Guild Wars 2

I believe that Anet implemented way too many rewards in Ranked PvP, and that feels like the main cause of so many problems for this season. Rewards are supposed to given to recognize achievements or hard work. Thanks to the fact that rewards are given even when you lose, this leads to two separate problems.

• 1) There are no real incentives to play hard to win. Sure you get a lot of chest pips if you win, but when you lose, pips are given anyway. If a player only cares about getting chest pips, then chests can be farmed as long as the person has spare time. In addition to this, some lower quality players would have no incentive to get better. In psychology, we’re taught that positive outcomes need to be reinforced to produce results. I think it was B.F. Skinner who concluded that behavior is a consequence of reinforcement. So if you reinforce negative outcomes, the subject won’t be able to unlearn bad behaviors. Map strategies like proper rotations, whole teams standing in DH traps, or the need for 2+ people to stand around and cap an uncontested point will persist.
• 2) Ranked PvP is no longer a true competition. If you have low skilled players, or players who don’t care about winning, this is detrimental to the others on the random teams they’re placed. Players who do want to do good are at the mercy of the RNG gods should the lower quality teammate cause a loss. I’ve lost over 100 MMR in Silver due to one or two poor players turning guaranteed wins into heartbreaking losses.

My solution to the current problems would be to separate the queues. One for Rewards and one for MMR. The first would keep the idea that everyone will be rewarded regardless of effort. If MO wants all players to feel like winners, then this queue is for them. The second would act as a true competition. Rewards are only for the winners, and losing is severely punished by negative reward pips. If you’ve reached a reward tier, losing will push you backwards, and reward progress is frozen until you win enough to get back to your previous level. This will effectively weed out players who only care about rewards.

Having an entirely separate queue for rewards is highly unnecessary. All that needs to happen is remove rewards from losing matches. That never should of been a thing to start with.

Shaogin.2679:

Having an entirely separate queue for rewards is highly unnecessary. All that needs to happen is remove rewards from losing matches. That never should of been a thing to start with.

Anet won’t do this. Their current focus is to be inclusive to all players. That alone is commendable, since MO is thinking of rewarding everyone. But I think they failed to realize that Ranked PvP is supposed to be competitive. We’ll have to see what happens with season 2.0 in a few months.

It already existed that way with reward tracks. More progress for winning, less for losing. This is just an extension of that philosophy. The thing is, you are not rewarding losing, you are rewarding for playing. Losing has a negative punishment (if we are sticking with Skinnerian behaviorism) in the form of 7 lost pips, and winning has a positive reinforcement.

Moonsinn.5382:

It already existed that way with reward tracks. More progress for winning, less for losing. This is just an extension of that philosophy. The thing is, you are not rewarding losing, you are rewarding for playing. Losing has a negative punishment (if we are sticking with Skinnerian behaviorism) in the form of 7 lost pips, and winning has a positive reinforcement.

Actually, losing is just a smaller positive reinforcement than winning. As I said, you get less pips, but the pips still move win or lose. A true negative reinforcement would be “losing” 7 pips, not losing 7 out of +10.

Rewards and losing rating is not a problem in my opinion. The problem is you have no control over composition of your team whatsoever, so in the end you are actually being rewarded/punished for other people, meanwhile your theoretical input to that is only 20%. That is the biggest issue with the current system, say whatever you are but when you are soloqueuing you play with pug and they can have gosu skills or be total noobs.

I would allow for premades of 2 players, 3 players and 5 players. Make them compete against each other and soloqueuers against each other. I don’t remember WAR! too much, but I think they had similar system.

Anyways I think the amount of players who play pvp is still too low to make such changes. They should rather think about making smaller maps for teams of 3 for example and allow for creation of arena teams just like it was in wow.

Everybody would be happy, you join with people you know and you progress together, everyone knows his role and so on. You would only have to forbid switching professions after starting the match as the entire system would be pointless with that.

The problem this creates though is through the current system, a pve player can come to pvp and afk ranked matches to farm ascended gear faster than he can earn it by actively playing pve. It’s not rewarding players for playing, as they don’t have to actually play. They just have to queue. The fix is simple, reward no pips at all unless you win the match.

If there aren’t enough players to make separate queues, do what they did in GW1 HoH – NPC teammates to fill the void on teams. I think NPC AI would be a step up over players who don’t understand PvP strategy.

