Guild Wars 2

Hi PvPers. I’m a long-time GW2 player but fresh sPvPer (nearly to deer). I really want to get into sPvP, but I’m having a very, very difficult time finding it fun and not frustrating, and it really turns me off. Fast.

I play a ranger, and have been playing it for a good 2k+ hours, so I felt it wouldn’t be that difficult for me. I mean, I’ve done my fair share of WvW and I understand the class like the back of my hand, so it couldn’t be that bad. I have a gaming mouse, and good keybindings. I felt set. Grabbed a couple cookie cutter builds (very aware that sPvP =/= PvE or WvW) to get my feet wet and at least know I’m playing with something that’s supposed to be good. On a good class. As a, honestly, good player.

I tried hot-join, but it was so zergy. So I tried solo-q and team arena.

:/ And I didn’t do well. At all.

Now you see, it’d be one thing if I just didn’t do well. But it’s a whole other thing when I—a mere bunny—am getting stomped by a shark. I understand how the expenental growth of ranks work. They’d have to have played at LEAST 300x as much as I have (if I had played 10 games, they must have played at least 30,000). With experience like that, how in the world am I supposed to have a sliver of a chance against them?

I thought, incorrectly, that I’d be a little bunny playing against other little bunnies in our land of newbie bunny play. Instead, I was thrown right in with the sharks (literally!).

I saw that not very long ago (November?) there was an update to improve matchmaking. If this is the improvement, I’m frightened at what was before it. It’s a turn off, and I really don’t want to step back in. Here I am, still trying to figure out if I’m fighting 1 mesmer or 1 mesmer with an ele tucked in there, a minonmancer who has an asura warrior hiding under his fastest minion, or one thief or two.

I’m not sure what to do. It’s scary in there.

don’t worry dude, that shark is probably wandering in the low elo bracket, meaning it’s just a scrub with tons of experience ( still a scrub tough).

Rank means nothing, a rank 60 may have farmed it via skyhammer tough knowing nothing about rotations and skilled play.

Don’t be afraid to get stomped, you’ll eventually get better and stomp all the sharks in the ocean ( or not, it’s all up to you).

Map awareness is all you need after all.

To get you started 300×10=3000. Hope I helped. Keep up the Spirit (haha ranger pun).
You get matched with high ranks simply because noone else plays at the time so they have to be matched with you. I’m sure they are just as disappointed as you are even if you play to the best of your abilities everyone likes to blame low ranks. Keep playing and you may find it fun to stomp those sharks with your rabbit finisher.

Mrbig.8019:

don’t worry dude, that shark is probably wandering in the low elo bracket, meaning it’s just a scrub with tons of experience ( still a scrub tough).

Rank means nothing, a rank 60 may have farmed it via skyhammer tough knowing nothing about rotations and skilled play.

Don’t be afraid to get stomped, you’ll eventually get better and stomp all the sharks in the ocean ( or not, it’s all up to you).

Map awareness is all you need after all.

Ignore this, what more than likely happened is that due to the low population and the starting MMR (being way too high), you were inappropriately paired up.

wvw and pve are other worlds compared to pvp. knowing your class there doesn’t mean anything in spvp. the only tip i can give you is: check your build and compare to working builds in spvp. build diversity in spvp doesn’t work. there are working builds and sucking ones. pick up first.

Pyriall.5027:

Mrbig.8019:

don’t worry dude, that shark is probably wandering in the low elo bracket, meaning it’s just a scrub with tons of experience ( still a scrub tough).

Rank means nothing, a rank 60 may have farmed it via skyhammer tough knowing nothing about rotations and skilled play.

Don’t be afraid to get stomped, you’ll eventually get better and stomp all the sharks in the ocean ( or not, it’s all up to you).

Map awareness is all you need after all.

Ignore this, what more than likely happened is that due to the low population and the starting MMR (being way too high), you were inappropriately paired up.

There’s no need to think that way.

Rank is totally meaningless, there’re TONS of rank 50-60 scrubs.

Population may be low, but there’s no need to hide this fact, giving PvP even worse advertisement than it deserves.

I would be more worried about the fact there’s no way to measure skill in this game rather than talking about “bad matchmaking”.

Mrbig.8019:

Pyriall.5027:

Mrbig.8019:

don’t worry dude, that shark is probably wandering in the low elo bracket, meaning it’s just a scrub with tons of experience ( still a scrub tough).

Rank means nothing, a rank 60 may have farmed it via skyhammer tough knowing nothing about rotations and skilled play.

Don’t be afraid to get stomped, you’ll eventually get better and stomp all the sharks in the ocean ( or not, it’s all up to you).

