Guild Wars 2

Just wanted to make a post highlighting some future changes that I believe would help revive this game mode and make it great again, not that it’s dead, it’s just pretty stale as you can see in the forums.

1) Release more non elite specific skills with the new xpac; I fear if only new elite skills are added with the upcoming expansion, we will be left with the same stale meta and a new meta “band-aid” to cover it up for a while.

Releasing more skills would force the population to redesign the entire previous meta and core builds, and with more skills to play with, it would potentially offer a much bigger variety of builds to play with. Just take a look at the sheer amount of skills GW1 had to offer, including secondary professions I believe those numbers are one of the reasons GW1 was so great.

2) Release team death-match; The problem I see with conquest is that it causes the entire game to often be misconceived as horrifically unbalanced, not because it is unbalanced (It isn’t, there is just no build variety), but because conquest is designed around playing three nodes.

Without the three nodes to play with, you would see these one shot glass builds all but completely disappear away to conquest, with a new meta prevailing focusing solely on playing 5v5. I do not suggest conquest should be removed, but put into a separate queue alongside team death-match.

3) New maps; This is a no brainer, in conquest different maps add unique plays and allow different classes to shine. This game needs a lot more maps, and new maps added at least every year. I would like to see some new maps based around the upcoming expansion too, something exiting with lots of different terrain. I think the current variety of maps are another reason the game mode feels stale.

4) Remove duo queue; Though I am unsure of this I propose to remove duo queue, purely to try and create a more healthy community. I have seen players from both ends of the spectrum directly or indirectly complaining about duo queue. Either by getting stomped on or stomping on teams, or being forced to carry lower ranked players. IMO this is not fair or competitive.

Personally I would like to see separate solo queues and full team queues or a solo queue and duo queue with the duo queue being 4v4 or 6v6 and consisting solely of duo’s.

5) Unlock weapons from elite specs; Although I am unsure of this too, it would offer even more crafting potential giving us even more build variety.

6) Increase non liquid and liquid gold rewards; No matter how many players play sPvP, the PvP aspect of any game is often an aspect that can bring new players to a game. The rewards can be an aspect that makes them stay with that game. I propose that sPvP rewards should be competitive with PvE rewards also offering more prestigious rewards unique to the game mode.

7) Give new players tutorials, and encourage playing different classes; sPvP badly needs some basic rewarded tutorials for conquest, offering an insight into playing advantages and disadvantages. You could even have a sPvP section linked through the game to the website with more in depth guides.

Players also need some incentive to playing different classes, one way to achieve this would be to have more achievements with liquid gold or unique rewards for winning games on different classes. That or to add “games won” requirement across say three classes to earn your rights to play ranked on season.

To conclude I wanted to say that it is really sad to see GW2 leave esports, its arguable that this was down to the neglect of sPvP in general. To anyone who was all for getting rid of esports, well you just condoned getting rid of a major marketing standpoint for GW2, and this is coming from someone who doesn’t even play at that level, and probably never will.

Many GW2 players are solely PvP players or like me really enjoy playing PvP after getting daily PvE tasks done. Without going off topic the PvE dailies are so far few and between I really believe it is in everyone’s best interests to give sPvP some of the TLC that it needs. Let us end this undying repetitive salt filled forum and start proposing some real changes that would make sPvP great again.

We share some things, but having read many other people and adding my own experience I think the biggest problem is the lack of diversity.

Meta builds are in most cases barely customable (if you deviate too much you get a far worse build), fixed to 1 or 2 options per class, and don’t change in years.

I know and understand that as a not massive competitive game GW2 cant bring new maps, classes, skills and/or builds every few months, its just too much work.
But at least, it should bring “new life” to the players via changes and balance to class skills and new/changed amulets and runes. Heck runes could be made stronger without really that much work (just better procs and numbers) so that builds may be created around them and let people explore/experiment.

