Guild Wars 2

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.

I dont know where you rank.

But i have personally seen ESL players, (pro level players) run far and win 1 vs 2 and sustain 1 vs 3.

As someone home lose a 1 vs 1 and we win mid. Only to have the person who lost home in a 1 vs 1 try again.

Crazy thing happens though, the ESL player at far still holds out and wins all those fights.

In my last game i ran into 1 vs 3 situations and sat on the point so they couldnt cap it.

a while back I think it was ben (anet staff) who said they don’t want to reward top stats because it would cause players to go after that rather then win the game.

It´s exactly why people give up sooner or later.

They feel their contribution doesnt´matter much.

Its fun and i like the combat system but this is an absolute motivation killer that started to bring down GW2 PvP at an alarming rate.

I’d like stat history for every match with a lot of details in order to know who did what and how. Figures also help to know where you lacked and where you failed or did good. For instance, cleanses are not counted anymore while they provide a lot of support. In a very competitional environment, you should be able to measure how much damage you prevented for your team as much as the damage done. Time spent in downstate, time spent reviving, distance traveled, number of interrupts, etc… there is so much to learn from a match if we could be given the tools to do so.

OP says there’s 10 players in a match, that means there’s five on each team, which means that you are 1/5 of your team..congratulations, OP can math. Just because there’s 5 players on a team doesn’t mean everyone does an equal amount of work in the match, there’s no ‘Oh everyone is worth 20% of the team’ nah son, if someone’s rampagin’, you betcha ass they’re doing more than 20%. Now don’t get after me, because I tl;dr’d and only went through the first paragraph or so and just had to comment on your apparent thought process that pvp is played like the team in controlled by an AI which splits the workload between its’ five different split programs.

GW2 pvp game design simply sucks. Anet has created that toxic environment which mainly calculates your MMR on skill and behaviour of other players. Whenever you see there is something wrong with other players behaviour or gameplay (true or not) you are the one who gets punished by lowering your individual MMR. Sometimes it goes the other way of course were you suck but your team carries you. But it is much more often that you feel it is the other way around.

Marxx.5021:

Anet has created that toxic environment which mainly calculates your MMR on skill and behaviour of other players. Whenever you see there is something wrong with other players behaviour or gameplay (true or not) you are the one who gets punished by lowering your individual MMR. Sometimes it goes the other way of course were you suck but your team carries you. But it is much more often that you feel it is the other way around.

This

With the way matchmaking works you are 100% at the mercy of the other players, last night and this morning I had players who didn’t care, on 1 map my team was 150 points up and dominating, then suddenly we had a “DC” who just happened to come back into the game right as the other team was ahead, he had a guild mate in the other team, and all but admitted in team chat to throwing the match to allow them the win, ( W T F am I supposed to do with that ) reporting doesn’t do squat.

Today had several matches where a warrior would die in 3 seconds, then QQ about not having support, and then proceeded to run to mid and give free kills away, this happens way more than it should because.

1. they don’t care about the game they are farming the title tracks.
2. they know there is no punishment for such acts.

I don’t know how Anet will fix this to be honest, the only real way is a 2 up 1 down system that ive seen in another game, that way those who just throw matches etc will eventually move down down down to the bottom and you wont have to worry about them again, and allows you when winning to move away from them, but I do know that if they don’t get the system sorted, there will be even less players next season ( if there is a season )

I was watching a top EU player on twitch a few weeks ago, who lost a match and even stated in twitch that there was no way to carry it, as the players on the team where so so bad, if top players cant carry bad players, people at lower tiers have no chance in hell, and they get stuck with that and held down, and lose interest.

playing a team game solo is always going to be a deeply frustrating experience

Although it would be nice to have a way to measure individual skill, there is absolutely no way the game can accurately do that. The top stats are the bets things we are ever going to have to show skill, and they are not exactly any good at that.

Individual skill is a massive part of what your rating will be. Yes, useless teams can drag you down for a few games and make you lose a bit of rating, but, if you are 100% stuck at your rating and cannot progress, YOUR TEAMS ARE NOT THE PROBLEM. You are. Why do you think that all the good players are at the top of the leaderboard? Because their individual skill is enough to carry games.

Yes, some games truly are impossible and I accept that. But the vast majority of games (as in 90% or so) can indeed be carried with enough skill, showing that you absolutely do not have to rely on your team to get highly on the leaderboards.

So yeah, the system we have now is as good as we are ever going to get to measure skill. But you certainly can show your individual skill by getting high on the leaderboards. Trash teams can make you lose rating, but you will always get to where you belong eventually based on your own skill.

suffish.4150:

Individual skill is a massive part of what your rating will be. Yes, useless teams can drag you down for a few games and make you lose a bit of rating, but, if you are 100% stuck at your rating and cannot progress, YOUR TEAMS ARE NOT THE PROBLEM. You are. Why do you think that all the good players are at the top of the leaderboard? Because their individual skill is enough to carry games.

The issue is actually the " 100% stuck " . After a few seasons, it’s fairly easy to understand people won’t bother after 30 games of unluck. What is the point if i have to play XX games each season in order to compensate bad luck on placement matchs ?

Top stats don’t always and technically don’t mean anything. I could run into a 1v1, take little damage, out kite and kill the enemy with a few moves, or, I could run into a 1v1 facetank a tonne of damage and put out a tonne of damage and healing. The former wouldn’t get me any top stats, but the latter would.

The former might’ve taken me say 30 seconds? But the latter took me 45 seconds. Say they were different players and the same outcome happened with each of their fights 5 times. The former player would’ve got more top stats thinking they were better but the latter wouldn’t get the stats, yet they were better.

It’s the same with surviving, it’s great if you can run in with a DH facetank and put out a tonne of damage but if you can’t finish anyone because you didn’t kite and used all your cooldown, what good is all that damage and healing? As above, you can’t measure tactics.

It’s the same with theif, sometimes you can carry a game without getting any top stats, because you were efficient with your damage and ended what you knew were the most important losing fights, saving deaths and decaps for your team while your stronger team fighting players get all the top stats then pm you a load of kitten even though you won the game and didn’t die once. Is there a top stat for not dying? No but it has its time and place, like damage, healing, offence and defence do, the amount of one stat that you get means absolutely nothing.

I’ve watched my teams 3v2 the enemy on close, thinking they are winning the game whilst we lose because of a two cap, they get all the top stats but stayed on close outnumbering our only point the entire game.

I’ve said it enough. Unranked needs the same rewards as ranked, that would save half our problems and would be a really quick fix for uneven games. In the long run we need game requirements across classes to play ranked. New game modes. Different ques. Less power creep. Rewarded tutorials on advantage/disadvantages, say black lion keys or whatever. Something needs to be done to end this never ending salty nooby atmosphere that is lingering in spvp.