Guild Wars 2

The illogical design of GW2 sPvP ranked league divisions-

Rank can be applied to an individual or to a team, but these are two very different things. Consider that Peyton Manning’s individual rank is completely seperate from the National Football League’s rank for his team the Denver Broncos. When the Broncos play, they play against other teams and the team rank is the primary focus of all team sports. The individual player rank, while not discarded, has much less focus than the team. The team is the entity that wins the ultimate prize.

Conquest and Stronghold are team sports. The team should be the focused ranked entity, but AreanNet didn’t build it that way. They decided to make the individual players rank the focus. Guild teams exist in game now, but they aren’t the primary ranked entity although the Leaderboards would make you think they are.

The whole point of confusion comes from mixing solo and team queues into one big pool. It has created a predominately solo queue experience with a handful of guild teams dominating Legendary and Diamond.

What we need

• Separate solo queue and team queue

• Separate solo and team league divisions (if Peyton Manning were teamed up with 10 other random NFL players that were by stats his peers it would still be a very unfair fight for this random (pug) team to go up against the Seattle Seahawks). As long as there are mixed team and solo queues, the game can’t be respected because the integrity isn’t there.

If they don’t want to put a lot of effort into it, they should nix guild teams altogether and make ranked 100% solo queue… Or nix solo queue altogether and make it 100% guild team play. It just makes no sense that these two be the same, it shows how little respect and how tongue-in-cheek ArenaNet sees sPvP

I’m left beveling they the game studio doesn’t take much of anything seriously and that serious gamer aren’t the type they want to stick around anyway. It wasn’t until this ranked League division system was introduced that I really correlated “causal, not-too-serious” with really horrible design. I really thought sPvP would be the aspect of the game they took seriously, especially given the push to go Pro with ESL.

In trying to reason why things have remained as they have, I keep coming back to ArenaNet trying to cater to their predominate PvE base. I truly believe they feel if PvP became too serious and were handled with the integrity needed to be true eSport it would turn off their core crowd.

My observation after being with many guilds over the years is that the Gw2 player who sticks around after the newness wears off is the same crowd that plays Final Fantasy on-line. They are in it more for the social experience and don’t really care if a lot of systems in game are broken. They have a very high degree of tolerance for poor design and in general just want to be able to grind their way to whatever prestigious new-and-shinny they can get. I’m not trying to insult anyone, but that is in my experience the GW2 player base today, several months following a major release.

I would strongly disagree with anyone who says “all MMORPGs are that way”. They just aren’t. Each community is different. I really believe following HoT, GW2 has developed the worst community I’ve seen in a very long time.

Good post. There is so much wrong and offered up some suggestions myself but won’t repeat them here except make the higher end people in a league be on the same team (especially if soloQ is brought back) and face the lower end people so the better players progress to the division appropriate to their skill level.

“My observation after being with many guilds over the years is that the Gw2 player who sticks around after the newness wears off is the same crowd that plays Final Fantasy on-line. "

I play Dark Souls and Street Fighter. Dark Souls’ PvP balance is bad enough you’d think Anet made the game whereas the Street Fighter series is the best of all time due to its responsive controls and excellent balancing. Dark Souls is great for the single player PvE experience so long as you don’t cheese grind it.