Guild Wars 2

Well people always saying GW2 will never be an e-sport. The changes to ranked matches not having full premade teams cement this as fact.

List of problems to ponder, unrelated to problems with the game mode:

-We are not going to see any new teams form that can play at a competitive level

Reason 1: competitive matchmaking (ranked) does not allow full team queues. therefore a team will never grow in skill required to be real contenders. We have some proof of this by the one team that entered the tournament made of last seasons top legendary leader-board players that suffered a somewhat humiliating defeat.

Reason 2: Heart of Thorns has shown that one cannot be competitive without having access to all trait lines. Would be pvpers that only care about pvp will not want to spend $60 for the latest expansion to get into the action, at this point in the gw2 cycle. As the game has aged this price to entry puts a barrier to new capable players to become contenders.

Reason 3: Difference between players in the highest percentile of skill and those matchmaking provides is too wide. Top players will not want to scrim and train would be contenders because they want their pay cheque from anet. The same subset of players have been winning cash prizes this along with system adverse to creating competition is not looking good for growth in GW2 e-sports prospects.

This is not an exhaustive list but it if I were management at Anet there are two options available:

Seeing as Anet is not capable of producing a matchmaking system that is favorable to the masses and to the production of e-sport caliber players a decision must be made. Management being profit oriented and about saving face has limited options.

Option 1) Increase spending on e-sports and attract players from other games. Can be done by increasing prizes or talk to people who know people in the E-sports with some secret sponsorship money. There are ways to get talent usually involves money. as discussed before GW2 incapable of producing e-sports quality players anymore. high risk limited reward potential.

Option 2) Grab your finance and accounting department create projections on what is the most efficient spending on their failed e-sports to save face or continue for it to be net positive for Anet. Low risk, limited cost, potential cost savings or efficiency generated.

Conclusion: GW2 e-sports cannot organically be a thing anymore. Current top players happy to take Anet’s money without caring about gw2 since its easy money due to lack of competition.

They really need to cut their losses before its too late. I suspect they’ll push for 2 more seasons though.

gw2 = 2000 viewer’s eeee-sssport!!
Are you joke?

so make all traits available to “PVP only” free of charge. perhaps some devs actually concerned about the PVE game and it’s customer flow… it is a crap PVE game and a knock off of WoW….fix PVE and let all traits be free in PVP, keep all other restrictions the same

None of the above.

The real reason GW2 e-sports died is HoT power creep. It removed skill and replaced it with spammable passives, which created unkillable monsters and stalemate games. ANet has chipped away at the power creep, but it’s still high. Most of the competitive players who couldn’t make consistent money from tournaments simply quit.

And just like the HoT power creep sucked to play, it sucked even more to watch. Viewership plummeted since every match was the same stale comps over and over.

Crab Fear.1624:

so make all traits available to “PVP only” free of charge. perhaps some devs actually concerned about the PVE game and it’s customer flow… it is a crap PVE game and a knock off of WoW….fix PVE and let all traits be free in PVP, keep all other restrictions the same

Or nerf the HoT traits/buff the normal traits for them to be on an equal level

Really not sure why Anet insists on putting so many skills in the game that provide defense while still letting you attack.

I dont think the Pro League should go, its been a big reason fro the improvements. I mean this solo/duo que did nothing for anybody which is what the many voted for what ever reason.

S1- Anet let the bunker meta stay and a Pro League actually quit a game because it was so bad.

S2- The death of warriors and thieves in PvP. As well as the rez bot revives.

S3/4- You could see anet make the changes after that, making it so when you went into down state you took constant damage. It was so clear that certain team comps were so OP just because they were better at rezzing.

Also Anet decided to nerf rev after all the changes since it was so much stronger. You could literally see in that last Pro League Season staff 5 rev take people down from full health to downstate. Did Anet over nerf it, of course because why test the things they do when they can just leave the player base in frustration.

The community has mostly terrible ideas when it comes to balance and many are not good enough to actually comment on things such as balance. But everyone can go back and look at the Pro Leagues and be like ohh yeah thats broken.

Right now Anet has to be loving the community voting for solo/duo que because that means they didnt have to fix match making till later, they dont have to deal with team comps and they dont have to deal with build diversity.

To me the Pro League helped out alot since it forced Anet to look at the PvP scene more then once a year. Currently no Pro League and the game has gone stale because guess what there is no reason to get better.