I think this thread is crap. It’s not all that fast getting ascended armor if you only lose, and I think people SHOULD be rewarded for playing pvp. Let them try something new. Increase the player pool. Some might be good, some bad. Some will like it and keep playing. Other’s won’t. There’s still more incentive to win, so people are going to try. The people who suck will drop down in rating. The people who don’t won’t.

The only real solution would be to lock the Ascended armor behind a wall. Specifically, only being sold to people who are in Legendary.

The reason being is that everyone will try hard. People will want to win. It will become competitive. From selling Ascended to nearly everyone, it can then be sold to nearly noone, which I think is more optimal given how difficult it is to obtain Ascended armor normally.

Moonsinn.5382:

I think this thread is crap. It’s not all that fast getting ascended armor if you only lose, and I think people SHOULD be rewarded for playing pvp. Let them try something new. Increase the player pool. Some might be good, some bad. Some will like it and keep playing. Other’s won’t. There’s still more incentive to win, so people are going to try. The people who suck will drop down in rating. The people who don’t won’t.

If new players want to try PvP, there’s Unranked and Hotjoin. Right now, new or lower quality players are populating the mid to lower tiers. When they join my team, it makes it so much harder to climb the ladder. That has pushed me and countless others to a lower MMR than we should be.

To be clear, I’m ok with losing if my team was outplayed. But because of the rewards in PvP being rewarded regardless, it creates no incentive to give 100% effort in matches. Some losses end up being guaranteed due to this. So I’m not ok with losing due to bad decisions by pugs.

Can’t really agree this season is so competitive so many high quality matches as never before and on top of that we have fitting rewards nowhere too much or easy to get for pure pvp players like me it’s perfect to make even some gold with pvp. If you don’t get competitive matches that’s not cause of ‘pvp gold farmers’ but because you’re just not good enough to get competitive matches no offense but that’s the reason then. Please stop complaining about to high rewards makes no sense at all…

Yes, gank all the rewards from SPVP, cut off the supply of fresh blood and allow it to continue shrinking. I understand some people’s frustration with totally clueless people entering a sorta competative scene just for rewards, but I think the game mode needs it, Not all of these strict PVE players are just going to grind their PVP ascended armor and leave, some will develop a taste for PVP content and in time you’ll have better and decent players. At least that’s the idea I think Anet is going for.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Moonsinn.5382:

I think this thread is crap. It’s not all that fast getting ascended armor if you only lose, and I think people SHOULD be rewarded for playing pvp. Let them try something new. Increase the player pool. Some might be good, some bad. Some will like it and keep playing. Other’s won’t. There’s still more incentive to win, so people are going to try. The people who suck will drop down in rating. The people who don’t won’t.

If new players want to try PvP, there’s Unranked and Hotjoin. Right now, new or lower quality players are populating the mid to lower tiers. When they join my team, it makes it so much harder to climb the ladder. That has pushed me and countless others to a lower MMR than we should be.

To be clear, I’m ok with losing if my team was outplayed. But because of the rewards in PvP being rewarded regardless, it creates no incentive to give 100% effort in matches. Some losses end up being guaranteed due to this. So I’m not ok with losing due to bad decisions by pugs.

People do start in unranked. You have to be at least rank 20 to play ranked queue. I’m not saying rank 20 means you know everything about conquest, but they’ve at least learned some basics and developed a starting MMR. I honestly think that people are looking for a scapegoat for why they aren’t objectively as good as they think they are. I’m only at tier 2 silver, and I’ve seen pretty much 0 matches with people who don’t at least know the basics.

Placement matches are higly volatile and decide how much grinding a good player needs. And rewards on loosing was a realy bad idea. Reward track OK but a loss is a loss. No pip or shard gain. MMR might settle after hundreds of matches but that is not funny for good players that had bad placement. Rank is competative. Players there should know how to play their class and conquest. A won matches per class to enter would be a good start. And rewards fixed on specific classes in ranked is also bad.

Deathok.2914:

Can’t really agree this season is so competitive so many high quality matches as never before and on top of that we have fitting rewards nowhere too much or easy to get for pure pvp players like me it’s perfect to make even some gold with pvp. If you don’t get competitive matches that’s not cause of ‘pvp gold farmers’ but because you’re just not good enough to get competitive matches no offense but that’s the reason then. Please stop complaining about to high rewards makes no sense at all…

Gold is where the competition begins. At least at that tier, everyone understands how PvP works. I was half way there until a string of RNG losses dropped my MMR. But that leads to another problem some players brought up. When you win, you get way less points than when you lose. Example: +13, -17, +11, – 14, -14, -12, -14, -11. It’s like you only get +80% of the rating for each win, and lose the full amount for each loss.

