Guild Wars 2

I am not sure if spvp dying, but it really need some adjustment.
Its a long thread so I have grouped all passage with sub title for easier reading.

Lets begin with competitive pvp first.
Now, tournament queuing time is getting longer and longer, both free and paid. But no matter what reasons behind this, I think Arenanet shouldn’t take tournament as a main focus of competitive matchmaking.

Why current tournament is not good enough:
1.Right now tournament require 8 teams to start, while these 8 team are not chosen based on skill level, which is due to lack of ranking system in gw2. So player will sometimes forced to face the team which skill level are much higher, vice-versa.

2. Require 7 other teams to queue at the same time may be hard in non-peak hour. I never played paid tournament not because I don’t want to play, instead I queue for over 6 hour still couldn’t get enough of team (Sorry I am Asian, so may be its because of my timezone). Nothing is fun when a game cant even started, you know?

Introducing another kind of matchmaking system
I think tournament is a good idea for special event/festival, but shouldn’t be the main matchmaking system for usual day. I believe there are many pvper already asked for normal skill based matchmaking (2 team), instead of 8 team tournament. Using WoW arena as example, its matchmaking (not the game type) is just so good, fast and convenient which is the best mmorpg pvp matchmaking system I ever meet.
Why this is better:
1. Faster, of course.
2. Skill based, player are always against enemy with similar skill level.
3. Since it is skill based, its more easy to be implemented with ranking, which many of us are asking for, too.( But not QP leaderboard, its not ranking. It just a record who is spending the most time on paid tournament)

From the blog and response so far I believe Arena.net is still happy with tournament. Its fine, but we need a faster matchmaking, instead of waiting for unknown time never know if there are enough team queuing.

Can tournament be implemented with ranking?
Its not impossible, but its hard to have 8 team with similar skill level together at the same time. So I still believe normal matchmaking (2 teams) is still better for ranking/competitive system.

I am afraid in the future we will have more kind of tournament if I didn’t open this thread, which splitting the whole pvp community, making the queuing longer and harder. So please, instead of adding new tournament in the future, I prefer adding a new matchmaking system like I mentioned above, or making the tournament smaller for easier matchmaking if you really want to keep tournament. Larger tournament should be reserved for special event.

Ranking and reward
And again, we don’t need QP leaderboard, we need actual ranking system for competitive. Right now the tournament reward aren’t attractive enough for competitive player. I believe competitive decent player want something that can distinguish themselves from non-decent player, like special gear, or ranking which is visible to other (skill based, not time based), for showing off mainly.

Casual pvp:
So how about casual pvp (hot join)? I believe adding more game mode should be a big help already. In gw2, we have seen some funny activity, like the one in norn main city, and those from Halloween. Since hot join designed for casual or non-competitive I believe, adding more game mode similar to those activity should be welcome.

Make use of the activities which already implemented in game
Take Halo as a example (I think many of you played it before), besides traditional team slayer and objective mode, there are also action snack, infection, racing, etc which people enjoy them very much. I think GW2 hot join can learn from it.

Now the activity in norn main city(sorry forget the name) are local server based, so it always lack of player. If those activity can be implemented as cross server, plus rewarding glory, and let us queue in heart of mist, I believe heart of mist (or spvp) population should be considerably increased. Why make them rewarding glory? I suppose the rank (not the competitive ranking I mentioned before) in spvp is not for showing off your skill level, right? So it should be OK to reward glory for those “funny” game mode.

Special event for promotion
Also Arenanet you may consider having double glory weekend something like that, every week, which promote a specific game type. Those special event would probably help attracting people who are not pvp oriented.

That is it, thanks for reading, sorry for some grammatically mistake Please feel free to share your opinion, especially for tournament matchmaking issue and new game mode/type.

I’ll just copy paste from another thread for a way of repopularizing sPvP and a new rewarding system:

Along with a ranking system, I think reintroducing the “favor of the gods” system will be a good way to re-popularize sPvP. For those who aren’t familiar with the favor of the gods system, here is the wiki about it from GW1:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Favor_of_the_Gods

Basically, it was a system where players earn the server certain features such as access to certain areas from accomplishing some form of ‘heroic deed.’

How this might look in GW2 is having ranked matches of top teams
(hopefully spectator mode is implemented too at this time as this will garner lots of publicity)
fighting against the top teams of another server. The team that wins earns some the favor of the gods for the server.

