Guild Wars 2

I would really like to know, how many players are playing PvP these days. HotM is dead, tournaments are dead, everything is dead. I just wonder why? What exactly have you made to make players play sPvP?

Since beta you promised that Guild Wars 2 will have amazing sPvP. Ok, we can’t have everything immediately, I can understand that… but what exactly did you make to improve sPvP and make it more exciting?

You disabled free/paid tournaments so every beginner who doesn’t even know how to play can now join solo/team tournaments and ruin the game. It doesn’t bother only the better players, but the beginners too, because they are only dieing.

You are making skill balances. There are tons of topics about tier list. You can obviously see what is overpowered and what is absolutely useless to play. What do you do about it? You just take the useless class and make it overpowered and the overpowered class useless. Can’t you really do something in between? How exactly do you test it? You have “test server” where is 20 players and you duel? Can’t you really recognize what is overpowered?

New maps. It is really nice that you made new maps, but serisously… who asked for them? Who asked for unbalanced skyhammer? Why don’t you make at least one game mode instead? You don’t have time to make new modes, but you have time to make new maps? Yes, the maps look great and in hot joins are fun, but do you really think that you should concentrate on this?

Rewards. At the beginning, there were gem rewards for tournament. You took it away and made glory/rank reward. It seemed logic, but seriously…. why glory? Do you really think that anyone rank 30+ needs glory? What for? And do you know, that it is more rewarding to play hot joins than tournaments? Do you really think that its motivating players to play tournaments? Why do you think that people should play sPvP since there is absolutely NO REWARD? Ou yeah, you are already working on new reward system, but when? Seriously when? Its been more than a year and I have very strong feeling that when we finally get the new reward system, it will be just disappointment. And I don’t really know what is taking so long.

Ranking (PvP level). Honestly… everyone who I spoke with told me to same: “I will make rank 40 and then I stop playing.” Ok, there are some who says the same for rank 50 and there are few who make even more. Why do you think they say something like that? Because it takes enormous time to change your emote? Do you really think that rank 69 should play one year longer than rank 60 and have the same emote? And the worst thing is, that it’s ONLY ABOUT TIME! It doesn’t matter how good you are, it only matters how much time did you spend in sPvP. Do you really think that this is the way it should be?

You creted custome arenas. Ok, that is good thing. I haven’t used one yet and I don’t have a reason to do it, but it sure was (for a lot of people) very good thing to do.

Matchmaking. Seriously… Do you still believe, that a player who plays 2 hours and just didn’t have time to fall down in rating, should be in the same team as a player, who played 3 000 games and played 1/2 game 4v5 so he has the same rating as the new player? And since you can’t probably do much about it, is it really so hard to make the teams even? Like 3x 40+ and 2x 10< in every team NOT 4x 10< and 1 40+ vs 5x 40+? I don’t really see any other option than write, that THIS IS UNFAIR.

Leaderboards. I would really like to write something about PvE leaderboard too, but this is sPvP section, so… Seriously? You play some games 4v5, you fall down in leaderboards, which is connected to matchmaking so you are low rating player just because you played 4v5 and now you have to believe, that you will have so much luck that you will win 20 times in a row to go up in leaderboards. Seriously… when you fall down, you play with totaly noobs, who doesn’t know anything and its only about luck who gets worse players… So it is terribly hard to be even 90% and than you have a friend, who just bought the game, doesn’t even know what his skills do, doesn’t know anything about the game and he is 200? Just because he was on the other side of 4v5? What exactly is the leaderboards for then? Shouldn’t it show skills instead of luck? And the patch with volatility… seriously… Someone who lost 5 times the day before patch went from 500 to 80%. After your patch, you have to win 50 times to be 500. GG! Why would you restart the rating? It doesn’t matter if there are some poor guys like this, you just don’t care. And why should you tell it before the patch? It really wasn’t anything important obviously…

Spectrator mode. Ok. To watch a match, you have to be in the match. So what the hell is it good for? To comment some tournaments? Is it really so hard to make observer like in gw1?

I think that tis is everything you managed to make in one year. Can you tell me, please, how did you make sPvP more exiting? Don’t you have any statistics about players in sPvP? Can’t you see that you are loosing them? Do you think that they will, one day, come back to this game? Seriously… what reason do players have to play sPvP now? If you keep doing nothing, do you think that the sPvP base will be bigger?

I would really like to know, very concrete, WHAT are you gonna do in sPvP and the main thing… WHEN! I am really tired of your excuses like you have to test everything and so… Custome arenas were in beta too. LFG tool is in beta too… We don’t need perfect system, we need something!

If you don’t have enough resources, why don’t you take some from pve? There is a living story update every 14 days. New pve items, new dungeons, everything. Why the hell isn’t anything in sPvP?

Well first if modern MMOs have taught us anything, then that players will go where the rewards are, regardless of whether it’s really “fun” (incidentally getting good reward equals “fun” for many).

And this is the biggest flaw with sPvP as it has no real rewards.

The whole separation between the sPvP world and the normal world has just alienated a lot of players because anything you do in sPvP is ultimately pointless for the progression of your character.

