Guild Wars 2

sorrow.2364:

Hello everyone…..

• Conquest mode encourages the new trinity:

The reality is that any good game mode is going to promote roles. A terrible game would be one where no one actually has a unique role and you all just sort of.. played… Something about competitive games is that you need to be the best at what you do, but not just that, your team needs to be better than the enemy team. The reality is that specializing in jobs (ie roles) will help to make your team more effective.

The question is, which roles do you want? I agree a bunker role is a lame and boring role and it is mandatory in the capture point setting.

• Conquest mode is PUG-unfriendly:

I would sort of agree. Mainly because the ONLY type of team play that exists in conquest is communication. And everyone knows how much pugs love to communicate.

• Conquest mode feels unrewarding:

I sort of agree. It’s more or less that there is no opportunity for that game changing play. If you think about it right, in any normal good competitive game, a great play actually shifts the dynamics from losing to winning and can happen at almost any point in the match. Conquest however, at least in this setting, has the concept that that can only happen if you are sufficiently close to each other. Otherwise, you’re still losing, but now just by not as much. Point being, it doesn’t feel rewarding because either you just sort of win or you just sort of lose. The chance that a huge comeback happens is an abnormality.

• Conquest mode is harder to understand:

Actually, this is the reason (in my opinion) devs chose this, and it is because capture points are EXTREMELY easy to understand. You hold a point, and you get points. There are extra dynamics in it, but that’s about it. The extra dynamics are things that contribute to the skill cap, but the bigger problem with capture points is that there is practically 0 skill cap. This means that you pick it up easily, but you learn to master it just as easily.

I think you see people running in hot join and being generally bad at that and you mistake it for them being bad. In reality, they just most likely have different motives, like glory.

Diage.6451:

Actually, this is the reason (in my opinion) devs chose this, and it is because capture points are EXTREMELY easy to understand. You hold a point, and you get points. There are extra dynamics in it, but that’s about it. The extra dynamics are things that contribute to the skill cap, but the bigger problem with capture points is that there is practically 0 skill cap. This means that you pick it up easily, but you learn to master it just as easily.

I think you see people running in hot join and being generally bad at that and you mistake it for them being bad. In reality, they just most likely have different motives, like glory.

Capture points is not intuitive. When you first join in PvP what you’re willing to do is kicking some kitten and that’s what every newbie wants to do. They have to slowly get used to the fact that killing is not that important as capping and this process usually takes quite a lot time.

In SoloQ, it isn’t rare that people are caught fighting off points or try to cap a point they clearly can’t cap instead of going for another node which is probably a freecap. Those things are, at least for me, a signal of the fact that conquest is way harder to understand compared to Annihilation (kill the enemy team), KotH (take and hold the hill) or CtF (run the flag and bash the runner).

+1 about everything, OP.

Great Thread.

sorrow.2364:

Capture points is not intuitive. When you first join in PvP what you’re willing to do is kicking some kitten and that’s what every newbie wants to do. They have to slowly get used to the fact that killing is not that important as capping and this process usually takes quite a lot time.

Killing is every bit as important as capping. The combat system is such that as soon as you bring one enemy down, your team has a massive advantage and will likely kill a couple more and get two or three of the points before the dead guys respawn and evens out the fight. In other MMOs, if you bring down a melee-dps, you may not make much progress on their tanks/healers before he gets revived, because the dps profession wasn’t contributing much to his team’s survival.

Regarding the other complaints:

—Trinity: yes, teams often use a bunker. There have been some very good teams roll pure dps comps, but for average teams/solos, you’ll want 1-2 defensive builds out of five. That doesn’t sound too bad—?

—Not pug-friendly: This is one of the reasons adding a solo queue was so important; voip does give an even larger advantage here. But solo queue is added now, and is already pretty good and will be even better when they work out a couple more issues.

—Conquest feels unrewarding: maybe. I feel rewarded even when I die on a point because I drew their entire team off balance. Again, getting kills is every bit as important as capping.

—Hard to understand: maybe. I don’t find it confusing but there are certainly a lot of players who have trouble figuring out that getting into duels while the enemy has control of all points is a bad thing.

—Hard to balance: I think GW2 is hard to balance because every profession is a hybrid of sorts, but I don’t think conquest is part of the problem. I understand your concern about thieves not being rewarded for acting sneaky, but they are highly rewarded for being able to get around the map quickly to backcap, or instantly end a 1v1 for a teammate on a neutral point and then quickly get back to a teamfight or other area they’re needed. In fact, 3-point conquest demands team splits (something that KotH, CTF, Deathmatch, and Annihilation do not require). That helps thieves, which, as you say, excel in small skirmishes.

tl;dr: The new modes will be great, but conquest is not deficient or unfair.

sorrow.2364:

• Conquest mode is PUG-unfriendly:

To be honest, all game modes that really enforce the idea of team play aren’t pug friendly because they require teamwork and coordination, something pugs aren’t known to be good at.

However, I think they could do well making it friendly by introducing a decent ping system, a la LoL, which has shown to make necessary communication very fast. Also, I’d like to see more thing put into the game that encourage individual awesomeness, but that can be addressed below.

sorrow.2364:

• Conquest mode feels unrewarding:

I completely agree. The problem here is that its so hard to feel like your individual play really made a difference. The only time I really feel like I’ve done something vital to the team’s success is:
1) When I stole a forest buff (which is so rare nowadays because teams are so careful about doing them because they aren’t worth the risk)
2) When I walk up to a treb and Charge it
3) When I’ve done a good play in a fight. Specifically when I’ve done a great job in a 1v1 or when I won (or stayed alive a long time) in a really inbalanced fight. But even then, often times you win a 1v1 and get a point, and at the same time your teammates lose one. Or you are fighting a 2-3v1 for a long time, but then your team is doing the exact same thing.