And probably the second one is the matchmaking. As it is, right now it feels -in my experience- like 95% one sided battles, every mach that has 500vs200 / 200vs500 or worse numbers feels like that. And they are a lot. Even in 300vs500 matches you probably feel really handicapped or an easy win. Only 2 matches in all my last played games are 400+vs500, and those were the most fun, by far.

Now, this may be a population problem, but then that makes another point: PvP may need new players and that has far too many problems:

- Free to play players are not meta capable and wont play to be murdered
- PvP is not really intuitive, if you started playing there is no easy access to meta builds, no explanation of how those builds work, no tutorial about the importance of rotations, map awareness etc… in a conquest mode and only a 1% of the player-base willing to help (heck most of the player-base will be totally toxic to them)

So, even if it is a competitive game, more cooperation rewarding systems should be added. PvP instructors that get some kind of benefit? Players from the loosing team being rewarded if they did their role right? Selecting your role before the match starts so that roles are reinforced in newbies minds and the matchmaking works better?

There are many things that could be made.

Opening up weapons and utility skills from the elite specs would be the wrong decision in my opinion.

I’d rather see it that the old class lines get turned elite and a weapon and/or utility attached so that the core classes are actually a choice and the current dual classing isn’t an issue anymore (yes, it is in essence dual classing).

None of this solutions will work. PVP doesn’t work on a PVE mmo sorry.

Balance patch every 2 months at the minimum.

Until they start to really work on balancing like they mean it… it’s still gonna be a disaster. Look at how long it took for them to fix invincible turrets. Hell, look at their history of balancing in general all the way down to guild wars 1 ( with invincible ninjas for every endgame instances). There are definite winners and losers in the grandmaster juggling act of ze meta balance and obviously it’s more tricky than it looks but to this day they still make me shake my head at some of the decision making being made and their justifications.

They gotta deal with the bot problem too, obviously.

Naurgalen.2374:

Now, this may be a population problem, but then that makes another point: PvP may need new players and that has far too many problems:

- Free to play players are not meta capable and wont play to be murdered
- PvP is not really intuitive, if you started playing there is no easy access to meta builds, no explanation of how those builds work, no tutorial about the importance of rotations, map awareness etc... in a conquest mode and only a 1% of the player-base willing to help (heck most of the player-base will be totally toxic to them)

You kind of hit the spot but it is not entirely true. Even if we get more players, these new casuals are going to be shred to pieces. At the beginning of HoT we had lots and lots of players for sure, yet it still failed. It was mostly due to OP specs but still... most of the OP part had to be on one team for the other to get shanked in the guts multiple times.
I’ve been there and I saw it, despite numbers the matchmaking didn’t handle it well.
I don’t think it’s only population but really the matchmaking is still a little wonky.
Sadly I do not understand what is to be found in gw2wiki on MMR algorithm, but practice says more than theory. Let’s not focus on situations where there are disconnections or troll players, but normal 5v5. I still wonder why so many times it happens that matches tend to be so one sided? If MMR works as intended, then why the vast majority of games is a one sided bloodshed or the team is handicapped? Where are those balanced numbers? If one team has superior players to the other, why aren’t two/three of them moved into the less skilled team to even the odds? That would still make it somewhat more balanced. Why can’t current MMR achieve that?
I really don’t mind losing 350+/500 or 400+/500 but being forced to lose -350/500 up to 5-7 times in a row despite trying to play during different hours, is making me feel concerned more and more. I wouldn’t be so if it wasn’t for other mmorpgs’ pvp (that are not all that known as GW2) I play and easily handle most of what happens there, than here. I am confident in my skills, but still, this is the first time in my many years of playing PvP game modes, that I feel this game is simply against me.

@Naurgalen.2374

Yes build diversity is a problem which is why as a bare minimum we need more skills that are not elite specific, otherwise were left with the same old meta and a new band-aid meta to cover it up.

500-200 games are not fun if you are losing, but in a good team vs a good team, just one kill can force a full cap and if every player on your team has good movement you can maintain the three cap causing this score. That’s what conquest is about, which is why I said we need team death-match.

