Guild Wars 2

Short window to play in? New build? Drunk? There are many reasons to hotjoin over solo arena, but it is absurdly hard to do so.

When I start playing, I find the first 9/10 game and join. It is usually the round end, map switches and 7/10 players leave. Play 1v2 for a while, it sucks, people join and sit in spec so they can stack to the 2 side once some sucker joins and evens the teams. 400-90, round ends, 7/10 people leave.

Back to the server list, find a new 9/10, lather, rinse, repeat. No server stays populated past one map, stacking is too easy, 2v4 is too common. Solutions required, I spend as much time loading new games to get out of 1v2s as I do playing 5v5s.

How does that solve the WTJ/LTL problem? If you play a non-arena match, players start leaving the low-point team as soon as the difference is 50 points or so. So you are in the winning team and get autobalanced to the losing team and therefore are punished for not doing something wrong at all.

The problem with hot join is that it’s plagued with people abusing the spectate system. I had seen a hot join game where it was 9/10. You know how many people were actually playing? 2v2.

When the other team gets ahead of the other team by 100 points, people start stacking the winning team and the losing team’s players start spectating to try to get into the winning team.

I kind of missed the days where points gained in a match influenced your gain of glory and rank points rather than the amount of time spent. If the current loophole for abuse can be done away, I think hot join would be much better and less lopsided.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Sounds like you should try the ‘Play Now’ button. It prioritizes servers that are just starting a map, has playable space, and is the same server other people will hop into when they use ‘Play Now’ so that they’re usually never empty and/or fill up quickly.

“normal” servers are basically custom arenas but i think you need to limit some functions for “normal” servers like:

-leave button
-choose team
-switch team

This is because people has always the same routine in hot join: match starts, people sux at the first fight, leave or go to spectator to try to switch team, if doesn’t work they leave the match. Match ends 1vs2 or something like that.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Sounds like you should try the ‘Play Now’ button. It prioritizes servers that are just starting a map, has playable space, and is the same server other people will hop into when they use ‘Play Now’ so that they’re usually never empty and/or fill up quickly.

That’s what I use and I encounter the same situation as the OP. Games start off with low populations and it’s not uncommon for me to be popped into an empty or near empty arena. Players on losing teams early, players from the winning side get autobalanced onto the losing team, those autobalanced players then leave, and by the time the losing team gets a full or equal roster, they’re waaaaaaaaaaaaaay behind on points.

This makes playing with friends a nightmare. If you join up with a guildmate or two for some casual games, one of you inevitably gets auto balanced onto the opposite team. This is even worse when you want to play some games with your loved ones…

Don’t get me wrong team PvP is fun, but it’s not always a good solution for PvPing with friends.

My advice: completely scrap the hotjoin system. The bandaid fixes haven’t fixed anything. Just copy WoW’s unrated battleground queue system.

Yujin.1785:

The problem with hot join is that it’s plagued with people abusing the spectate system. I had seen a hot join game where it was 9/10. You know how many people were actually playing? 2v2.

When the other team gets ahead of the other team by 100 points, people start stacking the winning team and the losing team’s players start spectating to try to get into the winning team.

I kind of missed the days where points gained in a match influenced your gain of glory and rank points rather than the amount of time spent. If the current loophole for abuse can be done away, I think hot join would be much better and less lopsided.

Yea this is extremely common. People do it for the PvE rewards. IMO they should que players to join 2 at a time so at least the teams stay even and randomly assign them to a team to prevent people from being rewarded for poor behavior.

omg this is oly hot join… u wasting dev time on this? come on ….

Evan Lesh.3295:

Sounds like you should try the ‘Play Now’ button. It prioritizes servers that are just starting a map, has playable space, and is the same server other people will hop into when they use ‘Play Now’ so that they’re usually never empty and/or fill up quickly.

Quite a few times (maybe it depends on the time of day) that I end up in completely empty matches, or completely 1 sided.

I literally only use Play Now to join on matches, and its either empty (waiting for players) or some 5v3.

It is really a 50/50 right now

hey I rlly dont get u ppl… It dosnt mather if its 5v3 or 2v1 its hot join only good for testing new things…. no one will lern how to play in team arenas in hot join… NO ONE!

