Guild Wars 2

Its been 2 years since I tried, auto balance ruined it every time.

Don’t play practice? You can group together with your friends in Unranked or Ranked. It’s 5v5, no auto balance.

When did they remove auto balance?

Auto balance has never been implemented in solo queue, team queue, unranked, or ranked arena matches.

Hot join is the practice arena, and has been described as such by ANet; yet many players still only play hot join, getting worse matches - matches of the auto balance more than actual PvP - instead of progressing onto unranked and then ranked, where you can have matches without the auto balance abusers, and queue with friends in a party to get onto the same team for the full duration of that match. If more hot-joiners did unranked/ranked queues, queue times would also be shorter.