As for what shape or form this favor of the gods will take, I’m thinking perhaps:

-Certain unique PvE and/or WvW buff similar to the orb in WvW.

-Players being able to buy items at a discount. Or perhaps bonus magic find buff. This would mean a lot as players on the server have a slight monetary advantage and stronger presence over the Trading Post which means serious business and giving all the more reason to send top players of the server to server vs. server tournament games.

-Having access to some locked dungeon that have amazing drops only available exclusively when players have favor of the gods.

-Implement a politic system in game and winning favor of the gods give advantage in politics

This would probably also mean locking free server transfers but I think its worth it and would give players of sPvP a new form of spirit that could possibly transform the entire sPvP community.

Phira.3970:

I’ll just copy paste from another thread for a way of repopularizing sPvP and a new rewarding system:

Along with a ranking system, I think reintroducing the “favor of the gods” system will be a good way to re-popularize sPvP. For those who aren’t familiar with the favor of the gods system, here is the wiki about it from GW1:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Favor_of_the_Gods

Basically, it was a system where players earn the server certain features such as access to certain areas from accomplishing some form of ‘heroic deed.’

How this might look in GW2 is having ranked matches of top teams
(hopefully spectator mode is implemented too at this time as this will garner lots of publicity)
fighting against the top teams of another server. The team that wins earns some the favor of the gods for the server.

As for what shape or form this favor of the gods will take, I’m thinking perhaps:

-Certain unique PvE and/or WvW buff similar to the orb in WvW.

-Players being able to buy items at a discount. Or perhaps bonus magic find buff. This would mean a lot as players on the server have a slight monetary advantage and stronger presence over the Trading Post which means serious business and giving all the more reason to send top players of the server to server vs. server tournament games.

-Having access to some locked dungeon that have amazing drops only available exclusively when players have favor of the gods.

-Implement a politic system in game and winning favor of the gods give advantage in politics

This would probably also mean locking free server transfers but I think its worth it and would give players of sPvP a new form of spirit that could possibly transform the entire sPvP community.

This is a good system, but this is basically another form of WvW, so I think it better move to WvWvW section. For now spvp team is not server (world) limited, and i think this is where spvp different from WvW (besides game type of coz). Otherwise GW2 has only pve and WvW, but no spvp.
Besides, for those pve only player this may hurt them quite hard, thus making them jumping to server which is good at that (unlike WvWvW now since the bonus are minor, not so hurt in pve), making the population of servers more extreme.
Anyway this may help since some player may like that, but I prefer solution without having pvp affecting pve or reverse, virtually forcing players play what they not really enjoy.

I just remember some problem of spvp rank, so I would like to talk about it, too.

Problem of rank in spvp(not the competitive one)
As you know, many of you feel the rank take toooo long to be increased. Its fine to take long time. However look at the reward for every single rank, just chest which similar to those we can buy with glory in glory vendor, and you should be able to buy many chest when your rank is increased since it need quite a lot of glory.

The reward in the chest only change every 10th level of rank. That means the reward is only meaningful for every 10th level of rank. That makes people feel like the ranking progression is meaningless, except for every 10th level of rank, plus the stupidly long time needed to increase the rank after 29, or even 19 for some more casual player, making the rank progression not rewarding enough.

You know player always demand goal to fight for, no one will fight for a goal that take near infinite time. So that discourage many of player from ranking up.
Possible solution can be:
1. Making reward more meaningful for every single rank, not only every 10th. Can be unlocking something, or new icon, new title for showing off, your job to think Arenanet or,
2. Reducing the rank point needed for each rank, or for rank before 50, something like that, making the rank progression feel like possible, not “dream”.
3. Make the rank character based, instead of account based, thus allowing faster rank progression. So the more you play with that character, the more choice or cooler outfit you get for that character, which is make sense, right?

I would have said pvp was future until I just saw loading screen in tournaments for 5 days now

josephsora.4579:

Besides, for those pve only player this may hurt them quite hard, thus making them jumping to server which is good at that (unlike WvWvW now since the bonus are minor, not so hurt in pve), making the population of servers more extreme.
Anyway this may help since some player may like that, but I prefer solution without having pvp affecting pve or reverse, virtually forcing players play what they not really enjoy.

