Guild Wars 2

Problem #1

NO MORE DAILY REWARDS!

This is one of the biggest problems with ranked games in almost any game, is they reward failure! This isn’t 5th grade where ‘no child left behind’ applies. So many people join ranked PvP who honestly don’t belong there because… they get rewarded if they win or not!

Daily rewards… track rewards…and repeatable chest rewards… it all adds up to a lot of these kids not even caring if they win or lose. Ranked PvP should only be for players who truly want to put their best foot forward.

The ONLY reward there should be for Ranked PvP is at the end of the season, based on your highest achieved rank. That’s it. Otherwise all other rewards should be obtained in non ranked PvP.

Problem #2

This is again one of the biggest problems with almost any game that has ranked play in it, which is that you gain or lose almost the same rank no matter what. Win a game, +10. Lose a game, -10. Etc… I find this to be an extremely oversimplified failure of a ranking system.

What I would change:

First: Every game gives the same amount of rating gained or lost, regardless of if one team is favored or not. Winning +2 and losing 15 creates nothing but dismay and is stupid. Can you imagine if your favorite football team only got 1/2 a win for beating the Browns cause they were ‘favored’ to win anyways? Gimme a break.

Every game should be worth -10 or +10

Second: You need to have a system where bad players derank fast and good ones rank up fast. How I would achieve this is to add/remove 1 point for every 25 score you beat your opponent by

So example:

Your team wins, +10

Their team loses, -10

You won 500 points to 420, a difference of 80. So 80/25, rounded, = 3

End result:

Your team wins, +13

Their team loses, -13

What this would do is make it so really bad players who lose contantly, by a lot of points, downrank much faster. And good players who win by a lot rank up faster. And if teams are evently matched and it’s a really good close game will rank up or down slower which is a GOOD thing. Teams who are evenly matched should be gaining and losing less points, not more.

Captain Obvious.6951:

First: Every game gives the same amount of rating gained or lost, regardless of if one team is favored or not. Winning +2 and losing 15 creates nothing but dismay and is stupid. Can you imagine if your favorite football team only got 1/2 a win for beating the Browns cause they were ‘favored’ to win anyways? Gimme a break.

I think the big issue here is that each player has their individual rating compared to the average rating of the enemy team. This means that a player who is put in team where the rest of their team is below their level is triply punished: they’re in a position where they have to carry the team to have any hope of winning, they stand to lose a lot of points if they fail, and don’t gain many if they win. And the last two points hold even if on a team-versus-team comparison, your team was clearly doomed to lose, as long as your personal rating is higher than the enemy team’s average.

It’s often the games where you feel the most frustration that then lead to the most point loss – you’re playing with a team that’s clearly not at your level, you try to carry and come close to succeeding, and then you get a big ratings loss because your personal rating was higher than the other team’s average.

Meanwhile, players who get carried get the opposite effect.

I don’t think the idea of losing less points if you were ‘expected’ to lose and so on is inherently a bad one – the idea is to soften the blow of obviously bad matchups, after all – but it needs to be done entirely based on the team comparison, not individual ratings against the enemy team. The current system punishes people who need to carry while protecting and even promoting those who get carried.

Once the system is working on a team-versus-team basis, you can introduce things like adjusting the rating loss/gain based on how close the scores were. I wouldn’t have the ranges as tight as you suggest – in my experience, a game where the losing side got over 400 generally feels like a close one (keeping in mind that in many maps, an upset with a secondary map mechanic can mean a difference of 50 points or more). I wouldn’t make the divisions any finer than 50 points.

On the ‘rewards’ issue…

I don’t think there’s an issue with allowing people to get the same rewards in ranked as they would get if they played the same match in unranked instead. For those rewards, if the player is just in there for the rewards, they have no incentive to play ranked.

The problem is the rewards that ARE exclusive to ranked. So the backpack and the reward pip track.

Personally, I can’t say I’d be sad if both of these got shifted to unranked, although the pip system might then need some reworking. I’d be inclined to leave the rewards in ranked as well, since if they are available in unranked, this should mean that the people who are only interested in losing their way to Ascended gear have no incentive to do so in ranked matches and will stay in unranked.

