Now let me start off by saying that these are my own views as a player who has been playing this game competitively from launch. Currently have 60 QPs and am Rank 41 with nearly 2,000 games played.
I’ve decided to summarize the issues that I feel are very important and need to be addressed for this game to have a future as a competitive game.
• Massive gap between low and high skill players
This is caused by many factors that I’ll get into later on in this post, but this section will focus on the lack of informative resources given to new players. Things that veterans have learned in time, such as timing your burst, stun breaking, blink locations, and team strategies to name a few are completely unknown to lower skilled players.
Lets take a look at League of Legends.
-Help section specifically for experienced players to help newer ones on their forums.
-Multitude of learning resources, ranging from guides to build fansites to content put out by Riot themselves (Character overviews in the form of youtube videos)
-Extremely popular on Twitch.tv, many perspectives from high skilled players who have a wide range of playstyles.
-Player replays are especially helpful.
Guild Wars 2 currently has:
-A few experienced streamers
-Very few guides written by experienced players, many from rank 10-20s. Most are outdated.
-http://www.gw2build.com/ is a decent site for players to find builds. It’s one of the only build resources out there right now but doesn’t even compare to http://www.mobafire.com/ in terms of quality.
• Lack of competitive features
Replays: An incredibly important feature that allows teams and players rewatch their successes and failures.
Ladders: Without them there is no competition. These need to be added ASAP.
LAN/Online Tournaments: Prize rewards will spark a huge interest into the competitive side of Guild Wars 2. Outside of the massive LAN event tournaments, online tournaments can easily be implemented and give teams a goal to strive for. Things will start getting real competitive when gems, titles, and exclusive gear is involved.
Without these the competitive scene will struggle to stay alive.
• Unfriendly to new players
So put yourself in the shoes of a new player. You load up PvP, enter Heart of the Mists, and take a look around. You don’t feel like tweaking with your build/utilities just yet and want to jump straight into the action. In Hotjoin you notice everyone zergs together, no one cares about winning and they only want glory. You’re getting killed in a few seconds either a Backstab Thief or a 100b Warrior becuase you don’t know how to counter them.
After awhile you become comfortable in Hotjoin and start better understanding classes and their skills. You’re looking for something more competitive, so you first try and form a group to do a tournament with. Right off the bat you’re having issues finding a group. Heart of the Mists (if you’re not on Anvil Rock) is a wasteland and trying to form a group with people from Hotjoin is a wasted effort, so you queue solo. You’re thrown in with 4 other random players who have no organization or team composition at all and are getting stomped over and over 500-200 by organized teams.
By now you’ve realized:
1. Hotjoin is a skill-less zergfest.
2. Tournaments have poor matchmaking and are run by premade groups, which you can’t seem to get into.
^ The above scenario I believe to be very common. People leave the game because of this, never to return. If you aren’t an experienced player who has been playing from the start you’re in for a bad time. This has to be addressed somehow, or else the PvP population will continue to drop into oblivion.
Will edit this post later with more info but this is all I’ve got for now.