Guild Wars 2

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/120344507

For those of you who don’t frequent reddit/watch helseth

I thought it was the same video he made at the end of last season. The first one was better.

So sad to hear this. I guess the new rank 55 vs. Denial is never gonna happen. That was something I was really looking forward to. It’s a real shame, and I am just as sad as Helseth is about no esports events. I would say Anet brought this on themselves and they got what they deserved, but to be honest I doubt they even care. Guild wars 2 esports is over and I have known this ever since the world championship (however much I have tried to make myself believe more events would come) and this only confirmed that to me.

Yeah, awful news to hear. Competitive things in gw2 are just going to become less and less now.

Whatever, I guess I can just go back to playing and give up on hoping for more competitive events.

Haven’t had the chance to watch the video yet, but this seems like really strange timing. Helselth seemed so kitten excited for the direction PvP was headed in GW2 with season 5

sad to see.

but who could be surprised. no 5v5 que, ridiculous time between balance patches, poor community support. devs drop the ball so hard.

although, i would say Paragon is much better than Smite.

shrug I guess it really was all about the money.

Ithilwen.1529:

shrug I guess it really was all about the money.

… or maybe at least a competivite outlet for a PRO team?
Of course money is a factor if you are a pro team. Cannot make a living as a pro-gamer playing solo/duo queue competing for a title.

we can hope that anet realizes the complete focus on esports was a failure, and instead turns their attention to improving spvp as a game mode that players can enjoy more.

ie rather than all hands on board for 5v5 conquest esports pvp, they can start to consider more game modes, 1v1, 2v2. annihilation, etc.

OriOri.8724:

Haven’t had the chance to watch the video yet, but this seems like really strange timing. Helselth seemed so kitten excited for the direction PvP was headed in GW2 with season 5

The game is getting great for the pvp “casuals”. After 4 years we got a functioning and visible MMR system, decent gold per hour. A daily/weekly ingame tournamet system for like mini gem prizes on AcademyGaming level of play is all whats missing.

The esport (real money) scene however didnt have anything recently. And nothing regular is assured.
They liked 100$ per week + 1.000$ month system more than “Anet randomly once a year or two drops a 50k or 150k or 200.000$ tournament”.

No surprised there, there is nothing competitive about GW2 pvp anymore besides cheesing out your build as much as possible. Even if he says the game is fine there are serious issues with the balancing.

Hell you can’t even queue as a team anymore lol. I’ve moved on because I can’t team queue and I’m like 0.1% as serious as these guys are…

Not surprised in the slightest. It is quite funny when he claims he cared about the game before he started winning money in tournaments, then when the tournament money goes dry because there aren’t any being started he immediately leaves. Imagine that.

Funny how, when the vote for restricting ranked to duoqueue was up, he said it was a good idea and encouraged people to vote yes, while now he’s telling there’s no where to play as a team.

WHICH. WAS. EXACTLY. MY. ARGUMENT. NOT. TO. VOTE. YES.

Trigr.6481:

Not surprised in the slightest. It is quite funny when he claims he cared about the game before he started winning money in tournaments, then when the tournament money goes dry because there aren’t any being started he immediately leaves. Imagine that.

Yeah, how dare he try to make a living off of esports and then abandon a taken when that’s no longer possible.

I mean I just keep working for a company going under without pay, money is for chumps, paying bills and life can wait when you’re the best in GW2!

If GW2 wants to be esports it needs to funnel money into it and keep up tournaments, if not then they should come out and say they aren’t going in that direction anymore. At the moment people wanted to make a living off the esports of GW2 and it was possible with the Pro League for the top teams but not if they don’t keep doing pro league and 6 months no pay is a long time.

Magnito.6187:

Funny how, when the vote for restricting ranked to duoqueue was up, he said it was a good idea and encouraged people to vote yes, while now he’s telling there’s no where to play as a team.

WHICH. WAS. EXACTLY. MY. ARGUMENT. NOT. TO. VOTE. YES.

Trust me, 5 manning ranked is not competitive play . . .