That’s the point. To unite the PvE and PvP community together because they affect each other.

And the buffs aren’t going to make that much of a difference. if people want to pve, they can still pve. This is more of a feature for semi-hardcore players to hard-core players who would do extra extra work for the boosts which is why this is mainly sPvP feature since most hardcore players are into sPvP rather than PvE or Wvw.

Though I do think making access to these server buffs has some problems.

Guild Wars 1 was split between NA, Europe, and Korea mainly so it was a 1/3 chance of getting Favor of the Gods whereas Guild Wars 2 has too many servers. So perhaps there could be some sort of “allaince” between servers through some “politics system” which affects not only sPvP, but WvW and Pve. This could add lots of interesting elements such as dramatic betrayals and unifications between the underdog servers.

I hope in the future they make an option to have a match up arena style system based on kills not on points and once you died your out of the match.

They had that during the Halloween event. It felt strange how people died instead of downing.

Warcraft 3 had a similar system where standard competitive game play was based on a ladder – match making system with the occassional tournament, hosted by Battlenet that anyone could enter. Tournaments would begin with a knockout round and the competitors with the most points (wins) would advance to play in a bracket. The bracket results were available to the public along with replays of many of the games. I thought this was a great system and it was all done about 10 years ago.

Another thing I can’t understand is why Anet does not provide in game voice chat for sPVP.

None of this stuff is new!

Except for the forgotten Favor of the Gods system GW2 abandoned.

I think reducing tournaments from 8 teams to 4 teams (and necessarily adjusting rewards) should be strongly considered. While I haven’t personally had any issues with queue times, I know that it’s a common complaint here. This would both reduce queue times, and reduce the necessary time investment from players as queue + pregame time + match time should be guaranteed to be under 45 minutes for all teams.

With 4 team tourneys, a loser’s bracket could be instituted. This would promote more casual interest in the tournaments because 75% of teams will win at least one match every tournament. As it currently stands, 50% of teams win absolutely nothing every tournament. Increasing the likelihood of having some success in every tournament should reduce the discouragement that can be felt by new players when they struggle to start their tpvp play.

Adding new game modes is likely not a good solution at this point in time because it dilutes an already meager population, which will increase queue times for everything.

Phira.3970:

That’s the point. To unite the PvE and PvP community together because they affect each other.

I think not all player like that if they affect each other greatly, we should be careful of what they can affect.

Phira.3970:

And the buffs aren’t going to make that much of a difference. if people want to pve, they can still pve. This is more of a feature for semi-hardcore players to hard-core players who would do extra extra work for the boosts which is why this is mainly sPvP feature since most hardcore players are into sPvP rather than PvE or Wvw.

If the buffs aren’t make that much of difference, its should be fine for all kind of player. However, if its about unlocking dungeon which contain exciting reward, something like that, that gonna hurt pure pve community.

Syeria.4812:

Adding new game modes is likely not a good solution at this point in time because it dilutes an already meager population, which will increase queue times for everything.

Adding new game mode to tournament (or other competitive matchmaking in the future) and making separate queue for each mode may have problem for already meager population now since competitive player always not so many. But my main focus on adding new game mode right now are just for casual pvp, which we don’t need to take the new funny game mode balancing super serious since its not gonna to have ranking/rating, those are just for fun.

I think its OK to add new game mode to hot join, since it still have enough player to create many room of full nowadays. Moreover, adding game mode will dilutes an already meager population is true only if the population still remain unchanged with those new features introduced, which I think its unlikely gonna happen.

Anyway, I am just talking about adding new fun game mode to casual pvp section(hot join), and I think the population of casual pvp is still high, so that is not a big problem, and would probably a big help to add more fun.

For competitive pvp, its fine to have only one game mode right now, since competitive pvper demand a fair, balancing environment for competitive more than having more not balanced game mode.

The idea is that they don’t affect each other that greatly.
The dungeon was just an idea. I’m not too sure what the rewards should be but it should be something worth spending hours for and something that isn’t too overpowering so that players don’t all move to the same server. But I do believe it is going in the right direction if it does unite the community. Its part of the philosophy of GW2, to band together.

Perhaps it could work better this way.

PvE->WvW<-sPvP

PvE affects WvW. sPvP affects WvW. But PvE does not affect sPvP and vice-versa, nor does WvW affect PvE and sPvP.

