A few simple changes could improve the PvP experience immensely, making it more accessible, and more fun.
Current sPvP is facing a few self-imposed barriers to participation that can be easily removed.
First, change queues to a kind of never-ending king of the hill that winning teams keep climbing. So, when a team wins, keep that team together and match them up against another team with a similar number of wins. This will alone will improve the quality of matches a lot, and win or lose, players enjoy a well-played match. (You can even give losing teams the option of staying together.)
Organizing a team takes a lot of effort, and often has unsatisfactory results anyway. But players recognize when they have a team that works well, or enjoyably, so why not make it easy for them to keep it when they have a good thing? And there’s nothing satisfying about a good team beating up on a bad one for either side, which happens all too often now.
Second Community. Players are either in matches, or stuck milling around the lobby with nothing interesting to occupy them. Why not fill a map with arenas and let players watch the games? A player could open their map and hover over an arena to see who is playing, click on camera icons to get views, or click on players to see their view. There could be featured arenas for top rated teams. And a chat tab for each arena when a spectator is viewing so people can kibbutz. This is how community is built in a natural way. Participating, spectating and kibbutzing. Also, being able to watch players in action is a great way to learn. And the more players learn, the better quality games everyone enjoys.
Third The format. Conquest is a great concept for highly organized teams that use chat programs and know each other’s builds. For the other 98% of players, it just leads to a lot of bad play. We need an alternate format that is intuitive for players without a lot of tactical coordination. Conquest splits each team of 5 across 3 points. Casual teams cannot coordinate effectively when split among so many objectives; most games are lost due to bad tactics, regardless of the fights. How about experiment with new formats that let players fight five on five, or split differently?
Some quick ideas:
Hot Zone—the closer a player stands to an orb in the middle of the map, the weaker he is, less health, less damage, etc, but also, the faster that team fills their win bar. On the outskirts of the hot zone could be assorted boons, like healing oases, or power ups. You will get a lot of group fights in this, but also, players will have to advance and retreat a lot, sometimes respawn, and splits can be effective, too.
Slay the Beast—a massive Champion has to be killed, and whichever team does the most damage wins; but, of course you can take out your opponents temporarily with kills, too. This could vary a lot too depending on the type of beast; a highly mobile beast that roams the map could be a very different challenge than a static one. Multiple attack zones on the beast would mean all melee wasn’t cleaving on the same location.
New formats will bring in new players, but they will also improve the quality of play in Conquest and all formats by pulling out players that aren’t interested in certain formats. I see this quite often in Conquest, players who just aren’t interested in good tactics or the demands of smartly attacking/defending caps. New formats will also show you what people choose, how they really want to play; only having Conquest makes it hard to gauge how much people really enjoy it. New formats will also encourage new builds.
ANet is trying to hard to get sPvP “right”. The one best format, with all skills balanced around playing that format. That approach rarely works. Be experimental, make formats that make it easy for players to jump into PvP, foster community. Let the community be part of your creative process!