Guild Wars 2

Is there a thread for a checklist of obvious things that need to be addressed to make Guild Wars 2 esports?

.* Looks for Grouch *

Like reworking the whole kittening pvp? Nope.

Now go buy gems. Thank You

I think most players know that esports is never going to happen, and it’s just a long running joke.

Random gif cause why not.

After demented “rank dumbing down” patch it was clear they care way more bout pve heroes than competitive pvp, i mean we already knew it but there we had the final proof

Why does it have to be esports or everything needs to be reworked? Seems there is middle ground between the two.

Before we laugh at the rediculousness of gw2 being an esport. Can we first laugh at the rediculousness of esports within itself.

Neptune.2570:

Before we laugh at the rediculousness of gw2 being an esport. Can we first laugh at the rediculousness of esports within itself.

Not really, there are some games that are a blast to watch the best compete in. A number of games have already shown this is possible by getting thousands and even millions of viewers for tournaments.

Yes its called GvG, again please prove me wrong.

Neptune.2570:

Before we laugh at the rediculousness of gw2 being an esport. Can we first laugh at the rediculousness of esports within itself.

Dota 2 International is like the Super Bowl/World Cup for nerds.

On OPs original topic..

There’s quite a few things, at least in my opinion, that need to be seen/implemented before we can expect serious amounts of competition and regular big cash tournaments to pop up. The 150K Boost is a great start, but were still a long way from stable. Going over some of the more polarizing points:

• Balance: A lot of people like to complain about this and how it impedes this game being good competitively, but to be honest right now, at least at the high tier, the game is probably in one of the better metas we’ve had in a year or more. There’s a decent balance of compositions across the board (you have your Teamplay focused comps like TCG and more individual minded comps like Abjured runs, and a whole mess of other comps teams are running). With that said, there are still quite a few issues with “rage-inducing” builds in low-mid tier play that could be addressed. These issues don’t directly impact the high tier competitive scene obviously, but Ill explain more about how it does affect the overall scene a bit later.

• Tournament Structuring: This is probably one of the more prevalent issues in the competitive scene at the moment. The issue in the current GW2 PvP scene is that there is no middle ground. You either suck or are top tier. This is mainly due to the extremely volatile ways teams form and attempt to introduce themselves to the competitive scene. There’s no ladder system and due to the highly fluctuated ways the leaderboard tracks individuals, not teams, it’s hard to try and gauge how good a team is based off of leaderboard performance alone. So what do teams do right now to try and raise their rep and skills? They play in the ESL and MP weeklies, but this presents a new problem. Because teams such as Abjured and TCG will play in these cups at all, any new team is essentially getting tossed into the fire because of the complete lack of an ameture scene or a structure to support it. How do we fix this however? Two ways come to mind: the first being a new tournament tier is created for ameture teams, but unfortunately this won’t work right now because the line between “ameture” and “professional” team in Guild Wars 2 is an extremely blurry line and virtually impossible to distinguish. The second way would be to implement a ladder system, which if dev comments over the past year have had any backing to them, should be coming soon.

• Additional Low-Mid Support: This one ties in from the previous two points. Right now there isn’t much drive for the casual player to actually play the game, and there also a few things that might push them away from PvP currently alive in low/mid-tier solo queue and team queue metas. Ladder/Seasonal system would greatly improve player drive to improve his/herself and his/her ranking in the game, plain and simple. In regards to balance there are a lot of “infuriating” builds, mainly AI ones that I’ve noticed, that tend to push players away from the game more than they encourage them to continue play and improve their skills. While these only affect the low-mid tier games, if people don’t want to play the game to begin with because they are angry at it or have no reason to play, they obviously won’t want to support it’s competitive scene, and without those players to begin with it will be impossibly to garner a competitive scene.

• More Community Tournament and Team Support: This one is plain and simple. People need to watch and support tournaments as well as teams if they attempt to grow themselves beyond the game. I understand and to some degree agree why people don’t watch some of the qualifiers for ToL/G/etc as well as the weeklies because they, generally speaking, are stomps nine times out of ten. It is important however for people to tune into these streams regardless because it helps collect interest from third parties which could breathe some serious life into the scene. Now hopefully this issue will solve itself once the last bullet point about tournament structure is solved and we have regular matches that aren’t stomps, but up until that point community grown or run events need as much support as can be garnered. The same goes for teams that try to grow themselves via social media, twitch streams, etc.

Those are just my thoughts, lemme know yours. ^_^

TL;DR: Create an Ameture Scene, Add Ladders, Increase Low-Mid Tier Support, Support tournaments and teams.

