Guild Wars 2

Most players would like to get rid of it. But anet will keep it in the servers list.
As they will not ditch hotjoin, they might aswell make it less tedious.

Now, I never take hotjoin seriously. Always with a grain of “salt”.
I play it when I’ testing some ridiculous build, or when I have too little time to play ranked.

Whenever I random join a server where Blue has 4 players and 300 points, and Red has 3 players and 23 points, I see some sneaky spectator quickly join the winning side. Almost as if the rewards hes getting are totally worth the effort and waiting.

The result? A 5v2 spawncamp zergfest, completely useless for any player.
50% of the losing team ragequits, and the match ends in a beautifull fancy mapchat-battle. (Aka; “Ez”, “noob”, “random insult”)

My suggestions are;
1. Remove hotjoin (they probably wont)
2. Remove sidepicking, force join (if you want to play with your friend, go ranked, unranked or custom)
3. Equalize rewards (much lower than ranked)

Tldr: Hotjoin sucks for new and old

Agreed, they should remove it, it’s so ghetto, the server lists remind me of playing FPS games 15 years ago, when I was a new player and saw them I was extremely disappointed, I expected something a lot more polished looking, like we have with ranked. I personally believe those server lists just give a bad first impression to anyone new to the game, oh and lets not forget the rank farm servers, yeah great first impression there anet….

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

Most players would like to get rid of it.

I have never heard a single player say that. Everyone seems to love the fact that there’s a mode where you can play PVP without any waiting time at all. Also, everyone seems to loathe the fact that you can no longer play hotjoin while waiting for your tournament queue pop.

That’s like the only change that is needed – let us play hotjoin while waiting for a queue pop again.

Hotjoins are the fastest dailies for me. I want it stay.

Hotjoins have only two purposes: test/train builds, and complete dailys (that´s why people wait to join the winning team).
My suggestions to improve hotjoin:
- It shouldn´t be allowed to choose the team.
- The match is balanced in numbers all the time, so a new player will join one of the teams only if there is also another player waiting in the queue.
- Reward is the same for winners and losers.
- Daily class win on pvp should be removed. Instead, put something like play 3 matches.

Removing team swapping is a must. Absolutely kittened.

at least in hotjoin

1. no queue wait
2. usu i can solo and expect to be only playing other solo-ers
3. mmr isn’t at play, so sometimes i play goods, sometimes i roll bads, at least i don’t get stuck in a 5+ game streak of loses because i’m playing premades. i just end up feeling like i’ve wasted so much time in these cases..
4. feel like i can enjoy playing and not be kitten by #1 – 3

theres plenty to complain about the snow ball effect that hotjoin has, but people already posted their suggestions on how to fix that

Removing Practice “Hot join” will most likely not happen.

I think the other approaches are better, such as removing team swap and modifying rewards for both sides. We do need a sand box for players new and experienced to play around in without compromising unranked and ranked.

Please do keep the idea coming and try to be detail as possible

If anyone is mad about hot join, why not playing unranked?
It has literally none of things you are accusing hot join of.

Many.8419:

If anyone is mad about hot join, why not playing unranked?
It has literally none of things you are accusing hot join of.

Because these players just want to quickly join a hotjoin match. Otherwise they would’ve gone ranked/unranked. But then they get irritated by the broken team picking, zerging and laughable ganking in hotjoin.
Are you suggesting that fixing or improving hotjoin isn’t worth it?

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

Most players would like to get rid of it.

I have never heard a single player say that. Everyone seems to love the fact that there’s a mode where you can play PVP without any waiting time at all. Also, everyone seems to loathe the fact that you can no longer play hotjoin while waiting for your tournament queue pop.

That’s like the only change that is needed – let us play hotjoin while waiting for a queue pop again.

There used to be lots of threats about this subject when team picking was added. And lots of players would rather get rid of it.

I think I’d rather see a better version of hotjoin, so players can still quickly join pvp and practice new builds.

SchmendrickTheMagician.8247:

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

Most players would like to get rid of it.

I have never heard a single player say that.

I just said it in the post before yours….

Having over 6000 hotjoin games, I prefer them over ranked for a few reasons:

1) Less pressure and I am free to do what I want which is usually just to fight others. I do try to cap but I don’t feel bad if I don’t.

2) No wait times; cant stand having to wait 3-5 minutes on average (including the 1 minute ready time before the match starts) for ranked games.

3) You can play with familiar faces/names. I like facing off against people that I’ve played with/against in the past and having that history and connection is nice. I doubt I would have played this long without feeling part of a community of regular players.

The only thing I really don’t like about hotjoins are the lobsided games. A large portion of the players that do hotjoins are there to just do their dailies and have no interest in pvping. This tends to contribute to the problem of lobsided games as most people join the winning side to create an even larger imbalance.