Map awareness is all you need after all.

Ignore this, what more than likely happened is that due to the low population and the starting MMR (being way too high), you were inappropriately paired up.

There’s no need to think that way.

Rank is totally meaningless, there’re TONS of rank 50-60 scrubs.

Population may be low, but there’s no need to hide this fact, giving PvP even worse advertisement than it deserves.

I would be more worried about the fact there’s no way to measure skill in this game rather than talking about “bad matchmaking”.

He literally just started ranked play. The starting MMR is too high. This has already been proven time and time again.

Does rank mean anything? Absolutely not.
Is match making jacked to all hell? Yes
Is the population so low that pinpointing the problem as being related solely to MMR nearly impossible? You bet.

It’s much more of a problem on NA than EU.

Can’t imagine anyone who’s played both recently not agreeing with this..

Pyriall.5027:

Mrbig.8019:

don’t worry dude, that shark is probably wandering in the low elo bracket, meaning it’s just a scrub with tons of experience ( still a scrub tough).

Rank means nothing, a rank 60 may have farmed it via skyhammer tough knowing nothing about rotations and skilled play.

Don’t be afraid to get stomped, you’ll eventually get better and stomp all the sharks in the ocean ( or not, it’s all up to you).

Map awareness is all you need after all.

Ignore this, what more than likely happened is that due to the low population and the starting MMR (being way too high), you were inappropriately paired up.

^^this

theoretically, the current system isn’t so bad however it fails due to lack of players so seeing lv 4 vs lv 60 is not so uncommon, sadly

additionaly, skyhammer/4v5 issue still persist in soloq so it is way to common that even top 200 players drop to 85% if they were unlucky enough to get bunch of 4v5/skyhammer/spirit watch with unbalanced comps in a row

i personally didn’t even do ranked untill i got to deer basically, surely i was/am still too scrubby compared to most “sharks” but at least i have some idea about map rotation and how to fight most classes so chances of winning are way higher and games are more enjoyable

i do believe/hope that with legaue system it gets bit better… but i think pvp in generall needs major revamp, especially in reward area to attract new players… atm wvw is way more rewarding and it is still form of unrestricted pvp

pvp in this game has good potential, but still too undeveloped and oddly enough there is almost no info about pvp in game; when i hit certain lv i get bombed by mail about LS, dungeons etc. none of that happens for pvp…. i remember as new player i didn’t even know how to accesss pvp… i believe every player should get in game mail with info about pvp when they hit 80 at least

Also look on this forum at video guides the experienced pvpers have put together. They’re great sources of information!

You are a ranger. Search for spirit ranger build and run that. It’s super easy to play and you’ll get the hang of it after a few matches.

Your issue is that you are probably trying the play the class as a RANGER. In this game, it is much stronger as a melee spirit build.

I agree that the starting MMR is simply too high. It assumes you are going to be more effective for your team than you actually are. Regardless, a few losses will get you closer to competition who are more your level of development, and you can work up from there as you learn.

It is really tough, because about 80% of pvp is being the right place/choosing the right fight, and the other 20% if actual performance in that fight. There isn’t really a great place to learn that 80% because, as you said, hotjoin is a zerg-ball of mostly scrubs, and people stack on one side like wins there mean something. Regardless, you should hotjoin (ONLY 5v5 matches) to learn how to rotate to the proper points and try to win.

My guess is that you know how to fight just fine, but don’t know how to rotate intelligently on the map or position yourself in the right spot. I would suggest watching some higher-ranked players on twitch.tv, and asking them during their stream to explain what they are doing or why they did what they did. If it is a team queuing and your hear their teamspeak, you will quickly get a better idea of how to rotate better.

In accordance to every thing else that was said, I recommend turning off map and say chat (keep team chat) as you’ll get some pretty hateful and demeaning remarks from time to time which can diminish a person’s morale and deter them from this element of the game.

It could be worse. You could be this warrior angry at dying to a d/d ele:

Funny how only 3 of the responses in this thread have bothered to help the concerned OP, where the others just flash kitten or blame the system…

Hi there! A few things to do:

1. Read https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/New-to-PvP-Start-here
2. Increase map awareness and rotations, this cannot be mentioned enough.
3. Wait for the rating to stabilize. Note that I think I noticed your rating only resets every hour. So, if you play like four games, they may all still be at a rating too high for you, thus having all these crazy match ups. Things should stabilize after a number of games. But yeah, this is definitely something that should be changed. Either starting rating should be lower or there should be some rank 1-10 newbie arena for newbies only.