Flumek.9043:

OriOri.8724:

Haven’t had the chance to watch the video yet, but this seems like really strange timing. Helselth seemed so kitten excited for the direction PvP was headed in GW2 with season 5

The game is getting great for the pvp “casuals”. After 4 years we got a functioning and visible MMR system, decent gold per hour. A daily/weekly ingame tournamet system for like mini gem prizes on AcademyGaming level of play is all whats missing.

The esport (real money) scene however didnt have anything recently. And nothing regular is assured.
They liked 100$ per week + 1.000$ month system more than “Anet randomly once a year or two drops a 50k or 150k or 200.000$ tournament”.

Yea, I got a chance to watch the video after class was over. Its sad that they are leaving, because it seems like Helseth really kittening loves the game. Which means that he’s leaving because he feels he doesn’t have a choice.

Dadefyl.1908:

Ithilwen.1529:

shrug I guess it really was all about the money.

… or maybe at least a competivite outlet for a PRO team?
Of course money is a factor if you are a pro team. Cannot make a living as a pro-gamer playing solo/duo queue competing for a title.

You know that the current system has nothing to do with “make a living as a pro-gamer”? In the past all the pro teams trained in scrims, not in queues. You don´t get anything for being #1 on the leaderboard except a title. The main reason Denial is leaving gw2 for now is that Anet didn´t announce any tournament whatsoever for 2017. Competing in tournaments with a prize pool is a big motivating factor for a pro player.

Well, you can’t blame them. Hard to be a pro team when you can’t compete for money on the regular. Anet has been a huge disappointment. What a waste of a potentially great game. The combat is there, but the game mode is super stale and nothing on the horizon to change that. GL to Denial in the future.

MMORPG aren’t great for esports. It may work if you have a complete pvp esports balancing team inside your mmorpg company which balances especially for this part of the game.
No mmorpg ever did this, because it costs them money and brings almost none. Anyone remember WoW esports?

For the denial team it’s a great decision and maybe it’s good for gw2 pvp too when they don’t have to think about balancing of a minigame inside their game anymore.

who cares man? this game has like 8/9 really addictive tools trying to think this game is Esport worthy, meaning if u make team from these 8/9 people u already won gw2.
then u wonder why anet has no interest?

real esport games has multiple teams and rising players smashing you off the top this game has nothing, im not into pvp scene but im pretty sure the same big names have been floating around for ages already.

Oh the PvP cynic, while badgering the community for not taking the e-sport section seriously is leaving? Don’t get me wrong he was right to be a cynic over how they balanced PvP. However being a jerk to the community is a big fat: No. Also he sent this out on the day of a large PvE patch. I guess everyone has their bias outlook on the game, if your apart of one those “massive pillars” of the game.

The whole e-sport thing for Guild Wars 2 has been a joke. The only way the e-sport system could have worked if Arena Net let the community built it up first. Before Arena Net started to play their hand into it. Instead they had their marketing team try to make a big deal of it way too soon. So now your having the reverse happen. Where the only reason why some of these “pro players” cared about game was for the e-sport scene. Not so much for the game itself.

What Arena Net should have done was work on different game modes, better match making system, and dividing skill balance between all three game modes. They are barley getting this done now, but it’s a little too late into the games life cycle. Nevertheless Arena Net needs to keep working at it. Eventually the community will hit it’s stride again, if you keep up with good quality content.

Anet failed hard…
They betrayed their philosophy…it became more and more grindy and P2W.
They did not announce their decision to let esport die. They let players on a pending situation waiting for a signal. Such a disrespect is bad.

Pvp is now dead…so sad…time to switch game I guess.

I really hope this is a good troll to make Anet wake up.
Smite looks like a bad joke.

As to be expected…

The devs do nothing meaningful to improve professions or fix problematic issues. Professions and combat are stale, and it’s not until the xpac that things will get exciting again. GW2 twitch streams hover between the 80-100 mark and these peeps aren’t going to make any money doing it. GW2 pvp and wvw combat is awful to watch, it’s all about stack and spam whatever. The devs wanted esports and wvw in the game, but they built and maintain everything for pve…

I’m sure more tournaments would be run, and more players playing, if anet actually got to business with creating professions 2.0, provided decent roles to play and made the combat more user friendly… but oh well.

martin.1653:

I really hope this is a good troll to make Anet wake up.
Smite looks like a bad joke.