Anet didnt fix there leader boards, didnt add leader boards to the forum and only added more frustrating confusing aspects to the game. So ill repeat again that i think the ESport scene helped but its probably gone and so will the general PvP scene.

offensive is offensive.
defense is defense.
If you make them in same time. Then a Boxing will become a Affray.
No watching point! Broing! Confusion!
No one would get enjoyable in this confusion game.

Then no player>> no viewer >> no gamer >>….

HOT powercreep, the insane visual effects spam and the horrid continuous point of view changes when watching ESL on twitch made me stop after my very first time viewing.

There was a post made by Toker (that got deleted) which literally says he would quit the game if he didn’t make a living from it because of how bad the profession design is, and how he thinks ESO is a more enjoyable game to play.

When your champion players are outright stating that they dislike the PvP environment that’s been created explicitly from profession design, it’s pretty obvious that there are major problems with profession balance and design.

The skills and abilities are too mechanically and visually convoluted to attract any significant viewership and the gameplay at this point from HoT simply too terrible to make people want to keep playing to give a reason for people to watch.

When are people going to realize e-sports is a waste of money? ANet needs to actually build a workable PvP system, not just throw money at it. ANet can’t take shortcuts. Pro-leagues have failed. A game doesn’t become a sport because of money, it’s because people enjoy to play and watch it. It infuriates me to see pro-leaguers complaining. PvP is literally made for them, forget the new and average player. They’re literally catered to by ANet. Where the hell are the priorities?

Right now PvP needs:
- Separate Solo Queue(1-man) and Team Queue(5-man)
- Profession Balance
- TUTORIAL
- Fix Hotjoin
- Fair matchmaking system

These are the BASICS.

If I had a choice between fixing PvP and killing the PvP “scene”, I would choose the second.

JTGuevara.9018:

When are people going to realize e-sports is a waste of money? ANet needs to actually build a workable PvP system, not just throw money at it. ANet can’t take shortcuts. Pro-leagues have failed. A game doesn’t become a sport because of money, it’s because people enjoy to play and watch it. It infuriates me to see pro-leaguers complaining. PvP is literally made for them, forget the new and average player. They’re literally catered to by ANet. Where the hell are the priorities?

Right now PvP needs:
- Separate Solo Queue(1-man) and Team Queue(5-man)
- Profession Balance
- TUTORIAL
- Fix Hotjoin
- Fair matchmaking system

These are the BASICS.

If I had a choice between fixing PvP and killing the PvP “scene”, I would choose the second.

I have to stop this one im sorry, most companys have a monthly expense or in Anet a budget for certain things.

X amount of money is acceptable for employees, then X is for the build/products, etc etc etc.

Now the money if ive read it write comes from the marketing department. So instead of Anet buying ad space, commericals on tv, buying space on store shelves and other possible things. They decided to give it back to the PvP players of the game.

If anything Pro League made what we have now better because Anet was forced to watch S1-/2/3/4. They had to see players who were completely frustrated quit because of the Poor meta.

They had to watch The Abjured out play Vermillion but Vermillion won because they ran more OP classes.

For instance i work at a hotel, the hotel has X amount of money a month we are allowed to spend on food for the restaurant and X amount of money for repairs or new equipment. If im under that amount i dont get to pocket it or give anyone a raise. If im over on 1 im not allowed to use the extra money for repairs or vice versa and if im over on both im called into the bosses office to explain the situation. That happens every month.

Pro Leagues was walking into the bosses every month saying hey man this is messed up. Right now we have a million threads about X class being OP and guess what none of us know if its true because we dont get to see the best players go at it.

I can admit that HOT has been horrible for the games ability to market it as Esports but please dont act like it was tossed money.

JTGuevara.9018:

When are people going to realize e-sports is a waste of money? ANet needs to actually build a workable PvP system, not just throw money at it. ANet can’t take shortcuts. Pro-leagues have failed. A game doesn’t become a sport because of money, it’s because people enjoy to play and watch it. It infuriates me to see pro-leaguers complaining. PvP is literally made for them, forget the new and average player. They’re literally catered to by ANet. Where the hell are the priorities?

Right now PvP needs:
- Separate Solo Queue(1-man) and Team Queue(5-man)
- Profession Balance
- TUTORIAL
- Fix Hotjoin
- Fair matchmaking system

These are the BASICS.

If I had a choice between fixing PvP and killing the PvP “scene”, I would choose the second.