I think they need to make side objectives more pronounced for this. Spirit Watch has a lot of room for great individual play, but that is one map.

sorrow.2364:

• Conquest mode is harder to understand:

I actually disagree here a lot. Most other eSports are a lot harder to understand because even though they have a simple objective (kill the Nexus, kill off the enemy), the way you do that can be really difficult. GW2 its easy, you capture points and you see your points go up. You kill someone and the points go up. In fact with how meh the side objectives are right now in the game, it is too easy imo, they don’t have enough intricacy.

sorrow.2364:

• Conquest mode only makes the game harder to balance:

I don’t see how this follows at all. They have this one game mode, so they balance classes based on it. If their one game mode was TDM or King of the Hill, they’d use those as balance. It is easy to balance one game, what will make it hard to balance is if they have 5 types of PvP all at once that they are trying to balance.

A lot of the OP’s stated problems stem from the fact that pugs aren’t playing conquest on conquest maps, for whatever reason.

I think the game type is incredibly easy to understand. I once played soloq with a complete newbie to the game (first ever PvP), and they did remarkably well.

On saying that, I’ve also seen a lot of people in hotjoin standing in the middle of the map ONLY pressing 1 and heal. These aren’t glory farmers. These are peeps who think they playing team fortress.

TL:DR Give death match to the people who need it, and conquest mode will be played more like conquest.

NevirSayDie.6235:

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Well, killing is important when you’re killing on a point. Most newbies kill just of the sake of killing and ends up fighting in the middle of nowhere, not helping the team at all.

- Trinity: pure DPS comps have never been viable because you aren’t capable to properly hold points. In SoloQ, once you realize you have no defensive spec at all and your enemy has, you realize that you’ve probably lost that match, unless the enemy team is really really bad. This is pretty much what happened with monks back in GW1.

- Not pug-friendly: I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here. Adding SoloQ with a pug-unfriendly gamemode is a good thing? It will only encourage syncing and creating frustrating situations.

- Conquest feel unrewarding: well, you know that you are way more useful to your team if you’re holding up a node against 2 people (and eventually die) but, sadly, you don’t feel rewarded by doing so.

- Hard to understand: exactly.

- Hard to balance: you are focused only on the thief part, but there are some PvE or WvWvW viable specs that are completely unviable in PvP because conquest mode does not encourage them. Trying to use the same balance for PvE, WvWvW and PvP adopting only conquest in PvP as competitive mode is not a good idea.

Bhawb.7408:

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• Conquest mode is PUG-unfriendly: not really. Some gamemodes encourage a shallower layer of cooperation that are more friendly for pugs. For instance, Deathmatch/Annihilation requires coordination, but probably only to focus up on a target, which does not require a VoiP, neither a lot of coordination. Conquest, as it is designed, really needs a VoiP and a good amount of communication to be successful at.

• Conquest mode is harder to understand: as I’ve pointed out, most people feels that killing enemies is the core mechanic of PvP. Still, conquest does not fits their needs. It happens that a team member is completely useless for his team because he’s trying to take a point held by a bunker without succeding at it, while, in that moment, he feels he’s having an awesome duel. There are several layers of deepness in conquest mode that, if not fully understood, they can heavily compromise your contribute to the team while there are other gamemodes that are way more forgiving to people who don’t understand them completely. It is not a good gamemode for newbies to start with and get used to PvP, that’s what I’m trying to say.

• Conquest mode only makes the game harder to balance: well, right now they are trying to balance PvP, PvE and WvWvW at the same time, without splitting skills that much. Some profession are intrinsically designed to be needed for a conquest gamemode (like guardian), which makes them unbalanced for that matter. Making competitive PvP a mixture of several gamemodes (like HA in GW1) makes the game easier to balance because if a profession has an advantage in a specific gamemode (bunker guardian in Conquest), won’t have the same advantage in another gamemode (annihilation). That means that teams are encouraged to run balanced and polyvalent builds in order to succeed in PvP. Balance will be only tied to shaving down clearly overperforming builds and buffing up underused builds, while now it is a contant struggle of professions to take their place in a PvP environment competing with each other.

The main issue with conquest is that it does not promote team spirit.

- the lack of full team fights doesn’t create a “team spirit” as strongly as say a GvG(especially gw1’s). The cohesion doesn’t feel the same: instead of fighting all together next to each other, you do your individual stuff.

It directly impacts the community imo, as we can see with the increasing popularity of GvG in gw2 while tPvP is on the decline for competitive teams. Gw1 had a wonderful and amazing community thanks to this team spirit by the way.

- the team effectiveness is diluted into individual highlights. Scoring points is usually the matter of 1-2 players at a time, so even if each member is working toward victory the feeling is not the same.

- the lack of death penalty removes the excitation of key moments and fights where the team really feels they must give their all or lose.

By trying to blend fps and mobas into a mmo, gw2 loses what made gw1 the greatest pvp game ever: team spirit.

I won’t deny that the reliance on guilds/teams was too extreme though (you basically couldn’t anything without a group). But moving in the opposite direction is just as silly. All the flaws I’ve just listed are actually design decisions purposefully made because Anet wanted something “cool” to watch.