Then there’s the entire failed reward-system with gazillions of items, salvaging, crafting, glory etc. and all for items you don’t really need or want.

People who do sPvP have nothing to show for it in the rest of the game.

And then there’s still WvW which provides many with their desired PvP fix, but in a much more varied and interesting context.

If you want to encourage people to sPvP give them rewards that are worthwhile for the entire game, not just the micro cosmos of the mists.

-Give sPvPs access to unique skins that are only attainable in sPvP and do carry over into the rest of the game. If someone is awesome, they should be able to show it.

-Make sPvP less about item-juggling. Legendaries already introduced the tech for changing your stat-combos on the items. Introduce the same for sPvP Gems.

-Drop the whole convoluted sPvP crafting system and glory system. Instead have the winners get a regular Champion loot box as a reward for winning a tournament map.

-Reduce the 2 minute wait prior to every tournament match. It’s tedious and everyone just tries to ignore it for as long as possible. Drop it down to 50 seconds or so.

The whole useless/OP isn’t a problem, most MMOs have far worse balance… yet are entertaining to play…

Conquest just puts such a focus on your spec and your spec alone, forgeting about things like positioning… like teamwork… those things are supposed to be in there to add in other factors, ones to diminish the appearance of imbalance and make gameplay far deeper without much work by the devs… that’s what team fight based MMOs are for…
GW2 tossed that for jack kitten.

Their ability scheme is trash.
Their maps are trash.
Their match setup (S/TPvP) is trash.
Their character building is hectic to say the least.

They cut out the necessities of good MMO gameplay for shiny graphics and an Esports logo.

garethh.3518:

The whole useless/OP isn’t a problem, most MMOs have far worse balance… yet are entertaining to play…

Conquest just puts such a focus on your spec and your spec alone, forgeting about things like positioning… like teamwork… those things are supposed to be in there to add in other factors, ones to diminish the appearance of imbalance and make gameplay far deeper without much work by the devs… that’s what team fight based MMOs are for…
GW2 tossed that for jack kitten.

Their ability scheme is trash.
Their maps are trash.
Their match setup (S/TPvP) is trash.
Their character building is hectic to say the least.

They cut out the necessities of good MMO gameplay for shiny graphics and an Esports logo.

If you don’t like anything about the game at all, I’d suggest doing something else with your spare time. I could understand lobbying for changes to changeable issues, but if you hate literally everything about the game and still play it, that’s a little weird.

Sorry for a post like this but wouldnt a new game mode also require new maps to be made.

Certainly not the way anet is trying to

I play sPvP occasionally, but it’s just so repetitive. So let’s see what we would need to make it less repetitive:

- More maps, more game modes. Conquest is seriously getting old.
- REAL custom arenas, custom game modes and big maps to facilitate GvG.

Start with those and sPvP will suddenly be much more lucrative.

About rewards, no. We seriously don’t need the loot piñata crowd in PvP. It’s bad enough in WvW where a good third of a zerg are absolutely clueless and run there just to get that karma/achi/world completion/ascended material whatever.

All ANET had to do was to make the right decisions (and set right priorities) to make PvP more enjoyable. So far, almost every decision was wrong. Leaderboards are still broken. Class/build balance is still messed up, the game is not skillful, but brainless. There are still no rewards. HELLO, it’s already a year late!!! Updates are slow as heck. Every patch brings new problems (endurance bar and massive lags). I have no hopes for this game. Not in the near future, at least (if ever…). As long as ANET will mess up things, noone will stay in this game for long.

WTF IS A PVE LADDER BOARD. BUWAHAHAHHAAHAH

Lonely Hermit.1967:

I would really like to know, how many players are playing PvP these days. HotM is dead, tournaments are dead, everything is dead. I just wonder why? What exactly have you made to make players play sPvP?

Well, first I’ll say that people seem to have been saying spvp is dead since a couple of months after launch, but it is still going. Also, whenever I play there are many full servers and team/solo queue pops quite quickly. I don’t know if the population is falling off or increasing and I don’t know how you can tell that it is “dead”.

Secondly, the devs changed the tournament structure because the community asked for that. Now they are condemned for doing as asked. I agree on your point about having to play with total noobs in solo queue and the randomness of it all, but there was no “golden age” where things were right. They made the change believing that over time skilled people would rise and end up playing together, while less experienced/less skilled players would gravitate together. I am with you that so far this doesn’t seem to be working for solo queue.

On maps/modes, I totally agree with you. It is mind boggling that such a great system has been wasted on one game mode. I think the game mode is great, but it sure does get boring after a while. That said, I respect the devs. They had a vision that sticking to the one mode was the way to promote esports and they stuck to their guns for a year to try and make it work. I always believed it was the wrong direction, and I think time has proven me correct; but it is so refreshing to play a game where the devs have a strong vision for where they want to take spvp, even if I believe that vision was somewhat misguided.

Rewards: I mainly play just for fun, I only found myself wanting rewards after the conquest mode got boring for me. I still wear the starter armor/weapon on my ranger after all this time, haha. But I do agree with you that something should be done on this front. A big issue of course is keeping spvp separate from pve to limit farming etc. My take on that is to improve the HOTM so that players could for example build houses/ buy islands etc, you know have something in the HOTM that you could only get through doing spvp and didn’t impact the rest of the game. Anyway, there is a lot to consider on that front as well.