So why should WvW be sandwiched in between? Because WvW is both PvE and PvP, it makes sense that this is where PvE and PvP would meet. Currently, to have a strong character for WvW, we have to manually level a character to 80 and buy the gears by ourselves. So, already, the PvE community highly affects the WvW community, and its a good thing they did this because it feels like end-game content for your hard work on your PvE character.

To the same analogy, working hard in sPvP should also have its reward, (which it currently lacks and is the reason why I brought this up) that affects not only sPvP, but WvW as well which would increase the incentive to sPvP because of its large effects on sPvP and WvW. The reward could be anything really but it should not have any imbalances. Here’s a nifty spiced up version of the Favor of Gods system I thought up of that has three phases:

1)There will be a week long sPvP tournament that determines a weekly top representative guild for a server.

2) There will be a where a final tournament (should match WvW reset time) held in sPvP where the finalist guild from a server fights another finalist guild from another server. Basically, all server finalists will fight one another in the same tournament structure to determine ranking.

3) Based on the rankings of the servers, servers gain stronger influences over the Gods of Tyria. The next day will be an election day where the representative guilds of the servers can vote for 1 of 5 Godly Favors (Melandru, Dwayna, Balthazar, Grenth, or Kormir.) they want. All favors give server-wide WvW and sPvP buffs. No favors are greater than one another so this does not cause imbalances, it just changes the meta in an interesting way. As for what each godly favor buff actually does, it could be something interesting such as territorial advantage. Points held with server with Grenths buff for example, will cause the area to freeze and rot causing enemies who stand in it to be chilled and poisoned. Points held with Dwayna grants ally Protection and Regeneration, etc… Obviously all this will be very meta changing which is why the representative guild of a server that has the highest ranking or highest influence among the God will have greatest influence over the next weekly meta.
-
Yeah.. maybe was feasible until step 3. lol But the main idea is to give a stronger incentive to sPvP by extending influence towards WvW just as pve does through meta changing elements as a form of reward besides just skins.

nice post.. +1 for this

Phira.3970:

Yeah.. maybe was feasible until step 3. lol But the main idea is to give a stronger incentive to sPvP by extending influence towards WvW just as pve does through meta changing elements as a form of reward besides just skins.

As long as the reward is not too overpower, it should be ok.
However, I know that many of the spvp team are not full team of same server (many reason behind this, but not main focus here), thats should be a problem coz you are basically transferring spvp to a smaller WvW, which violate the original concept of spvp. For me, WvW should stay WvW, spvp should stay spvp, unless there is really no other solution. We should try not to make spvp another WvW, but they can still affect each other, just not in this way.

Moreover, there is always a big problem of that large tournament, due to timezone of various player. For example, if the top team of server A was Canadian while the top team of server B was Korean, when should be the final match hold? I think its always not possible to hold this kind of large tournament while various region of player are playing this game, and should always avoid this kind of idea.(I mean in-game event, not reality tournament)

For reward of spvp, I agree it need better reward so that spvper are more willing to spend time on, and fight for. Now spvp didn’t have anything worth for semi-competitive player to fight for (Qp leaderboard? are you kidding?).

I believe most competitive player only care of themselves, rather than their server (for those care their server should already having fun in WvW). So this can be fixed easily I think, adding ranking/rating system, while gaining access to some special outfit or other feature (not overpower stuff, but mainly for show off) exclusive for top team should be enough for competitive player keep fighting for (the awesome gladiator dragon in WoW is a good example). Competitive player, most of them, just want something can distinguish themselves from non-decent player only.

Paid tournament currently can’t do that coz many non-decent player can just join and lose the first battle, getting the reward chest, and eventually wearing the same gear of the winner in paid tournament.

For casual pvper, I think adding more game mode is enough to keep them having fun.

There are however steps that could help the game very fast and in fact are only “small adjustments”

As i said in my previous post.. you made nice summarry and your solutions are pretty much nice and i would really love them in game.

However ArenaNet was going different patch by tournaments and since these are in game allready i think they will not go out of this format so soon.

Therefore i think we should also think about how to improve current state of the game. And in current state as you pointed out its hard to get 8 team of similar lever inside one tournament.