@LouWolfskin.3492

I absolutely did not say unlock elite skills from specs, only the weapons. I also said I was unsure of this, but considering you wouldn’t be able to trait the weapons without using their specific elite specs, it might not be highly beneficial but could offer more build variety.

@Tyrion.9015

Don’t be so pessimistic, plenty of other MMO’s including GW2 and GW1 already have great sPvP, simple additions such as team death match, more maps and more skills would be a great step in making things more exiting.

As I said there isn’t much to do daily in GW2 so PvP is a big part for many players, it needs TLC too. Unless you find farming for the oh so not lucrative rewards that GW2’s PvE has to offer of course.

@Kaga.7629

Personally I would like to see more non elite skills and elite specs to give us more build variety. It’s pointless wasting time going back and forth trying to balance a stale meta.

Without condoning the lack of balance patches and the fact they are rarely revised, this is an MMO, it’s never going to be balanced. It’s especially difficult because GW2 has such unique and intricate designing of classes.

Also because conquest is the main game mode, combinations of +1 builds and heavy bunkers shine and offer unique mechanics of their own. Team death-match would offer much more balanced builds to shine.

@Rodzynald.5897

Couldn’t agree more that match making has it’s problems causing one sided games. I think that duo’s affect this heavily, forcing the duo with lower ranks to balance games.

Also unbalanced teams such as 2 support vs none and class stacking make games very lop sided. This is down to the match maker and also down to players refusing to swap classes.

However I made this post to be about changes to make sPvP a great and exiting game mode. Even with a better match maker and more frequent class balancing one sided games would still exist, duo’s would still stomp, most effective builds would still prevail, +1 builds would still dominate their flaws forgiven by mobility and three node gameplay e.t.c.

What I am trying to say is that I think people are kidding themselves if they think more balancing or a better match maker alone is going to make sPvP more interesting and exciting.

I got a “play doff classes encouragement” for you. Its called ranked without class stacking. And ofc to all who will be like “but i want to play my class” theres unranked que go have fun. This isnt about playing what you want this is about beimg competitive and havimg an overall good experience.

I also do believe that allowimg us to use elite spec weapons out of elite spcs would be good but only the weapons. Utilities and traits will still be chrono locked.

I believe the largest issue is the gamemode.

The thing about competitive games, is to keep players engaged and wanting to continue playing.

Conquest simply does not fulfill this role.

Mixing up the meta does almost nothing to improve the actual enjoyment of sPvP in its current state, whereas if you have an enjoyable interesting, dynamic and balanced gamemode as your base then meta shifts happen naturally in 2 ways: as players create builds to counter the current meta, and as balance changes effect the meta.

And at the end of the day, people can handle a stale meta as long as they enjoy the core sPvP mechanics and gameplay.

Itz Jay.8941:

500-200 games are not fun if you are losing, but in a good team vs a good team, just one kill can force a full cap and if every player on your team has good movement you can maintain the three cap causing this score. That’s what conquest is about, which is why I said we need team death-match.

500-200 scores in games are examples of unbalanced matches: they show that a team more than doubled the score of the other. As you said, its not impossible to bring back games from 100-300 to a win, we all have done it… but that needs balanced teams to work, and when that happens the final score resembles 400+ vs 500 or things like that, certainly not a final difference of 300 points or more.

Naurgalen.2374:

Itz Jay.8941:

500-200 games are not fun if you are losing, but in a good team vs a good team, just one kill can force a full cap and if every player on your team has good movement you can maintain the three cap causing this score. That’s what conquest is about, which is why I said we need team death-match.

500-200 scores in games are examples of unbalanced matches: they show that a team more than doubled the score of the other. As you said, its not impossible to bring back games from 100-300 to a win, we all have done it… but that needs balanced teams to work, and when that happens the final score resembles 400+ vs 500 or things like that, certainly not a final difference of 300 points or more.