So rather than going for esport with an easy to understand mode based on points, try to design first a game mode that is solo-friendly while still heightening team spirit when competitive teams get their game on.

sorrow.2364:

- Hard to balance: you are focused only on the thief part, but there are some PvE or WvWvW viable specs that are completely unviable in PvP because conquest mode does not encourage them. Trying to use the same balance for PvE, WvWvW and PvP adopting only conquest in PvP as competitive mode is not a good idea.

Well it was fairly obvious that thief was the profession you were referring to…

I’d be pretty surprised if any PvE build for any profession did well in any form of PvP, no matter what the mechanic. Still, you bring up some valid points. People said the same thing last September when folks were complaining about how OP thieves were: “conquest balances them out—sure, they’re the best profession at killing, but it’s a good thing that’s not the only thing that wins matches or no one would ever run anything else.” You could say the same thing about hammer train GvG, etc, etc.

Thief has some great builds for conquest, but none of them are bunker builds. I guess I just don’t see that as a big deal.

sorrow.2364:

Hello everyone.
I’d like to sum up what, in my opinion, are flaws of conquest mode in the current Guild Wars 2 ecosystem and why it is a lot of times source of frustration and bad PvP experience.

• Conquest mode encourages the new trinity: Guild Wars 2 made a great step in the right direction by removing the holy trinity, which solves a lot of problems in terms of matchmaking and profession balances. In other games, the success of your team is heavily reliant on the team composition: no healer, no win. The class design of Guild Wars 2 is great since no healer is required but conquest mode makes a bunker as required as an healer is in other MMOs. The whole Guild Wars 2 system is a step ahead, but conquest mode vanify all the improvements behind the awesome combat system and class design.

• Conquest mode is PUG-unfriendly: conquest mode requires a lot of team coordination, thus voice communication, to be played effectively, which is something unreachable in hotjoin groups, when you’re matched against people you barely communicate with (and some times don’t even understand what you’re saying). This requirements creates frustration when you are matched against non-collaborative teams and makes being matched up with newbies a real catastrophe. Hotjoin/SoloQ is better suited with easy gamemodes like Annihilation/Deathmatch or KotH, where not so much team coordination is needed.

• Conquest mode feels unrewarding: we should be honest with ourselves. Everyone likes to see the “Player kill” popping up on your screen and performing your finisher on a downed enemy and knowing that, in that moment, you outplayed your enemy and helped your team reaching the win. That is the reason of why most people in hotjoin play like it is a deathmatch and most of the custom arenas are occupied by people doing duels. Conquest mode, compared to other gamemodes, feels much more unrewarding because capping points doesn’t give you the same thrill of victory that stomping an enemy does and, yet, killing enemies isn’t what makes you win in conquest mode.

• Conquest mode is harder to understand: this is something that developers are really fond of. Once a newbie join a match in PvP, what he wants to do is killing people with his beloved profession. But, yet, he have to face different maps with different mechanics withing them and he has to learn them all in order to getting really into PvP. He has to know that going for middle point in Kyhlo when the enemy has their treb up isn’t a good idea. He has to know that in Skyhammer, you probably want to hold the hammer as much as possible. Then there is all the other layers of finesse to learn, like not fighting off points, not trying to take down the bunker the whole time, not pushing when you have 2 points if not sure and so on. That is added to learning all the skill animations and class mechanics. That’s a lot to learn for newbies.
  Gamemodes like Deathmatch, Annihilation, KotH and CtF are way easier to understand. Yes, they lack the depth of high-level Conquest, but they are great for smoothing up the learning process.

• Conquest mode only makes the game harder to balance: this is a tough point. Some professions are clearly designed to be better on conquest compared to others. An example could be Guardian, with its party buffs and survivability, or engineer, with its point fight capabilities and massive AoE. This game offers a lot of game possibilities and since devs have already stated they don’t want to split skills that much between gamemodes, the only solution to this problem is to make gamemodes which let the player face against WvWvW-PvE-like situations and make competitive PvP a mixture of those modes.
  For instance, Thief is extremely strong in 1vs1 encounters and disengagements, which doesn’t really apply to conquest, since you can’t contest point while stealthed. On the other hand, Thief would be great flag runners and splitters if placed in the old GW1 GvG. Staff ele and Blood necro are another examples: they are extremely useful in WvWvW, not so much in conquest, while they would be great in KotH gamemode.

Those are only my opinions, obviously. Feel free to comment and write your opinion too, but please, be constructive.

This is one of the best post I have seen on the forums.

sorrow.2364:

Hello everyone.
I’d like to sum up what, in my opinion, are flaws of conquest mode in the current Guild Wars 2 ecosystem and why it is a lot of times source of frustration and bad PvP experience.

• Conquest mode encourages the new trinity: Guild Wars 2 made a great step in the right direction by removing the holy trinity, which solves a lot of problems in terms of matchmaking and profession balances.

Since Conquest’s main source of points aggregate is the number of points captured (of course along will player/npc kills/stomps), the only type of character that fulfills this role of maintaining a point is bunker. It could be a full bunker, or a semi bunker. But inshort, bunker. Full bunkers are almost inefficient for there is a certain limit that you can just outheal damage. To eliminate other point capturers, you should be able to withstand damage or eliminate the source of damage while withstanding its damage.

Since we have 3 capture points, zerging a point will be inefficient. team comps are illusionary and what fulfills the objective is to distribute your people for a triple cap. Your people should only have this abilities – delay or withstand 3 people or kill 1 or 2 people.

Trinities require cohesive team comps. in gw2, it doesnt matter for you can combine 3 bunkery killers on a point, focus fire on a target and win.

