Guild Wars 2

So SPvP has been pretty neglected since GW2 release. We always got crappy rewards (excluding wintersday) and no one deals with the frustrating OP meta builds more than SPvPers. Thankfully though, come the 15th PvPers are going to get a little love from A-Net. The crappy part, like most A-Net patches, is this love won’t be realized without a few downsides getting in the way (its hard to keep everyone happy).

The Dragon Rank Controversy

If you played GW1, you’re probably not a stranger to obscenely high requirements to get a respectable PvP rank. The GW1 PvP community used to use these ranks as a way of gaining prestige. Understandably, this mindset continued with the release of GW2 and the ridciulous rank point requirement to get dragon only strengthened it.

A-Net has said multiple times (even on multiple community forums) that the current ranking system is too unattainable, even to the hardcore players that have the time to play all day everyday. This is the core reason why ranks had to change. Now, because the PvP community historically attaches prestige to the ranks, lowering the requirements to get dragon rank correspondingly lowers the prestige associated with dragon rank (and all of the ranks below it). A-Net knows this, and they said on last week’s Ready Up that it is not in their vision of GW2 to have these ranks be the measure of prestige, but rather the new ladder system will be used for that purpose. No one really likes change that much, especially when ranks have been associated with PvP prestige since the release of GW1
(back in 2005). It is only natural that changing the measure prestige that players have used for nearly 10 years would foster some community unrest.

With that said, I don’t feel like I deserve Dragon rank, I would even be willing to bet that some rank 70s don’t even feel like they deserve dragon rank. Dragon rank has been so unattainable to most people that I can’t imagine anyone truly feeling like they deserve it. What we need to keep in mind though, is that ranks are not supposed to be a measure of prestige anymore. Ladder rewards will fulfill that role, and I’m confident that A-Net can pull it off.

Rewards for PvP

Reward tracks are a nice start for helping PvPers get over their monetary problems; but essentially they’re PvE rewards (A-Net calls them GW2 rewards), that we will then be able to sell on the TP (or do whatever) and make money. I’m 100% ok with the new reward track system, I try to play all of the areas of the game, and being able to work towards whatever I want just feels like freedom.

PvP players are also indirectly getting very rewarded with the new wardrobe system. High ranks are more likely to have more skins in their PvP locker that will become automatically available through the wardrobe come feature patch day. I think that a lot of PvPers are undervaluing A-Nets decision to give us all of these skins. You gotta think that PvE/WvW kids’ wardrobes are starting off with the clothes on their backs and nothing more, where we will all have 100s of skins immediately available (some of which cost 100s of gold on TP for the PvE version).

Achievments in PvP

Since the top 1% of spvp ranks (r54-55+) will be dragon rank, that means that we will all have most of the achievments in the PvP tab maxed out (all the way up to Legendary Champion). I would very much like to see more achievments added to keep us busy until the new ladder system is underway. Adding tiers (and new titles) to the champion titles would be a very nice start — 150 wins isn’t much.

Conclusion

I’m hopeful for the future of GW2 PvP, I’m kind of sad that tons of Dragon ranks will be born on the 15th (me included), but I think that we’ll all get over it. There’s no disputing the fact that the ranking system had to change, and as long as the ladder system rewards properly give us the prestige that we feel we’re losing with the with the Dragon rank busniess, then I think we’ll all be better off. It’s a bold move by A-Net, but like I said, I’m hopeful for the future.

This is a good post. I have just two things to say:

1. Higher ranked players like OE who are r70+ should not be shafted and get rewarded less than r55+ players when it comes to retroactive chests.

2. Any form of progression is cool. Whether it’s ranks or tourney wins or whatever. The idea is to always have a higher goal to reach. At no point should someone say “I’ve achieved it all. Now I have no more goals to reach and no more reasons to play”.

The problem with leaderboards and MMRs is that they’re temporary. You lose progression if you stop playing, or experiment with a new build and lose repeatedly. I think that’s wrong. Progression should be permanent. Else no one will want to do anything different. Rewards once given should not be taken away.

To this end, I think titles for new achievements will be awesome. But what is preventing people from making them the “new rank”? The fact of the matter is that there will always be people far, far ahead of everyone else. And they need goals as well. So those who’re below will face the same problem they’re facing now with ranks.

bhagwad.4281:

1. Higher ranked players like OE who are r70+ should not be shafted and get rewarded less than r55+ players when it comes to retroactive chests.