Although I do agree maybe 300 pts difference is a bit much and could well be unbalanced, even balanced games can have large score differences.

If you are in a balanced 5v5 and somehow somebody messes up and dies, then the killing team snowball and force a three cap, say the enemy regroups on close but two go into mid. If they end up in an even 3v3 on close and 2v2 on mid and nobody moves 200-300pts can easily fly by when people are try hard surviving.

Large point differences aren’t always down to unbalanced games, IMO its part of the conquest gameplay, at high tier play when games are balanced and everybody survives just forcing and holding the caps alone will win the game. In some ways I would expect large point differences in this situation.

This is why I would like to see team death-match, it provides solid ground for the creation of balanced builds unlike conquest which is all about movement allowing squisher but more mobile classes to be forgiven. Personally I really don’t think you can balance GW2 around fighting three nodes.

Itz Jay.8941:

Although I do agree maybe 300 pts difference is a bit much and could well be unbalanced, even balanced games can have large score differences.

If you are in a balanced 5v5 and somehow somebody messes up and dies, then the killing team snowball and force a three cap, say the enemy regroups on close but two go into mid. If they end up in an even 3v3 on close and 2v2 on mid and nobody moves 200-300pts can easily fly by when people are try hard surviving.

Large point differences aren’t always down to unbalanced games, IMO its part of the conquest gameplay, at high tier play when games are balanced and everybody survives just forcing and holding the caps alone will win the game. In some ways I would expect large point differences in this situation.

This is why I would like to see team death-match, it provides solid ground for the creation of balanced builds unlike conquest which is all about movement allowing squisher but more mobile classes to be forgiven. Personally I really don’t think you can balance GW2 around fighting three nodes.

This is very true. For me, there were matches that on paper looked like blowouts but as I watched my team play I could safely assume that we knew what we were doing. It’s the moment of that one tiny mistake that made it all go to naught. Then the opposing team played it safely rotating between mid and close with two bunkers on them and we couldn’t do anything due to their cautious gameplay, thus ending a match in lets say a 300+ point gap. I ain’t worried about it, it was winnable and we failed, as simple as that.
However, what we all wish for is a lower margin of blowout. Currently I can’t even tell how good or bad I am in this game due to how MMR pulls my nose around. I crawled out of T2 gold to T2 plat on about 65% close call matches, the rest blowouts, or as some call it, free wins. I was about to return to top 250 but I fell down due to a troll player who was already in 250. He died a lot and shrieked on /team how bad we are for not helping him (he was going by himself on mid as a necro). Now I am barely trying to stay in plat at all, losing blowouts with -17 and winning close calls for +12

Itz Jay.8941:

Naurgalen.2374:

Itz Jay.8941:

500-200 games are not fun if you are losing, but in a good team vs a good team, just one kill can force a full cap and if every player on your team has good movement you can maintain the three cap causing this score. That’s what conquest is about, which is why I said we need team death-match.

500-200 scores in games are examples of unbalanced matches: they show that a team more than doubled the score of the other. As you said, its not impossible to bring back games from 100-300 to a win, we all have done it… but that needs balanced teams to work, and when that happens the final score resembles 400+ vs 500 or things like that, certainly not a final difference of 300 points or more.

Although I do agree maybe 300 pts difference is a bit much and could well be unbalanced, even balanced games can have large score differences.

If you are in a balanced 5v5 and somehow somebody messes up and dies, then the killing team snowball and force a three cap, say the enemy regroups on close but two go into mid. If they end up in an even 3v3 on close and 2v2 on mid and nobody moves 200-300pts can easily fly by when people are try hard surviving.

Large point differences aren’t always down to unbalanced games, IMO its part of the conquest gameplay, at high tier play when games are balanced and everybody survives just forcing and holding the caps alone will win the game. In some ways I would expect large point differences in this situation.

This is why I would like to see team death-match, it provides solid ground for the creation of balanced builds unlike conquest which is all about movement allowing squisher but more mobile classes to be forgiven. Personally I really don’t think you can balance GW2 around fighting three nodes.

