Guild Wars 2

“TLDR: PvP is dying because of lacking content for aspiring new players and those in between the casual/hardcore area. A ladder/matchmaking needs to come as soon as possible to create a playfield that is enjoyable no matter how good you are at the game and helps you grow as a player.”

Good will, but, it is impossible.

First, by the nature of any competitive sport, there is no painless way to let player grow. As normal person, someone must be beaten to grow to a good player.

when talking about aspiring new players, all we need is nice balanced and beautiful fight. We already have nice play field designed.

Ideally, the free tournament is the place for new team to build up and train there skills, hot join is the causal players play for fun. Paid tournament is where the hardcore time will play for price. Then, later on we will have custom game of course. Plus, the WvW is also a part of PVP, although it is not sPVP it still help players join the PVP.

By the nature of GW, sPVP it is team base game, remember before really think joining tPVP. You have to have a team, the game won’t give you team, but you have to build it up. That’s something beyond the game itself. Read a little about the most successful team e-sport game (CS so far, dota also coming up), we will learn from there. How many teams in the world you can name it? How many “new players” or new team come up each year? Did they death?

If someone is causal player, we have hot join and WvW for you. Also, don’t forget, we enjoy the game not only by playing it, but also by watching top player performing. I believes, later on more and more player will form teams, because we rise team from WvW, we know new friends. Also, when it start really tournament that paying out real good amount of cash, it will rise the number of sPVP players.

My issues with sPvP in this game as a player that was in guilds ranging from top 100 to top 5 in GW1.

1) High barrier to entry, especially compared to either Tombs or random areas. No real way to effectively solo or duo queue with people to face similarly ranked players. Included with this is no real way effective way to find groups. In GW1 the entire population was located within a few zones, making in easy to find people for pug groups. In GW2 it is just your lone server in Heart of the Mists, so I hope you are in an active pvp one.

2) Stomp or be stomped gameplay, mostly caused by no real match making system. You can face players with 1000 tourney wins in your first tourney, and conversely you can face people that have never played a tourney before, while you have 1000 wins. Neither option is fun. The travesty that is paid tournaments I don’t even want to get into.

3) No sense of continuity between your pve character and pvp character. Why shouldn’t you be able to use your PvE skins in PvP, and your PvP skins in PvE. If I farm a legendary I should be able to use that skin in PvP, and conversely if someone else farms a legendary, I want to be able to curb stomp them while they are wearing it. On the other side if I unlock cool skins via PvP, I should be able to transmute them onto my PvE gear.

Plague.5329:

“- “Some” balance changes.”

Oh, lord. I get the impression a lot of people are going to be very mad at this supposedly “big PvP patch.” As I feared, it’s shaping up to be nothing more than bug fixes, with no attempt whatsoever to fix any of the major problems with some of the classes right now.

Bug Fixes are actually a pretty big part of what’s required at the minute. Pick any class and think about how much better it would be if all the currently broken and bugged skills/traits worked as they are supposed to work. At least as far as my Ele is concerned, I can think of a handful of potential bug fixes that would immediately make me re-evaluate my build to improve the efficiency, and quite a few more that would be huge quality of life changes (lol, how about a RtL that actually works consistently).

Making big balance changes while leaving massive bugs still in the game would be a terrible idea, and is only asking for those balance changes to be reverted or further tweaked once the bugs are squashed.

While I’m not in any way denying that a lot of things outside of the ‘bug’ spectrum need work, it’s important that the foundations of the balance are correct and stable. Obviously everyone would prefer bug fixes and balance changes, but these guys have limited time/manpower, and need to prioritise, and while I disagree with prioritising custom arena’s, I’m in complete support of them making the traits/skills work as they’re supposed to before going on a huge number-changing mission.

Noctred.6732:

According to Jon Peters in the mists a few hours ago:

- The profession part of the upcoming patch notes is roughly 5 pages long.
- ~16 bullet points for rangers.
- ~30 bullet points for engis.

But nothing for Ele’s <sigh>

samo.1054:

-Remove the hotjoin 8v8 altogether.