I dare you anet, play one hotjoin match.

ah, hotjoin.
it was fun when there were official 8 vs 8 servers.
but no, they said they wanted players to learn how to 5 vs 5.
then they silently abruptly removed the 8 vs 8 servers when they introduced reward tracks in april 2014.

and so nowadays we have these kinds of problems in the current 5 vs 5 hotjoin servers.

during beta weekends, launch, where there were official 8 vs 8 hotjoin servers, without spectator mode, players unable to team swap freely, players earned glory points and rank points based on their own personal score, well, it was much more fun back then.

A simple solution for Hotjoin is if a person has already joined a team, they can no longer join the other team during that match. This allows friends to play together. Allows people to choose a side or still spectate etc etc.
It stops team swapping dead though.

Negatives are that some people may wait longer to see who is winning before joining but that’s at risk of the teams filling up. If that becomes an issues the suggestion of 3 games played for the daily mentioned earlier works.

One simple fix (that I know has been mentioned before) is to just prevent people from joining the team that is winning unless it is short one person. Block people from rejoining the game for ~5 minutes after entering spectate and you’ve solved most of the problems of hotjoin. Can anyone name what would be a downside to stopping people from overloading the winning team?

They just need ‘pending’ for team joining when it’s more vs less. Keep pending until there’s also someone wanting to join the other team. If someone leaves midfight, then someone on the more team volunteers to go pending.

End this more vs less problem in a very easy step. But no, anet will refuse and continute with the bad AutoBl anyway.

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

Most players would like to get rid of it.

It’s a stat on the forum, so it can’t be made up, right?

That being said, I agree with suggestions 2 and 3.

Hotjoin is usually the first thing a new player does in pvp and its a terrible experience they will get farmed by winjoiners again and again. It really needs an update.

- Rewards should be the same, personal score increases rewards.
- Dont let people pick team or they will wait in spectator and pick the better team.
- Change daily to play 3 or so games.
- 1 person cant join to 4v3 a 3v3 game, must wait for another.

I agree with OP, but in reality this won’t happen… Mainly because casuals will cry on how they won’t be able to finish their daily because they can’t win a single pvp matches. And those guys are the one to “buy” gems for Anet. Its funny how Anet wanted to cater to casuals and promote well behaving when these are the guys that trash talked after a 5v2 hotjoins matches daily. Game balancing are mainly focused on pve players now since they are the one “that dish out the dough”, just forget about being competitive.

I’ve had several people tell me how horrid the PvP in GW2 is because they base their opinion on hotjoin 5v4 team swap abuse stuff. These types turn players away from PvP and harm PvP.

Hotjoin is supposed to be a place to test builds and learn the very basics of PvP… it is not a decent place for that.

Hotjoin needs reform for the good of the PvP scene.

The team swapping and imbalanced teams is bad.

I think swapping to the losing/weaker team should be allowed at any point in the match (I like doing this because it gives me a good challenge – either to see if I can turn the match around or fight against better players).

But joining spectate and rejoining a match should be disabled – if you go from playing on a team into spectate, you can’t play again till the next match.

I also like the idea of “waiting to balance numbers” when you try to join a team – so you won’t enter the match until another player has been put in to balance the opposite team numbers, unless the team you are attempting to join is losing by over 100 points?

Anyway I agree, it still needs fixing, to make the experience better for all players.

Hotjoin has to stay. As bad as it can be, spending most of my time waiting in a que to play the game blows. To improve hotjoin…

1. No team picking, just the option to join match or spectate.
2. Hide team composition and score when selecting whether to join match or spectate. Just put a black screen or loading screen in the background with nothing but a “Join Match” and “Spectate” button available.
3. Once you become a spectator, there is no joining the match after it has started.

Coelho Nat.4697:

Hotjoins have only two purposes: test/train builds, and complete dailys (that´s why people wait to join the winning team).
My suggestions to improve hotjoin:
- It shouldn´t be allowed to choose the team.
- The match is balanced in numbers all the time, so a new player will join one of the teams only if there is also another player waiting in the queue.
- Reward is the same for winners and losers.
- Daily class win on pvp should be removed. Instead, put something like play 3 matches.

Well, more than testing builds it’s good to get the hang of the game again after a pause.

It’s good for seeing what numbers you get on players, but for testing survivability it doesn’t work, because it usually involves 3-4 people zerging trying to win while the other team is scattered, each one trying to bash heads on his own. This means you will usually end up in a 3v1 where you either overestimate your survivability (in case you are in the zerg) or underestimate it (in case you are the zerged).

Changes that would be welcome:

-Games should not start, until both teams have 5 members
or should only start if there are equal amount of members on both teams.
For example if a game has started with red3vblue3, than a 4th member can only join if that can happens on both sides.
This can be done true joining a side and being put in wait, until there is a player/players on both sides in wait, making you being put into the game.

-Once you join a team, you cant switch anymore, unless it is to the team who is behind/shorter on players, due to people leaving.

-If someone leaves a game during the match, than that person should get a debuff.
Making him unable to join another game for 15minutes or so.
This will help preventing matches being ruined like halfway, when someone leaves when they are a little bit behind in points, causing a chain of people who than also leave on that teams side.