• Conquest mode is PUG-unfriendly: conquest mode requires a lot of team coordination, thus voice communication, …

it is pug friendly. GW1 had pug friendly builds like IWAY. when you say pug friendly, it doesn’t require much of voice com. Solo queue experience tells me that mechanics and battle awareness are enough. You don’t need to call 3-2-1 spike, have that much of a coordination.

• Conquest mode feels unrewarding: we should be honest with ourselves. Everyone likes to see the “Player kill” popping up on your screen and performing your finisher on a downed enemy and knowing that, in that moment, you outplayed your enemy and helped your team reaching the win. ….

It’s rewarding if you see your team go to 500. But you will kinda examine yourself if you got carried or you carried people. That’s the part that you kinda doubt your contribution to a team. Coz they’re not concrete. in gw1, you will know if you killed fast or you made your team not die. Conquest, deaths are forgiving. you get respawned
and try to cap an unmanned point.

IDK at top level if this is the case.

• Conquest mode is harder to understand: this is something that developers are really fond of. …

Yes, it’s hard to know the winning formula if you’re a noob. Some says to not cap far point but sometimes it works and capping far point leads you to an extra 20 points to win the game. its not formulaic. Conquest, while it appears to be boring and not pvp, is actually complex in a sense.

• Conquest mode only makes the game harder to balance: this is a tough point. Some professions are clearly designed to be better on conquest compared to others.

the only qualms that i have is they try to balance everything around sPvP conquest. PvE and WvWvW are not about capturing 3 points last time i check.

alcopaul.2156:

Since Conquest’s main source of points aggregate is the number of points captured (of course along will player/npc kills/stomps), the only type of character that fulfills this role of maintaining a point is bunker. It could be a full bunker, or a semi bunker. But inshort, bunker. Full bunkers are almost inefficient for there is a certain limit that you can just outheal damage. To eliminate other point capturers, you should be able to withstand damage or eliminate the source of damage while withstanding its damage.

I understand a lot of what you’re saying, but I feel like people have this belief that PvP is all bunker builds all the time, and that’s just not true. Most teams use 1-2 bunkers, and in a solo queue, you’re likely to see about that number per team, varying of course because no one is planning out the compositions. Are defensive builds important to conquest? Absolutely. Are bunkers a majority of builds played? No. (Although I guess you could make the claim that every warrior build is a “bunker” at the moment since it’s impossible to not have huge sustain while playing warrior…but that’s another story).

It’s also worth noting that if kills were worth more points, bunkers would become even better, since they don’t die. Glass cannons would become a liability—sure, they might successfully flip a point every once in a while, but the point loss incurred by dying would be too much to handle. Strategies like roaming/harrassing to far point would become too much risk for too little reward. An extreme example would be team deathmatch, where staying alive is everything.

tl;dr—bunker builds make up something like 30% of the population of an average PvP match. The rest are mainly condi pressure, lockdown, and burst.

Hate to break it too you but trinity is alive and well in GW2 regardless of the game mode….. just try doing a deathmatch 5v5 without support healer and people givings stability boons vs a team that has those things.

Too the people saying glass cannon is a liability in deathmatch they have no idea what they are talking about, liabilities are overly bunker folks that dont add much.

Glass cannon builds are going to be a bigger liability than a super-tanky bunker that brings support. The glass cannon build will get focused down over and over, even the smallest misstep by them is going to get them killed. Whereas bunkers aren’t going to die, and will still help the team through support; whether it be boon/healing support, condition application/removal, CC, or even just being tanky enough to sit around rezzing and stomping without a care.

Whereas Glass cannon builds will do one thing; damage. The problem is they will need to be able to do enough damage to take someone down, without getting downed themselves. Thieves and Mesmers are the only ones I can see doing this successfully, while bringing a wee bit of support.

Killing in conquest is really important, people that build bunkery and sit on a point waiting to die are liabilities.

Ex. what diff does it make if you can eat a ton of dmg if a bomb engi is just going to light you on fire with his bombs. Let him neut or cap the point, but build so that you can kill him! That is taking a step back to take a couple steps forward.

If you do the math killing the other team 4 times per person ends up netting (4*5*5) = 100 points. That’s two Niflhel bosses, but the advantage to that ends up snowballing b/c they aren’t going to stop you from getting secondary objectives or hold points effectively while short handed the whole game.

Building to survive in Conquest is stupid – building to kill ends up getting you the win. Car Crash understands this and that’s why they were rolling over people throughout the EU Invitational tournament.

So all the naysayers whining that Conquest is for bad players who can’t play right, come win an organized tourney with an aggressive build and actually prove yourself

jmatb.6307:

Killing in conquest is really important, people that build bunkery and sit on a point waiting to die are liabilities.

Ex. what diff does it make if you can eat a ton of dmg if a bomb engi is just going to light you on fire with his bombs. Let him neut or cap the point, but build so that you can kill him! That is taking a step back to take a couple steps forward.

If you do the math killing the other team 4 times per person ends up netting (4*5*5) = 100 points. That’s two Niflhel bosses, but the advantage to that ends up snowballing b/c they aren’t going to stop you from getting secondary objectives or hold points effectively while short handed the whole game.

Building to survive in Conquest is stupid – building to kill ends up getting you the win. Car Crash understands this and that’s why they were rolling over people throughout the EU Invitational tournament.

run 5 glasscannons and tell us the result.

How does aggressive = 5 glass cannons…

Obviously you want some support for team fights nobody runs 5 glass cannons for that reason.

Really good post here, i agree with everything you said.

Btw i like conquest, i think it’s very strategic mode, but this game can’t survive with only one mode.

