Guild Wars 2

So, We’ve got an update that reduced the passive gameplay of “certain classes.” This was the first step in a positive direction.

But it’s not over yet…with Season 7 looming closer, we still have yet to face the spooky monster that lurks in the corner of the room… Low Population.

Background
The low population count in Season 6 caused the matchmaker to hand out imbalanced matches. Huge forum arguments developed, about what the real “culprit” was behind the bad matchmaking.

Folks like myself believe that the culprit was a mix of stale game balance, combined with the rewards nerf and monotone diversity to game modes. All three culminated in the exodus of all the PVE’ers who stuck around in S5, and the departure of veteran PVPers who were getting tired of the meta-game. These in turn, caused the matchmaking to hand out terrible matches, causing even more players who remained for S6 to give up…placing us in the situation we had at the end of S6.

Others believed that matchmaking was the sole reason for the pvp population decrease, Believing that the matchmaking was always terrible (in S5->S6), which caused people to stop playing, which in turn causes more people to leave due to low population.
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The death of ESL was the nail in the proverbial coffin and set the tone for S6. If i have to make an analogy, you could consider this “the great depression” of Gw2 PVP. The great depression wasn’t solved in a day’s worth of patch notes. I think to get the community back into a healthy state, we need many additional positive changes that will reverse the damage done in S6.

This is where we can begin having our discussion. What else is needed to make guild wars 2 pvp great again?

Get rid of the current trait system. Bring back the old one, or something similar. Allow people to make creative builds (and save them). Because right now, the cookie-cutter bull is boring and inspires nothing.

TheTimelessShadow.2958:

Get rid of the current trait system. Bring back the old one, or something similar.

I don’t think they will ever revamp the trait system.

I do think that the current trait system has potential, and can be built upon to increase diversity and complexity.

TheTimelessShadow.2958:

Allow people to make creative builds (and save them). Because right now, the cookie-cutter bull is boring and inspires nothing.

Yea, totally agree. Perhaps some nice QOL changes to PVP could do the trick as well.

Perhaps build templates, allowing duels in the lobby, more game modes, and more maps could reinvigorate the PVP scene. I’m hoping we can see changes like these before the next expansion, but indeed these changes would HAVE to come out in the next expansion.

i think the biggest possible positive change would be to boost all current useless/bad traits+utility skills so that there is more variety to choose from. more variety means more builds and with that diversity we wont be stuck in 1 stale role.

The writing was on the wall since HoT was released. Veteran PvPers immediately realized how brain-dead overpowered elite specs were from the start. It just took some a while to finally give up.

The dramatic drop in population from S5 to S6 is mainly a result of a dramatic spike in population from S4 to S5. For S5 they finally implemented a proper ranking system and that, in addition to easy ascended items, drew a lot of people back to PvP. But when the balance patch for S6 hit and it showed absolutely no progress in resolving the awful state of gameplay, those people just gave up again on PvP. If you draw a line from S4 to S6, it would be the same downward trend as the rest of HoT.

GW2 PvP is dead until the profession design team is “re-assigned”. They’ve shown that they’re incapable of making or unwilling to make the major changes that need to be made in order to save the game. I’m certain it’s the former, as we’ve had a serious of “what were you thinking” changes like daze on thief shortbow. There is absolutely no concept of risk vs. reward or trade-offs.

Even if we find the golden years of GW2 PvP and miraculously bring forth that era to present, what good will that do?

I feel the Devs have a lot to tap into in terms of in-game functionality. In-game tournaments, 3v3 mini TDM with rounds, fun mini PvP games between seasons, Stronghold functionalities.

It really comes down to Anet not wanting to experiment with GW2 PvP, rather, the lack of resources to do so.

From a 90% Pve’er point of view. I personally enjoy the 1v1 duel servers far more than a capture the point fiesta though I’ve played a fair bit of ranked every season.

1. S6 ranked was the same toxic environment without the same kind of incentive kitten to play in. (AKA Welfare ascended armor). It was a lazy temporary solution to population which wore off exactly as long as it took someone to play 100 matches.

2. Most farmers got their wings already and moved on.

3. There isn’t really of a tutorial about capturing points, rotating etc or even sensible default builds for some classes. cough revenant

4. Really bipolar matchmaking. In the worst cases I could 1v3 players whom were obviously new to the pvp scene. Other times, I would be against duoed ex-pro top 100’s crash into my Mid Tier Gold game and obviously wipe soloqueue team 500-80. ¯\(?)/¯

5. Some detailed explanation behind balancing decisions would be nice. Not every player in this game multiclasses or spends the time to learn a second playstyle.

6. General community attitude at the moment for my pvx/ pve guilds are “Just do it for the wings.” When asked what they thought about the mode itself, it’s mostly dislike or something along the lines of disgust from veteran players.

Weo weo.6378:

From a 90% Pve’er point of view. I personally enjoy the 1v1 duel servers far more than a capture the point fiesta though I’ve played a fair bit of ranked every season.

Right! I’m a duel server local, and the atmosphere is so awesome, with people versing each other, others learning, others joking around, talking to each other and having fun. If they do put dueling in the lobby, i hope it doesn’t void the atmosphere that the servers provide, but instead bring that atmosphere into the heart of the mists as well.

Saiyan.1704:

It really comes down to Anet not wanting to experiment with GW2 PvP, rather, the lack of resources to do so.

True, I assume that the lack of resources are due to the production of the expansion, and is the reason we haven’t seen all that much change in PVP other than lackluster balance changes. Perhaps the devs think that the expansion will bring about new pvp goodies and enhancements, which will coincide with the flux of new people buying the expansion, which will increase the pvp population “back to normal.”

Problem with that, is the new expansion is about a half a year away still…i’d be surprised if anyone is still pvping at all when it arrives.

A majority of what people are saying on this thread is that the build diversity is still lacking, and that the only way to fix pvp is to increase the build diversity. This makes sense and it’s a core reason as to why GW1 was so successful…there were so many builds one could create, not only for yourself, but even for team builds (like who remembers rainbow spike…Invokespike, spiritway…hell all the -ways!

This brings us to a new problem…which is why is there no build diversity in the first place? Someone mentioned revamping the trait system, which i don’t think ANET will do…but i do believe that the trait system has potential to be enhanced, to increase diversity exponentially. (My little idea was to add some sort of point system to each trait… you get 25 points to spend, and each trait has 5 levels to invest in, the higher points invested into that trait the more powerful it becomes.)

Others have said that unused skills need to be buffed to be inline with all the other overpowered kitten introduced with HOT…but idk if more powercreep is even a good idea at this point.

JusticeRetroHunter.7684:

Folks like myself believe that the culprit was a mix of stale game balance, combined with the rewards nerf and monotone diversity to game modes. All three culminated in the exodus of all the PVE’ers who stuck around in S5, and the departure of veteran PVPers who were getting tired of the meta-game. These in turn, caused the matchmaking to hand out terrible matches, causing even more players who remained for S6 to give up…placing us in the situation we had at the end of S6.

There’s plenty of reasons why, but the truth of the matter is just that this game is five years old, and has very little momentum going for it following Heart of Thorn’s divisive if not outright negative reception from the PvE, PvP, and WvW communities. I am hopeful that the next expansion will perhaps turn things around, but it’s not very common that games that are over five years old see an influx of a ton of players. Hell, even Heart of Thorns sold below expectations, and that’s including the fact that many players purchased multiple accounts for Mystic Coins.

Personally I wouldn’t be surprised if ArenaNet began working on Guild Wars 3 in the next couple years.