Guild Wars 2

It’s been long time since last change of hot join spectator mode.
People can simply enter spectator mode while losing and outnumbered.
Force a rebalance so they can rejoin the winning team.

For example, in a 5 vs 4 match, while team with 5 people is winning, player in the losing outnumbered team can enter spectator mode,
thus make it 5 vs 3, causing a force rebalance to 4 vs 4.
The player entered spectator mode can chose which team to join now, of course the winning team in most case.

This should be considered as a match manipulating exploit and should be fixed, IMHO.

Seeing as it’s hot joins it really isn’t THAT big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. Just play on or change lobbies if you can’t handle it.

agreed, its mind numbing to think how this feature made it in in the first place,
and even worse how it has stayed in.
they fixed skyhammer farming so why not this?
it is so much worse since it effects our experience.
a bunch of farmers jumping down a hole in a different server didn’t effect us,
EVERY SINGLE GAME being a 3v5 one-sided farce does affect us.
a decent 400 v 500 match is very rare nowaday.

ANET
give us our 8v8 back, remove team select, add restrictions to spectator mode.
hotjoin will once again be fun!

Chaotic.9742:

Seeing as it’s hot joins it really isn’t THAT big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.

that response annoys me every time i see it..
because somehow wanting to enjoy Spvp is out of the question.
some of us don’t want to wait 10 minutes for each round to start during our very rare nights were we can play.
some of us don’t want to risk having skyhammer pop in tournaments and either spend another 10 minutes afk or get frustrated on that map.
some of us don’t want to play as or against meta clones, we enjoy playing more imaginative builds and playing against more imaginative builds. (yes there will always be a few meta-clones thrown in there too).

so naturally when i read the generic “well its just Spvp, why should you have fun?!” response it really bugs me,
Structured pvp does not mean 3v5 onesided slaughter.

the removal of 8v8 and the addition of team select and spectator were the worst things to happen in this game IMHO as someone who enjoys enjoyed Spvp.

It’s the only thing people can do to counter team stacking and 1v2/2v3/3v4/4v5, which probably has a much worse effect than this match manipulation that you speak of. Spectate/rebalance happens as a result of severely imbalanced matches, not the other way around.

On top of that, apparently having 10 people in the server, playing or spectating/AFK, will “soft cap” it (“Play Now” will no longer send people in), you will often end up with 4v5 with a spectator and greatly diminished chance of someone else coming in to take that last spot.

If you want more even matches in a setting where people can just come and go, then you need to reduce the win-loss reward gap and provide extra incentives for someone to join/stay on a losing team. AB volunteer is one example of this done right, and I am generally the first person to click the button unless playing with friends. I am happy to play for the underdog, but I am not enough of a masochist to sacrifice 60% of the rewards for it.

Until then, if people are farming rank points by stacking one side, I will have zero bad feeling about forcing myself into the farm with the spectate button.

DaveGan.8065:

you need to reduce the win-loss reward gap and provide extra incentives for someone to join/stay on a losing team.

this would work too if they can’t be bothered trying to fix the problem by removing the cause

Liewec.2896:

this would work too if they can’t be bothered trying to fix the problem by removing the cause

I think you’re confusing the cause with the effect. The cause is severe win-loss reward imbalance. The effect of this is stacking teams at the start, and the effect following this is the spectate/autobalance.

If you want balanced and even matches, you cannot have incentives for unbalanced lopsided matches.

Liewec.2896:

ANET
give us our 8v8 back, remove team select, add restrictions to spectator mode.
hotjoin will once again be fun!

There are very good reasons why 8vs8 was removed – zerging and too much stuff on screen to handle. Imagine how 8vs8 would look now when even 5vs5 are plagued by add builds (necro MM, spirit rangers/pets, mesmer illusions). Today I actually counted 15+ targets moving at me while trying to defend mid on Temple. Imagine how fun it must be with the flawed target selection system in GW2.

You shouldn’t be allowed to pick your team when you join. If you become a spectator you probably shouldn’t be allowed to rejoin as a player until the match is over.

holodoc.5748:

Liewec.2896:

ANET
give us our 8v8 back, remove team select, add restrictions to spectator mode.
hotjoin will once again be fun!