There are few things I’d like to specify further.

• It is pretty obvious to me that the only level of team cooperation about Conquest is the coordination given to other teammates about controlling the map. This is what makes you win in a Conquest match and it is mainly determined by communication (“2 on close”, “hold mid+close”, “push far”, “far is free”). It is still possible to communicate via chat, but it isn’t half as effective as voice communication and most times people don’t even understand what to do when they see those message written in a moment while holding up against 2 people. Other gamemodes aren’t that reliant communication as Conquest is. What do you need to communicate in Deathmatch or King of the Hill? A target to focus on at best. That makes those gamemodes a lot more PUG friendly.

• It is true that WvWvW and PvE aren’t about capping points and that the balancing behind conquest is way different from the balancing of WvWvW. In WvWvW KotH-like or DM-like situations are way more common, which means that adding them as structured gamemodes in competitive PvP will make the game easier to balance according to WvWvW too. It is true that there are also some other factors in WvWvW like food buffs, other rune sets and stat spreads, but adding in PvP WvW situations for sure will help the WvW skill balance too.

Building to survive in Conquest is stupid – building to kill ends up getting you the win. Car Crash understands this and that’s why they were rolling over people throughout the EU Invitational tournament.

Car Crash ran with two defensive specs in any match they have played, which is the standard for every team build.

Conquest lacks momentum and showdown. With “Victory or Death!” GvG had an amazing mechanic to keep the match interesting. In the last minutes the weaker team could come back into the game and win it. The possibility of comebacks creates tension for players and viewers. In League of Legends a single mistake in the lategame can decide about winning or losing. GuildWars2’s Conquest, however, does not allow weaker teams to come back into the game (except for foefire). With a lead of 150 points you can almost announce a winner. Therefore, most conquest matches bore viewers in the last minutes. No showdown, no comeback, just boredom.

The linear point accumulation makes Conquest one of the most anticlimactic gamemodes.

Xom.9264:

Hate to break it too you but trinity is alive and well in GW2 regardless of the game mode….. just try doing a deathmatch 5v5 without support healer and people givings stability boons vs a team that has those things.

Too the people saying glass cannon is a liability in deathmatch they have no idea what they are talking about, liabilities are overly bunker folks that dont add much.

You just said that a support guardian (the only profession that gives out significant stability) was mandatory for a 5v5 deathmatch. I agree.

So a good 5v5 deathmatch comp would look something like: guardian, warrior, warrior, necro, 1 more (maybe necro, engineer, a third warrior, etc.)

A good 5v5 conquest comp looks something like:
1 teamfight bunker (guardian, warrior, or maybe engineer)
1 backpoint duelist (ranger, warrior, engineer, necro)
1 roamer (thief, ele, engineer, ranger, mesmer, dps guardian)
2 teamfight dps (necro, warrior, engineer, ele)

And yet people have this idea that PvP is all about bunkers. It’s not. Yes, a composition with one bunker is usually better than one without. That’s all.

OP:
Nailed it ON THE HEAD! Thank you for these accurate insights! I deeply hope that this post influences the PvP developers!

This is exactly how I have felt for almost a year, but I haven’t been able to express myself this well. THANK YOU!

Phadde.7362:

OP:
Nailed it ON THE HEAD! Thank you for these accurate insights! I deeply hope that this post influences the PvP developers!

This is exactly how I have felt for almost a year, but I haven’t been able to express myself this well. THANK YOU!

Thank you for bringing this topic back up
Hopefully some developer will notice this.

Only thing I agree with is conquest being unrewarding, I’ve felt that way since beta, however thus is also why temple and foefire are my favourite maps. Tranquility and the lord do feel rewarding, I wish the lord was even more so but whatever.

More than 3 roles exist in conquest.
I also dont think it makes the game harder to balance. There are multiple capture and hold events in pve and WvW is large scale conquest. If it is strong in conquest it is strong in WvW the opposite isn’t always true due to the exclusion of gear and skill splits. The game itself isn’t so different outside of their own addition of segregation via exclusive equips, buffs and to a lesser degree skill splits.

I want new game modes… really do but part of why Conquest isn’t appealing is that it needs more polish not that it cannot work. If they push conquest they should aim for the best conquest possible but it feels they are (which is understandable) working on the bug fixes and balance forgetting the core experience. Chat macros would be great for Conquest communication even more so if they have some audio macros. Things like that reduce the “Pug unfriendly” sense generated.
unimportance of victory over general kill farm doesn’t make winning matter. Which isnt stuff like “kill hotjoin” its why are people not caring about winning. Plenty of games have primary objectives that are not killing and they are performed by their playerbase, why is GW2 different? Because it is an MMO? Nope. If you look at say FA or JQ, WvW, the winter’s day game, keg brawl , gvg or a mobs the main objective is an NPC or running an item not killing players. Yet the playerbase performs the objective this isn’t because people are “hurr durr I need deathmatch”.

This is a good post. In addition to understanding map mechanics, probably the hardest part of conquest to learn is where to be at what time. Many times people who are low ranked in sPvP aren’t bad at their class…they simply show up at the wrong place at the wrong time. For example, people thinking it’s a good idea to just stand and defend the home node or people who assault a bunkered far point while the enemy is respawning.

ensoriki.5789:

~

I think that most people that does not like conquest does so because they “dislike” the core objective of the game mode. Polishing would help, but it wouldn’t do much of a difference for those players.

Personally, I think it’s a great Game Mode, but I don’t like it as the only Game Mode. I want a sPvP experience that’s about the combat and not running around and capturing nodes.