But is that true? I still see lot of people in mists, lot of people in hot-joins. Free tournaments are poping in like 2 mins. Main issue is PAID where the queue is long like 15-20 mins. And to be honest noone want to spend time by waiting.

So what we should do to improve and to help the system? how we can improve? I said that in different topic. I do believe that the main issue right now is that PREMADE groups never moved to PAID tournaments where they are supposed to fight.

Why they never moved? There are 2 reasons.

1) some players like easy victory and playing against unorganized groups give them enough satisfaction. Shame on them, but im 100% sure there are teams like this.
2) PAID tournaments are not balanced in terms of entry fee and rewards. Its too easy to lost tickets and too hard to get them back. (actually to get them back you have to move back to free and spend there at least 3 hours.. )

So simple proposal.

1) forget the gem lottery. any random system in this just destroy the reward system and still its random !! I dont want to have random rewards that I NEED in order to CONTINUE playing.
2) balance the entry fee and rewards properly. GOAL should be that every organized premade should be able to play PAID. No matter what level of play they are, if they are full premade, they should be able to compete.

Results?
1) As i results PAID tournament quality will go down for sure. That will probably not make happy the TOP teams but these will very soon (hopefully) get custom arenas and hopefully price tournaments organized by websites.
2) PAID tournament queue times will go down rapidly. Therefore more teams will be able to join and play
3) Free tournaments will be almost (yea almost) only for solo / casual players. Therefore queue times here will probably increase but still casuals players will have easier life because they will have option to go tournament and dont get roflstomped by premade group
4) hot-joins will probably have less activity. Players will move to Free tournaments instead as they will feel the FREE TOURNAMENTS will be now more PUG / CASUAL friendly.

so what we need? just change and adjust paid tournaments so premades can play them.

When this is done, matchmaking can be implemented for paid tournaments and probably there will be still enough players to have short queue times.

One additional advantage -its fast solution, and it can bring some players back…..

Heroes Ascent in GW1 had serious waits that went from 20 minutes to even hours. I know my guild took almost three hours sometimes just to properly set up a team. Did that stop people from doing it? Nope. Even then, it remained popular. Why? Actually I don’t want to type another essay right now -_-/.

Phira.3970:

Heroes Ascent in GW1 had serious waits that went from 20 minutes to even hours. I know my guild took almost three hours sometimes just to properly set up a team. Did that stop people from doing it? Nope. Even then, it remained popular. Why? Actually I don’t want to type another essay right now -_-/.

never ever remember any waiting time in HA – and i spend quite a time there. At least not in prime time.

[However, I know that many of the spvp team are not full team of same server (many reason behind this, but not main focus here), thats should be a problem coz you are basically transferring spvp to a smaller WvW, which violate the original concept of spvp. For me, WvW should stay WvW, spvp should stay spvp, unless there is really no other solution. We should try not to make spvp another WvW, but they can still affect each other, just not in this way.]

I don’t think free server transfers will be a permanent feature.

[Moreover, there is always a big problem of that large tournament, due to timezone of various player. For example, if the top team of server A was Canadian while the top team of server B was Korean, when should be the final match hold? I think its always not possible to hold this kind of large tournament while various region of player are playing this game, and should always avoid this kind of idea.(I mean in-game event, not reality tournament)]

Yeah, was just a quick example I thought up of. I’m just saying there should be something to 1) repopularize sPvP since sPvP has such larger consequences for the server 2) unite the community in the idea where PvE affects WvW and sPvP affects WvW 3) giving better rewards to make those top sPvPers feel powerful. The server vs server sPvP idea was to hold highly publicity events which hopefully spectator mode is also enabled. But these are just examples to achieve those goals. I’m not necessarily saying these examples are the way.

[I believe most competitive player only care of themselves, rather than their server (for those care their server should already having fun in WvW). So this can be fixed easily I think, adding ranking/rating system, while gaining access to some special outfit or other feature (not overpower stuff, but mainly for show off) exclusive for top team should be enough for competitive player keep fighting for (the awesome gladiator dragon in WoW is a good example). Competitive player, most of them, just want something can distinguish themselves from non-decent player only. ]

It doesn’t just affect the server, guilds representing an entire server surely is a way to distinguish and express power. Or think of a politics system that affects WvW from sPvP where these representative guild leaders gain access to to make strategical positioning with other servers.