I get that some players feel that if you don’t belong in your current level, that means you should be able to carry 2 or 3 lower quality teammates. That’s unrealistic. Some pugs don’t read Team Chat. Even pinging or drawing on the mini map to show rotations doesn’t help. So if they keep making bad decisions, that guarantees losses. And with rewards coming so easily, a loss doesn’t affect them mentally. So then they won’t get better the next time around. It’s a vicious cycle of repeated mistakes for each team they land on.

No I can not agree. I am a long time pvper and ranked pvp is finally getting the rewards it deserves.

I think this whole thing has to be looked at from another angle.

I know the cause of this is new players going into lower tiered ranked pvp and not doing well. Don’t take the rewards away from yourself.

Identify a way to avoid, new players doing poorly. Definitely need some reworks on how matchmaking is working, definitely need to consider that people need more tutorials and more guidance in terms of learning to pvp.

Every season we have people that afk, and do horrible things in ranked pvp, sometimes just for the sheer enjoyment of ruining your match. This isnt a new thing, it is just with a higher population of people it becomes a bit more rampant. Perhaps people who are afk and not moving for more than a minute shouldn’t recieve PvP reward track progress whether the team wins or loses.

I like the idea of punishing AFKers or trolls who throw matches. But leaving it to the AI of the system to make that determination is problematic. You need an actual GM to view what’s going on so that there are no false positives.

As for avoiding lower quality players, that’s something Anet would have a harder time with. Some players had an artificially too high MMR at the beginning of this season. Lose a few matches, and not play a few days, and their MMR is still higher than it should be. Maybe something like a decay of -100 MMR each day you don’t play, regardless of your tier?

For rewards, I really do think that this needs to be looked at further. Losing matches should not gain you anything.

I don’t think there is a problem with the rewards in PvP, or that you still get pips if you lose. The problem is that the rewards in other game modes are bad. For instance, many people are basically farming the same fractal or meta event over and over, which seems like an indicator of a bad reward system. So some people come to PvP, even if they don’t want to, to make progress.

Also the rating system should be designed to handle an influx of new players without causing too much disruption for established players. I don’t think it does that currently, but the fix should be for the rating system, not discourage new players from trying the game mode. More placement matches and a lower initial rating for new players might help the situation.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I believe that Anet implemented way too many rewards in Ranked PvP, and that feels like the main cause of so many problems for this season. Rewards are supposed to given to recognize achievements or hard work. Thanks to the fact that rewards are given even when you lose, this leads to two separate problems.

• 1) There are no real incentives to play hard to win. Sure you get a lot of chest pips if you win, but when you lose, pips are given anyway. If a player only cares about getting chest pips, then chests can be farmed as long as the person has spare time. In addition to this, some lower quality players would have no incentive to get better. In psychology, we’re taught that positive outcomes need to be reinforced to produce results. I think it was B.F. Skinner who concluded that behavior is a consequence of reinforcement. So if you reinforce negative outcomes, the subject won’t be able to unlearn bad behaviors. Map strategies like proper rotations, whole teams standing in DH traps, or the need for 2+ people to stand around and cap an uncontested point will persist.
• 2) Ranked PvP is no longer a true competition. If you have low skilled players, or players who don’t care about winning, this is detrimental to the others on the random teams they’re placed. Players who do want to do good are at the mercy of the RNG gods should the lower quality teammate cause a loss. I’ve lost over 100 MMR in Silver due to one or two poor players turning guaranteed wins into heartbreaking losses.

My solution to the current problems would be to separate the queues. One for Rewards and one for MMR. The first would keep the idea that everyone will be rewarded regardless of effort. If MO wants all players to feel like winners, then this queue is for them. The second would act as a true competition. Rewards are only for the winners, and losing is severely punished by negative reward pips. If you’ve reached a reward tier, losing will push you backwards, and reward progress is frozen until you win enough to get back to your previous level. This will effectively weed out players who only care about rewards.