People have been calling for this since beta 3 when it was obvious that 8v8 was not ideal for the maps as designed. Pretty ridiculous to design maps around 5v5 then increase it to 8v8

What it really boils down to is that the sPvP/tPvP dev team is too incompetent/understaffed in order to fully take advantage of this games potential. This aspect of the game has been lacking since day 1, and will STILL be very sub par after the release of their upcoming addition, custom arenas. Something much more drastic needs to happen.

morrolan.9608:

Noctred.6732:

According to Jon Peters in the mists a few hours ago:

- The profession part of the upcoming patch notes is roughly 5 pages long.
- ~16 bullet points for rangers.
- ~30 bullet points for engis.

But nothing for Ele’s <sigh>

I hope you’re being overly dramatic for comedic effect, because there’s no other explanation as to why someone could say “5 pages of profession patch notes” and have it be interpreted as “No Elementalist changes”.

Cogbyrn.7283:

I hope you’re being overly dramatic for comedic effect, because there’s no other explanation as to why someone could say “5 pages of profession patch notes” and have it be interpreted as “No Elementalist changes”.

Not to mention the part of the post that said mesmers saw the fewest number of changes…

Noctred.6732:

Cogbyrn.7283:

I hope you’re being overly dramatic for comedic effect, because there’s no other explanation as to why someone could say “5 pages of profession patch notes” and have it be interpreted as “No Elementalist changes”.

Not to mention the part of the post that said mesmers saw the fewest number of changes…

Perhaps Mesmers had negative changes, where some of the recent changes have been reverted, allowing Elementalists to still have 0.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Sorry, I totally misread that. As many of you have stated, I thought you were asking for the ability to PUG in free paid tourneys, which is what I responded to. Sorry for that. I was coming from one meeting, going to another, and tried to quickly get on the forums to at least read/post something. I apologize.

It’s not that we don’t care, is that’s we’re really busy adding things to the game. Custom Arenas are the current focus for my team. A fully 100% random tourney system (where all teams are random and no teams are an organized 5-person team) is something we can look at down the road, but I think there are many other things that are more important to get finished first (which I spoke about in my blog).

Again, sorry for the misunderstanding, and I’m heading out to another meeting.

More cheers,

J

Custom Arenas are great and im one of players who is trully waiting for them as i want to organize tournaments for our community.

BUT
Custom tournaments wont fix PUG vs premade issue at all. In fact it will split the playerbase even more.

I think you should read the whole topic here as people are trying to explain mainly how they dont enjoy to even kill everything without challenge or get killed without chance to fight back.

Ability to play against equally skilled players is in my point of view priority number 1. Without this being in place any additions will only increase the mess.

Fantastic video, hopefully Arenanet will take a look at it

Hat off, OP.

This topic should be brought to ANET attention as fast as possible

Good post, agree with it.

One of the main kickers, at least for me, was the lack of synergy.
The game is 5v5 conquest.
Balanced around and only played threw.
A solid tourny setup, but terrible pug.
It caused working with people in this game to involves voicechat, pretty much end of story. The game has its teamwork don threw maneuvering around to cap/keep BOs, the disparity of who is with who (along with the general class setup) just ruined open synergy between players.
They got rid of the trinity which made synergy part of PvP by nature but didn’t actually replace it with anything. That just left classes as far too standalone to really fit my taste, at all…
(bunkers bunker and roamers roam… you can work a comp to have toons be able to work together to any notable degree but it is just rarely there otherwise)

Pug PvP, it involves zerging, it always does in every game, but this pug PvP by far, to me, is the least entertaining I’ve played (I went threw WAR->Rift->here, was one of the top zealots on war for a while, in Rift I playedh a rogue till the final tier while they were still a terrible class [won near every 1v1 and never touched the assassin tree, that and me and my brother won 2v4~s pretty consistently] then rerolled a half dozen toons before leaving since 1-40? was a hell of a blast)
I loved WAR, thought Rift was great play till the final tier… GW2 had a chance to trump them all, WAR had 99 problems because of a shoddy after release dev team; Rift screwed up their entire PvP end game, had a terrible open world PvP system and a mess for team v team fights; leaving plenty of room for improvement. GW2’s combat is even setup far better, but the devs just couldn’t work out how to make classes work together, there isn’t good balance at all, SPvP matching is just bad (as in it is an utter pain to find a server at your skill level and worth playing in, for whatever goal you have in mind), terrible bragging rights (bad looking gear and score cards that say nothing) that and tournies are blind (no idea what team is doing what and winnning) and mean nothing (just tickets in an inventory). Oh and of course auto-dyeing.. kitten its more obnoxious than anything… if its for observer mode, put it in observer mode.
So close, but they failed.
I’m sorry there’s just too much they ‘almost’ did for me to see any hope for the game’s PvP keeping a large populations attention (nonetheless mine)…