I’m not advocating that balanced matches cant have large score differences, just that IMO those are really really rare if we are talking of 300pts+. They need as you say a really bad screw up early game and a balanced performance of both teams the rest of the match.
And I certainly don’t doubt that 100% balanced performances may be the common thing above plat. Its just that in my experience as solo Q, below and even in plat, that’s just really strange. If I had to guess what are the mayor problems that make games one-sided those are:

- Players with meta-builds that don’t use their builds at their strongest (thief’s not de capping far, reapers going alone, eles not healing their team)
- Bad team-comps (matchmaking doesn’t work with roles: so you may have an ele, ventari rev and druid for no-damage comp, or not having a thief/mesmer for no mobility – And while I know you can swap char, few do and even less play its second char as well as its main)
- Bad coordination between players (People complain really fast about how others don’t do this or that, but when playing, how many players call home? how many tell others if they are using a non meta build? how many ping targets to coordinate attacks? how many draw in the map to call help or show something? those things are rare as hell and can give some serious advantages)

Those things are IMO far more problematic than the mode itself. Heck the devs knew that core conquest can promote “bunkering” the early advantages so they implemented map-mechanics to counter that. And again, IMO some map mechanics work really well to mitigate that and giving the “underdog” team a chance… but I will agree that not all of them do enough.

Having said that, I wont complain if they put death-match in the game, I like it too.

I too think there is a lack of diversity. We should implement affirmative action programs to increase the representation of African Americans and Women in the PvP leaderboards, and should create marketing programs specifically towards these groups to create equal representation.

This is just a joke please don’t infract me

Much more frequent balancing and NO, destroying a class one patch and making another class OP is not the way to do it. Tweaking numbers, cooldowns, damage etc should be done incrementally in steps.

Yeah I know match making can be really bad sometimes but its near enough impossible to make a system that actually balances match ups around fighting three nodes and duo queues e.t.c.

The biggest problem is that you could have a perfect MMR match up but you’ve actually got 5 really good mechanical players that can’t move or rotate for kitten vs 5 really good mechanical players who can rotate really well. Or some combination of that and we all know in a close match up all it takes is one person who doesn’t know where to move and gets caught up not contributing to the match.

Although I do agree to some extent, pitting people from different divisions with each-other is just ridiculous. Also it’s not taken into account that even with an even MMR match up, if one team is DPS and the other has engi/ele then 9/10, you’re kittened.

There is a post in the forums by a druid who got -2 for a game so match making does have its problems I know, a -2 game is not only wasting a players time with a low gain but it’s also risking them losing by expecting the player to carry 4 people that might have no game sense whatsoever.

All it really needs is for the HoT powercreep to be toned down way more. Its fine if core specs are a bit worse than elite specs, but as it stands, elite specs are still way too good for the most part. That and much more frequent balance patches. Its boring to play the same build on your class for month after month because there’s no balance patch trying to change the meta.

OriOri.8724:

All it really needs is for the HoT powercreep to be toned down way more. Its fine if core specs are a bit worse than elite specs, but as it stands, elite specs are still way too good for the most part. That and much more frequent balance patches. Its boring to play the same build on your class for month after month because there’s no balance patch trying to change the meta.

Current problem is that they will nerf HoT specs….then release the next Xpac ones to completely overshadow both the core and HoT specs to make sales :/

Zietlogik.6208:

OriOri.8724:

All it really needs is for the HoT powercreep to be toned down way more. Its fine if core specs are a bit worse than elite specs, but as it stands, elite specs are still way too good for the most part. That and much more frequent balance patches. Its boring to play the same build on your class for month after month because there’s no balance patch trying to change the meta.

Current problem is that they will nerf HoT specs….then release the next Xpac ones to completely overshadow both the core and HoT specs to make sales :/

Who said that they would nerf HoT spec to make next elite spec OP ?