Hi !
As a former pve player i have enjoyed pvp since the new daily rewards for various reasons.
PVP encourages an experimentation environment which requires in-depth understanding of classes you play and play against. While I do not consider myself to be top-notched (still learning mesmer and engi mechanics) i believed i have grasped a good understanding of the pvp system (rank 59 with little to no rank-farm ; only dailies on classes i don’t use).
I cannot but help to think Guild Wars 2 was built around the idea of pvp in mind, which could explain the great imbalance of class utilities in pve. It is also true (to a lesser extent) that pvp suffers from some imbalance (d/d cele eles having huge advantages for little to no drawbacks) wich i believe to be a consequence of limited resources allocated by anet to this aspect of the game. (Compared to other heavy pvp based games)
The strange thing is, anet seems to want to grow an emphasize on spvp and competitive play…
So far, i have noticed a few problems with the actual spvp (throughly repeated) :
- lesser frequent balancing patches, encouraging long-time abuses of bugs or unbalanced mechanics (engi grenade double damage, high burn damage, warrior rampage).
- low gold-income for pvp players
- no ladder ranking / progress other than rank 80
- small pvp population, even smaller community with (from my perspective) no reliable way to build social bonds and encourage premade / organized pvp.
I believe all if not most of these issues come down to two causes : anet’s investment in pvp and the player based interest in pvp.
- Anet allocates limited resources to pvp because the playerbase it catters to is small and considered unprofitable.
- Player’s are driven off pvp because it feels left out and poorly maintained. Also because it is unprofitable on their side in terms of gold, results in frustrating experiences due to unbalanced pvp matchmaking and so on.
The focus on this topic is to mainly find possible solutions to such problems.
As for myself, i have a few suggestions that might be worth looking into :
- having a possible interface for browsing and spectating ranked/unraked games. It could be a nice feature while queuing for a match.
- betting. Put at stake gold on participating teams to create a reason to actually follows matches, both teams would get a percentage of the gold at stake to resolve issues regarding gold-income all the while avoiding farming.
- PvP guilds specialized in spvp, as i see it, it would be far easier to speculate on organized teams with history backtrack than random hotjoins. They could then decide when such match could take place and have an audience waiting for them. Then again, having gold at stake would help increasing the said audience. It will also encourage people to get involved wich each other, which i a good and a bad thing. But hey, a pvp without cries & screams is a dead one, right ?
- in terms of rewards ; new PvP titles and achievements to gain (cost effective) to acknowledge pvp guilds contributing to the spvp activity. Also skins pvp-exclusives skins (like the glorious reward track) to give pvp players an edge. I am not against having them accessible in a cash shop for non-pvp players, also profitable for anet.
Lastly, I would gladly add a ladder with divisions and such, but imo there a still too few pvp players to build up a real ranking system.
TL;DR : my guess is that anet wants to emphasize on competitive pvp, while it has the potential to be what it wishes it cannot be done without catering to its playerbase.
You are free to comment & criticize down below i am curious to how other pvp players feel about HOTM.
Many thanks for reading me !