can record and not part of the match be killed on each point and not respawn so they can capture footage of each point to be edited later?

It’s why early on I wanted custom servers and observer mode before matchmaking/ladder because then the community could take the game into their own hands making their own leagues instead of being forced to wait for anet to do something. It would be like fps games like you mention, that simply have a server browser and thats it(I believe hotjoin was meant to be like a typical fps games server browser).

XIII.9615:

Counter Strike and Quake didn’t have a ladder, i think.

Not in the beginning. Ladders and competitive play started off as clanwars. Our clans would practice, we would have websites, we would host servers and organize our own tournaments. Well into this the actual lan tourneys with prizes and entry fees emerged, but the groundwork was laid initially by our clan community because the games were good, they were FUN and they were community friendly in design to allow a competitive scene to form and evolve. If GW2 had the fun factor down holding players attention this could also happen…. however

And I would say the most important incentive to get better is competition and to get competition you need a community that consists of players

Cutting you off where I did because that’s the big thing. The game mode isn’t holding players, the being forced into the 5-man no-lifer teams all on synced schedules is also prohibitive when the community itself is so small (again, the fun factor plays into this). If the game itself actually held player attention a community formed ladder, website and ‘scene’ would evolve and ANet would have the time needed to implement the built in support that the community wants/needs (opposed to what ANet THINKS is important). Granted many gamers nowadays are FAR lazier and want things handed to them rather than be a part of community organized systems, but that’s not a huge limiting factor. The problem is, regardless of the few die hards proclaiming otherwise, the game itself just didn’t hold player attention (fun, balance issues, annoying design and team comp requirements coughsoloQneededcough).