I think conquest mode, creates the illusion of a linear game, and or linear objectives, in a game that is actually anything but linear. Creating an environment where most “simple” pvp`rs are oblivious to the actual non-linear nature of pvp in gw2.

sorrow.2364:

• Conquest mode feels unrewarding: we should be honest with ourselves. Everyone likes to see the “Player kill” popping up on your screen and performing your finisher on a downed enemy and knowing that, in that moment, you outplayed your enemy and helped your team reaching the win. That is the reason of why most people in hotjoin play like it is a deathmatch and most of the custom arenas are occupied by people doing duels. Conquest mode, compared to other gamemodes, feels much more unrewarding because capping points doesn’t give you the same thrill of victory that stomping an enemy does and, yet, killing enemies isn’t what makes you win in conquest mode.

You are assuming that capping points are just nothing more than ninja-capping.

What gives players the most thrills when capping a point is when there is a huge battle involved beforehand.

runeblade.7514:

sorrow.2364:

Conquest mode feels unrewarding: …….. ~

You are assuming that capping points are just nothing more than ninja-capping.

What gives players the most thrills when capping a point is when there is a huge battle involved beforehand.

Agreed, but I that doesn’t make the quote from the OP wrong.

runeblade.7514:

You are assuming that capping points are just nothing more than ninja-capping.

What gives players the most thrills when capping a point is when there is a huge battle involved beforehand.

The cases in which there is a fair battle involved are close to 0. Most times one side outnumbers the other and it is just a matter of holding enough to let the other teammates cap the other points.

When there is a battle involved into capping points, you are wasting time and thus not helping your team. That’s why in conquest people just avoid combat as much as possible, unless they really need to get/defend that point.

sorrow.2364:

The cases in which there is a fair battle involved are close to 0. Most times one side outnumbers the other and it is just a matter of holding enough to let the other teammates cap the other points.

When there is a battle involved into capping points, you are wasting time and thus not helping your team. That’s why in conquest people just avoid combat as much as possible, unless they really need to get/defend that point.

Maybe sometimes. But most of the time, games are decided by which team fights better in even fights at mid. It’s just an added bonus that they can occasionally be decided by a really good solo player on the sides (either attacking or defending) or by good splits for secondary objectives.

As for “wasting time”—as a rule, killing someone is only an absolute waste of time if it takes three people to do it. If it takes two people, it can be a waste of time if they can’t get the point neutral or if it takes them more than 30 seconds or so to win a 2v1.

As for duels, yes, they can sometimes be complete wastes of time. However, duels over a neutral point are critical almost no matter how long they take. GW2 was designed to be active, and as a result, professions have massive mobility potential compared to most MMOs. Conquest is able to reward that (i.e. roaming) while not making it unbeatable (i.e. if you can’t take control of an area, you’ll lose even if you are able to disengage constantly).

It’s a good system that’s going to be very difficult to improve upon; still, it’s good that the devs are testing new modes.

sorrow.2364:

The cases in which there is a fair battle involved are close to 0. Most times one side outnumbers the other and it is just a matter of holding enough to let the other teammates cap the other points.

The cases for you is 0. Unless you have scientific and peer-reviewed proof that someone else may have this. But your case and your small sample is not the same for everyone.

The cases for me is over 0. Definitely not even zero or close to it. Maybe because I like running builds that are most useful in a team fight rather than a 1v1 only duel and actually try to find team battles to pick a fight in.

sorrow.2364:

When there is a battle involved into capping points, you are wasting time and thus not helping your team. That’s why in conquest people just avoid combat as much as possible, unless they really need to get/defend that point.

There is a reason to fight a battle that involved capping points, it is so that your score reaches to 500 faster if you get it. If you let the enemy capture it, not only will your team score reaches to 500 slower but your enemy will get to 500 faster. If you have a team peel off from the battle, you run a risk of lowering your chances of winning that battle and then your team wipes.

runeblade.7514:

The cases for you is 0. Unless you have scientific and peer-reviewed proof that someone else may have this. But your case and your small sample is not the same for everyone.

The cases for me is over 0. Definitely not even zero or close to it. Maybe because I like running builds that are most useful in a team fight rather than a 1v1 only duel and actually try to find team battles to pick a fight in.

You can’t deny that most teamfights are unfair and one side outnumbers the other.

runeblade.7514:

There is a reason to fight a battle that involved capping points, it is so that your score reaches to 500 faster if you get it. If you let the enemy capture it, not only will your team score reaches to 500 slower but your enemy will get to 500 faster. If you have a team peel off from the battle, you run a risk of lowering your chances of winning that battle and then your team wipes.

That’s the point.
You are not engaging to kill your opponent, neither for the sake of fighting.
You’re just engaging to keep the node white as much as possible, otherwise you’re wasting time.

Most of the fights in conquest are based on numerical advantages and proper man-force distribution. Individual combat skill has only a secondary role.

You can be an average-low skilled team and easily win against a very skilled team by having just a better control of the map.

sorrow.2364:

runeblade.7514:

There is a reason to fight a battle that involved capping points, it is so that your score reaches to 500 faster if you get it. If …….

That’s the point.
You are not engaging to kill your opponent, neither for the sake of fighting.
You’re just engaging to keep the node white as much as possible, otherwise you’re wasting time……

^This

The core nature of Conquest isn’t appealing to everyone. I’m glad they’re working on other Game Modes, because this should certainly not be the only option, even if it has a good design.

sorrow.2364:

You can’t deny that most teamfights are unfair and one side outnumbers the other.

