Guild Wars 2

For those unaware, before tournament matches you have a staging period before the match which does not end until every player in the tournament hits the “I’m ready” button or 5minutes pass. 5 minutes on its surface seems reasonable, some people may have slow computers and need extra loading time, were afk or had something come up in real life that needs to be taken care of.

I would argue that the most common reason for 5 minute waits prior to the start of the match is from people simply forgetting to press ready up, it is in a small box in the left side of your screen. This box needs to displayed in a much more prominent position and should be accompanied with an auditory cue every so often, hopefully using a voice as grating as “Your base is under attack!”. Another large cause of 5 minute waits are people who want to troll, if you ask in any fashion, regardless of how politely it is done, a large portion of the time the other team will troll you and not ready up despite fighting your team randomly around the map or them even telling you they are now going to make you wait. I will never understand the mindset of people who wish to waste their own time simply to waste the time of another persons, but while the troll may think they are only annoying the team they are facing, their delays slow down the tournament overall. I would say that while “playing” tournaments maybe 50% of my time is spent waiting.

I see two potential solutions, one which is drastic and another which is not quite so much. The drastic solution would be to axe tournaments completely and go to a queue based matchmaking system (hopefully using a rating system soon to be implemented). This would limit any troll groups effect to just 1 other team and would encourage less pre-match afks since people would conceivably not queue until they were all ready to go. My other proposed solution would be to simply lower the pre-match time period to 3minutes.

Five minutes is ridiculous. Two minutes at most with the option of being able to ready. Its enough time to go to the bathroom, get a drink, or play with your build between games

maybe forcing team to stay in the starting zone disallow them to go all over the map should help teams to press READY

I have a feeling the 5 minute wait is to promote the mind game of changing builds and such before the match starts. So not sure if they’d lower time since they seem to feel 5 minutes is good for switching out characters/builds.

More prominent ready button would be nice though. Not gonna be able to do much about trolls. They’ll always figure something out to annoy you.

I think the best solution I’ve heard is to have the 5 minute timer, but every time a player hits the ready button it drops 30 seconds off. So if your whole team comes in ready to go the most they’ll have to wait is 2:30.

This makes sure that if one team does have an issue and needs a couple minutes they can still protect their player from being afk at the start. It also keeps a single player from holding up a match for more than 30 seconds.

5 minutes is way too long!! The amount of time wasted per day/night…. just wow, most of the time cuz of 1 person that refuse to ready up. Also a big waste of glory booster time. It need to be reduce to like 2 or 3 minutes.

edit: also, most of the time, people that dont ready up are just out on the map running around or fighting, so yeah, BIG waste of time.

Fuuga.3287:

I have a feeling the 5 minute wait is to promote the mind game of changing builds and such before the match starts. So not sure if they’d lower time since they seem to feel 5 minutes is good for switching out characters/builds.

More prominent ready button would be nice though. Not gonna be able to do much about trolls. They’ll always figure something out to annoy you.

You shouldn’t be able to switch professions or builds anyways. Swapping out traits and changing is weapons is fine, but there should be strategy in building your team around being able to succeed at all three maps. The fact that everyone just switches to their guard/mesmer/engi for kyhlo is indicative of bad game design.

The only time you need in the lobby is enough time for people to step away from their computer for a second, and enough time to analyze the enemy team and build a strategy.

When doing tournaments, it is very literally about 50% spent fighting, 50% waiting in one fashion or another. 5 min is silly, people don’t need 15 minutes per tournament. They can do their afks and brbs after the tournaments.

I think even one minute would be sufficient. But 5 is absurd. And time wasting trolls are everywhere.

Then there is an issue of one match ending well before the next match in your group is ready. There needs to be a queue pool so basically all round one matches are in the same pool and whoever is finished first gets moved up to the first available round 2 slot. Free tournaments don’t need to be ‘ranked’ or grouped because the structure is superfluous anyway and you can’t see who you’re going to go against until the round has begun.

This would eliminate so much inefficiency from tournaments.

5 min is to allow people who may be afk time to enter the match and to discuss strategy when you can actually see the setup the enemy is using. After all, the strategy against a heavily offensive team (multiple thieves/eles/wars) won’t be the same as against a heavily defensive team (guardians/necros/engis). I feel it is just fine the way it is.

The 5 minute thing is SUCH a waste of time, so I agree completely. It should be reduced to 2 minutes or so. Even in a PUG, it doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes to figure out what you’re doing. Most of the time people are running around fighting each other instead of hitting ready anyways…