Guild Wars 2

I know this has been complained about many times before, but it would be great if practice/hotjoin was fixed to make it actually useful for learning and tinkering with new builds. As it stands now I would say 3/4ths of the matches are blowouts from imbalanced teams with one team often perpetually down a person. I personally always try to join the losing team, but even that doesn’t help because you’ll usually have someone just teamswitch from the losing team to the winning team.

Here are a few things that could improve the situation:
-Make it so that you cannot join a team that is winning, unless it is already short a person (also block teamswaps from losing to winning team).
-On the browser list show how many people are actively playing and how many are speccing. So many times 10 people are on a server, but you have one person perpetually speccing and one team never fills up.
-In order to get credit for a win, you have to be on the team before the match starts (no waiting to see which team is going to win before joining)
-This idea is probably a bit trickier: if a team has an extra person, they can only have as many people spawned as the other team. The person waiting in limbo only spawns after a teammate dies (and their spawn timer expires). Then the person who just died has to wait for someone else to die. This will suck if your team never dies, but it will give people an incentive to be on the “bad” team so they don’t get stuck waiting so much.

In my opinion hotjoin should be removed. For practicing and trying new builds, you can go unranked. As should all new players. It would also remove the problem with rank framing servers.

Obviously private servers would stay.

Consider practice mode like mode for test builds, mechanical skills, off point fun fights, and other frivolous things. Unranked for tactic testing and build. Don’t take practice fights to heart.

I find more annoying when to players that won’t pay for a custom arena or join one of the custom arenas already set by players for duels decide to hijack an arena, and manipulate the matches, griefing and harassing anyone who joins the match to keep the arena and get wins in turns.

They will tell you they are “dueling” if you join the match, but if you just stay there observing you see they are not dueling at all. Just farming rank and wins.

The achievements that count wins in Hotjoin should also be reworked.

Taking three times as many points, and getting 3 points per victory and 1 point per loss. So people don’t jump around for points as much since they’ll get points (and more rank and PvP rewards than leaving ) if they stick for whole matches.

Achievements should not count ranked plays.

Practice arenas shouldn’t keep score at all. As in wins or loss don’t matter, offer no rewards, no track advancement, EXP. Nothing. That way those who want to practice and try different builds, tactics, etc. would be free to do so, without dealing with rank farmers and those who just want to log in and get an easy win.

Its practice. It shouldn’t reward you.

I think it should just be removed and replaced with bot matches

It called practice for a reason. It’s place for beginners and test builds.
And no, it should not be removed or nerfed until unranked and ranked will be split to team and solo.

pdavis.8031:

Practice arenas shouldn’t keep score at all. As in wins or loss don’t matter, offer no rewards, no track advancement, EXP. Nothing. That way those who want to practice and try different builds, tactics, etc. would be free to do so, without dealing with rank farmers and those who just want to log in and get an easy win.

Its practice. It shouldn’t reward you.

I’m not against, but…
Do you wanna those daily profession guys move to rated arenas?

It’s good for dailies on alts. I wish more people would do them there, instead of subjecting ranked queue to that nonsense.

Mak.2657:

pdavis.8031:

Practice arenas shouldn’t keep score at all. As in wins or loss don’t matter, offer no rewards, no track advancement, EXP. Nothing. That way those who want to practice and try different builds, tactics, etc. would be free to do so, without dealing with rank farmers and those who just want to log in and get an easy win.

Its practice. It shouldn’t reward you.

I’m not against, but…
Do you wanna those daily profession guys move to rated arenas?

Skilless farmers moving to rated matches? I am actually ok with that. More death to feed my necro :P
If anything they will move to the ranked matches, get horribly beaten and force them to actually learn or quit.

pdavis.8031:

Mak.2657:

pdavis.8031:

Practice arenas shouldn’t keep score at all. As in wins or loss don’t matter, offer no rewards, no track advancement, EXP. Nothing. That way those who want to practice and try different builds, tactics, etc. would be free to do so, without dealing with rank farmers and those who just want to log in and get an easy win.

Its practice. It shouldn’t reward you.