‘Play Now’ is the best way for Hotjoin to find an ok game but…

I more or less only play hotjoin in PvP and there has (Not what I can remember) a whole match without leavers or people switching teams. Some people don’t even play for victory. About a week ago I was asking a group of players to not fight 1v1 matches outside of cap points and they told me they was R80 and was challanging people to 1vs1 with them and if I wanted to play real matches I had to do teamQ (This was not a custom arena it was the “Play Now” HotJoin).
There is so many ways for players to ruin the game for others in Hotjoin. I still like it but it could have been so much more fun if there was a way to stop people from Switching, Leaving, AFK’ing and Kill-hunting(Don’t care for team score just to kill).

ozzero.3892:

hey I rlly dont get u ppl… It dosnt mather if its 5v3 or 2v1 its hot join only good for testing new things…. no one will lern how to play in team arenas in hot join… NO ONE!

Some maby want to play quick games without feeling the need to be hardcore but still want to be able to have a fun experience….
Heart of the Mists is where you test things and yes No one will learn how to play in team arenas in Hotjoin so why should I go play in Team Arenas when I don’t want to play like they play there?

Hot join in a nutshell: Find out who the 1-3 good players are in the server and always stack on their team to get landslide victories. I’ve watched players who see a rank 80 on red, stay in spectate spamming the red team until they get on it, then the rank 80 player gets auto-balanced to blue because it’s 5v2 and all the players instantly leave to spectate and spam the blue team which now becomes stacked with nobody on the red team. This process repeats until eventually the noobs are the ones to get auto-balanced and all the bads get carried to their victory. It’s pretty pathetic, and means either you sit in spectate spamming winning teams all day, or spend entire matches fighting 1v3s and 1v4s because your team is either non-existent or full of new players wandering around in the spawn looking at the environment. Regardless of whether a PvP match provides imaginary rank points or not, it seems like Anet would at least want it to be fun.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Sounds like you should try the ‘Play Now’ button. It prioritizes servers that are just starting a map, has playable space, and is the same server other people will hop into when they use ‘Play Now’ so that they’re usually never empty and/or fill up quickly.

This isn’t the problem. Leavers, stackers and uneven teams are. I usually do soloq so this problem doesn’t exist really. But lately I’ve been doing hotjoin, every server no matter which one you join will end up like one or all of the following:

1. 4v5, 3v5
2. Players purposely joining the team they believe will win
3. A 5v5 initially, but someone will leave once they feel the team is losing

You guys took away 8v8 because you wanted to make it more like soloq, to serve as a stepping stone for players to understand the soloq/teamq format. What you guys didn’t do is implement the rules from soloq/team:

1. Not being able to pick your own team
2. Not being able to abandon your team if you feel you are losing
3. A 5v5 match, not a 3v5 or 4v5
4. Not being able to purposely stack teams so you can win

Since the feature patch hotjoin has been a awful awful experience. I’d say good luck to you finding matches that are 5v5 from start to finish.

ozzero.3892:

hey I rlly dont get u ppl… It dosnt mather if its 5v3 or 2v1 its hot join only good for testing new things…. no one will lern how to play in team arenas in hot join… NO ONE!

What the heck am I testing in a 1v3? “Confirmed, this build won’t wipe a mesmer, necro, and a guardian!”

Huh. I never even knew about the “Play Now” button. >.>

But yeah, I agree that the rewards should be reworked so it doesn’t just encourage stacking and afking. What I propose is instead adjusting the rewards so earned glory is based on what you did in the match, rather than being primarily weighted towards victory. Here’s an example:

Old system:

Player A on the losing team gets:

- Top Captures: 5
- Top Defender: 5
- Top Revives: 5
- Match Lost: 200

Total: 215 Glory for a loss.

Player B on the winning team gets:

- Top Killer: 5
- Match Won: 500

Total: 505 Glory for a win.

New system:

Player A on the losing team gets:

- Top Captures: 100
- Top Defender: 100
- Top Revives: 100
- Match Lost: 100

Total: 400 Glory for a loss.

Player B on the winning team gets:

- Top Killer: 100
- Match Won: 200

Total: 300 Glory for a win.