I’m starting to think its a conspiracy, I can’t see how corporations funneling so much money into games can get such bad results… especially when everything a dev team needs is already out there, if they just slapped together the best parts of other games people would thank them…
But i can’t think of an aim worth all the time/money…
><

Indeed. If they don’t fix the issues in the next patch I will be finished with spvp. I am a Ranger, I can get downed by any other class easily. Warriors and Theifs 1 shot me. I decide to make a tank build, get downed in 2 seconds instead of 1. I survive but do no damage. I go glass cannon. Can’t compare to the burst and dps of other classes, get downed in a second. So literally what is my point in even trying. I can’t get points for capping or anything if I can’t get my enemys off. Or if I die so fast. I am a pointless class at the moment. So are a few others. EVERYONE plays a Mesmer, Theif, or Warrior because they can destroy most classes in seconds. I guess if this isn’t fixed I will have to reroll for pvp.

2.5 months since release and the gw2 competitive scene is smaller than gw1’s competitive scene 2.5 months after it was released. The difference between then and now? James Phinney left Anet…..

I think for casuals 8v8 is just a practice in Zerging and gets OLD it gets old Fast, competitive PVP is great but there has to be more than that. WvW feels the same, everything just feels like a one dimensional Zerg. Over compartmentalized and inorganic. I like it for what its worth and its fun trying different specs out and all but even that feels one dimensional. I have played a lot of mmos and the specs for every class look cut and dry, essentially most people are doing some variation of dot spamming crappy short term dots cough conditions and seeing how many of those they can stack on the other guy while dodging. That or maybe crits and high base damage.

I was doing well with my ranger but am now fairly bored Zerging + conditions just gets old, structured gets old, there seems to be a lack of interesting dynamics and any lack of showing skill since most of the time you are fighting zerg vs zerg or outnumbered. Downed state doesnt help either.

I mean I will keep playing since I do get a few good hours a day out of the game, but I wont act like I am not looking at the upcoming releases either.

Noctred.6732:

According to Jon Peters in the mists a few hours ago:

- The profession part of the upcoming patch notes is roughly 5 pages long.
- ~30 bullet points for engis.

cooome on engi love <3

I agree with the original post. I have not played this game in over a month simply because it was obvious there is no point to doing pvp. I would Love to hop on and do some PvP in Guildwars over say League of Legends, but frankly whats the point? it takes to long to get any real play going if you dont already have 5 people and theres no ladder system to track your acomplishments.

Until they get this rating system up and going, I won’t be playing this game again. I couldn’t give half a —-- about pve. If I wanted to PvE there are much better games to turn to.

Infinitus.3712:

Noctred.6732:

According to Jon Peters in the mists a few hours ago:

- The profession part of the upcoming patch notes is roughly 5 pages long.
- ~30 bullet points for engis.

cooome on engi love <3

ask him about Rangers

Noctred.6732:

According to Jon Peters in the mists a few hours ago:

- The profession part of the upcoming patch notes is roughly 5 pages long.
- ~16 bullet points for rangers.

^ Possible ranger love

http://tinypic.com/r/xelzja/6

image evidence of said conversation to the doubters.

JonathanSharp.7094:

A fully 100% random tourney system (where all teams are random and no teams are an organized 5-person team) is something we can look at down the road, but I think there are many other things that are more important to get finished first (which I spoke about in my blog).

This is the only thing that I’m looking forward to. But of course not completely random. Right now in Free tournaments the team can consist of 4 rank 30s and then 1 rank 1. Yes, literally rank 1 people just come to tourneys. That’s as good as a 4man team. So what I’m looking forward to is Solo Que where you are qued up with people around your rank in both your and enemy team. But with the current playerbase this can’t probably be achieved, so I’m just fine if everyone is at least rank 10. But not 1, god, not rank 1.

Honestly I don’t see why this feature is for “down the road” as all the code for tournaments is in place. All the work that needs to be done is just create a new tournament type called Solo Tournament and only allow to submit 1man rosters there.
Guess you’re worried that que times for the other 2 tournaments would increase even more cause of that? Well how are private servers gonna not do that either?

