Guild Wars 2

Season 1 was good, to me it seemed to benefit teams of 3 moderate to highly skilled players more than solo or 5 player groups. To me it seemed as though Anet would put worse players on your team the better the you did but with a team of 3 reasonably high skilled players you could advance very quickly gaining 15~20 pips a night in just 3~4 hours play. I personally got to the last tier of ruby before I decided to stop playing as I was a bit bored with it & I used the 3 man system (never used exploits or smurf).

Season 2 was decent, I felt it still benefited the 3 man playstyle but instead of putting worse players on our team I felt it matched us against more and more 5 player premades & even against some top tier gaming groups that frequent the tournaments (we would usually lose those). To me the system didn’t feel like fair matches, it felt more as though the game was trying to force us into a 50/50 win/loss instead of finding out what our skill level was and placing us against other players at that same level.

I took a break half way through season 2 & came back towards the end and played some solo queue & climbed from low sapphire to diamond tier 2 before deciding to stop. During the time I spent in solo queue I felt the same as when I did with my 3 man team, being forced into a 50/50 win rate as I played over 50 games in ruby but eventually got a win streak from tier 2 ruby to tier 3 diamond. Either I magically got awesome or this proves match making is not actually reflective of player skill level and I was just being constantly placed in 50/50 win/loss matches & something got me out of it and I finally started to face players of my similar skill level in diamond. I eventually stopped playing season 2 due to boredom and being back in the 50/50 win/loss struggle like in ruby.

Season 3 I didn’t play much. I wasn’t impressed by the balance changes as none were extremely impactful on my main class (ranger). In complete honesty the biggest change to my class was actually reducing our viable builds from 3 to 2 (less condi removal via glyphs). I was still rather bored from all the stagnant, unchanging, low diversity pvp that was season 2 & I didn’t feel the need to subject myself to that torture again. What few matches I did play felt like extreme blowouts where I didn’t have to put much effort in to win & no matter how much I put in to win a lost game it was impossible to make a comeback. I finished with a 75% win rate.

These are just my experiences, make of it what you will…

I nearly feel the same way. To the point unless for the 1 or 2 max a week pvp guild missions, I refuse to play sPvP in GW2 anymore, nearly all of the other games with pvp in them are better for this then GW2 is now sadly.

I started out Season One of sPvP Ranked Leagues at about 15 to 25 friends constantly online and having fun, down to about 5 to 10 towards the middle of Season 2 which is where I basically stop trying. The begaining of Season 3 I had maybe 2 or 3 players on my friends list that are sPvP orientated log in to GW2, and at current I have only one on my friends list who might log on 3 times out of the week mostly to play some WvW with me. My friends list as a whole off what used to be 40 plus active players is down to 3 active and 2 simi active players. So we are not alone in this feeling, just more tolerant then the many others that have completely lefted GW2 altogether.

Gotta say, this season’s matchmaking was really bad for me. Sapphire (where I started) to Legendary were mostly ludicrously easy matches — I had a winning streak of 27 at one point. Once I hit legendary though, it started regularly pitting me against people at the top of the leaderboards. And I solo queue. So I went from ridiculously easy matches to stupidly hard matches in no time flat. I gave up after nearly getting to 2nd level of legendary. My fiancee started at Emerald, and had the hardest time reaching Diamond, because the matchmaking system kept working against her.

Unranked produces somewhat more interesting matches, but often it seems to use me as a balance, with several of my team mates being newbies, which is irritating when it feels like I’m doing all the work. If I had an analogy, it uses MMR rating like weights on a scale. Because my rating is relatively high, it puts lots of lightweights with me. It ends up being significantly less fun than matching me with a bunch of people of similar skill level.

Season 2, if I recall… I ended up getting stuck in a rut in Diamond. Ended up with a 50/50 win rate.

I don’t remember season 1 particularly well.