There are very good reasons why 8vs8 was removed – zerging and too much stuff on screen to handle. Imagine how 8vs8 would look now when even 5vs5 are plagued by add builds (necro MM, spirit rangers/pets, mesmer illusions).

there were always MMs and mesmers,
and 8v8 matches were far better balanced due to one person making less of an impact.
missing one or 2 players in 8v8 was no biggy, missing 1-2 players in 5v5 is a severe handicap.
yes there was almost always a zerg in the middle, but there would also be 3-4 people in each team focusing on objectives, landslide wins were very rare, it was usually a GG.

and most importantly it was very, very fun!

Liewec.2896:

there were always MMs and mesmers

Not as many as there are now. The current meta simply screams for people to play AI driven builds, because of the damage buffs AI received. That being said it is more likely than ever to have at least three of those professions/builds converge to a single point at any time. For a ranger, necro and a mesmer that’s at least 10+ adds. Now try to imagine how messy that would look in a 8vs8 fight. That’s 16 players on a single map with tons of visual effects which add up to the lag and a general feel that zerging from point to point is how sPvP was meant to be played.

As far as the influence of leavers between 5vs5 and 8vs8 is concerned. People were leaving 8vs8 too, just in greater numbers than 5vs5. If a single player decided to leave the match because his side was loosing it was almost customary for at least three or four players (sometimes even more) to follow. In those situations matches would either way start to look like and 5vs5 and become much more enjoyable.

I have many issues with the way how sPvP currently works – removing 8vs8 is not one of them. I actually fully support it. If they ever decide to make bigger maps objective based maps which will require people to spread out I will welcome the return of 8vs8.

DaveGan.8065:

It’s the only thing people can do to counter team stacking and 1v2/2v3/3v4/4v5, which probably has a much worse effect than this match manipulation that you speak of. *Spectate/rebalance happens as a result of severely imbalanced matches, not the other way around.*

On top of that, apparently having 10 people in the server, playing or spectating/AFK, will "soft cap" it ("Play Now" will no longer send people in), you will often end up with 4v5 with a spectator and greatly diminished chance of someone else coming in to take that last spot.

If you want more even matches in a setting where people can just come and go, then *you need to reduce the win-loss reward gap and provide extra incentives for someone to join/stay on a losing team*. AB volunteer is one example of this done right, and I am generally the first person to click the button unless playing with friends. I am happy to play for the underdog, but I am not enough of a masochist to sacrifice 60% of the rewards for it.

Until then, if people are farming rank points by stacking one side, I will have zero bad feeling about forcing myself into the farm with the spectate button.

Exactly this.

It is *not fun* to be in an outnumbered match and get stomped over and over again - and get loser-level rewards for playing an unfair match.
It’s not a good way to practice/test most builds, and gets especially frustrating when deliberate rank/skill stacking will put more experienced players on the same team.

In such imbalanced matches, I have absolutely no problem with spectate-AB-rejoin - either doing it myself in a match that my team clearly has no chance in, or performed by someone else in a team I’m fighting against.
It’s only possible to do when already outnumbered, and the vast majority of outnumbered HJ matches start and end with one team completely dominating. Is it really *that* fun to beat foes you already have a pretty big advantage over?

Hotjoin rewards (rank/coin/track progress) are poor compared to other modes, but the difference between win and loss rewards is still significant enough that it feels really unfair for people who happen to have a smaller team size to lose out.

A couple of things that could help:
1) If players click "play now", immediately take them into a map and put them onto a team. Either the team with fewer players, or that with the lowest score. They can leave a team and spectate if they wish, but pre-spectating to choose the best team just contributes to the imbalance.
2) If players switch to spectator mode, don’t let them rejoin either team for the remainder of the match. Certainly don’t let them join the winning team. Leavers triggering autobalance? Cool, this is why it exists. Spectating to force AB? I support it while new players get to join the winning team and so keep matches unfair, but once this is fixed then AB exploits can also be fixed.
3) Clarify that getting autobalanced gives winner rewards, and that volunteering gives a small bonus on top of that. Most people seem to think of AB as ’stealing their win’ when it’s really just ’stopping you from killing so many people in unfair fights, while still giving you winner rewards’.

It doesn’t seem extremely difficult to address.

You still want to keep spectator mode in hot join because it’s useful for learning (see what beat you, how someone better plays, etc). So the simplest solution is to put a cooldown on joining a team. If you swap to spectator mode, you can’t join any team again for 2 minutes (configurable in custom arenas down to 0 seconds) or the map changes.

Though for technical reasons it may not be able to stop people from leaving the room and rejoining to get on the winning team. But that’s a lot more effort.

