With the recent update notes for April I think it’s a perfect opportunity to address the direction that the structured PvP community is headed and what ANet is missing. I have been an active sPvP player since beta and I’ve noticed an oversight that ANet seems to be missing and the recent patch notes are evidence that they still don’t understand what is fundamentally missing from PvP. In the first Guild Wars, PvP was king. The system that was in place inspired competition and had a ranking system that promoted play and rewarded skill. Although the current leaderboards attempts to address this there still seems to be less focus done to fix these issues and more on increasing the PvP player base. If you were to ask any legit/experienced PvP player what they want in Structured PvP the answer would be almost unanimous: Structure. It’s funny how ANet gives the title Structured PvP when it’s missing just that: Structure. All we want from the PvP community is a platform to compete against players of equal skill and be rewarded for it. And with the recent patch it just goes to show how far off from the target they are.
I’ve seen hundreds of posts and pages of people trying to attempt to offer solutions, but what they truly need is something that is far simpler and more reasonable to do. For example, why not offer a system that creates a tiered platform for players to be placed based on their skill. I’ve played both League of Legends and Starcraft II and love the system that they have in place. For anyone that is unfamiliar they have a tiered system of Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond etc. with increasing notoriety and fame that was based on your win rate. I can’t imagine a system like this can be that difficult to implement. The recent changes further emphasize how sad a measure rank is of skill. There is simply no effective way to determine skill in the current state of structured PvP. A system based on wins by nature defines who the best is and competition naturally follows. If you saw a tiger or phoenix in GW1 you knew that they knew their stuff, the “snail ranks” made sense and the points were only attainable by winning.
Another suggestion would be to see an “Unranked Arena” where players can go in, learn the game, try out builds etc. Hot join just doesn’t offer realistic scenarios where players can experiment and learn. Also, the achievements and titles that you can get are either too easy or too difficult, there’s little to no middle ground. To achieve Champion title, for example, you need 150 wins in arena on a certain profession, but Champion Brawler requires 1,000 wins. ANet can implement a tiered aspect to these as well to offer players more incentive to play the class they love and reward them for it while still being based on skill. With true skill ranks and titles, a strong sense of community will emerge from the competition, pride, and glory. Players will strive to be top, guilds will recruit and train newbies, discussions will be had on top players/guilds/builds; a whole community will blossom and bloom all to better themselves and each other. If you want to create a strong community, you have to first create a reason for it to exist.
I love the changes and features that are coming in the April patch (with the exception of rank) and think they’re a fantastic addition to PvP, but they don’t offer a solution to the problem that’s been haunting structured PvP since its birth. If ANet wants to create a competitive scene that can rival the best of them I feel a system like this NEEDS to and SHOULD be implemented. The biggest thing that GW2 has going for it is the gameplay. ANet is sitting on a gold mine that’s one pickaxe strike from exploding and it seems like they’re digging in the wrong spots and fixing things that aren’t broken. It may have been said before and I’m repeating what has been said a thousand times, or these changes might actually be right around the corner and all this will be for naught; but it pains me to see such simple missing elements cripple a game so phenomenal. Thanks for reading!