Ranking: I think this being linked essentially to time played is fine. Many mmos reward players who have consistently played the game for a long period of time, and I think it is a great thing. There are other titles etc for tournament wins etc that might be more linked to skill. Its not a major issue in my opinion, although the pace at which rankings are acquired could perhaps be adjusted.

You also talk about balance etc. Actually this game has great balance compared to spvp in other mmos. It is the least of the problems in this game. Of course things always need to be tweaked, but the devs do seem to act in a reasonable manner in terms of both time and extent of nerfs/buffs. Everyone makes mistakes, but in the overall scheme of mmo balance, GW2 shines as a wonderfully balanced game.

For me the issue is what you allude to when you ask what have the devs done to make spvp better. That is, where they take spvp from here. They have changed their stance on the game mode issue apparently, which is awesome. However, they could waste this opportunity by just releasing a tired old version of DM, or they could take the whole genre to the next level by thinking outside of the box a bit and making something really memorable by stretching the traditional boundaries of “battlegrounds” that on the whole haven’t evolved much since WoW, and indeed I am not sure that any game has actually improved on the original ideas in the WoW BGs (although GW2 conquest is really, really well done). Edit: The BG Tera released where you have to take/defend a keep was actually pretty amazing.

I would be happy even with WoW’s battleground diversity.

I would also love to see GW2 versions of Isle of Conquest and (original) Alterac Valley. Normalized gear/stats combined with ~30-40 players per side would be just awesome in GW2.

I guess all I really am asking is diversity. sPvP works in the sense that it’s true PvP, where people actually engage each other in PvP combat, often with equal numbers and stats too, where only the skill of the players matter.

All we need is a bit more diversity so it doesn’t get boring so quickly.

yup. anet pretty much made the most dissapointing sequel of the decade.

Duke Nukem?
Diablo 3?

I think gw is #1.

edit: Okay starwars 1 wins

Tom Gore.4035:

I would be happy even with WoW’s battleground diversity.

I would also love to see GW2 versions of Isle of Conquest and (original) Alterac Valley. Normalized gear/stats combined with ~30-40 players per side would be just awesome in GW2.

I guess all I really am asking is diversity. sPvP works in the sense that it’s true PvP, where people actually engage each other in PvP combat, often with equal numbers and stats too, where only the skill of the players matter.

All we need is a bit more diversity so it doesn’t get boring so quickly.

Exactly, it would be cool right? And GW2 already has all the resources/assets on the programming side to implement a super improved version of Alterac Valley/IoC.

Imagine an spvp version of WvW. Two keeps, 20 players a side, resource nodes, siege weapons, upgrades from resources, first team to take out keep lord wins; playtime 40mins to an hour.

The thing is I expected this game to come out with multiple cutting edge spvp game modes. Its a year on now and more and more games are coming out that push the lines between moba and mmo, and some major and innovative mmo titles are on the way.

Meanwhile, the vision for conquest to become an esport has failed (right?) and in a way it seems like a year’s momentum has been lost. Sure, a release of all the regular game modes GW2 style would be absolutely fantastic and definitely make the spvp side of things so much more fun, but to be mindblowing and revolutionary-like GW2 was when it came out- I think the devs are going to have to dig deeper.

NevirSayDie.6235:

If you don’t like anything about the game at all, I’d suggest doing something else with your spare time. I could understand lobbying for changes to changeable issues, but if you hate literally everything about the game and still play it, that’s a little weird.

I haven’t played it in a while, I just peruse the forums when I’m REALLY bored at school.
But pointing out where they went wrong… is pointing out where they went wrong.
It just happening to be a large part of the game (not every) is a tragedy.

I had an outrageous amount of hope for this game so I guess I’m kinda stuck still hoping Anet decides to actually fix all their kitten-ups… which is an entirely unrealistic thought considering how the devs have tended to make more issues than they solve…

garethh.3518:

NevirSayDie.6235:

If you don’t like anything about the game at all, I’d suggest doing something else with your spare time. I could understand lobbying for changes to changeable issues, but if you hate literally everything about the game and still play it, that’s a little weird.

I haven’t played it in a while, I just peruse the forums when I’m REALLY bored at school.
But pointing out where they went wrong… is pointing out where they went wrong.
It just happening to be a large part of the game (not every) is a tragedy.

I had an outrageous amount of hope for this game so I guess I’m kinda stuck still hoping Anet decides to actually fix all their kitten-ups… which is an entirely unrealistic thought considering how the devs have tended to make more issues than they solve…

My point was that you would never have had that hope if you actually hated everything about the game. You wouldn’t check the CoD forums hoping it becomes something besides a first-person shooter. I don’t mean to sound argumentative, sorry if it’s coming across that way.

Give us some kind of Hutball (from SWOTR). It was by far the most fun and entertaining sandbox pvp i have ever had in any game.

The “sport” is awesome, only with teamwork will you score, and the map design is simply perfect!