Guild Wars 2

How come it is taking hours and hours to get matches for paid tournament; sometimes i dont even get matches all day. Does anyone else have this issue?

Bear with me here as we go on an adventure of information as to why our PvP player base is getting annihilated.

1) The game was advertised as a nearly E-sport ready experience. The BWE’s provided a medium for data collection and, even then, people were requesting observer/spectator mode, custom arenas/server, less ambiguous skill and trait descriptions, matchmaking, ladder system, and more transparency regarding game mechanics.

2) Come release, a large volume of the player base was expecting a number of these things to be resolved. Sure, it takes some time for any game to become, or grow into, an E-sport; but the neglect here hit players to the extent to which they decided to go elsewhere. Aside from the perceived neglect, one could also say that the impatience of the pvp player base coupled with this particular point started a lot of the negativity aimed toward the state of tPvP.

2) The absence of an obs/spectator mode means the onus is on the individual to stream game play and then on the inexperienced player to find the resources available to step up their game. Some may argue that google is just a click away. The problem I have is that this adds a barrier of entry into the pvp scene. The streaming issue, now, is that only a small handful of people are streaming consistently – at least they’re good players. Every paid tournament match should be in an obs. mode feature so that the barrier to learning/entry is lowered by reducing the number of information mediums required to keep the player both informed and competitive. Before you even get into the minutiae of the things you can display with an obs. mode, we actually need an obs mode.

3) The absence of custom arenas and servers means that third parties cannot initiate their own tournaments or structured rule sets. Even invitationals. If I had, at the very least, a custom server I would personally host tournaments far more structured (with better rewards) myself. You also lose the ability to scrimmage against other teams, especially teams better than you. Instead, you’re left with trying to que with each other so that you can get feedback or at least experience competition.

4) A number of skills and traits have ambiguous or misleading descriptions that aren’t bound by logic or math. “Pets periodically remove conditions from you.” Spectacular, now I have to go test and see how often this triggers and whether or not other game mechanics will change this action (ICD’s included). Thanks, Arena.Net, now I have to actually test your game to obtain the information I need to make a build that could, at the very last, be considered competitive. I, personally, don’t have to, but the absence of clear and concise descriptions adds another barrier of entry into competitive pvp because, without fail, someone is always running something that is inherently detrimental to their performance in-game. Not only this particular point, but this now requires ancillary resources to see how certain skills and traits function in-game.

5) The mechanics of the game should be evident and not require me to spend time testing the minutiae of the game. And, if I’m missing some in-game explanation of internal game mechanics, by all means, let me know as I’m sure I’m not the only one. Again, time spent testing and locating ancillary resources is another barrier to entry.

6) Oh, dear. Match making and a ladder system – how I’ve missed you. We used to be such good friends in GW1 – climbing you like a tree and pushing others off the branches and limbs I wanted to possess. What’s that you say, match making? Oh, you find humor in matching the random pugling group with experienced and coordinated teams (regardless of caliber)? Only problem is that it’s destroying the community, cannibalism style. Believe it or not, this is a terribly huge barrier of entry into competitive tPvP. People experiencing tournament play for the first time are inexperienced and unprepared – it doesn’t help that there is a lack of readily available resources that are quickly accessed or that they get stomped in less than 5 minutes by a team that has a clue. It also doesn’t help that hotjoin, regardless of size, is a terrible precursor to competitive play. Moreover, there is no way for a team to gauge their progress.

7) In the absence of other features, the onus is then on the community to try to make it work. The pvp base is an inherently volatile one, considering the competitive nature of the scene. I’m honestly half and half with regards to the pvp community at the moment. Sure, you have elitist pricks who won’t give constructive feedback or are just generally duchey, but then there are well practiced players who are willing to provided true criticisms (re: individual player skill and team performance). GG cannibalism as another barrier to entry (who would really want to be part of a community like that anyway?).

