Guild Wars 2

I am here to criticize the system, and i will try to be as constructive as possible, and ask for the following post to be constructive as well.

Hot join is not working the way it is now, i know i am not the best pvp player in the world( maybe a bit above average), but it is not about skill because even a very great player cant carry a team against 5 good players.

There’s almost always these 2 scenarios:

1. there are 3vs2 or 4vs3 and 3+ people in spectate to join the best team.
2. there is always a huge gap in the score.

Why? of course no one wants to lose but instead of playing the game to win, people just wait to join the winning side, and the teams finally get full when the score is at 200-50, at this point, since there isnt much coordination in hot join, the losing side always sees one or another player leaving because of the feeling that there is just no point in the fight anymore that will always result in an even bigger gap in score.

Personnally if the map isnt legacy of the foefire, its hard to make a comeback, and even if the losing side has a great player, and all the others have the same skill as the winning team, its impossible for comebacks.

So all we see is people waiting to get to the winning team and its gg. And this will happen even more because more people will feel forced to do this aswell.

Of course this has fixing and i dont know if everyone feels the way I do, but if Anet decides that this system needs improvement, here are my suggestions:

1. This one would require less change to the current system, and is very simple. When you enter an hot join, you have X seconds (15 or 20 seconds for instance) to join the match, and if you don’t, you would be forced to spectate until the end of the current match. (of course you could still change to other server and join a match there).

2. Make it so you have to chose between join random or to spectate, but don’t let people see how many players there are in each team or the scores until they chose one option.

3. If you chose to let them chose the team, don’t let them see scores and people on each team. Making people unable to join the match for 5 minutes on that specific server if they chose to spectate would be great to prevent them from watching how the match was, and then return later to join.

If you feel that the system isn’t or is working fine post here your opinion to compare some points of view

and again please be construtive, for a friendly discussion, in consideration for devs, and for the sake of our community.

Hotjoin is a hot mess because of all the things you explained, the only way to have fun in hotjoin is not care at all about team score and practice fighting people. Either you’re on the rank stacked team that is 5v4ing or you’re with new players who don’t spectate the rank of everyone in the match so they get stomped. I only hotjoin to practice builds, after that it’s soloq and teamq. At least those two have 5v5 matches most of the time.

yes, i know that it seems to be my only option, i do soloq but, sometimes i get home late and just want to do 2 or 3 quick matches for fun and now it seems impossible, soloq i do it more when i have time and that doesn’t always happen unfortunately

I agree in principle with this. Hotjoin, although thought of as either lowly, or just purely for fun and testing is much like its ancestor, ‘Random arena’s.’ The concept of it still has a winning and a defeated side and it does provide rewards so therefore it is applicable to balance decisions. For whatever that best suit me I hotjoin a lot lately. After a number of bad soloQ experiences (4 vs 5/ leavers/ being matched against players with far less experience than me.) It just left a bit of bad taste in mouth. Not to mention I play outside of U.S time zones so at times I can wait for 10-20 minutes and now have an AFK player in team. I do see in hotjoin some players just go there and practice for tpvp by bunkering an entire node all game, or not try to capture a node all game and just roam and pick off individual players. This kinda shows people are taking it seriously, even if their end desired intention is to take what they have learned to a different aspect of PvP, and also vice versa of players going specifically to places that will help their team win and team chatting certain objectives.
All in all if it is included in the official Pvp aspect of the game, it is deserved of having some measure of balance applied to it.

Here’s what I think…

Autobalance doesn’t do a thing. Here’s what happens every time:

• 4 vs 2
• somebody gets autobalanced onto the losing team: 3 vs 3
• a new player joins the winning team: 4 vs 3

I don’t see why players are even allowed to join the winning team when both teams have the same number of players.

At the moment, you don’t play for points to win. You play to get an early headstart, so new players are guaranteed to join YOUR team and not the other one, thus ensuring the victory by player numbers rather than better play.

I know that teams eventually even out at 5 vs 5 or 8 vs 8 or whatever, but at that time in most cases one team is too far ahead for the rest of the game to be interesting.

As for autobalancing: not only are you guaranteed to get the win bonus, but also an additional autobalance bonus of 25 rank points, which is really nice and all the incentive anybody needs to help out the other team, so that part is working at least.

However, in order to have the chance to get the guaranteed win and the autobalance bonus, you have to be on the dominating (by player numbers) team first, so this, too, just makes people join the winning team instead of the losing team whenever they have a chance. Autobalance on its own is, therefore, not helpful enough making the games more balanced and interesting.

TL;DR: players should be forced to join the losing team when both teams have even player numbers.