I find it catastrophal that they don’t even really have a real matchmaking system planned at the moment despite the massive negative feedback (being very new user unfriendly) concerning the tournament system. Wow!

- Probably no hope of ever letting us disable the terrible skill queue.

How hard can it be to let skills automatically cancel other skills when activating them? Man, it’s a joke, if they’re aiming for a MOBA-style e-sport scene when they don’t even prioritize simple fixes dramatically enhancing PvP combat like this.

PotatoOverdose.6583:
So basically, it is a small part of the functionality that GvG had in GW1 except we have to pay for it?

Might I suggest such a suspicion of what’s behind the scenes that does not contribute much, if anything, to this thread:

1, PvP department genuinely hears and cares about the community but are short on resources and thus are not able to meet essential demands of the players

2, PvP department requests more resources from management

3, Management replies, saying that they need to see revenue figures before they can spend more resources on the PvP department

4, PvP decides hastily to include paid tournaments

5, Due to the lack of the basic, core essentials and structures, tournaments flounder

6, Management unable to distribute more resources

7, PvP spirals into the gy

Before point 7 comes true, QUICKLY THERE’S NO TIME, QUICKLY:

- Someone buyout their management; or
- Restructure funding scheme, so that fund amount is not per division but per GW as a whole. Resources further distributed internally by Anet

Would also like to throw in:
Dev’s response to known bugs is to say “its broken, people are abusing it we are working on a fix for it” instead of “this is broken, until its fixed we have disabled or nerfed it into non-existence until its working to avoid people exploiting it”. This approach to bug fixing is turning many organized teams off of playing.

Another thing is that turns people off is the speed at which bug fixes are released. In fact the thief rendering issue has already been announced that it has been fixed and will be in on the 15th. Why wait that long for something that is already done, especially when “dyes are dropping too often” becomes an instant hotfix, makes people wonder where the games priorities lie. There is also the hesitation to balance things and to “wait until people find some kind of weakness that may or may not exist”, is not a good approach in my opinion.

Get rid of all-in bunker builds . Get rid of the Protection boon . No hardocrebunker make the game way more interesting because of constant changes in node controll . 80% of the games , after you either loose or win the 1-st teamfight the game is pritty much OVER.
-get rid of all-in bunks
-get rid of spike brusts (mesmer , thief , gs warr)
-give different hotjoin matches 5v5 6v6 4v4 (8v8 is a slugfest of thiefs and mesmers ,and if you are casually playing the game u get angry and get on the forums ranting about how much the theif needs 2be nerfed)
-mesmer portal needs a range nerf , because it is making this particular proffesion mendatory for competitive player versus player
-the currnet ticket value for paid tournaments is absurd. Make it from 5 to 1 , because people are looking for other games.
-ladders , info info info. People play competitive because of the info they get. 80% of the viewers on twitch are teams watching other teams , becase of the lack of info.
-the developement scale atm is 10-5% pvp – 85-90% pve .

p.s Do not make this TORTANIC 2.0

Fenixz.7194:

Get rid of all-in bunker builds . Get rid of the Protection boon . No hardocrebunker make the game way more interesting because of constant changes in node controll . 80% of the games , after you either loose or win the 1-st teamfight the game is pritty much OVER.
-get rid of all-in bunks
-get rid of spike brusts (mesmer , thief , gs warr)
-give different hotjoin matches 5v5 6v6 4v4 (8v8 is a slugfest of thiefs and mesmers ,and if you are casually playing the game u get angry and get on the forums ranting about how much the theif needs 2be nerfed)
-mesmer portal needs a range nerf , because it is making this particular proffesion mendatory for competitive player versus player
-the currnet ticket value for paid tournaments is absurd. Make it from 5 to 1 , because people are looking for other games.
-ladders , info info info. People play competitive because of the info they get. 80% of the viewers on twitch are teams watching other teams , becase of the lack of info.
-the developement scale atm is 10-5% pvp – 85-90% pve .

p.s Do not make this TORTANIC 2.0

Agree with some things, like ladders and the hot-join etc. But the mesmer portal would be fine if they make it so you can’t carry a repair kit through. Glass cannons is annoying but does what it’s meant to do (if you exclude the AoE of it). The bunkers have gotten quite a few tweaks/nerfs, especially to their boons. Bunkers should (and is not, mostly) being used straight out as all-in bunkers in the higher competition, it’s more like semi-bunkers there, because you can’t afford to lose the damage for nothing. And (for guardian at least) the protection have already been nerfed strongly. You can get perhaps 10 sec per 30 sec of protection. And a lot of that is skill based (ie number 4 on shield, gives nice protection but has to hit the allies).