Aragiel.6132:

Phira.3970:

Heroes Ascent in GW1 had serious waits that went from 20 minutes to even hours. I know my guild took almost three hours sometimes just to properly set up a team. Did that stop people from doing it? Nope. Even then, it remained popular. Why? Actually I don’t want to type another essay right now -_-/.

never ever remember any waiting time in HA – and i spend quite a time there. At least not in prime time.

I played GW1 since beta and have been doing GvG and HA or.. Tombs of the Primeival King since that time.

If it was easy to get a group, I assume:
-Was near the beginning of the launch of GW where nobody knew what a good team set up looked like and people just invited PUG to go.
-Joining a pug group and not necessarily a quality group such as spike groups which take time to make.
-Got lucky and joined a guild that became highly competitive and was able to get invites from there
-Have lots of active friends to invite
-Was r5+ playing a wanted class such as monk

Well, I didn’t really have or wanted any of the above. If you were just some casual player like you are mentioning in GW2, in GW1, they’d generally have to spam LFG for 20ish+ minutes to get in a group if I remember correctly. But yeah, I guess many left. But that took years. And looking at GW2, there’s already a good % of people gone and its just the first few months.

Aragiel.6132:

Therefore i think we should also think about how to improve current state of the game. And in current state as you pointed out its hard to get 8 team of similar lever inside one tournament.

But is that true? I still see lot of people in mists, lot of people in hot-joins. Free tournaments are poping in like 2 mins. Main issue is PAID where the queue is long like 15-20 mins. And to be honest noone want to spend time by waiting.

Yes, as I said before if you read it carefully hot-join still have enough people, and I have no complain of the free tournament queue time, but only paid tournament.

Getting 8 team of similar skill level is not as easy as you think. If there is ranking/rating in matchmaking system there will be some calculation, result in some overhead when matching different team. For fair matching, the formula usually will be more complicated than you think, and now you need to match 8 team, not 2 team, while a team may consist of members with various ranking/rating, result in more complicated calculation.

Anyway, this is Anet’s job to think about, not me:) As long as the queue time is acceptable (probably <5min), I am fine for any kind of changes.

Aragiel.6132:

3) Free tournaments will be almost (yea almost) only for solo / casual players. Therefore queue times here will probably increase but still casuals players will have easier life because they will have option to go tournament and dont get roflstomped by premade group

Isn’t hot-join already doing that? There are some room dedicated for 5v5 (except no tournament reward :p).

Aragiel.6132:

4) hot-joins will probably have less activity. Players will move to Free tournaments instead as they will feel the FREE TOURNAMENTS will be now more PUG / CASUAL friendly.

You say the point. This change will probably ruin hot-join. So whats the meaning of hot-join now?

In the original design from Anet, hot-join are for pug/casual, thats why u can never queue in premade. Free tournament are for non-competitve premade, but pug are also welcome. Paid tournament should be for competitive premade. Correct me if I am wrong.

However, why competitive premade team still queuing free tournament? You mentioned that there is some player like easy victory, and the reward and entry fee. And yes I agree.

So, if there is a ranking/rating system, they will never have any easy victory, provided that the matchmaking system is fair enough. Adjusting the entry fee and reward would probably making competitive premade team willing to play paid tournament, and focus less in free tournament.

Anyway, as long as the queue time is acceptable, I am fine for all design.

Phira.3970:

It doesn’t just affect the server, guilds representing an entire server surely is a way to distinguish and express power. Or think of a politics system that affects WvW from sPvP where these representative guild leaders gain access to to make strategical positioning with other servers.

I agree this is some kind of “good” reward. Just to make sure that the spvp is still a small team battle which different from WvW. While spvp is not called WvW, so I think we better avoid server based reward. Otherwise it will be so confuse of the difference between spvp and WvW.

Your proposed system is fun, I don’t mean its bad. Just need to careful of the accessibility of different kind of player (player have less flexible time vs player has tons of free time, different timezone, etc), and the impact to other community.

A system which is convenient and have fun easily is always “good”, while a system can only serve super hardcore player with tons of free time is definitely “not the best” system.

@Phira.3970 i see what you mean now. Ok then in HA it took really long to find a group without being in HA oriented guild or with many friends. But if you spend so much time by just spaming “LFG” you should invest this time to find casual pvp oriented guild. There are more than only hardcore guilds outthere.