Clearly these guys that made the changes aren’t IT’s because there’s a saying “if it aint broken don’t mess with it”

Hotjoin was great before these changes they’ve did. Raid of Capricorn IS a great and fun map but its not used anymore. Hotjoin back than was FUN. Now hotjoin is stressful and feels like your doing a solo que because its all about winning and not about having fun. I do miss the individual scoring for points because it encouraged people to fight even off the points which was a lot of fun. However now its all about capturing nodes and bunkering down. Also the teamfights were much more intense and better, I’ve played the 10v10 but that’s just too many people, 8v8 is where its at and its just right.

Many of these changes after September 2013 I don’t like at all.

Yeah, I agree that 8v8 is a bit too messy for Solo or Team PvP, but in Hotjoin it actually helps to smooth out any imbalances due to unbalanced teams. With 4v5, the missing team member hurts a lot, especially if one team is overstacked with high rank players, but once you get up to 6-7 team members on each side, the pressure from numbers starts to equalize the differences.

For my part, I’ll admit I do take note of who are the good players in a match and try to join their side in subsequent matches, but if I get autobalanced, I just shrug and YOLO it. Getting autobalanced means I get a win credit and reward regardless, so not much point in forcing yet more autobalance chaos.

This “6v7/7v8 is not as imbalanced” argument does not actually apply as much here, as spectate-autobalance was not nearly as common back then.

With more players in matches things will just get worse. The undermanned team will be more likely to have a rallybot, and also more likely to have more rallybots. In addition the addition of people will just turn the matches into AI/AoE spamfests.

aliksyian.7642:

You shouldn’t be allowed to pick your team when you join. If you become a spectator you probably shouldn’t be allowed to rejoin as a player until the match is over.

I agree, good idea.

Also I am really happy they got rid of 8vs8.

Yasha.5963:

I am really happy they got rid of 8vs8.

there were both 8v8 and 5v5 servers, you could play 5v5 all you like…
and the 8v8 servers were all always full because alot of us preferred it to 5v3.

Liewec.2896:

Yasha.5963:

I am really happy they got rid of 8vs8.

there were both 8v8 and 5v5 servers, you could play 5v5 all you like…
and the 8v8 servers were all always full because alot of us preferred it to 5v3.

The only reason why someone would prefer 8vs8 over 5vs5 would be because it was way faster to roflstomp the losing team that way.

Liewec.2896:

Yasha.5963:

I am really happy they got rid of 8vs8.

there were both 8v8 and 5v5 servers, you could play 5v5 all you like…
and the 8v8 servers were all always full because alot of us preferred it to 5v3.

Yes it was terrible when there were also 8vs8 servers, especially when they were all at the top of the list.

Hotjoins are a total embarrassment to Anet.

All they do is teach bad habits and have nothing but lopsided ‘competition’.

The only thing it’s marginally good for is testing builds, but anyone relying on how they do with a build in hotjoin is in for a rude awakening.

Even WoW 2.0 (or whenever they first released non-competitive battlegrounds) had a better setup over 10 years ago.

Actually it does matter now in the grand scheme. Pvp now gives reward tracks. PVE rewards. That means exploits = PvE balance issues.

SPESHAL.9106:

Hotjoins are a total embarrassment to Anet.

All they do is teach bad habits and have nothing but lopsided ‘competition’.

The only thing it’s marginally good for is testing builds, but anyone relying on how they do with a build in hotjoin is in for a rude awakening.

Even WoW 2.0 (or whenever they first released non-competitive battlegrounds) had a better setup over 10 years ago.

I totally disagree.

Hotjoin is an amazing and fun avenue to get some of the best and most balanced “battleground” type pvp in any mmo to date. It kittens all over WoW, that’s for certain. The only thing other mmo spvp-type gameplay has over GW2 hotjoin or tourney is more gamemodes.

The spectator mode in addition to the pve rewards has corrupted the game to an extent, because now you get people playing hotjoin for the rewards and not just for the fun of it or to practise.

Because spectator mode essentially gives players a way to “cheat” and a reward for successfully doing so we are inevitably seeing that kind of behaviour.

I really think that the devs need to get on top of the spectator mode issue. Right now the culture in hotjoin/spvp is still largely positive for the game. However, there is a risk of a rot setting in, and in the end the overwhelming culture could become similar to the situation in Neverwinter online (for example), where it became the accepted norm to “surf” through games until a player found a winning team, and is almost completely wrecked by bots and afkers sitting in spawn to collect rewards.

At any rate it is just preposterous imo to claim that spvp in other mmos is better than what we have in GW2 (other than in terms of game modes).