Yes I can. Maybe some teamfights are unfair. But mostly the beginning of the matches are the fairest part. After everyone caps homepoint, they travel to midpoint for a epic battle to the death.

sorrow.2364:

That’s the point.
You are not engaging to kill your opponent, neither for the sake of fighting.
You’re just engaging to keep the node white as much as possible, otherwise you’re wasting time.

In a Deathmatch, I am engaging to kill my opponent so that my party gets more points.
In a Kill of the Hill map, I am engaging to kill my opponent so that I get control of the Hill.
In a Capture of the flag map, I am engaging to kill the map flag carrier, or people that keeps the flag carrier alive.
It doesn’t have to be conquest so that I engage to kill instead of fighting.

sorrow.2364:

Most of the fights in conquest are based on numerical advantages and proper man-force distribution. Individual combat skill has only a secondary role.

You can be an average-low skilled team and easily win against a very skilled team by having just a better control of the map.

This is what gives Conquest depth instead of it being linear like you are trying to make Conquest sound like.

Does depth ruin games in general? I don’t think so.

Phadde.7362:

runeblade.7514:

sorrow.2364:

Conquest mode feels unrewarding: …….. ~

You are assuming that capping points are just nothing more than ninja-capping.

What gives players the most thrills when capping a point is when there is a huge battle involved beforehand.

Agreed, but I that doesn’t make the quote from the OP wrong.

Yes it does. Lets look at the quote that you chose to cut out and ignored.

Conquest mode, compared to other gamemodes, feels much more unrewarding because capping points doesn’t give you the same thrill of victory that stomping an enemy does

In the Toulmin model, if one of the grounds(evidence) is wrong, then the claim(Conquest mode feels unrewarding:) is wrong regardless even if 99 other points are true.

runeblade.7514:

Yes I can. Maybe some teamfights are unfair. But mostly the beginning of the matches are the fairest part. After everyone caps homepoint, they travel to midpoint for a epic battle to the death.

The mid teamfight lasts not that much. Once one team takes mid, the manforce is completely spread around the map and there is no way to have another teamfight like that for the whole match, unless in some occasions.

Not to say that even the first mid teamfight is imblanced a lot of times because it would be way more profitable to just split to take the far point if it is not bunkered instead of wasting time fighting on mid.

runeblade.7514:

In a Deathmatch, I am engaging to kill my opponent so that my party gets more points.
In a Kill of the Hill map, I am engaging to kill my opponent so that I get control of the Hill.
In a Capture of the flag map, I am engaging to kill the map flag carrier, or people that keeps the flag carrier alive.
It doesn’t have to be conquest so that I engage to kill instead of fighting.

Those are different situations.
King of the Hill does not encourage team splitting as much as Conquest do, neither Capture the flag or Deathmatch.

runeblade.7514:

This is what gives Conquest depth instead of it being linear like you are trying to make Conquest sound like.

Does depth ruin games in general? I don’t think so.

I never said that Conquest is linear.
I’m just saying that Conquest is deep in the wrong direction.

runeblade.7514:

In the Toulmin model, if one of the grounds(evidence) is wrong, then the claim(Conquest mode feels unrewarding:) is wrong regardless even if 99 other points are true.

Claims I made aren’t always just true or false, we are not talking about mathematical evidences.
I’ve just tried to give a reason to the common behaviour of seeking kills instead of caps of a good portion of low-to-mid level PvPers, which is the population that you should be aiming to get involved.

You can’t say that the claim I’ve made is either wrong of true because there is of course a portion of people who play conquest as it is supposed to be played, but you can’t just ignore that the WvWvW population (in which skirmishes and non-comquest fights are way more common) is way wider compared to sPvP population.

Actually conquest is very simple to understand and a complete newb should understand the proper rotations after about 100 tournaments. Sure you won’t beat an experienced group in team queue but in solo q where everyone is random its easy to see the people that just dont care to make any attempt to attack points intelligently. Anything that takes a little thought is not automatically bad. People act like fighting is not central to winning conquest type matches and its just not true. Its making the proper rotations and then winning fights.

I’m just going to say that I don’t think that conquest itself is a bad game type, but the way it’s implemented isn’t as interesting as it could be.

The idea that a single person can deny the cap of a point isn’t something I agree with. It makes more sense to adopt the Battlefield way of doing things, the team with the most players on the point capture it, but if an enemy is there is captures at a slower rate. Bunkers will still be useful but they won’t be able to deny a cap against 2 people for an extended period of time. This could lead to another layer of strategy.

First off the capture points are far too small, the fact that most of them are uniform circles makes AoE much more powerful. If the capture points were shaped to match the environment then AoE would lose some but not all effectiveness.

The increased capture point sizes would also allow for more creativity when it comes to what is inside said points. What if Graveyard actually had busted up graves and mausoleums that can be used to break line of sight. Perhaps make the home points of a map hills that have the capture point at the top. Make it tall enough that getting knocked off requires running back up and you take a bit of fall damage, but not to the extent of Skyhammer.

The side objectives are a good idea, but many of them need updating or tweaking, such as one person should not be able to solo the gates on Foefire.

Changes like these could spice up gameplay, I think conquest is a solid objective based game mode but the way it currently is feels underdeveloped. The good this is, there’s

runeblade.7514:

…….
……….
This is what gives Conquest depth instead of it being linear like you are trying to make Conquest sound like.

Does depth ruin games in general? I don’t think so.

It’s not what it’s about, is it? It’s about that some people would love another Game Mode besides Conquest. Even though it’s well designed, it doesn’t cater to what every PvP player wants. Frankly, it seems like this is true for a rather large part of the playerbase.