The biggest problem I have at the moment is that the strongest spike abilities actually is a small AoE, or even gets stronger when used as a AoE. Both warriors and thiefs and mesmers has this. Couple this with time warp, nullfield, cluster bomb or epidemic and you have for yourself a silly broken teamfight mode.
Bottom line, I am fine with spike damage as long as it is on 1 target, and very CD/resource demanding. But in it’s current state it is used more as a “AoE win button” than the ability to quickly bring down speccs/classes with a high survivability.

And I don’t know that lowering the prices for paid tournaments is a fix either. The rewards would most likely be lowered, the competition would be the same etc. But perhaps increase the ticket drop rate from chests? Or even a straight up glory price for tickets? Even at rank 25 I have 50k+ glory and no where to put it, already bought/crafted pretty much all the gear for my rank.

Merge this topic with Pray’s and sticky it so that everyone who cares about pvp can post here and devs actually see it every time they come to sPvP forum.

Sonnet.9840:

Merge this topic with Pray’s and sticky it so that everyone who cares about pvp can post here and devs actually see it every time they come to sPvP forum.

pretty sad that game has to be dying before devs listen… and why release ladder when game is at this state??

What they really need are some battlezones maybe like instanced town areas where people can do some more realistic world pvp feeling gameplay. WvW is just a larger Zerg than the 8v8 hotjoin zergs, there is no casual pvp vent anywhere. And as much as we complain about the thief invis bug, hell they just do it because its one of the few fun things to do in pvp, there HAS to be some screw with other people factor in the pvp or its gonna be boring. As of right now everything is way to cut and dry.

I cannot believe they merged your topic Jacobin, that’s some real incompetence right there. Good to see that the moderators are about as capable as the PVP team.

@ Jacobin you covered all the bases and analysed the core issues. Everything you said was spot on.

The game is not sustainable in its current state. Even atm, if you ranked in the top 5, you really haven’t achieved much as there are probably only 15 teams across both NA and EU that compete several days a week.

yup, thread merge = less visibility. gj…

why not merge all threads in this section into one even?
They are all sPvP feedback threads after all. Gosh

NeoO.2960:

Ideally, the free tournament is the place for new team to build up and train there skills, hot join is the causal players play for fun. Paid tournament is where the hardcore time will play for price.

By the nature of GW, sPVP it is team base game, remember before really think joining tPVP. You have to have a team, the game won’t give you team, but you have to build it up. That’s something beyond the game itself. Read a little about the most successful team e-sport game (CS so far, dota also coming up), we will learn from there. How many teams in the world you can name it? How many “new players” or new team come up each year? Did they death?

You are missing the point, nobody is going to form a team and stick around for the long term because they have to spend money or farm tickets to just end up getting farmed by the teams that have already spent hundreds of hours in the game.

The community basically cannibalizes the new or less experienced teams until they leave and we are in the situation now where there are only ~30 players who are “competitive”.

PotatoOverdose.6583:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Leaderboards-for-Qualifying-Points/first#post665723
In order to be in the top 32 players (not teams or guilds) as of Nov 8, you only need 2 tourney wins. That’s not a healthy competitive scene.

Think about it for a moment. You need 2 measly tourney wins to be in the top 32 players for your entire REGION. That is not active competitive pvp. Period.

I’ll be totally honest. From where I’m standing it looks like there are fewer then 5 or so dedicated teams. Gw1 had hundreds. And dota, sc2, and other esports? Yeah….the audience for custom arenas, especially PAID custom arenas just isn’t there.

Yes, exactly correct. If you win 9 games, even against pug or inexperienced teams you are in the top 30. The competitive scene is in a death spiral.

Coopers.4376:

I cannot believe they merged your topic Jacobin, that’s some real incompetence right there. Good to see that the moderators are about as capable as the PVP team.

@ Jacobin you covered all the bases and analysed the core issues. Everything you said was spot on.

The game is not sustainable in its current state. Even atm, if you ranked in the top 5, you really haven’t achieved much as there are probably only 15 teams across both NA and EU that compete several days a week.