I made a similar post like this that addressed the second issue

I don’t think you should be rated off of teams, its just too easy to lose a bad match up, you alone could the reason the end score was even 300 to 500, youre still going to get moved down in terms of rating

Where as if its completely based on the individuals performance we would have less people annoyed by it

Some ppl will never see plat, not because they themselves are bad, but because they keep getting put with teams where its just not a good match up or their team is bad

You shouldn’t be punished for that. Lets say youre gold rated and youre almost plat, yet for the last 2 days straight youre teams have had 1 person I call johnny 2×4

Johnny 2×4 doesn’t know wtf he’s doing, he isn’t paying attention to the chat, so you basically have a 4v5 and, we all know how unlikely you are of winning those

Then you have bots to take into account which is another topic for another day

It should just be based off of how well each person performed and how hard they tried to win. Did they ptfo? Did they support one another as a team? Did they contribute?

Did they cap and decap objectives? etc

It should go by the individuals, not based off of entire teams

cant do it by individuals, you would have people just focusing on certain things and ignoring the bigger picture.

If you cant make plat its not your team fault. Moreover not everyone should be able to plat

NeXeD.3042:

cant do it by individuals, you would have people just focusing on certain things and ignoring the bigger picture.

If you cant make plat its not your team fault. Moreover not everyone should be able to plat

eh true, but what other way is there to counter bad match ups?

nothing. bad match ups happen in every game. I find it hilarious people will complain that this game is too easy and its a spam fest yet there are games that are imbalanced…. You know why? Skill disparity. Its those same people complaining about losing and bad match ups that claim the game is a spam fest.

Lord Velar.1509:

I made a similar post like this that addressed the second issue

I don’t think you should be rated off of teams, its just too easy to lose a bad match up, you alone could the reason the end score was even 300 to 500, youre still going to get moved down in terms of rating

Where as if its completely based on the individuals performance we would have less people annoyed by it

Some ppl will never see plat, not because they themselves are bad, but because they keep getting put with teams where its just not a good match up or their team is bad

You shouldn’t be punished for that. Lets say youre gold rated and youre almost plat, yet for the last 2 days straight youre teams have had 1 person I call johnny 2×4

Johnny 2×4 doesn’t know wtf he’s doing, he isn’t paying attention to the chat, so you basically have a 4v5 and, we all know how unlikely you are of winning those

Then you have bots to take into account which is another topic for another day

It should just be based off of how well each person performed and how hard they tried to win. Did they ptfo? Did they support one another as a team? Did they contribute?

Did they cap and decap objectives? etc

It should go by the individuals, not based off of entire teams

The problem with this is that it’s hard for the AI to judge what does and doesn’t make a difference in the game.

For instance, in some games someone can bunker a point for an extended period and do very little damage to the enemy team at all but still have made a significant difference because the enemy team has two roamers that keep trying to take the point and you keep scaring them off, while if you weren’t bunkering they would keep capping the point. Alternatively, someone could be sitting on home when the enemy team never seriously attempts to take the point, and that person is effectively doing nothing while the rest of the map is a 4v5. How would the AI be able to pick whether bunkering was a decisive factor in your team winning or whether the rest of the team was awesome enough to win an effective 4v5? Or whether, conversely, you bunker a point and your team loses, but loses for reasons other than you bunkering and you were actually making the right call?

Whatever criteria you come up with for determining a player’s individual performance, some players are going to figure out that criteria… and a means of exploiting it. And then you’ll get players looking to inflate their personal score rather than legitimately trying to win the match – particularly the kind of player who decides the game is lost if their team doesn’t do well in the first couple of minutes. I’ve seen PvP games before where it often feels more like you’re competing with your own team more than the enemy, and I’d hate to see that happening here.

Currently rank as we know it is not entirely relevant. I’ve seen some good gems stuck in gold or silver. They surprisingly played well but played solo, couldn’t get out of their rank despite the fact that I could call their skill on high gold/low plat kind of level.

