Guild Wars 2

I posted this in another thread but I think it got buried in the myriad of other posts.

The idea is to remove the option to go into spectator after the player has chosen to join a specific team. The only way to join the other team would be to quit the match/server (forfeiting all points earned) go back into the browser, find the server again, and then hope that there is a spot on the winning team by the time you do all this. Even then the bonus from winning alone wouldn’t be very high at all as you have 0 contribution (or a very small amount depending on the time spent finding the same match).

I can’t see any negative effects from doing this.

The next thing would be reward Volunteers more. Rarely do I ever see people volunteer to join the losing team even though you get the win either way. So why not make a Volunteer reward track or something? Maybe even give a special title for Volunteering X amount of times? Possibly a daily achievement for volunteering? Hell, even a bigger increase than 25 pvp exp would be great.

Thoughts?

I think it’s a great idea. Even if you don’t want to provide further incentive to volunteer it’s good to restrict team swapping.

This might work. However, it could also lead to just more people ragequitting, causing a cascade effect as the losing team decide it’s not worth the time to stay as opposed to just finding another match. IMO, it’d be more efficient to incentivise people to stay on the losing team, and join early as opposed to just waiting to see which side has the better players. (See my “Random Team” bonus post I’ve made elsewhere.)

Volunteers already get the winner’s bonus, so I’m not sure it needs more buffs (although I wouldn’t object to it. I already automatically volunteer every single time it comes up).

Zaxares.5419:

This might work. However, it could also lead to just more people ragequitting, causing a cascade effect as the losing team decide it’s not worth the time to stay as opposed to just finding another match. IMO, it’d be more efficient to incentivise people to stay on the losing team, and join early as opposed to just waiting to see which side has the better players. (See my “Random Team” bonus post I’ve made elsewhere.)

Volunteers already get the winner’s bonus, so I’m not sure it needs more buffs (although I wouldn’t object to it. I already automatically volunteer every single time it comes up).

I usually hit Random myself now. Used to I’d always go blue (favorite color) but now I just hit Random no matter what. The problem is how do you give incentive to stay in the match when the outcome is pretty apparent? It would be nice to give some sort of bonus to those that hit Random at the start and it would still leave people who want to play with friends the option to choose a team. So this is too is a good idea.

But sadly hot join is already plagued with ragequitting from the losing team, though, so I’m not sure there will be anything you can do to stop it. That’s really the main appeal of hot join to begin with is the ability to pick up or put it down whenever you want.

I think if the volunteer bonus were increased or given some sort of daily reward or even it’s own reward track, this would at least keep teams balanced number wise when someone just rage quit. As an indirect affect, I think it would cause others to want to stay in the match longer to see if they themselves could get the Volunteer bonus.

The only thing it doesn’t solve is the uneven matches of 2v1 or 3v4 but then again if someone leaves others are rewarded.

Reposting my idea then.

If you pick “Random Team” when you join a match, you get a special buff that DOUBLES the rewards at the end of the match (capped at the winner’s normal reward). This means that if you picked a random team, and your team ended up losing, you’d still get the same rewards as if you’d lucked out onto the winning team anyway. This has the following benefits:

1. There is no incentive to hop teams. You’d get the same reward staying on your random original team as you would switching to the winning team. This discourages Autobalance Wars.

2. It encourages people to join the match at once instead of watching until it becomes clear which team is superior. This discourages waiting in Spectate and should thus help solve the issue of 4v5.

Coupled with the fact that rewards are given out based on time played, this means it’s most profitable to instantly hit “Random Team” the moment a match starts, and then see it out to the end, win or lose.

Now, to ensure that winning still has some meaning, if you pick Random and lose, it won’t give you credit towards the appropriate achievements (Genius, Phantom etc.) Also, to incentivise people to move up to Solo/Team Queue when they get experienced enough, I propose increasing the rewards of the two modes to triple Hotjoin rewards (for Solo) and 5 times Hotjoin rewards (for Team). Note that the Random Team buff only applies to Hotjoin; it does not appear in Solo or Team Queue.

So all this should mean that Hotjoin remains a casual, “lite-PvP” mode that anyone can join and slowly work on PvP ranks and reward tracks. But if you want to earn your ranks/tracks faster, as well as gain renown and leaderboard ranks, you’ll need to move up to Solo/Team Queue.

It’s definitely an interesting idea.

It’s a shame that A-net hasn’t put much effort into coming up with these options themselves. Working too much on Living Story I suppose.

I would almost rather the PvP team stop working on crap maps like Skyhammer and put more effort into fixing what’s been broken for two years.