Smite is a fantastic game. End of story. The only reason I stopped playing it wasn’t anything balance or gameplay related but a problem with their launcher and patching system.
It’s one of the better MOBA out there – imho the best one.

gebrechen.5643:

martin.1653:

I really hope this is a good troll to make Anet wake up.
Smite looks like a bad joke.

Smite is a fantastic game. End of story. The only reason I stopped playing it wasn’t anything balance or gameplay related but a problem with their launcher and patching system.
It’s one of the better MOBA out there – imho the best one.

Could be just the moba hater in me voicing opinion, but it’s really hard to believe one could go from GW2 combat to Smite combat. It’s like jumping from a horse to a lame donkey.

martin.1653:

I really hope this is a good troll to make Anet wake up.
Smite looks like a bad joke.

Smite might look like a joke, but gw2 actually is a joke when it comes to pvp. There is no competition, there has never been any competition and there probably never will be any competition, simply because not enough people are willing to put serious effort into it.
This most likely boils down to two things imo:
a) There is no environment that supports proper competitive play (team arena is unlikely to fix that because of the low player pool)

b) The game is plagued by a skill/class design philosophy that gives people the impression that the outcome is not determined by their own efforts but by builds. Be it low cd high impact skills like skull grinder, super annoying pets like smokescale/bristleback, instant/low activtion time skills that do have high impact like steal/dh f1, an abundance of defensive skills or dodges like the meta chronomancer/daredevil/revenant, or spamable soft cc/conditions like reaper/chronomancer. Obviously there is a difference between good and bad players but this does not become apparent to newer players, the game simply feels “spammy” and “random”, which does not encourage people to stay and improve but to stop when they lose (as it is very difficult to see why you are actually losing or what the other person does better).

Sindex.9520:

Oh the PvP cynic, while badgering the community for not taking the e-sport section seriously is leaving? Don’t get me wrong he was right to be a cynic over how they balanced PvP. However being a jerk to the community is a big fat: No. Also he sent this out on the day of a large PvE patch. I guess everyone has their bias outlook on the game, if your apart of one those “massive pillars” of the game.

The whole e-sport thing for Guild Wars 2 has been a joke. The only way the e-sport system could have worked if Arena Net let the community built it up first. Before Arena Net started to play their hand into it. Instead they had their marketing team try to make a big deal of it way too soon. So now your having the reverse happen. Where the only reason why some of these “pro players” cared about game was for the e-sport scene. Not so much for the game itself.

What Arena Net should have done was work on different game modes, better match making system, and dividing skill balance between all three game modes. They are barley getting this done now, but it’s a little too late into the games life cycle. Nevertheless Arena Net needs to keep working at it. Eventually the community will hit it’s stride again, if you keep up with good quality content.

Well said and the joke there is no challenge for a team seems he only cared about money.

Took 1 second google and here : https://play.eslgaming.com/guildwars2/global
there is challenge and competitive scene.O wait you do not get any money there so sad for them.

No there isn’t a competitive scene. ESL is for 1v1 and 2v2 but not for the actual gw2 pvp game mode, which is 5v5 conquest and even if there was, there are not enough teams on a similar level and not enough changes in the meta game to keep it interesting.
Obviously, the absence of cash prices is likely to influence their decision but you cannot blame them for that. If anything it is surprising that the played for so long given how pathetic the competition in this game is.

For me alot of players have been leaving the game simply because there is no real competitive scene.

I wont use names but from a NA perspective top 2 warrior hasnt been playing, the top 2 engys havent played this season and a former top 3 thief hasnt played this season.

There is no build diversity from a solo or team perspective.

Helseth is basically playing the sponsored player character role saying all the right things.

But nothing about GW2 feels better now then it did before HOT. Heck we have had former Pro players left and right lose there stuff when a certain Anet employee left. I do agree on 1 thing, if you are in GW2 looking for something competitive, dont just move on.

well this sucks, at least EU have 55 and VM .. meanwhile in NA ESL players fighting and ruining pvp scene just for a god awful title.