I’ve never been more discouraged from PvP than in this game in this season. I am in plat 1 (fell from 2nd tier yesterday) Throughout 2 past years I’ve had a win ratio of about 60% to 65% the more I played and the more I knew about that game my ratio was stable and did the thing. In the past few seasons I had something about 57%-59% in which roughly 6 or 7 matches out of 10 were lost in a manner where games couldn’t get carried due to either overpowered team or clueless teammates. Now this season threw me into, I think, 50% win ratio which I’ve never ever experienced in any game where I played PvP be it MMORPG or FPS or MOBA. I refuse to agree with something as "you just bad", no. I know how to play this, I know my class and I know what others are capable of, I know how to focus and which targets to pick first, how to disengage from combat, to kite, to win most 1v1’s and even if I fail to, I put up a long enough fight to ensure that the enemy loses as much precious time as possible when defending a node. I even share my cooldowns to save others, CC those who focus my teammates. I’ve played PvP aspect of many games for many, many years and GW2 pvp is the first one in which I am so greatly displeased that I myself can’t believe. I can’t return to 250 on solo and I cannot seem to find a reliable duo partner. The most funny thing in all of this? When I tried to get back to 250 some guy already in 250 prevented me from doing that by throwing 2 of our matches. He literally went necro without a wurm doing literally 1v2/3 on mid, spamming the chat that we don’t support him so he dies.

Most of my won matches were one sided massacres where I roflstomped along with my team, most of my lost matches were one sided massacres where I were roflstomped along with my team. Because of that I can’t really tell what my real skill is. Everyday I stray further away from this game mode and whenever someone wants to try it, I tell them my story. This game is just a test of how much luck you have with a little spice of personal skill to even the odds if needed.

Problem #1.Class Balance

Problem #2.Class Balance

Problem #3.Class balance

That’s the only reason I stopped playing.
Not the rewards or the ranks.
Unfortunately GW2s PvP class balance has ended up including each and every balance flaw possible.
Classes are way too powerful and bloated for PvP.
This is game where one shooting players while being invulnerable and dps bursts from stealth are a thing.
I can’t take this seriously,and this is definitely not a world class PvP game.
Hopefully they will get it sometime and do some serious work on class balancing and combat quality.

Rodzynald sums up everything perfectly. I think the issue is season restarting, leading to players not tryharding so much after getting common frustrating loses. You’ve finally managed to get to gold/platinum, then a new season starts, and you have to deal with the same issues again. If i used to play a lot in the past, i found myself giving up rather quickly( sometimes right after 1 lose) in last seasons. But that is a common problem in many games, everyone claims that matchmaking is poor everywhere, but i’m convinced this is due to the season system.

I do believe that reward farming also has a little touch of "meh" factor during matches. What does that mean? Some people enter ranked just for the rewards and the fight for it is "meh" for them. I am fairly certain that a little change might force these players to think more about fighting than slapping their enemies to not get kicked for afk’ing.
Just don’t receive pips for not winning. Losing pips for a lost match might discourage a lot of people, but if they don’t move further and stay in place with a lost match that would make some players wonder and try to fight more for the reward. You have to earn it and not passively "sloth" your way through a bleeding streak of losses with wins every now and then.
There is one more issue, it is lack of means to spread knowledge in the game. Curren "tutorials" are not enough to introduce players to pvp well. There is no mention of words such as: focus, rotation, node etc... I am sure that giving a good ol’ tip info while loading a mists map could do some good as well as an npc who can tell more about fighting mechanics, for example those I mentioned above and more about combos, cleave damage, aoe damage, kiting, disengaging. If more people learn those, more fights could get interesting and it would pose a greater challange for all of us. It might also lower the numbers of blowout matches while the teams that are "bound" by the system to lose, could put up a better fight and even change the outcome more often.

P.S.
I am still with the idea of pressing the focus button to enter ranked, looks like a lot of players don’t know what focusing means xD