Hi, As a player who hot joins regularly, Ive seem to notice some problems and would like to attempt to share my 2 cents on perhaps how these things can be fixed. There may already be a similar post around but this will be my own personal opinion.
Hot Join is for all the casual players who don’t like to be competitive or for old and new players to test out their new builds. Its meant to be fun and not to be taken too seriously.
But I still come across countless servers where it becomes an unfair outnumbered fight and (some) players just waiting in spectate for a spot to free up on the winning team because you get extra exp reward(killing the whole meaning of hotjoin). In the same time I can’t blame some of those people because who likes losing right? And thats the problem, the reward system for hot join encourages people to take it a lot more seriously then (IMO) intended to be.
How do we fix this?
Balance out the exp rewards for both losing and winning teams.
This will then encourage both new and old players to join which ever team despite who is winning since everyone will get the same amount of exp reward. Its rather simple in explanation.
Always felt Anet didnt like to punish their players and think this would be a nice way to reward players who just casually want to spvp.
1. What if rewards were given out equally regardless of the winner? To prevent AFKs, have a short timer that kicks players if they are not out of the spawn zone for 5 seconds or so.
But yeah, I agree, hotjoin can be ridiculous, with everyone hopping out of the losing team like a game of hot potatoes and entering again on the winning team after the auto balance. I noticed that it’s especially bad starting around late afternoon when I assume the kids come home from school and gets better late at night.
2. Another possible solution could be to change how auto balance works so that no matter the number of players, new players cannot join the winning side. This might solve the spectator issue.
Before adjusting anything else, first they need to get rid of the profession dailies (or at least re-work them into something that can count some kind of partial progress when on the losing team).
Currently those type of dailies are a big incentive for people to seek out ways to end up on the winning team at all costs. And consequently they encourage quitting out whenever their team is likely to lose. As a rather logical and straightforward result, most hotjoin matches end up being unbalanced and ridiculous.
Thank you for the detailed explanation. All very interesting points. Sir Black, that is definitely another big problem in itself which anet has to look into.
The problem with this behavior isn’t due to rank point rewards, because you only get points based on how long you’ve been in the match (spectate mode excluded) – if you’re on a losing team for 7 minutes you get 200 points, but if you’re on a winning team for 1 minute you get maybe 50 points, so it’s actually counterproductive to try to squeeze into a winning team in the last minute if your intention is to farm rank points. There’s also a bit of a curve to the time-reward scale, because being in 7 winning games for 1 minute each gives you less points than being in 1 winning game for 7 minutes.
So as Sir Black says, it’s almost entirely about getting the win credit. Removing or equalizing PvP rewards will not change this behavior because what’s actually being farmed is Achievement rewards.
Was not sure on those details so thank you for that! Admittedly I was looking at the different Track rewards you can choose from in Spvp. I have personally noticed losing a game will get you roughly half a bar of reward track exp and almost a full bar if you win.
Someone responded to this and highlighted the fact that the reward farmers will move onto ranked or unranked. You know well as to what they will mostly do there.