Neptune.2570:

Before we laugh at the rediculousness of gw2 being an esport. Can we first laugh at the rediculousness of esports within itself.

That view is so 1990s. Esport is actually expanding rapidly in the past couple of years and alot of people actually take it pretty seriously. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next decade that esport games get as many people watching their tourney as a soccer tournament, the trend can already been seen in league of legends and dota 2 world cup where the tourneys are held in stadiums with hundreds and thousands of people there as well as more watching from the internet.

I’m well aware of the interest and expansion of it, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a hearty chuckle at the idea every now and then.
Call me 1990’s but I still don’t see people who play video games 8 hours a day as athletes. (Before anyone get’s me wrong, I’m all for the expansion of the gw2 competitive scene and have respect for all top players)

just play something like dota2 or team fortress 2 or cs:go ….. and you will realize Guildwars 2 is soooo years behind

and when you think about what they did in last 2 years for gw2 pvp than you have to accept gw2 will never catch up and will never be esport

arenanet just to slow and stuck somewhere 2005 and did not see how time passed

If this game mode would be that appealing that it would make it into esport, it already would have made it. Wouldn’kitten

IMO u would need to:
#1
First u would need a (much bigger) market research team to analyse scientifically what makes this game not that appealing to ppl.
(After every patch make a pull: Who would u rate the latest patch? What did u like the most? What would would u like to see changed in this game?)
U cant just guess those things. Or say: I like it this way so will the customers. It doesn’t work that way in the long term.

#2
Add more competition to the game. Make lots of rankings where u can compete in.
(Most Caps, Most Decaps, Best Kill/Death, most kills, most healing,…, most kills in one houre/week in WvW, Most towers caped, …., Fastest solo/2/3../5-player dungeon Runner, Highest Fractal runner,…)

3
Make a big “competitive MMO” upgrade with lots of new stuff, official GvG game mode, new graphics, and SELL it as extension to get the medias and peoples attention.
There is now way around this. This twitch thing does not work.

[ ] Spectator Mode for High ranked matches
[ ] More game types other than “King of the Hill”
[ ] GvG
[ ] An actual nonstop ongoing Tournament like HoH
[ ] Actual depth to player builds/skills, and a decent number of traits, skills, to encourage diversity and teams that actually work together aside from stacking buffs.

I would like to see things that make the game more consumable for viewers and players analyzing tactics.

Spectator mode is great, but without replays, and the option to save off replays I think a lot of value is being wasted. Being able to save off highlights of replays would help the player base and ArenaNet market PvP as an added bonus.

Visual effects and the speed of the game make it hard to tell what’s going on quite often unless you have a trained eye. It’d be awesome if Spectator mode had a queue of the last 10 incoming hits and the last 10 or so outgoing skills used. That way people can double check what they think they saw.

I think once they get the Spectator mode issues worked out they can then make PvP f2p and simultaneously release a way for players to build a prize pool. Identify a way to measure revenue generated by pvp and take a portion of that and offer it up as prize money. Also a way to directly contribute to an annual prize pool would be awesome.

Tl;dr

• Replays with Spectator mode
• Save off replay highlights into video format
• Spectator mode history of of recent incoming damage
• Spectator mode history of recent skills used
• Method of calculating revenue generated by pvp and returning a percentage back to the player base as a prize pool
• Way to directly contribute to an annual prize pool, with some kind of reward reward for contributors.

BLUna.7928:

On OPs original topic..

There’s quite a few things, at least in my opinion, that need to be seen/implemented before we can expect serious amounts of competition and regular big cash tournaments to pop up. The 150K Boost is a great start, but were still a long way from stable. Going over some of the more polarizing points:

• Balance: A lot of people like to complain about this and how it impedes this game being good competitively, but to be honest right now, at least at the high tier, the game is probably in one of the better metas we’ve had in a year or more. There’s a decent balance of compositions across the board (you have your Teamplay focused comps like TCG and more individual minded comps like Abjured runs, and a whole mess of other comps teams are running). With that said, there are still quite a few issues with “rage-inducing” builds in low-mid tier play that could be addressed. These issues don’t directly impact the high tier competitive scene obviously, but Ill explain more about how it does affect the overall scene a bit later.