This is definately an unfortunate outcome, though I think its the principal of the thing that OE is concerned with, not the actual reward chests that he’s losing out on. 15 reward chests or whatever isn’t worth complaining about itself, it’s the principal of the thing.

bhagwad.4281:

2. Any form of progression is cool. Whether it’s ranks or tourney wins or whatever. The idea is to always have a higher goal to reach. At no point should someone say “I’ve achieved it all. Now I have no more goals to reach and no more reasons to play”.

Yeah, I kind of feel like I’ve “beat the game” as far as PvP is concerned. This is why I’d like to see a whole bunch of achievments added along with the rest of the stuff coming on feature patch day.

bhagwad.4281:

The problem with leaderboards and MMRs is that they’re temporary. You lose progression if you stop playing, or experiment with a new build and lose repeatedly. I think that’s wrong. Progression should be permanent. Else no one will want to do anything different. Rewards once given should not be taken away.

An unranked queue that still uses matchmaking might be nice for this reason.

Ultimately I feel that many people seem to have a problem just knowing that someone has reached a unachievable (to them) goal. So they say “Ranks don’t mean anything”, while at the same time being vociferous supporters of the removal of ranks. Why? Because when it comes down to it, ranks do mean something – at least to them. Otherwise there would be no reason to remove it.

So if we have an achievement for really really high up players (like the 10,000 tournaments won achievement), they will then object to that, saying “It’s too hard. It should never be so far away” not realizing that those goals are the only things left to achieve for many of us.

So the issue is a deeper one. People don’t like to be reminded that there are others who have done way more than them, at the same time saying that they don’t care.

bhagwad.4281:

Ultimately I feel that many people seem to have a problem just knowing that someone has reached a unachievable (to them) goal. So they say “Ranks don’t mean anything”, while at the same time being vociferous supporters of the removal of ranks. Why? Because when it comes down to it, ranks do mean something – at least to them. Otherwise there would be no reason to remove it.

Well lets be frank here, if ranks really didn’t mean anything, and no one cared about them, than no one would be talking about it on the forums. A-Net planned to remove ranks, but after they got an overwhelming flood of player feedback in support of keeping ranks (and making them attainable), they decided to take it in a different direction. We were probably very close to losing rank finishers all together — if that happened we only would be left with whatever prestigous rewards the ladder system gives us.

Just a quick word from me on the Ranks themselves.

I think in the first 5 months maybe rank meant something. (Of GW2)

Rank hasnt really meant anything for a long time. I feel like Anet may be rewarding people with that rank and the finishers etc that will come with it for sticking with GW2 and spvp in general.

The main source of prestige atm is the leader boards, but like they said there is more coming for players to test themselves against others in a ‘prestige’ manner.

Ok Dragon is the best rank, but you get awesome rewards being that high. The games been out for a year and a half, not many are near.

To get NEW players in spvp we need to attract them, if you were a new player and saw that people had played spvp solidly and daily for over a year and weren’t even top rank how would you feel? Probably something like:

‘Dam, this spvp rank be high! Ill never catch up and be as good as those guys’

Also Skyhammer ruined any legitimate claim for anyone to claim they are awesome from their rank alone. Rank is experience of the mode and not quality of the player.

As I suppose, all upcomming Blog entries will deal with the Megaserver and there are no more new things comming for PvP.

My resume:

Balancing:
I like, that there are some, but I wont praise ANet for those, as they were due for a long time.

Rework of the Reward System:
This is also sth. I see very neutral. Nobody knows, what exatly will be unlockable besides dungeon skins. So I’m sceptical, as we didn’t get any kind of tracks for Legendaries or other “rare skins”. Especially, that for max. quantity, you will have to do PvE (dungeon modes) is very bitter.

New Locker System:
Big Meh. That skins will now be useable PvX gives on the one hand PvP players a slight advantage in Quantity, as they already had skins in the PvP locker. However in my opinion, the PvE players advantage in quality (Legendaries, a lot of other rare skins, which weren’t obtainable via PvP) is bigger.
And the facts, that we will now have to pay for every skin change and only have one PvX appearance are for me 2 big downsides of this.

New Traits, Juwels, Runes, TDM Map etc:
Those are the only actually “new” things in PvP.
I also sceptical towards those, as they bring more stuff which needs to be balanced.
Not to mention that all of them have to be unlocked via gold (quite a big amount).
The new TDM Map is nice, but I only see it as a new Map. It simply gets TDM as it doesn’t have any other mechanics or capture points. 1 New map in ~6 (?) months isn’t that extraordinary.

All in all, I have to admit, I’m not that impressed by this “big” feature patch.
The majority of the “new” features are Reworks.
There’s not very much, they actually added to the PvP system.

We’ll probably face a new Balancing and a new Meta and have some fun in the new map for maybe a month or so, but that’s it.