Erzian.5218:

martin.1653:

I really hope this is a good troll to make Anet wake up.
Smite looks like a bad joke.

Smite might look like a joke, but gw2 actually is a joke when it comes to pvp. There is no competition, there has never been any competition and there probably never will be any competition, simply because not enough people are willing to put serious effort into it.
This most likely boils down to two things imo:
a) There is no environment that supports proper competitive play (team arena is unlikely to fix that because of the low player pool)

b) The game is plagued by a skill/class design philosophy that gives people the impression that the outcome is not determined by their own efforts but by builds. Be it low cd high impact skills like skull grinder, super annoying pets like smokescale/bristleback, instant/low activtion time skills that do have high impact like steal/dh f1, an abundance of defensive skills or dodges like the meta chronomancer/daredevil/revenant, or spamable soft cc/conditions like reaper/chronomancer. Obviously there is a difference between good and bad players but this does not become apparent to newer players, the game simply feels “spammy” and “random”, which does not encourage people to stay and improve but to stop when they lose (as it is very difficult to see why you are actually losing or what the other person does better).

Pretty agrree on “b” part

too many passives.
not enough actives.
every mmo is like this and then make the mistake that they can go competitive.

Erzian.5218:

martin.1653:

I really hope this is a good troll to make Anet wake up.
Smite looks like a bad joke.

Smite might look like a joke, but gw2 actually is a joke when it comes to pvp. There is no competition, there has never been any competition and there probably never will be any competition, simply because not enough people are willing to put serious effort into it.
This most likely boils down to two things imo:
a) There is no environment that supports proper competitive play (team arena is unlikely to fix that because of the low player pool)

b) The game is plagued by a skill/class design philosophy that gives people the impression that the outcome is not determined by their own efforts but by builds. Be it low cd high impact skills like skull grinder, super annoying pets like smokescale/bristleback, instant/low activtion time skills that do have high impact like steal/dh f1, an abundance of defensive skills or dodges like the meta chronomancer/daredevil/revenant, or spamable soft cc/conditions like reaper/chronomancer. Obviously there is a difference between good and bad players but this does not become apparent to newer players, the game simply feels “spammy” and “random”, which does not encourage people to stay and improve but to stop when they lose (as it is very difficult to see why you are actually losing or what the other person does better).

You can’t say arenanet lacks constructive players. Sometimes people think community is toxic, but in every topic i see great constructive criticsm like this that goes unheard.
In fact, we probably have a better pvp community than any competitive game.
What we lack is attention.

All my love to other players of this fantastic game.

It’s sad to see them go as individuals, but as a team, good riddance. If Tournements still happen, it will be way more exciting to watch with remaining people, and underdogs will surprise way more. The Ultra ‘skill’ stacking is now over with Rom+helseth no longer being a team.

And this stacking proves the following point: He does it for the money. Not really for the fun factor. But soon he will get bored of paragon/smite. Of that i’m sure He will enjoy ‘working for his money’ much less.

As for Arenanet: I only read now Grouch is gone (should have known earlier lol). I’m sure helseth took this in his decision to leave, not trusting the person replacing grouch. Mike obrien is way to slow with hiring a replacement for Colin Johansonns old post (creative director?). And Anet should do something, against the ‘Amazon studios, pay to get employees’ strategy. If they can’t keep even relative good talent, then it’s not good; Also new people means more time they need to ‘get into’ it, more time needed to make expansion. I hope Anet takes this ‘silent time’ as a wake up call to be great again.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

But soon he will get bored of paragon/smite. Of that i’m sure He will enjoy ‘working for his money’ much less.

I cannot speak for smite but Paragon is sick! Paragon is the best game I have played that is cross platform between PC and PS4. Back to the issue though, it’s sad to see Denial leave, this game only benefited from their presence. They brought more awareness to the game through twitch and youtube videos. Good luck guys in smite!

Magnito.6187:

Funny how, when the vote for restricting ranked to duoqueue was up, he said it was a good idea and encouraged people to vote yes, while now he’s telling there’s no where to play as a team.