• Tournament Structuring: This is probably one of the more prevalent issues in the competitive scene at the moment. The issue in the current GW2 PvP scene is that there is no middle ground. You either suck or are top tier. This is mainly due to the extremely volatile ways teams form and attempt to introduce themselves to the competitive scene. There’s no ladder system and due to the highly fluctuated ways the leaderboard tracks individuals, not teams, it’s hard to try and gauge how good a team is based off of leaderboard performance alone. So what do teams do right now to try and raise their rep and skills? They play in the ESL and MP weeklies, but this presents a new problem. Because teams such as Abjured and TCG will play in these cups at all, any new team is essentially getting tossed into the fire because of the complete lack of an ameture scene or a structure to support it. How do we fix this however? Two ways come to mind: the first being a new tournament tier is created for ameture teams, but unfortunately this won’t work right now because the line between “ameture” and “professional” team in Guild Wars 2 is an extremely blurry line and virtually impossible to distinguish. The second way would be to implement a ladder system, which if dev comments over the past year have had any backing to them, should be coming soon.

• Additional Low-Mid Support: This one ties in from the previous two points. Right now there isn’t much drive for the casual player to actually play the game, and there also a few things that might push them away from PvP currently alive in low/mid-tier solo queue and team queue metas. Ladder/Seasonal system would greatly improve player drive to improve his/herself and his/her ranking in the game, plain and simple. In regards to balance there are a lot of “infuriating” builds, mainly AI ones that I’ve noticed, that tend to push players away from the game more than they encourage them to continue play and improve their skills. While these only affect the low-mid tier games, if people don’t want to play the game to begin with because they are angry at it or have no reason to play, they obviously won’t want to support it’s competitive scene, and without those players to begin with it will be impossibly to garner a competitive scene.

• More Community Tournament and Team Support: This one is plain and simple. People need to watch and support tournaments as well as teams if they attempt to grow themselves beyond the game. I understand and to some degree agree why people don’t watch some of the qualifiers for ToL/G/etc as well as the weeklies because they, generally speaking, are stomps nine times out of ten. It is important however for people to tune into these streams regardless because it helps collect interest from third parties which could breathe some serious life into the scene. Now hopefully this issue will solve itself once the last bullet point about tournament structure is solved and we have regular matches that aren’t stomps, but up until that point community grown or run events need as much support as can be garnered. The same goes for teams that try to grow themselves via social media, twitch streams, etc.

Those are just my thoughts, lemme know yours.

TL;DR: Create an Ameture Scene, Add Ladders, Increase Low-Mid Tier Support, Support tournaments and teams.

You need to copy this and Paste it where a Developer will actually see it. Very good ideas and observations here

BLUna.7928:

• More Community Tournament and Team Support: This one is plain and simple. People need to watch and support tournaments as well as teams if they attempt to grow themselves beyond the game. I understand and to some degree agree why people don’t watch some of the qualifiers for ToL/G/etc as well as the weeklies because they, generally speaking, are stomps nine times out of ten. It is important however for people to tune into these streams regardless because it helps collect interest from third parties which could breathe some serious life into the scene. Now hopefully this issue will solve itself once the last bullet point about tournament structure is solved and we have regular matches that aren’t stomps, but up until that point community grown or run events need as much support as can be garnered. The same goes for teams that try to grow themselves via social media, twitch streams, etc.

Those are just my thoughts, lemme know yours.

TL;DR: Create an Ameture Scene, Add Ladders, Increase Low-Mid Tier Support, Support tournaments and teams.

I’m just going to respond according to section.

Balance- The game will never be anything as long as the game still supports things that give you passive abilities that are stronger than ones you actually have to manage and have the ability to be countered, aka healing signet.

Tournament Structuring – There is no “ameteur” or “pro” teams in this game, saying that would require everyone on a team to actually have a level head. 90% of team making “atleast in na” has been composed of backstabbing, trash talking, and false rumors to get themselves to be viewed as the more valued player when it comes to the competition. There is a reason why the Na scene cannot keep stable teams for longer than a couple months at a time in extreme cases, It’s because the ego surrounding players in the game is so high that players are willing to break apart even good teams if it means not risking their persona in a online video game.

Additional Low-Mid Support – This for me ties into ladders, and having more game modes. You have literally said in the past that “in your opinion” that having more game modes would split the player base. I honestly believe you would rather let the game die…actually the game is pretty much gone, let me rephrase. I believe you would rather let the game go into a worse comatose state than actually be wrong “god forbid, we don’t want that” about this certain topic. And when it comes to a “competitive” scene, this game is truly dead. The denial just doesn’t hit some people as fast as others more than likely because those people are emotionally invested.

The only ones who believe this game is fine the way it is are the left over remains of players shouting esports every sentence waiting for some miracle to happen. Bring new game modes and ladders for each mode. Not only will it give the existing player base of 10 people something new to do while they sit in their 20 minute que, but it will actually bring new people into the game. Making that 20 minute que a more exciting 10 minute que….. Kappa

More Community Tournament and Team Support – This topic is a no go for several reasons.