You’re way far off on what was needed to make this game “esport”. Anyone who has been here since launch can tell you two glaring issues off the bat:

1. The game is still aids to watch as an outside spectator to see (particle effects are one of the biggest offenders).

2. Proper balance: but what I mean by it isn’t so idealistic, HoT powercreep broke the entire gamemode they were trying to build and it took almost 1.5 years for them to barely normalize this (and it still isn’t good enough). With another expansion meant to cash in their dying revenue and another set of problems for pvp, you can clearly see why people ran for the hills (unless they are getting paid) a while ago.

Once devs communicate back on why x-change was buffed or nerfed and actually get community balance (not 2 months apart to fix) rather than being stuck on their notions of what “balance” is then you can start to tackle the issues you brought up.

Vlad.1739:

Well people always saying GW2 will never be an e-sport. The changes to ranked matches not having full premade teams cement this as fact.

List of problems to ponder, unrelated to problems with the game mode:

-We are not going to see any new teams form that can play at a competitive level

Reason 1: competitive matchmaking (ranked) does not allow full team queues. therefore a team will never grow in skill required to be real contenders. We have some proof of this by the one team that entered the tournament made of last seasons top legendary leader-board players that suffered a somewhat humiliating defeat.

Reason 2: Heart of Thorns has shown that one cannot be competitive without having access to all trait lines. Would be pvpers that only care about pvp will not want to spend $60 for the latest expansion to get into the action, at this point in the gw2 cycle. As the game has aged this price to entry puts a barrier to new capable players to become contenders.

Reason 3: Difference between players in the highest percentile of skill and those matchmaking provides is too wide. Top players will not want to scrim and train would be contenders because they want their pay cheque from anet. The same subset of players have been winning cash prizes this along with system adverse to creating competition is not looking good for growth in GW2 e-sports prospects.

This is not an exhaustive list but it if I were management at Anet there are two options available:

Seeing as Anet is not capable of producing a matchmaking system that is favorable to the masses and to the production of e-sport caliber players a decision must be made. Management being profit oriented and about saving face has limited options.

Option 1) Increase spending on e-sports and attract players from other games. Can be done by increasing prizes or talk to people who know people in the E-sports with some secret sponsorship money. There are ways to get talent usually involves money. as discussed before GW2 incapable of producing e-sports quality players anymore. high risk limited reward potential.

Option 2) Grab your finance and accounting department create projections on what is the most efficient spending on their failed e-sports to save face or continue for it to be net positive for Anet. Low risk, limited cost, potential cost savings or efficiency generated.

Conclusion: GW2 e-sports cannot organically be a thing anymore. Current top players happy to take Anet’s money without caring about gw2 since its easy money due to lack of competition.

Reason 1: makes no sense, all teams in other esports picked up players from the top players of SoloQ, before you would pubstomp people with your friends and get high rating, so your “skill level” was inflated. Play ESL if you mind it so much.

Reason 2: capable players don’t come from other games, they play this game for a longer period of time.

Reason 3: if players see someone who is really good they’ll play against that team/player because its in their interest to get better.

Conclussion : you dont understand stuff but you still post stuff.

XGhoul.7426:

JTGuevara.9018:

When are people going to realize e-sports is a waste of money? ANet needs to actually build a workable PvP system, not just throw money at it. ANet can’t take shortcuts. Pro-leagues have failed. A game doesn’t become a sport because of money, it’s because people enjoy to play and watch it. It infuriates me to see pro-leaguers complaining. PvP is literally made for them, forget the new and average player. They’re literally catered to by ANet. Where the hell are the priorities?

Right now PvP needs:
- Separate Solo Queue(1-man) and Team Queue(5-man)
- Profession Balance
- TUTORIAL
- Fix Hotjoin
- Fair matchmaking system

These are the BASICS.

If I had a choice between fixing PvP and killing the PvP “scene”, I would choose the second.

You’re way far off on what was needed to make this game “esport”. Anyone who has been here since launch can tell you two glaring issues off the bat:

1. The game is still aids to watch as an outside spectator to see (particle effects are one of the biggest offenders).

2. Proper balance: but what I mean by it isn’t so idealistic, HoT powercreep broke the entire gamemode they were trying to build and it took almost 1.5 years for them to barely normalize this (and it still isn’t good enough). With another expansion meant to cash in their dying revenue and another set of problems for pvp, you can clearly see why people ran for the hills (unless they are getting paid) a while ago.