@josephsora.4579
In the original design from Anet, hot-join are for pug/casual, thats why u can never queue in premade. Free tournament are for non-competitve premade, but pug are also welcome. Paid tournament should be for competitive premade. Correct me if I am wrong.

Depending on design, if this is true – then the system is working well. What i understeand was that Free should be for noncompetitive players. But the main what i see is that many guilds thats find themself to be competitive doesnt feel they are able to fight in PAID and they are forced to go FREE instead which is not fun for them.

I agree with you that mathcmaking would help, im actually saying that matchmaking is so strongly needed for us that it should be priority nr. 1

No No Your missing the point on what I was trying to point at. I’m saying there is something is something fundamentally wrong with the game play itself in sPvP. It all truly boils down to this: whether you’re having fun or not. The fact is that many sPvPers are getting bored within just a month and are already leaving for other games in comparison to HA in GW1 where even with a long queue line, it took years for players to get bored of this. If a games sPvP aspect is good, even without elo rating/with long queue lines/without rewards, people will play it because its fun. Example: Counter Strike didn’t necessarily have rating early on and there is no reward for winning. Also when you died, you have to wait sometimes even longer than the time you get to play. But that didn’t deter the many people out there that played it for years on end.

Rating, rewards, etc… are just fluff that cover whether the original game play and mechanics are good or not. In PvE, this is okay since there are plenty of fluff that makes up for the lack of game play quality present in many MMOs. But when your in a small sPvP arena, the game is stripped to its bare bones and we can see quickly whether they got the games mechanics fundamentally right or not and obv. GW2 isn’t delivering if LoL has about 25,000 views and GW2 has about 150 views (Yes, I just checked) and is doing POORER THAN RUNESCAPE on Twitch TV (and you may be thinking its because GW2 just launched but.. GW2 is getting less and less views each day rather than getting more and more. so no, time isn’t going to fix anything) and when the majority of the sPvP portion of the community is whining that the skies falling upon us on the forum and when we see loads of /good bye farewell posts.

Now I’m not saying GW2 is a failure (though there are currently other threads that implies otherwise). There are ‘good’ ways to fluff sPvP which does include rating, elo rating, etc.. but I believe there is a best kind of fluff and it relies on recycling the best aspects of game (such as World Events which can be made into a sub-objectives in sPvP. ) that makes GW2 GW2 and to tailor into a specific, innovative game mode that suits GW2 and spells GW2.

And why I’m saying a better game mode is more important is because in terms of game play in sPvP where your locked in a small compact arena, there are 2 determining factors: Game mechanics and game mode. Obviously, their not going to change the game mechanics (they can make small ones such as balances) so their only choice is game mode. And while ideas such as Elo rating, custom match making, better rewards helps, it is in no way going to directly effect the raw game play quality. Well, Think of WC3 and Dota. Basically just recycling parts into a better innovative game mode known as moba and not the standard generic game modes such as conquest, capture the flag, death match, etc… that has now evolved into the highest viewed channel on Twitch TV.

And this is why i’m favoring mixing PvE and PvP elements together. sPvP will never compete with say a game like Leagues of Legends because they spent the majority of their coding on polishing their game mechanics and adding new elements every with new champions whereas Guild Wars 2 spent, say for example, 70% of their effort on PvE, 20% on WvW and 10% on PvP (Don’t quote me on these statistics I just made up though it is what it seems like. These are merely for example purposes). If you exclude these two aspects, sPvP will never beat Leagues of Legend because all the PvE elements that they spent all their time coding is removed. That’s why I was saying recycling elements from PvE such as World Events or maybe even hearts into PvP in a way that affects the objectives of the game mode in some way would be a good idea. However, I am and NOT saying combining WvW with sPvP and PvE but making it so that they influence one another. This will create a more fluid connection between these separated worlds, sPvP, WvW, and PvE where their overall effort will reflect in WvW, sPvP, and PvE rather than secluded 10%,20%, and 70%.

I completely agree with ^, well said post. Its too standardized and predictable… Why is forest of nifheil the first game of the tourney? Where is the variety? Node capture is all we get? Last time i checked no one even cares about nodes… everyone in sPvP fights off the point because they just wanna scrim each other.(which is dumb). So make a brawl game types?