Guild Wars 2

Still pretty new to PVP (run mostly PVE) but have read a lot in these forums about the state of PVP: small community, balance, meta, and lack of love from ANET. Not sure if this has been discussed before (apologies if so), but seems to me that one of the issues is that PVP is not very profitable for ANET (you can buy you’re buying a custom arena or finishers, anything else?). I’m guessing there might be more dedicated resources coming from ANET if there was a greater stream of profit from the PVP community.

Speaking from the PVE side of things, I gladly spend a regular amount of gems due to the constant content updates and rewards. My experience so far in PVP is mixed (played to rank 12), but I’m sure that’s mostly from hotjoin issues and I’m going to try more tPVP. But have to say, given the learning curve and how few matches are actually fun (only like being zerged to death so many times).

Personally, if I knew that a lot of the suggested changes were coming – and implemented on a biweekly/monthly rotation like in PVE – then I’d be happy to stick around and throw real money into PVP. So my questions:
1. Do you think this true – would more profit coming from PVP help build the community and help to implement the community’s feedback faster?
2. What, if anything, would you be willing to spend money on that might keep your interest?

Also wondering:
1. How many people here split their time between PVE/PVP and what’s the ratio?
2. Are you losing steam with gw2 PVP – planning to say or leave?

I actually PVP because I like playing against other players (gasp!) I don’t need any carrot on a stick to get me to play it. I would pay quite some money though if I could simply buy the better skins from the locker instead of having to grind 24/7 for 3 years to get anywhere close to the required rank.

From experience with many mmos, when PvP becomes highly profitably, PvP becomes pay to win. You are only going to be able to sell so many cosmetics. Yes, ANET is seriously against p2w and I am not accusing them of it, but they wouldn’t be the first company to open micro-transactions explicitly against it and turn to it later down the road, and profitable PvP is a major area of bad p2w policies in other games. I’d prefer none of this to happen.

step 1) make a good pvp game
step 2) offer paid services/cosmetic items

most companies forget about step 1

There is really no option for p2w in the pvp system as it is, yes if they started selling ascended trinkets with slight bump in stats over regular it would be ridiculous, but I don’t see that happening. I also don’t think they should sell skins above your level, a deer in tiger skins isn’t okay (coming from a dolyak).
What would be neat to see is like EverQuest added in their f2p package, many skins that are not available anywhere else, auras, particle effects, ect. All cosmetic, all definable as contributors (or farmers) yet nothing that lessens the reward of grinding to level 70.

If you mean rewards like gold for winning tpvp I completely agree, the droprate on dyes is horrendous from Match Win Reward Chests, how are pvp only people ever supposed to afford Abyss and Celestial dyes getting no gold and 1 unid dye every 10ish wins?

I love pvp and do pretty much nothing else but it does feel like there is very little to gain by focusing on pvp.

I have been playing mostly pvp recently and am ‘very’ close to bear rank. But i am looking for new games because i just dont like the way this one has been going. I do have an open mind to play every part of the game (pve pvp wvw etc) but i dont think any are in the condition they should be by now. (im up to about 6500 achievements and 1-2 days grind to bear, so i admit that i have played alot).

Regarding rewards, there is a small chance for pvpers to profit from dyes. I have some 130-140k glory saved up and honestly i think i would profit far more by farming pve than using hours to spend all that glory to make random dyes. So yea you could say the reward system is broken.

Honestly i think just adding ALOT more skins(and pvp only skins), perhaps even class specific would help alot, kinda “LoL” style of things :/

Starcraft 2 is highly profitable for Blizzard. It’s basically the NFL of e-sports and gets tons of love from its producer. I think it gets so much good press and revenue because Blizzard gave it love first though, and then players fell in love. Ideally NCSoft will eventually cough up some extra cash for ANet’s PvP development so we can eventually (maybe) see something really come up this game’s competitive formats.

milo.6942:

step 1) make a good pvp game
step 2) offer paid services/cosmetic items

most companies forget about step 1

This. I think there is a false view about this money issue in the forums. Some people suggest that we should somehow give money to anet then they could start investing it to pvp. Anet is business so IT should invest money and only then expect some return, it does not and should not work the other way around (if it did I would immediately open my company and just let the money flow for me doing nothing).

Another thing that is an issue probably only for me is that custom arenas are not available from currency obtained in PvP – glory since there is no way to obtain gems anymore. I have written a long post about this, but that topic got deleted, so to make it short:

- Why should a PvP thing be more easily obtainable by people that do pve?
- How would a pve crowd act if you should pay gems for entering dungeons?
- Why is custom arena barely customisable?

Now back ontopic:

I would not be willing to spend money on anything, but that is just me. Others I would think that skin shop would be easiest to implement so how about start there.
I do not play pve at all, only leave mists to exchange laurels for dyes and I have been playing gw2 from beta weekend 1.
I am the only one from my group of friends that stayed in gw2 – 5 of us started playing and since there was only one mode with 3 maps it got boring for a few, then without a full team it was not as fun for others. That said I still login everyday to play my warrior at 5×5 hotjoin and just obliterating nabs fotm necros for 3 maps.

Cosmetic pieces are the only way to go to make more money for ArenaNet – and they’re already doing that.

The money for competitive Pvp games come from cash reward tournaments. Tornies with a money on the line serve as advertisement and fame for participants. They encourage more people to pick up the game with the thought they will one day compete for money and a name for themselves.

Let’s see how this tournament at PAX goes because I think ArenaNet is onto something (balance issues aside).

Even if they release cosmetic kitten it won’t do much, the playerbase is so low that it doesn’t matter.
Pve stuff can be sold to 90% of the players, pvp only to 10%, and that’s being generous.