1- Every shoutcaster I’ve seen try to cover this game either do one of the following, or all of them. I’ll be nice and not disclose names this time.

-Talks too fast
-Skips small scale fights
-Rambling
-Miss big plays on map, ex- lord rush without noticing
etc
-Favoritism between players they know in game related to exposure time on stream.

However, this isn’t “entirely” the shout casters fault. This is partially the blame of the devs for poor map design, a 5v5 conquest mode in which the large scale mid fight cluster kitten is unavoidable, and other factors.

In short the majority of people don’t watch because there is nothing to be missed by tuning in. It’s just a uninformative, unbearable, unwatchable 5v5 conquest. Again smaller scale game modes including death match would be a good start, but hey, what do I know, right?

I figured I would take my time with my response since I’m currently updating a patch in Archeage. Hope you enjoyed it.

Countless

Get rid of engis and we esport

Mindtrick.5190:

People still playing are holding on but I do enjoy watching a epic crash.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Pqd3yrmBk

League of Warcraft is more esport than gw2 and it’s a giant Zerg! Sure you can say there is no dodge and you might even say gw2 combat it better. But the passive abilities built in to gw2 out weighs all the bad combat in wow. Gw2 is just like a console game with built in aim assist, most the players don’t even know the game is aiming for them they think they got skill. Keep it frosty.

That’s one thing that always bothered me in this game. There’s really no distinguishing a good player from a great player. The skill ceiling is so low in this game, you have AI builds and a bunch of passive abilities that blur the lines between players. Sometimes you’re watching a game and thinking, “Wow that was a really good time to use fear!”, then you realize it was a passive proc and the necro just got lucky with rng.

1- New game modes (conquest is not compelling enough for esports, for one of many major issues, it doesn’t not have a progression that builds up excitement, matches are a steady progression to victory with little room for major comebacks)
2- Much better spectator tools and analytics for serious professional gamers to work with.
3- Severely reduce RNG throughout the game.
4- Severely improve visibility and readability during matches (which would require seriously toning down the reliance on condis).
5- A much, much larger population of pvp players and much, much better marketing (which won’t work without improvements to the game).

In other words, it’s not going to happen. The game would have to be more or less redesigned from scratch.

See GW1 PvP. See GW2 PvP. Die a little bit on the inside. Uninstall GW2. Return to GW1 PvP.

Ta’da!

Neptune.2570:

Before we laugh at the rediculousness of gw2 being an esport. Can we first laugh at the rediculousness of esports within itself.

Teams competing against each other in front of thousands, if not, millions of people? Sounds like a serious sport to me.

To the OP. If Anet wanted this to be considered an Esport from the get-go, it would have been. If this is their idea of it being so…well, I don’t have a lot to say.. That Aside, yes this game has the potential to be an Esports game through patches and pvp improvment. Already classes are more balanced now than before but the game has a long way to go to reach that Esport level.

3 prized tournaments have been announced , where :

‘’the tourmament with money , will attract big streamers and their followers in this game’’

Killthehealersffs.8940:

3 prized tournaments have been announced , where :

‘’the tourmament with money , will attract big streamers and their followers in this game’’

It seems to be working… no not really

Honesty it’s too little and too late, you can’t have an esports game with a nonexistent community and little to no infrastructure. If they would have focused on the latter before esports then pvp would be in a better state.

Harbinger.8637:

Mindtrick.5190:

People still playing are holding on but I do enjoy watching a epic crash.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29Pqd3yrmBk

League of Warcraft is more esport than gw2 and it’s a giant Zerg! Sure you can say there is no dodge and you might even say gw2 combat it better. But the passive abilities built in to gw2 out weighs all the bad combat in wow. Gw2 is just like a console game with built in aim assist, most the players don’t even know the game is aiming for them they think they got skill. Keep it frosty.

That’s one thing that always bothered me in this game. There’s really no distinguishing a good player from a great player. The skill ceiling is so low in this game, you have AI builds and a bunch of passive abilities that blur the lines between players. Sometimes you’re watching a game and thinking, “Wow that was a really good time to use fear!”, then you realize it was a passive proc and the necro just got lucky with rng.

Haha it’s so true great post. I doubt they tone down the passives and that’s a bummer. Or add a pause feature or fix the wonky camera angles in spectate. Even better is that skyhammer thread. By the looks of it people don’t like that map. But this company must like it. Haha

All BS aside…they should have a plan to make things happen/improve the pvp side of the game.