So the end result is that your rewards depend much more on your own individual skill and participation, rather than just stacking on the winning team. This means it’s possible to get MORE rewards on the losing team than on the winning team, depending on how well you do as an individual.

The above rewards are just a brief outline, btw. If we actually implement this I’d tweak it so that they scale per kill/capture/revive etc. instead of just being a flat reward for being the top scorer.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Sounds like you should try the ‘Play Now’ button. It prioritizes servers that are just starting a map, has playable space, and is the same server other people will hop into when they use ‘Play Now’ so that they’re usually never empty and/or fill up quickly.

i must be clicking the wrong play now button, because the play now button i click always sticks me in a 300v50 game (thats an example) with lopsided teams, and when that pointless game ends everyone will leave out of frustration, the next game will be 1v1/1v2 for just long enough that the game becomes lopsided again and then people start joining, and so the cycle continues.

never had this problem with 8v8.

To be honest… I don’t play TPvP/SoloQ any more. They’re both full of meta builds, and getting a good team together takes a lot of dedication and again running a meta sync. Hotjoin makes things simpler, I jump in when I want, play what I want (kitten meta), troll around, get autobalanced once in a while BUT I don’t care… it’s all for the fights here, not for the rewards.

And i’ll be kitten ed if I ever prefer running silly overpowered meta builds such as hambow.

Edit: I think I missed the gist of OP’s post: I do agree about the balance being really bad in most games, due to people spectating then joining winning team. I myself never do that, I always jump on losing team and try to have a good time.

I do wish they could just prevent people from switching teams and chosing team. Make everyone who joins game automatically added to losing team maybe?

People spectating to join the winning team and/or switching teams mid game is irritating – there needs to be restrictions on this.

Had one hotjoin recently where our side is in the lead by a decent margin, though teams were even – one particular player appears to quit, but then when it becomes a 5v3 and autobalance kicks in, I get chucked on the other side despite top score and contributing majority of leg work for our team – then this kitten rematerialises and proceeds to join the winning team…
It doesn’t matter that this is “only hotjoin”, that kind of thing should not happen.

Likewise landslide victories/losses and horribly unbalanced teams.

I always join the losing team/team with fewest players if I can help it, although sometimes there’s just no point if faced with a semi organised guild group.

Hotjoin has a vital place in pvp – a place where you don’t have to worry about rank, meta builds, disconnects or great team synergy, but can kick back and have some casual pvp in your own time. At the moment though it is a mess.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Sounds like you should try the ‘Play Now’ button. It prioritizes servers that are just starting a map, has playable space, and is the same server other people will hop into when they use ‘Play Now’ so that they’re usually never empty and/or fill up quickly.

The problem still persist.
It’s not about find an empty match or whatever, the problem is that Hotjoin is totally broken.
This is because:

• Leave and join are permitted iteratively.

There is no point that hotjoin exist in this way.
I’m agree that it should be different from ranked matches if it need to exist, but at the same time you need to build a patch to implement new rules to hotjoin.
No one is satisfied with this “hotjoin system”.

A solution should be:

• Add a button that allow to queue (prioritizing time system) in a match while in the spectator mode to maintain the same amount of players in each team, and instantly join when another player queue; with the amount of comings and goings, it will take more less the same time as now is, to take part of a match.
• Queue for started match: wait a couple of seconds that someone else queue in that match or just join instantly cause someone else is currently queued.
• Leaving players: if a player has left the game then 1 random player of the other team gain the amount of rank points earned till that moment and leaves the game, with a queue priority for another match, so if someone else is queued in another random match, this player will instantly join another game.
• Leaving players: if a player has left the game, autobalance in 5 seconds and another currently queued player can take part into the game.

This will maintain the same amount of players in each team. Autobalance is fine, but it doesn’t work when there is an unbalanced match like 4vs5 or something.

Otherwise just add to hotjoin too a sort of Dishonored debuff, cause some reliability does not clash anywhere.

A simple solution would be to just not allow people the join matches they are spectating in.

Entering hot join battles would be the same as before spectator was added. People who are interested in just watching battles could still do so.

And if you really want to join a battle that you are spectating, you can return to the HotM and then select the server you want to play in manually.