WHICH. WAS. EXACTLY. MY. ARGUMENT. NOT. TO. VOTE. YES.

Completely missing the point.

A working solo/douq ranking system is for majority to play most of their games, meet and try new poeple, try and get better.
Once you find 4 other GOOD AND COMPATIBLE friends, which is very small part of overall population, you atm have to organize skrims – which are best for training value…or somewhere in future we will get an ingame daily/weekly tournament to play…. ALL 5x POEPLE ARE ONLINE FOR 2H AT SAME TIME MAX.
So either a few rounds of scrim or a mini tourney. That is what you play with 5-man teams.

5-man esport money teams are completely different and are more dependent on outer organizations than Arenanet. Like does a regular like you bother with age restrictions for cash tourneys or players swaping teams mid season etc?
Those are pro rules and have nothing to with general community. They left because long time and no fixed schedule, its reasonable.

HoT is totally kittenING patch This is all I want to say.

Not practical at all to try and move an entire roster to a new game. Inevitably there will be some of them who will lag behind the others and so it is not sustainable.

Just goes to show though…all this giving out money to the very small minority of Esports people for their tournaments achieved nothing. These people will just leave the game as soon as they do not get money for it. So anet have failed massively with their approach to this game. That 200k from the world championships should have been spread out over years to support esports. And then let it grow organically. Instead their tournament did nothing at all. No help for the game at all. Imagine you run a business and invest 200k and then nothing after. Why bother? They should have regularly run tournaments with small prize pools for years with that money. gg anet.

gl to helseth though, he made a good choice to leave gw2, which is just a frustrating game on so many levels. Also good to see him recognise how toxic he was in the past.

Hopefully if esports is dead then we can get some fun 2v2 or 3v3 game modes at last.

Bummer that they are leaving, but it makes total sense. If you are a Pro team you want to compete and you want to make money by winning. They can’t just keep waiting around for GW2 to provide that, its too much of an opportunity cost. They have to strike while the iron is hot, both in terms of their skills/team and in terms of the landscape of available games.

I did learn a lot about playing Druid from ROM’s stream though. Probably would have been stuck in bronze forever if I didn’t watch it.

Come on, man. Did anyone actually think these pro-leaguers were looking out for this community? NOPE, they’re in it for themselves. They just want to get paid. They don’t care about making the basic features and structural changes that pvp needs that benefit the majority of people. So now that the cash dries up, they leave. Well…good for them. I hope they find fortunes elsewhere.

PvP’s focus on e-sports has directly benefited pro-league at the pvp community’s expense. This is why I didn’t support this so-called “scene”. It’s artificial.

- No 5v5 queues
- No separate solo queue or 1v1
- No new pvp modes (stronghold is weak)
- No TUTORIAL

There is not a chance in Hades that you will have a competitive TEAM game without a TEAM queue.

Glad I quit. Season 6 is already dead.

I think most of you miss the point. A non 5 man q in ranked makes it competitive for the majority of the community and makes PvP more fun for most soloers too since they don’t get farmed by 5 mans. Helseth supported this and he was right, S5 was pretty good with some issues which will hopefully be fixed in S6.

Pro league is a totally different issue, these guys play top tier and compete as a TEAM. They don’t wanna queue ranked as a team lol, they’re too good for that. They want to compete with other teams on a pro league/cash tourney level which ANet hasn’t organized for almost a year. If they can’t play as a team there’s nothing for them to do in GW2 since they’ve already reached the top as a team, it makes sense to move on to another game for now if not permanently.

I actually don’t really like Helseth, I think he is too arrogant but you can’t deny he makes sense in the video where he talks about competitive ranked and not having 5 mans there and this video too. He’s also much better as a person, and player than everyone on the NA pro league scene.

JTGuevara.9018:

Come on, man. Did anyone actually think these pro-leaguers were looking out for this community? NOPE, they’re in it for themselves. They just want to get paid. They don’t care about making the basic features and structural changes that pvp needs that benefit the majority of people. So now that the cash dries up, they leave.