Yes thank you, the competitive scene is on life support.

As for merging my thread, at least somebody somewhere took notice. However, I can’t help but think its burying criticism to a certain extent, and trying to make the forum look prettier.

admiralnlson.2380:

yup, thread merge = less visibility. gj…

why not merge all threads in this section into one even?
They are all sPvP feedback threads after all. Gosh

Why should we have several topics discussing the same PvP issues , when one constructive topic with good arguments has better chance to stay on the 1st page longer (we already have tons of thief topics flying around and I personally wish that this discussion would stay more compact and purposeful)? It’s also easier for people conserned about PvP issues to post in one topic instead of several. Jacobins video was already posted on this topic and only thing missing was his written shorter version of the matters he talks there. I only wish there were stickies in this forum.

edit: Also, I think that ‘PvP Feedback’ is a better title for serious discussion than likes of “This game is dying”, although it’s too vague.

Sonnet.9840:

admiralnlson.2380:

yup, thread merge = less visibility. gj…

why not merge all threads in this section into one even?
They are all sPvP feedback threads after all. Gosh

Why should we have several topics discussing the same PvP issues , when one constructive topic with good arguments has better chance to stay on the 1st page longer (we already have tons of thief topics flying around and I personally wish that this discussion would stay more compact and purposeful)? It’s also easier for people conserned about PvP issues to post in one topic instead of several. Jacobins video was already posted on this topic and only thing missing was his written shorter version of the matters he talks there. I only wish there were stickies in this forum.

edit: Also, I think that ‘PvP Feedback’ is a better title for serious discussion than likes of “This game is dying”, although it’s too vague.

I dunno merging topics and changing the titles to something less provocative could be seen as an attempt to bury legitimate criticism. Also, merging ‘PvP Feedback’ into one thread is going to make it harder for the discussion to stay compact since that title is about as general and non-specific as it gets.

I don’t do SPvP because none of the classes I want to do it on are really viable. Anytime I want to DPS it’s just stupid not to be a thief or warrior cause they deal ridiculously high burst compared to any other class. I’m more than content to get my PvP fix in WvW where there’s so many people that silly bunker builds or stupid damage builds are lost in the mix of people.

They nerf things like Engineer damage or Elementalist damage but then leave in the ability for other classes to practically one shot ya. Maybe in a few years when they finally manage to balance things we’ll see. Until then I’d rather let the whole thing suffer to the point no one does it so they’re ultimately forced to look at the real issues.

PotatoOverdose.6583:

I guess my point is this: wouldn’t it be better to fix your core gameplay for all users rather than push a feature that no one except maybe 5 or so dedicated teams would use? That’s the way it was done in gw1 and in dota and it worked pretty well (both set up solid gameplay before adding esport features).

This is correct.

I’ve been a competitive DotA player for a very long time and there are some things that I would like to point out. DotA’s competitive scene started off very obscure and the game itself had a huge skill barrier to entry. It wasn’t easy to pick up, and had no real support. In some ways it’s a miracle the game took off, but I can see a lot of people looking to it as inspiration that any other game with “properly” built PvP can eventually do the same.

The reality is that GW2 is a VERY different scenario. When DotA started out as a competitive game in 2005 or so, it was a unique game. The people that played it were already very devoted because the game had no rivals. If it didn’t succeed, the entire genre that all those players loved would die — they had a lot of motivation to make it work. GW2 does not have that luxury of devotion. If you don’t like PvP in GW2, you can simply hop to any number of other MMOs on the market.

ArenaNet needs to act fast because this isn’t the sort of thing that the community is going to faithfully wait around for. Delaying to make PvP more fun and inviting for the average gamer will kill PvP for the serious gamers. You need the foundation of the low and midskill players for it to work.

Kodiak.3281:

Until then I’d rather let the whole thing suffer to the point no one does it so they’re ultimately forced to look at the real issues.

I would say we have already reached that point. The danger is that they see nobody playing sPvP and therefore put development on the back burner in favor of PvE. This is unfortunate because the good combat mechanics will be lost to a competitive community.

Otter.9238:

I’ve been a competitive DotA player for a very long time and there are some things that I would like to point out. DotA’s competitive scene started off very obscure and the game itself had a huge skill barrier to entry. It wasn’t easy to pick up, and had no real support. In some ways it’s a miracle the game took off, but I can see a lot of people looking to it as inspiration that any other game with “properly” built PvP can eventually do the same.

