PvP in GW2 was created without any vision.
A harsh statement, don’t you think? Well, let’s look how it all started and where we are now.
When the game first launched its PvP consisted of hot-join and free tournaments. After some time we received paids with a barrier of entry, nice rewards (gems) and QPs that were promised to qualify teams to tournaments in the future.
We also received a very simplistic progression system based on grindy rank and skins. That was it.
First thing to acknowledge is that the free/paid distinction was probably created with belief that PvP would be very popular with thousands of teams jumping in, buying tickets, competing and fighting for QPs. It wasn’t the case.
It first made some people quit the game when only frees existed, because casual people were joining matches solo or in teams and were being stomped by hardcore people.
I don’t know if devs believed that adding paids would solve that, but it certainly wasn’t the case. With an addition of paid tournies, the already smaller playerbase was split. Even more so with the initial cost of 5 tickets to enter, they caused more teams to leave the game.
What we ended up with at that point were super-casual players playing hot-joins, semi-casual prospective players were losing frees against hardcore people whole day with an exception of evenings when hardcore people were starting to play paids.
People were leaving, hc teams were accumulating QPs and everyone was waiting for announced custom arenas. People at the same time, since premiere, were asking for solo queue and ratings.
Suddenly, the devs decided to step back with Customs to implement matchmaking and ratings. It was most probably caused by a worsening situation back then.
We waited. Lately the devs “had” the idea to change paids into 1v1 instead of 3v3. It proved to be a relatively big success, just as people predicted. Of course they decided to keep one map for a whole week to keep us equally entertained. We were said that the system would be there to stay.
But this month’s update just shows the sad truth – PvP team had no idea how to make an entertaining, competitive and popular PvP system that would keep people playing.
This month they deleted paid tournaments – the barrier of entry proved to be a very bad idea. They deleted the QPs and tickets – this is not the way tournament entry will be decided in the future, at least for now. It is another thing they wanted to have but it proved useless. Just another bad step. The matchmaking is apparently there, but it is NOT solo queue. We can only wonder and wait to see how bad of an idea not making the 1v1 solo-only will prove to be.
I have no idea how experienced game developers/alleged PvPers that run this game’s PvP were unable to pull this off after so much hype and millions of people at start. How could they fail with so many intelligent and dedicated people that were literally beta-testing and even designing (!) game systems for them. For free.
Add a terrible balance, hundreds of bugs and ridiculously over-powered specs since launch with no live and immediate response to the above and we have a story of how PvP that was supposed to be everything turned out to be nothing.
TL;DR:
Anet thought that making a PvP that would be based on hot-joins for non-PvPers, frees for semi-dedicated players and paids for professionals would work out. They wanted everyone to pick their mode and stick to “because it’s fun”. They thought this reason is enough to forget about rating and matchmaking. The idea was to add Customs in the future so that pros can just play them and occasionally go to paids and then use their QPs to play in bigger tournaments. It didn’t work, was bad design, people knew this better than devs and now there’ no one to fix things for.
Less QQ, More pew-pew.
(edited by leman.7682)
) its so kittening boring being stuck with variations of the same thing for months..