I played WoW BC through early Cataclysm, quit right at its peak because many of the decision being made seemed utterly ridiculous to me. Despite Blizzard reporting expansion driven pops in population numbers, the truth is that game has lost well over half of its player base since then.
I now feel the same way about GW2 pvp. This new system is utterly ridiculous. In a 5v5 match, you represent one tenth of those involved and of your team you are a fifth. That’s 10% and 20% respectively and it’s hardly enough to make a difference in its final outcome. I’ve heard from top plays that the lower divisions (bronze and silver) are utter nonsense and even they simply can’t carry. Regrettably, I still enjoy PvP and perhaps that’s a fault with me.
Three matches I did tonight. On the first I decided to camp home because the opposite team kept pushing, and sure enough I noticed there were two players who would only move far and I noticed this because they alternated: as soon as I got one down, the next would show up; this happened at least twice before the match was over. As soon as I did that, and despite being able to hold home, my team started hemorraging points. 4v3 they were in the remainder of the map, yet two in my team kept dying and I noticed because they would spawn, assist with kills (not that it was necessary) and move on. Ended up losing because 4v3 is tough.
On the last one, we were ahead until the very end when I see three players push home in legacy and even after I ping home, two in my team decide to go and die over at far. Of the three, one slipped past me and a recently respawned team member and got the lord, hence the loss.
Bottomline: even though I owned just about everyone I came across and died no more than three times (at most) in those three matches, I’m 0 for 3 tonight. Not only does that mean worse ranking but worse rotations as well, worse map awareness from even worse players. Worse yet, that not only means no reward for my efforts but in fact a penalty thereof. And I do believe this to be the single worse aspect of the current pvp system: people like to be rewarded for their efforts, getting three extra pips towards some random chest for gaining tops stats in a close match doesn’t cut it.
The solution is simple and I want to see it implemented. There is already a system in place that measures individual performance, to one extent or another, and in that system offense shouldn’t rewarded but lack of deaths should. Now, place the five players on your team and measure them against one another in each of those fields: damage, defense, kills, deaths (maybe add decaps and time in combat?). If you outperform your teammates, you should earn more per win and lose less per loss, and viceversa. It really is that simple.
Being a fifth of a team and a tenth of the match is much too insignificant a measure to be judged by. In the long run, a mathematician would argue, those random variances become insignificant, but how is the long run? How many matches would that represent? I’m willing to be good money it’s well over 500 matches. 500 potentially crappy matches, I might add, such as the ones I described.