The reality is that GW2 is a VERY different scenario. When DotA started out as a competitive game in 2005 or so, it was a unique game. The people that played it were already very devoted because the game had no rivals. If it didn’t succeed, the entire genre that all those players loved would die — they had a lot of motivation to make it work. GW2 does not have that luxury of devotion. If you don’t like PvP in GW2, you can simply hop to any number of other MMOs on the market.

ArenaNet needs to act fast because this isn’t the sort of thing that the community is going to faithfully wait around for. Delaying to make PvP more fun and inviting for the average gamer will kill PvP for the serious gamers. You need the foundation of the low and midskill players for it to work.

Good post. I would say a major difference between MOBAs and GW2 is that LoL and the like were not initially sold to people as an esport. They started small and grew.

GW2 is the opposite. We had lots of developer content stating GW2 would have esports potential and a lot of people bought into that and purchased the game for that reason.

They pretty much duped people by then they releasing a game that has a barely functioning competitive system and thus most people have left and interest has plummeted.

zhi.3918:

Noctred.6732:

- The profession part of the upcoming patch notes is roughly 5 pages long.

A Halloween event and now this Lost Shores thing. It would behoove the dev team to spend a bit more time on the content they create as they create it or at least fix it up now that it is out rather than focus on new content. Simply assigning 1 person to fix up the games tooltips for a week or two would be amazingly helpful for all of the player base. Not to mention making the tooltips accurate in relation to the wiki.

You simply cannot say this sort of thing with how they have their dev TEAMS set up. It isn’t only one team doing everything, the Halloween event and the Lost Shores were being worked on by completely separate teams than the ones that handle existing content.

Trying to scream about PvP content being done when you want PvE fixes, or vice versa just isn’t an intelligent thing to do and shows you don’t pay attention to how ArenaNet actually does things.

Jacobin.8509:

Good post. I would say a major difference between MOBAs and GW2 is that LoL and the like were not initially sold to people as an esport. They started small and grew.

Another interesting thing to note is that competitive LoL gameplay was (at least was a year ago when I payed any attention to it, not sure about now) not very active or interesting, compared to other games. Not trying to start a huge fight with LoL fans, but the reality is that the gameplay was very static and passive in the majority of matches. The competitive LoL scene did well and was popular despite that because the casual players liked the game itself. The community had a blast watching people being very skilled at something they themselves enjoyed playing.

In essence, the casual community bought Riot a lot of time to improve their game. Tons of people liked LoL, which translated to tons of people liked competitive LoL enough to give it a chance. If it had been pushed at people as the pinnacle of competitive gaming it would have failed, because it wasn’t. Having people care is much more important than anything else. Gameplay can always be fixed, as long as the community has some patience and faith.

Otter.9238:

Jacobin.8509:

Good post. I would say a major difference between MOBAs and GW2 is that LoL and the like were not initially sold to people as an esport. They started small and grew.

Another interesting thing to note is that competitive LoL gameplay was (at least was a year ago when I payed any attention to it, not sure about now) not very active or interesting, compared to other games. Not trying to start a huge fight with LoL fans, but the reality is that the gameplay was very static and passive in the majority of matches. The competitive LoL scene did well and was popular despite that because the casual players liked the game itself. The community had a blast watching people being very skilled at something they themselves enjoyed playing.

In essence, the casual community bought Riot a lot of time to improve their game. Tons of people liked LoL, which translated to tons of people liked competitive LoL enough to give it a chance. If it had been pushed at people as the pinnacle of competitive gaming it would have failed, because it wasn’t. Having people care is much more important than anything else. Gameplay can always be fixed, as long as the community has some patience and faith.

This is why streamers at the moment like myself and even the top players at the moment are averaging 1-150 viewers tops in comparison to LoL’s 5k-6k for top players and 500-800 for average players and the fact is that GW2 at this moment is not causal friendly you cannot go into paid torne’s without getting stompted and even free can be a challenge since alot of the decent teams are now just doing free.

Hot join does not help either seeing there is no real structure and no real learning value for new players so they have to go from that to free and get shell shocked and people who try and transition from free to paid also get shell shocked there is no steady progression for players. Which in turn results in people getting fed up with the game and lose interest.