Once devs communicate back on why x-change was buffed or nerfed and actually get community balance (not 2 months apart to fix) rather than being stuck on their notions of what “balance” is then you can start to tackle the issues you brought up.

Oh I completely agree with you. PvP is atrocious to watch and you do need proper balance for any competitive game.

Needs a complete combat overhaul, imo. Boons, conditions… what a bunch of rubbish.

Many factors has butchered the pvp in this game. One being the trait revamp and removing the stats and themed trait lines. This gave the game certain limitation on how far you can take a build.. exampling being you had to invest in the line to obtain 300 power while also lacking in one area. Also traits how they are don’t work.. previous trait system nothing was wrong with other then making lackluster traits a bit better instead of making traits have huge damage numbers they do in the current system. The traits should only compliment builds and not make the entire build like they do now.. but yeah the biggest culprit of the current balance and gameplay is the

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Game_updates/2015-06-23

The completely over the top damage buff traits introduced by this update along with adding more stats to equipment WITHOUT any boost in Hit points in anything and damage traits being wayyy to high (looking at you Mental Anguish… only one example I can think of at the moment) has caused the major issue with balance to this day. All damage increasing traits should be halved.
All stats across the board (when you equip the certain equipment) except the hit point pool which was designed for the lower damage output of classes were boosted as well. There was a reason this game went the direction is is currently because they messed with the original balance of the classes which was exceptional (Of course issues back then as well but easily fixed if the effort was given) Also with old traits you had to invest in a certain line to perform in a type of category such as condition damage.. or if you wanted more boon duration you had to go to another line. This made sure that these types of builds had their limitations on performance. With the current system you can get everything without any drawback. We even had the HoT Beta classes introduced a few weeks after this update popped and they actually had to BUFF the already relatively balanced new HOT specializations to compensate for the hike in damage introduced in this update. We drastically saw changes to the original traits of the HoT specializations which had the perfect balance for the trait system at the time and then when this update came out they had to change everything to make them perform at that new level which was already broken. Good example is dragon hunter and tempest. If you look at the historical traits of these specializations on dulfy you can clearly see that the traits they DID have were not over the top.

But yeah bottom line.. that update really messed up the entire games balance. Then you even got a might boon which imho is not even tailored to this higher damage as well but makes things even more over the top with damage.. prob not big of an issue in spvp but it is in other locations.. look at raids and wvw.. which make might stacking a must.. which is kind of wonky if you ask me you shouldn’t be required to have might on 25 stacks all the time in a game.. which limits the pool of who can even be in those game modes.

then I find it funny how burning and other conditions got hiked so much but over the last 3 years before their change… they worried about burn durations and damage even adjusting them a bit. but then forget all of that to add very high burn ticks to the game… Oh wait this happened SAME UPDATE? coincidence… nope

Reason 4: the gameplay itself and the mode itself offers no avenue for competitive play.

The combat is kitten in this game. No skill required. Yes, people can play better than others but it don’t matter. In a gamemode so forgiving of mistakes, and so independent of individual action, its completely irrelevant.

Who would want to watch pvp matches? These boring maps…where people have to stand in circles, where the fights have nothing to do with the winning?
gw2 has esports cause anet forked up cash for wannabe’s to fight over. Tbh I think esports in terms of playing games are stupid, But lets look at it objectively: there is no way for individuals to shine in this gamemode. And there is no real skill with the hot changes making everything into aoe attacks. Its boring, there is no comparison between this and a moba or this and an rts…..
Some1 offers money for you to play hellokitty island adventure and it suddenly becomes an esport? That pretty much sums up gw2 esports.

Its 10 person matches with 3 circles to stand in, and some meta-event going on that helps increase ur circle tick rate to speed up games. Just a desert with 3 points and 10 idiots running around, 5 on each team, camping and running around the maps fighting over circles. ANd when everyone is firing ranged aoe’s at eachother…..its kitten. Its boring, pvp is boring. WvsW is where things ‘could’ be esports worthy and interesting to watch. The more people you have playing the mode the more interesting and competitive it becomes. Its like saying “ok having 2 pidgeons fight over a handful of feed isn’t getting us anywhere….what would happen if we have 200 fight over a handful of feed”….this si where the competitive side of this game lies, its wvsw. But the devs focus on this dying boring pvp mode instead….and wvsw remains dying and boring as well.

Other than that..an entire new mode must be created. maybe one that is actually player vs player focused? Not player vs circle?