The system in place for hot join is fine for the most part. By randomizing teams (or whatever other variable it might contain) it enables people to play with their friends, but doesn’t make it 8 premade vs 8 pug fights, so it is generally enjoyable. You still seem to get those games where the other 7 people on your team have no idea what they’re doing, but that’s part of the lotto of hot join.
Tournament play, however, needs to be better. I don’t even queue free tournaments anymore because the best I can hope to do is fourth place, unless I’m extremely lucky and there are no premades in the tournament. But why, exactly, is this a problem in the first place? Why should ANet reconsider their “get a team or gtfo” stance with tournaments?
Since sPvP doesn’t provide any statistical upgrades, it should be a focus on fun. Hot join doesn’t offer anything like tournament brackets, and so for those who like the idea of fighting for the top spot in a tournament ladder, free tourneys are great. Currently, however, nearly every free tournament is won by premades or partial premades, with full pugs losing by the second round nearly every time.
You can safely assume there are three groups of people who are in free tournament games. First, the PUG player who is joining a tournament by himself, or maybe with one other friend. He’s probably looking to have some fun and maybe come out of this with a free tournament chest. Second, the premade team who wants to get some practice in before they try paid tournaments. Maybe they need to develop their builds, or it’s a new team trying to learn how to play alongside each other, but for whatever reason they’re not comfortable spending tickets/gems on paid tournaments yet. Third, the premades who are there to pubstomp, often while giggling on vent about how they’re dominating everyone (I’ve played alongside these guys; this is something some of them actually do). This third group is often considered the bottom feeder of the PvP community, and for some reason Arena Net has catered to them above all else.
Competitive arena teams do not want to fight pugs, and pugs do not want to fight premades. The only premades who want to fight pugs share a lot of characteristics with those who buy hundreds of bugged karma items and complain about how they had no idea it was an exploit.
There is no competitive reason to pit pugs against premades, and there is little to no fun in getting crushed 100-500 by a full premade and spending double the time for a fraction of the favor you would have earned from hot join. If pug vs premade is a design feature that is working as intended, I think you might need to have a closer look at the guy that made that decision, because every competitive game that has come out in past several years has seperated pugs and premades in some way or another. WoW, League of Legends, and Smite, to name a few.
In games that did not have any sort of pug vs premade filter, that’s been a really high priority target for the players when discussing things the game did wrong, or could improve on.
When I get around to joining a tournament team, I’m going to be stuck in between two places I don’t want to be. On one side I can play free tournaments and face pickups for 1 or 2 of the three matches, and get a good match in the final only (unless I’m lucky enough to get into a game without pug teams), or I can go into paid tournaments with no practice but face fierce competition. If paid tournaments were a possibility using a readily available currency then maybe that would be the better choice, but tournament tickets cost money or cost significant time investments. The fact that you give them out in free tournaments only further encourages the practice of pubstomping, because it’s a much easier way to farm tickets than facing real competition.
The entire system is pretty broken, to be honest, and I really hope it gets reviewed in the near future.