Jacobin, I understand your argument and it’s a valid one. Still, if I were a GW2 game developer, I would not search for topics with provocative names, but ones with well argumented discussion of the state of sPvP.

Back to the topic though.

I played GW1 for years myself as a casual pvp’er. I found the GvG scene a bit too elitist to be bothered with, although I always wanted to try it with good casual guild. When GW2 came out I had a group of friends and acquaintances that I knew from other games ready to get into pvp. Sadly, opposite of how it was advertised, the content was lacking and people indeed hopped to Pandaria (mind you I have never played WoW myself) or back to LoL and the likes. Although the group was not hardcore, they were experienced and avid pvp players that could have been mid range tournament gamers in GW2. Again I’m in a situation where I just play PvE and casual hot join or WWW and won’t be bothered with tPvP. I might give it a try however if there would be an easy entry level and some kind of ladder in place.

I also think that the meta should be fixed asap. GW1 (and let’s not kid ourselves, that’s the obvious comparison we will make, not because it’s in anyway similar to GW2, but because it’s maybe the best pvp mmo to date and made by the same developers) had tons of build options and ever shifting meta in it’s prime. It’s early for GW2 I know, but some basic polishing and structures are needed, rather sooner than later.

Whisperlude.3860:

I think damage meters SHOULD get implemented in the game… just a thought….

Not needed, so no.
Let them work on and fix things that are actually important.

Jacobin.8509:

- Stagnant, uninteresting play (bunker guardian, tp mesmer in every comp, few viable builds overall)
- Limited options for solo players
- New or pickup teams have no consistent way to play against other evenly skilled opponents
- The ticket system is placing a barrier in front of people who may actually want to try to find consistent arranged opponents
- tPvP is missing many basic features that even GW1 released with 7 years ago

I elaborate on these points in the following video.
http://youtu.be/jvXDv70-6Gg

Just wanted to say that I agree 100% with this, Jacobin. I really do enjoy the combat mechanics in the game and I think it’s the best instanced team based PVP in a MMO at this point, but all the tools and tweaks to the system that we are missing now should have been in place since launch. A huge amount of competitive players are losing interest (I did and so did my friends from several different teams) and casuals have this huge wall that prevents them to slowly grow into the game and learn it.

Something must be done, but it must be done quickly to save this one.

admiralnlson.2380:

yup, thread merge = less visibility. gj…

why not merge all threads in this section into one even?
They are all sPvP feedback threads after all. Gosh

Why not just delete them if they just wanted to “cover it up”? Ban your accounts too.

Get a grip, the merged threads were nigh identical and repeating themselves.

Can we get this made into a sticky?

Hi I’m new to GW2 and I’m looking forward to competitive PVP.

hot joins
gets zerged
learns nothing

OK I’ve been playing for awhile and I think I’m ready for tournaments

joins free tourney
has no idea what is going on, has never played 5v5, is basically useless
gets crushed by premades

Looks like I need a dedicated team to play this game competitively

tries to find a team
only like 4 people in mists and 2 are AFK

Welp, that wasn’t fun sorry guys

logs off
uninstalls

Primo.4385:

Hi I’m new to GW2 and I’m looking forward to competitive PVP.

hot joins
gets zerged
learns nothing

OK I’ve been playing for awhile and I think I’m ready for tournaments

joins free tourney
has no idea what is going on, has never played 5v5, is basically useless
gets crushed by premades

Looks like I need a dedicated team to play this game competitively

tries to find a team
only like 4 people in mists and 2 are AFK

Welp, that wasn’t fun sorry guys

logs ofkittenuninstalls

A very sad but true account of what happens.

You get punished for playing legit, that’s sick.

One week ago when ppl didnt abused guardian mace bug (they thought it got fixed) so much we were able to play and stand a chance. Now if the guardian takes ur point. Leave keyboard go make tea.

Top teams using it (not all ofcoz), on streams, nothing happens.
Didnt you guys banned players for buying karma weapons? Now check logs from paid tourn.

AIR RUNE dmg warrior because they are rezing, gets hit for 6k from air rune. Working on downed, rly?

Whole team Air Runes +2 guardians with mace, meta game in GW2.
I know, the big update at 15th. We want to play, but we will not cheat to win.

Nobody reads it anyways. Just had to write it somewhere.