Guild Wars 2

A few things bug me dreadfully about the whole dynamics in sPvP.
Lately I’ve been playing a lot of PvP, much more than I used to do in the past year, because I finally feel motivated and decently rewarded.
What I notice, every day, at every moment of the day, every match is: 1 team winning madly, 2-300 scores above the other that can barely get to 100 before the end. Why does this happen? Because, obviously, players want to win and it’s easy to notice which are the best players around, so, after a max 2 matches, it will always end up with a team filled with the most experienced and skilled players, the other filled with newbies and bad players who can’t, in any way stand a chance. Which turns into a following of “Player x leaves losing team after being destroyed by whole enemy’s team whenever trying to leave base-autobalance-player from winning team is sent there and even if he gets victory bonus anyway, he either leaves or forces autobalance to return to winning team”. I think most of people can confirm because by now it happened way too many times to say it was just a case. Join losing team you might say, and that would be good if people were there to play and not just to farm. If only one decent players finds himself alone against 5 good players it is just going to turn into frustration and I know it well.
Preventing people from seeing others’ rank in score board in the end of the match did not fix the problem, because it’s even too easy to realize who the best players are.
Second thing that bugs me badly: spectate->autobalance->spam click->join winning team.
No, it doesn’t bug me because I end up in the losing team and I don’t know I will get victory bonus anyway, it is more of a matter of principle. Victory should be achieved by those who deserve, but in this sistem most of the times, people who directly caused a team to lose, can simply move to the winning team and get a victory reward just like that, which I find disgusting.
To me the solution to this would be quite easy: do not allow people to choose team at the start, just like it was at the origins. If a person goes spectate, make it so that said person can rejoin only the team where he was put. (Ex. Is in blue team, goes spectate, then either rejoins blue or leaves because can’t join the other team.) I honestly think this would help to keep some balance and avoid to “traumatize” new players and players willing to learn sPvP, while in same time preventing undeserving people from stealing rewards.
Thanks for your time, I really hope ANet will work on this at some point because I find it terribly unfair.

Hotjoin was a really interesting idea that the devs had back in beta. The idea was that maybe an MMO could be so action-oriented and casual-friendly that PvP could have a mode where players just joined and left whenever they wanted.

I’ve never really liked hotjoin, but it was a bold idea. I still use it when I feel like running a really awful build just for fun or if I want to warm up before a real match. Just make sure you never look at the score while playing hotjoins, and that you don’t play for more than ~20min at a time, or it starts to feel really dumb.

Try some solo arenas! Yes, you have to wait in a queue for a few minutes, but when the match starts, it is way more enjoyable and meaningful.

Yeah, in the last few weeks it’s gotten really bad. People just dump to spectator if they’re losing and swap to the winning team. Most of time, when I go looking for a hot join game, I have to cycle through 5-9 servers as I come across 90% of games as 34 to 389, etc. I think part of the problem is the removal of 8v8s for hot join. More players means 1 or 2 of them dropping out or swapping around makes less of an impact. Just to take the example to the extreme: if you had 100 player teams, would 5 people leaving make much of a difference?

Hotjoin does not have the people that want a competitive match. Ppl that want a competitive match do solo and team queue.

Hot join is largely farmers going after their 2 tiers. Since they are farming what they care about is speed of rewards. Team stacking gets them wins faster. They ideally try to make every match last 7 minutes.

Go to solo or team queue of you have a team and want a competitive match

Lol what is sad is that any player can chose to kill himself and make the enemy win. When the teammates realize they are losing they will be mad and leave. This means around 370 points, you can spectate auto balance and join the winning team. at 400 points they can’t auto balance. That is the system to always win lol.