It’s ok once everyone had filled out there chests once and got all of the ascended shards they can for this season, the “loot hunters” will go back to what ever game mode and not be seen till next season. It only took me a week of a few games every day to finish all the chests, now its just gold and dyes and trans charges. Seeing as i have well over 300 now, can’t see anything other than the gold reward keeping me playing the league. But then even that’s not going to be with the hassle soon as the players pool shrinks and only the bad, and “pro” players are left. Both of which can be as bad as each other if you happen to make a mistake. I’ll probably give ranked another week, then just go back to unranked where everything is more relaxed.

Mushin.3928:

I don’t think there is a problem with the rewards in PvP, or that you still get pips if you lose. The problem is that the rewards in other game modes are bad. For instance, many people are basically farming the same fractal or meta event over and over, which seems like an indicator of a bad reward system. So some people come to PvP, even if they don’t want to, to make progress.

Also the rating system should be designed to handle an influx of new players without causing too much disruption for established players. I don’t think it does that currently, but the fix should be for the rating system, not discourage new players from trying the game mode. More placement matches and a lower initial rating for new players might help the situation.

This is true. There are WvW players doing PvP simply to get free Ascended gear rewards.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Mushin.3928:

I don’t think there is a problem with the rewards in PvP, or that you still get pips if you lose. The problem is that the rewards in other game modes are bad. For instance, many people are basically farming the same fractal or meta event over and over, which seems like an indicator of a bad reward system. So some people come to PvP, even if they don’t want to, to make progress.

Also the rating system should be designed to handle an influx of new players without causing too much disruption for established players. I don’t think it does that currently, but the fix should be for the rating system, not discourage new players from trying the game mode. More placement matches and a lower initial rating for new players might help the situation.

This is true. There are WvW players doing PvP simply to get free Ascended gear rewards.

I thought the pvp gear wasn’t usable in wvw.

Edit: nvm, I think I’m wrong and maybe stupid…definitely ugly.

Actually no. GW2 is a massive GEAR grind, one of the reasons pvp was as dead as it was is because there was no benefit for doing it.

Bling alone Just does not cut it when you have to invest a massive effort in the main games mini game.

The rewards for losing matches exist to provide motivation if your side is losing. Remove them and we’d be right back to afk’ers and abandoned matches and falling population.

PvP is voluntary. Remove the rewards, remove the players.

You only remove rewards for losing. If AFKing and abandoning becomes a problem again, then it’s on Anet to have GMs ready to block these players from joining Ranked matches.

GM Chris used to kick AFK players out of PvE maps during the Scarlet Invasion events. Why can’t that be done in PvP?

The good news is, your terrible suggestion isn’t going to fly. PvP needs these players more than they need guys like you at the moment.

Second, you give reward for losing in other to have a game. If you take it away and a team is behind, why would they attempt to keep playing? Either way there is no perfect solution, but there is a solution that is beneficial to the game aka majority of players and arena net smartly choose that option.

You’re correct on one point Platinum. Anet is trying to reward a majority of the playerbase, and that is the main problem. It’s not a smart thing to artificially inflate the PvP population by bringing in cannon fodder for more skill players to roll. There needs to be an incentive to be good.

Now onto the other point you made about losing. When you give away rewards for losing, you create Entitlement. You reinforce the mindset that if you don’t do good, oh well, I’ll still get stuff. If your team is behind, and there are no longer rewards for losing, these players try a lot harder to win. More so if you introduce punishing mechanics for the losing team.

I honestly don’t understand the complaints about the reward system. I think this is the best system they’ve implemented yet. It keeps newer players motivated despite the fact they might lose repeatedly due to being new. And for veterans, it’s nice to get some gold and ascended stuff when you’re aiming for the leaderboard.

The issue is exactly the opposite. The way pvp progresses in this game is by attracting new people to it. Anyway what i really want them to do is implement a better turorial system (more in deph, bettee npc sparring partners sporting current meta builds) and to get ascended shards on the Byzantium chest during repeats. I’d be satisfied with just getting back 10 shards every time i complete the sixth tier.

omg,i cant even belive this topic,are you serious?
so it was ok when you didnt get anything after 200 games and 80% just stoped playing pvp all together,but god forbit if ppl getting something for hour of playing? 1g for 2-5 games,rly thats the issue you have with pvp, i have 5000 other problems with pvp,but rewards isnt one of them.
be glad that some1 is finaly in pvp,if you wana take it seriously,go in duo and tryhard,you will get to diamond somehow,but take away reward from new players which are allready so confused about whole pvp is just nonsence.