Guild Wars 2

Going on a little bit of a rant here, bear with me. A lot of good points are brought up that need to be addressed.

NA PvP is in a deplorable state, there are only 3 (4?) established teams. Why is this? Every single team that has tried to get into the game has gotten tired of playing an “esport” game without rating, spectator, cash tournaments etc and they’ve all quit.

Entire PvP guilds that were flourishing at launch are now ghost towns.
Heart of the Mists outside of Anvil Rock is deserted.
Lack of NECESSARY features for a competitive game (I don’t need to say anything here)

The casual players aren’t happy either. Aside from them getting bored of the same mode/small selection of maps, they’re thrown into a game that’s so counter-intuitive to skill progression it isn’t even funny. Anyone wonder why we see threads about Thieves/Mesmers/Bunkers/Warriors pop up every day? This is part of basic game design. You need to have a game that’s not only balanced at the pro level but is also balanced at entry level. Easy to learn, hard to master. There are also no rewards outside of cosmetic items, which is fine for some people and a problem for a majority. Give us SOMETHING that’s useful in areas other than PvP. This will definitely help pique interest in sPvP.

Lack of a matchmaking system doesn’t help. Would you like to be thrown against the top 100 players in Starcraft 2 from the time you pick up the game until the time you get sick of losing every game and leave? Because that’s how paids work right now. There are such outrageous queue times because people don’t want to waste extremely hard to acquire tickets so they can lose to the same team over and over.

Hotjoins are honestly just dreadful. You either hop in with the zerg and farm glory because there are no incentives to win/play the objective or you get mobbed by the 5 thieves on the enemy team. You lose either way.

What’s that? You want to break away from the mindless glory farming zergfest to play competitive tournaments? I hope you enjoy losing against premades, unless by some miracle you find a group willing to take a new player in and teach them (not happening).

The last thing I’ll touch on is stream viewership. I don’t think this game is all that fun to watch for many reasons, but I believe the majority of people just aren’t interested in watching or even playing PvP. Stream viewship is pathetic right now compared to what it was at launch, we had single streams reaching 600-1000 viewers regularly (and I’m not talking about internet celebrities, new no-body streamers)

Interest in PvP has just disappeared. Where have all the PvP podcasts gone? The video build guides? Tournament commentary?

We need changes and we need them NOW. So many people have already jumped ship but I still have faith that you can turn it around, Anet. A lot of us had such high hopes for PvP and it hurts us to see it in it’s current state.

This game will be great prophecy says

well… some balance updates next week, and 2 new maps in february, I dont really see pvp going anywhere

Rezz.8019:

well… some balance updates next week, and 2 new maps in february, I dont really see pvp going anywhere

Can someone provide a source to the two new maps in February? I know there is going to be a lot of PvP content coming out, but I haven’t heard anything specific.

In short to the OP’s rant, I agree with the PvP spotlight really fading. It’s because there is a huge lack of features that the community needs to build upon such as a ladder, proper dueling, team rosters, custom PvP servers and player-hosted tournaments.

Most of this is promised in the near future (within a few months), but the problem is that it’s a few months too late for some people. ArenaNet understands that, though, and is putting one foot in front of the other and trying to get these features online so that when they do, they’ll really hit home.

The state of pvp show didnt mention new maps, just balance in december and big updates in january and february… one of them being a pvp patch (wvwvw though) and their first priorities = getting e-sport going with ladders, renting servers and eventually spectator mode. Maps, or different kind of maps isn’t on the priority list at this point.
I understand random players can dream, but random things posted by a random player should always be read critically… at least if there’s no source of confirmation. To back my post up a little better I give you this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hByqoWsnz-I

Anvil Rock used to have at least 300 people standing around chatting and instant queuing up and all that stuff. Now we have like 50 at a time and stand around waiting forever to queue up. It used to almost be instant queue every time, now it’s like 10 minutes to 20 minutes easily. Paids queue pops so little, that my guild won’t even wait for a paid queue to pop, and they all refuse to even join the queue for it, so we always do free tpvp and it’s getting really boring playing against random pugs who suck and other premades who are not as good.