Dude, they don’t owe you or anyone else anything. Not a dime. It was their skill that got them on top and ONLY their good will that they even got involved in trying to keep the competitive scene strong and teaching us plebs how to play the game instead of sucking hard.
They gave suggestions and constructive feedback, just like majority of community did. Anet didn’t listen much. What else is there for them?
If they have chance to earn money playing games somewhere else they have all the freedom to do so. Absolutely nothing binds them to the GW2 game. If anything community and Anet owe them – because these players shared a lot of their knowledge with anyone willing to learn.

fishball.7204:

I think most of you miss the point. A non 5 man q in ranked makes it competitive for the majority of the community and makes PvP more fun for most soloers too since they don’t get farmed by 5 mans. Helseth supported this and he was right, S5 was pretty good with some issues which will hopefully be fixed in S6.

Pro league is a totally different issue, these guys play top tier and compete as a TEAM. They don’t wanna queue ranked as a team lol, they’re too good for that. They want to compete with other teams on a pro league/cash tourney level which ANet hasn’t organized for almost a year. If they can’t play as a team there’s nothing for them to do in GW2 since they’ve already reached the top as a team, it makes sense to move on to another game for now if not permanently.

I actually don’t really like Helseth, I think he is too arrogant but you can’t deny he makes sense in the video where he talks about competitive ranked and not having 5 mans there and this video too. He’s also much better as a person, and player than everyone on the NA pro league scene.

Nope. Helseth, like all pro-leaguers, are just trying to get paid or trying to hustle you.

Solo queuers got farmed by 5-mans because the queues were not SEPARATE. Now they just get farmed by duos.

Any TEAM game that wants to be competitive without a TEAM queue is an illusion. Solo queuers truly are better off advocating for a separate solo queue or 1v1 mode.

Not to mention helselth was the number 1 pvp streamer on twitch as far as numbers go. This was a big blow to the games popularity, not to mention the snowball it might cause….

I can’t blame helselth though, not much point playing competitive in a game with non-existent competitive scene.

Ithilwen.1529:

shrug I guess it really was all about the money.

How about you actually watch it.

Sindex.9520:

Oh the PvP cynic, while badgering the community for not taking the e-sport section seriously is leaving? Don’t get me wrong he was right to be a cynic over how they balanced PvP. However being a jerk to the community is a big fat: No.

I’m cynical about the way he announced he was leaving before then came back as a big supporter but watching the video he makes some good points.

martin.1653:

JTGuevara.9018:

Come on, man. Did anyone actually think these pro-leaguers were looking out for this community? NOPE, they’re in it for themselves. They just want to get paid. They don’t care about making the basic features and structural changes that pvp needs that benefit the majority of people. So now that the cash dries up, they leave.

Dude, they don’t owe you or anyone else anything. Not a dime. It was their skill that got them on top and ONLY their good will that they even got involved in trying to keep the competitive scene strong and teaching us plebs how to play the game instead of sucking hard.
They gave suggestions and constructive feedback, just like majority of community did. Anet didn’t listen much. What else is there for them?
If they have chance to earn money playing games somewhere else they have all the freedom to do so. Absolutely nothing binds them to the GW2 game. If anything community and Anet owe them – because these players shared a lot of their knowledge with anyone willing to learn.

Never said they owed us anything. I said they needed to stop pretending that they care. They don’t. They want the money. This exodus proves it.

For that matter, I don’t owe them anything either. I owe them no thanks. Pro-league and its participants were a drain on this community. Period.

So funny, he talks about how he doesn’t want people to use his words in this video to bash anet and they are leaving because they can no longer compete as a team. Then here we have a whole thread of people using this video to bash the game and talking about how he was only interested in money. Lol, too funny.

Shaogin.2679:

So funny, he talks about how he doesn’t want people to use his words in this video to bash anet and they are leaving because they can no longer compete as a team. Then here we have a whole thread of people using this video to bash the game and talking about how he was only interested in money. Lol, too funny.

Couldn’t compete? Ha! BS. Then they should’ve left at the START of the season where it was known that 5v5 wasn’t going to be in.

No no no. They left because the e-sport money dried up, pure and simple.

Best of luck boiz