It’s a right step but in the wrong direction…
ArenaNet, it’s good to reward performance and have good set matches but the problem isn’t entirely just that, the issue is the limiting ways you can play. And no, I’m not talking about balance.
- “Practice Mode” is not legit practice.
If I get on my Mesmer with 50 games to practice, I’ll be practicing against people not wanting to wait for queue times with 2,000 mesmer games.
Solution: Until you are rank 10. In practice mode, you are flat rewarded 500 points up even if you lose or do badly. After rank 10, you are given 500 points if you win OR lose ‘IF’ you are playing on a class you don’t play much. In addition, you should get LESS points if you win on a class you play the most. In other words, you CAN be fully rewarded, just be on a class you don’t play much.
Practice Mode should reward diversity and welcome newcomers. Right now, it’s failing at both. Changing rewards will have it continue to fail at both.
- There is nothing for warming up other than practice or smashing golems.
I got 4,000 games on my Elementalist, why is the only option warm up with my PvP buddies against people that are under rank 20?
Solution: Add a Warm Up mode. This SHOULD be what practice mode is right now, where players are given flat rewards, 500 or 200, win or lose. This will promote more skilled players to stay away from practice and play what they are good at. This mode should also be LOCKED until rank 10. Let people get a feel of PvP in Practice before they go against people in Warm Up that are rank 80 with 5,000 games.
- No Random Arenas like GW1 hard. You get that? BRING IN RANDOM ARENA’S. Give me a team to play with until I lose.
This is the PvP community builder.
Solution: Add Random Arena’s. This is where random people become your PvP buds. GW2 doesn’t punish players for grouping or playing alone, but when content in both PvP and PvE can be beaten under 15 minutes, it’s hard to get a connection with your fellow players. Keep it locked to new players until rank 10.
- Give Custom Arena’s all maps, even beta and discontinued ones.
Why not?
Solution: Helps rebuild the community when you give tools to the players.
- Changing that team queuing will favor teams of the same size. A good idea, but the issue is GW2 PvP community is really, REALLY small thanks to terrible match making and balance/bugs being left alone.
This system could actually punish players UNLESS GW2 brings back a lot of it’s PvPers.
Solution: Favoring team sizes needs to happen, but honestly, not yet. You are going to anger a lot of players if they get a queue timer more than 30 minutes.
Do not take six months to fix if that happens.
- Skyhammer… It’s very toxic because it overly rewards certain builds.
People quit playing and go do something else because of this map. ArenaNet, you still don’t see what is wrong with this? UGH.
Solution: If you are above 50% health and fall off the map, you are teleported back to base and stunned. If you are below, you die. Rewards fighting instead of purely trying to knock people off.
- PvP growth can be better, much better and doesn’t have to be littered with goodies.
Why do you have players pay GOLD to unlock sigils, amulets and runes? You have a ranked system guys, do not fail gold sink. Now, this is not a must need but when HoT coming you really should consider the amount of returning or new players that will be arriving.
Solution: Flat out keep some Runes, Sigils and Amulets locked until a certain rank is reached like rank 20 or even rank 30. Restrict items that are good but far from essential. like Bloodlust Sigils, Settler Amulet and even Speed Runes. You can easily lock half the PvP items and still will not hurt the beginner experience. No Ogre Runes? There are other good power runes to serve you until rank 12. This will reward diversity and experimentation for new players without forcing them to find an online guide.
The problem is good players can troll and destroy the reward system for newcomers, if you have all the objectives, the thing that comes next is to camp spawn.
It’s good that you are restricting teams to play against teams, but the PvP community isn’t quite big enough to fully support that without lengthy queue timers.
Take another step ArenaNet, seriously, don’t stop. You got good intentions but bad ideas, hopefully, you’ll see this mistake before it happens.