BurrTheKing.8571:

The idea that a single person can deny the cap of a point isn’t something I agree with. It makes more sense to adopt the Battlefield way of doing things, the team with the most players on the point capture it, but if an enemy is there is captures at a slower rate. Bunkers will still be useful but they won’t be able to deny a cap against 2 people for an extended period of time. This could lead to another layer of strategy.

I understand, but then what would be the point of ever allowing your team to be outnumbered? Unless the decap was very, very slow, it would by far be a better strategy to keep all five players together at all times.

NevirSayDie.6235:

BurrTheKing.8571:

The idea that a single person can deny the cap of a point isn’t something I agree with. It makes more sense to adopt the Battlefield way of doing things, the team with the most players on the point capture it, but if an enemy is there is captures at a slower rate. Bunkers will still be useful but they won’t be able to deny a cap against 2 people for an extended period of time. This could lead to another layer of strategy.

I understand, but then what would be the point of ever allowing your team to be outnumbered? Unless the decap was very, very slow, it would by far be a better strategy to keep all five players together at all times.

If you did that then all the other team would have to do is split into 2 groups, avoid the mob as much as possible, and just recap the 2 points that they aren’t on. It would be more like “the bunker is on his own in mid, Bob and Joe go there and cap.”

You would have to manage how many players you need to send to have an advantage at one point, without leaving yourself too exposed at another. Right now a good bunker can delay the cap against multiple foes for a long time but that all changes if even a 2v1, the 1 being the bunker, mans you’ll be able to cap.

You’re going to see zergs in hotjoin no matter what you do because most of them aren’t even attempting to win.

BurrTheKing.8571:

If you did that then all the other team would have to do is split into 2 groups, avoid the mob as much as possible, and just recap the 2 points that they aren’t on. It would be more like “the bunker is on his own in mid, Bob and Joe go there and cap.”

That was what I was trying to say. Why would the bunker stay on mid if he knew Bob and Joe could come and there would be nothing he could do? He’d be much better off to stick with his four teammates.

NevirSayDie.6235:

BurrTheKing.8571:

If you did that then all the other team would have to do is split into 2 groups, avoid the mob as much as possible, and just recap the 2 points that they aren’t on. It would be more like “the bunker is on his own in mid, Bob and Joe go there and cap.”

That was what I was trying to say. Why would the bunker stay on mid if he knew Bob and Joe could come and there would be nothing he could do? He’d be much better off to stick with his four teammates.

Because Frank the bunker can still delay they cap, perhaps I should have been clearer in my description, the cap rate would probably have to be around 1/4 as fast as a normal cap. That means that Frank’s teammates can respond and deny the cap, but if they can’t/don’t then Bob and Joe can still take the point.

This video has been posted in another topic in this subforum.

It pretty much shows my point.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKSmrsmDHpM

sorrow.2364:

This video has been posted in another topic in this subforum.

It pretty much shows my point.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKSmrsmDHpM

A tad extreme maybe. And clearly not enough metal ^^

Phadde.7362:

A tad extreme maybe. And clearly not enough metal ^^

It’s not that much “extreme”.
That’s the kind of fights that conquest mode encourages.
They really shouldn’t have done nothing else then just sitting and waiting unless someone else would come to outnumber the other side.

sorrow.2364:

The mid teamfight lasts not that much. Once one team takes mid, the manforce is completely spread around the map and there is no way to have another teamfight like that for the whole match, unless in some occasions.

Not to say that even the first mid teamfight is imblanced a lot of times because it would be way more profitable to just split to take the far point if it is not bunkered instead of wasting time fighting on mid.Those are different situations.
King of the Hill does not encourage team splitting as much as Conquest do, neither Capture the flag or Deathmatch.

I don’t see what is wrong with team splitting.

• MOBA games split teams, and I think MOBA are fun.
• Capture the flag split teams. Someone defend flag carrier, someone attack enemy flag carrier.
• In FPS shooters team deathmatch, you would see people splitting up all over the map.

sorrow.2364:

Diage.6451:

Actually, this is the reason (in my opinion) devs chose this, and it is because capture points are EXTREMELY easy to understand. You hold a point, and you get points. There are extra dynamics in it, but that’s about it. The extra dynamics are things that contribute to the skill cap, but the bigger problem with capture points is that there is practically 0 skill cap. This means that you pick it up easily, but you learn to master it just as easily.

I think you see people running in hot join and being generally bad at that and you mistake it for them being bad. In reality, they just most likely have different motives, like glory.

Capture points is not intuitive. When you first join in PvP what you’re willing to do is kicking some kitten and that’s what every newbie wants to do. They have to slowly get used to the fact that killing is not that important as capping and this process usually takes quite a lot time.

In SoloQ, it isn’t rare that people are caught fighting off points or try to cap a point they clearly can’t cap instead of going for another node which is probably a freecap. Those things are, at least for me, a signal of the fact that conquest is way harder to understand compared to Annihilation (kill the enemy team), KotH (take and hold the hill) or CtF (run the flag and bash the runner).

Conquest is easy to understand if you have played any other mmo with spvp (battlegrounds etc) in it because point capture is one of the most common game types. So no I do not agree with you.

On the contrary I would say, it is extremely easy to understand, but with only three points offers limited strategic complexity.

I don’t really agree with any of your analysis; conquest is a standard mmo game mode and is well done in this game, but that is all it does which is the problem.

Four conquest maps are all that is needed, plus a few more game modes with there own maps and the overall game would be much more interesting due to the variety and fundamentally different strategy required in each game mode.