I’m not against, but…
Do you wanna those daily profession guys move to rated arenas?

Skilless farmers moving to rated matches? I am actually ok with that. More death to feed my necro :P
If anything they will move to the ranked matches, get horribly beaten and force them to actually learn or quit.

I can only see you saying that if you always queue up with a team of 5. Solo a queue a bit and get someone just learning on your team a few matches in a row and your mind will quickly change.

I usually hot join my first few matches to get profession dailies out of the way and it usually takes 4 or 5 rooms before you find a decent match but it beats playing those matches in ranked and ending up on a team with 3 rangers and 2 necros or something like that. If you get rid of practice arena you will just annoying people in ranked who solo queue on constantly get 3 or 4 of the same class on their team.

Basket of Boxes.1976:

pdavis.8031:

Mak.2657:

pdavis.8031:

Practice arenas shouldn’t keep score at all. As in wins or loss don’t matter, offer no rewards, no track advancement, EXP. Nothing. That way those who want to practice and try different builds, tactics, etc. would be free to do so, without dealing with rank farmers and those who just want to log in and get an easy win.

Its practice. It shouldn’t reward you.

I’m not against, but…
Do you wanna those daily profession guys move to rated arenas?

Skilless farmers moving to rated matches? I am actually ok with that. More death to feed my necro :P
If anything they will move to the ranked matches, get horribly beaten and force them to actually learn or quit.

I can only see you saying that if you always queue up with a team of 5. Solo a queue a bit and get someone just learning on your team a few matches in a row and your mind will quickly change.

I usually hot join my first few matches to get profession dailies out of the way and it usually takes 4 or 5 rooms before you find a decent match but it beats playing those matches in ranked and ending up on a team with 3 rangers and 2 necros or something like that. If you get rid of practice arena you will just annoying people in ranked who solo queue on constantly get 3 or 4 of the same class on their team.

I do a bit of both actually. I never particularly cared if someone was learning or not. Win or lose, in the end I still have fun.
However, I’m not advocating for the removal of practice. Practice arena is needed, and useful. Just remove any rewards associated it with. Practice shouldn’t be rewarding, except in that you improve your play/build to actually be a contender in ranked matches.

pdavis.8031:

Skilless farmers moving to rated matches? I am actually ok with that. More death to feed my necro :P
If anything they will move to the ranked matches, get horribly beaten and force them to actually learn or quit.

“Force others to play like I want them to play!” isn’t a good approach, you know.

Rednik.3809:

pdavis.8031:

Skilless farmers moving to rated matches? I am actually ok with that. More death to feed my necro :P
If anything they will move to the ranked matches, get horribly beaten and force them to actually learn or quit.

“Force others to play like I want them to play!” isn’t a good approach, you know.

I don’t see how removing rewards for practice mode is forcing anyone to do anything. If players want to pvp, they should pvp. If they want to practice, they should be able to practice. Being able to farm rank and be rewarded for jumping in to a winning team, gaining rewards for exploiting the system isn’t what Anet had in mind, and certainly not the spirit of pvp in general.

pdavis.8031:

I don’t see how removing rewards for practice mode is forcing anyone to do anything. If players want to pvp, they should pvp. If they want to practice, they should be able to practice. Being able to farm rank and be rewarded for jumping in to a winning team, gaining rewards for exploiting the system isn’t what Anet had in mind, and certainly not the spirit of pvp in general.

Your “pvp spirit” atm dying with spvp due to severe lack of players, and you purposing shrink it even more and cut one of most popular ways for casual pve players to start pvping.
Brilliant.
And no, they will not jump straight into arenas, and they will not gonna play practice without rewards. They will simply forget about pvp button at all.

Here’s a couple more ideas: instead of removing rewards reduce the difference between a loss and a win. I don’t think the reward track progress is the main thing that causes bad behavior in practice (its so easy to hit your cap for a day even losing a good bit) but I’m sure it certainly encourages it. My next idea is to place low rank players in their own servers. Yes I know rank doesn’t always mean skill but it isn’t really fair to have noobs facing teams of very experienced people. This would also allow for a better chance of balanced games for higher rank people who are messing around in practice.