A few months ago an Anet dev released a video of him and Grouch giving some speech on how they can make GW2 more competitive citing CSGO, Dota, and LoL as examples! Well I posted in that thread with no dev reply about basic fundamentals that all these esports games have that makes them competitive that GW2 lacks: visible MMR, good matchmaking, leagues, rewards! These characteristics make these games extremely competitive and it makes the game look very appealing to newer players who like to compete! I will only make comparisons to CSGO because that is the game I am familiar with but I know for a fact that the other 2 games all have these features!
Anet has stated on multiple occasions that their reasoning for not implementing visible MMR is they think people will BM each other over their rating! To me this is beyond ridiculous! This is the Internet! People will troll and badmouth each other but there is a block feature that completely negates all of that and a report feature for the kids that get out of hand! Not implementing an amazing and necessary feature as a solution for BM is simply not a solution at all! You’re depriving the many of an awesome feature to protect the feelings of a few players! And newsflash! BM happens anyway! We literally get none of the good aspects and all of the bad!
I really like CSGO’s handling of MMR! Instead of a numerical rating, your MMR is displayed as a rank! When you play matchmaking, you will only get paired up with people of the same or near your rank! GW2’s matchmaking pairs up high rated players with low rated players! How does that even happen!
Visible MMR is an important part of the strive to become a better PvPer! In CSGO, most, if not all, matchmaking players constantly try to get better and advance their rank! There are servers that are dedicated just to bettering your aim and they are always packed! There are servers that are dedicated to bettering your game sense and awareness and they are always packed! If GW2 adopted something similar to the CSGO ranking system, you could reward players for achieving a rank with titles and unique armor and weapon skins! These rewards will promote getting better at PvP instead of the current system of receiving chests inside chests inside chests inside chests just for AFKing a game!
Anet has also promised us leagues but has never delivered or even mentioned the subject since then! There are dozens of leagues in CSGO! The most popular one has a monthly fee! People are willing to pay money every month for a league system! If this isn’t an indication that you guys need to get on that, then I don’t know what is! A simple league system can be just a few tiers! A team can sign up as five players with one substitute and be placed in a certain tier based on the average MMR of all the players on the team! Then over the course of a season, which can be just a month, they play a certain amount of games and based on their performance, they can advance a tier, they can be demoted, or they can remain in the same tier! Rewards like unique titles and skins can be given to teams who reach a certain tier! Maybe at the end of each month you can stream the teams with the best records going against each other to determine the champion of that tier! That team can receive additional unique titles, skins, and gems as prizes! Everything about this system promotes bettering yourself and your GW2 skillz and it rewards you for that and that alone! We may even see some new teams with fresh faces enter and rejuvenate the stagnant high level PvP scene!
Like I said, these are some basic characteristics that make games competitive and literally every single esports game or most viewed competitive games on Twitch have these features! And then to give a speech wondering why this game isn’t competitive… it’s just beyond me! I don’t think these features would even be hard to implement as an understaffed department but that’s just my uninformed opinion! Anyway that’s my rant for the month and I don’t expect a dev reply so…
Wahoo! Bye frands!
TLDR: Game needs visible MMR, leagues, better matchmaking, rewards for getting better at PvP