8) Paid tournaments – how I love your arrival and marvel at how you created an uproar. The rewards are nice – gems/chests/blah. The barrier to entry? O. M. G. Don’t get me wrong here, I have plenty of tt’s and I don’t mind blowing them to participate – but we’ll get to why people don’t share the same sentiment. Five tickets seems fair – everyone on your team may or may not, regardless, but they are obtainable. First, they have to pay real money – right LOL. Or, they could win in free tournies – goodluck against those premades, you inexperienced and unprepared teams. Third, they could just salvage and craft one – inherent time sink (good luck on both winning to get chests, getting the appropriate salvage materials, sinking in enough time to level up consistently for additional chests, and spending glory, attempting to farm for said glory). Check it – they could also complete daily and monthly pvp achievements to obtain some tt’s, either in hot join (terrible preparation for competitive fields) or in frees (against teams of variable skill providing no means of qualification). You could also win five free tournaments, first place (ugh, nice afternoon you got there). By this point, you’re probably saying: “But Bear, that’s a ton of options for getting tournament tickets!!!11!!!oneone.” Yea, you’re right, there are. The issue is that the cost of entering a paid tournament is too high, the preparation too poor, the resources too scattered, and the perceived rewards of success too nominal. You couple this with a stagnant, dwindling competitive player base and people wonder why randoms don’t sign up to feed gems to teams that have given their time to this game.

The competitive base of this game has already become the vocal minority, again. So soon. Aside from the aforementioned features and information required to be easily accessible in-game, the cost of paid entry needs to come down considerably – and the gem reward as well by an equal margin if so decided to be both undertaken and fair. Unless A.net decides to both lower the entry fee and provide the same rewards. The cost of entry should be no higher than 3 tickets and if I had my way it would be 1 ticket.

Think about it for a moment and consider the time sink required for 1 ticket. Doing a daily? 15 minutes, if that. Winning a free tournament? First try, 40 minutes or so. Ranking up and salvaging from the chest? ROFLMAO, yea whatever on that one. Crafting, also considering the aforementioned? Depends on what you have saved up. Decreasing the cost of entry to 1 ticket means every team can take at least one swing at paids every day. Sure, they might have to hot join their one ticket for a daily, but at least it will revive some of the competition.

tl;dr – We need these things to be addressed and hope that the late arrival will revive the player base.

p.s. A.Net., when you release custom servers/arenas please give me the ability to charge gems for tournaments so that I can offer larger rewards.

As an edit – 5001 characters is too small, I had an essay for this post and had to butcher it to fit the pieces in lolz……

paids are great. I would like to play them as much as possible.

but

- im not here to wait in queue. So if there is no pop in like 5-10 min = im out. Even 10 min waiting is bad enough.
- lot of competitive teams can´t participate due to the fact they are not as good to defeat the best teams outthere. Basically you can win first and second round but thats only a small victory. if you dont win in paid you loose your tickets. or you only win a small ammount back that will not pay you the entry fee. Right now there is like 5 teams? who are able to win 1 or seconc place constantly. Other 6 teams are loosing tickets.. pretty easy
- gem lottery is a bad idea. it promotes random luck instead of rewards that are needed for additional entry.
- GEM´s are probably problem. WHile areananet probably wants to make some money out of it.. all rewards are GEMS. I dont care about gems to be hones. Im a PvP player. I dont care about anything expect to fight and to have good games. My reward is VICTORY or match that is worth to remember. But im a minority.. not that many is thinking this way.. and people love rewards. So here you go.. thats what you wanted.. rewards (thats are not rewarding)

Excellent essay. I agree with all points, but I think one important point needs to be added—while it’s true that things haven’t been great at the top end of PvP, things have been much, much worse at the bottom end. Most people will jump into a match long before looking up a stream or tournament recording—and the problem is that the people who jumped into a GW2 match almost universally had a bad experience.

Part of that is a necessary learning curve. Most was that there was never really any “casual” PvP at all—there’s just a weird, dysfunctional test area called hotjoin. Let’s say you enter the mists, make a build and enter your first match, in which you

—start in the middle of a match,
—switch teams mid-game,
—fight two players down, or up,
—get rewarded for playing badly/punished for playing well,
—realize that no one cares which team wins, and
—choose between getting destroyed by the zerg, or joining your own zerg,

none of which are fun.

Before we can attract new players to higher levels of competition, we need to recruit some new players who don’t hate the game.

Don’t get me wrong—Anet has done an outstanding job with almost every aspect of GW2. It’s an incredible accomplishment, really. But I would argue that there is no meaningful entry-level pvp, which in turn means that there are no PvPers progressing to higher levels of competition.

Solutions? Honestly, I’m not completely sure, this is a huge difficulty. If I worked for Anet, I would recommend a pretty big overhaul to the hotjoin system—maybe matches just a few minutes long, but where both teams start with a full roster and winning feels more important. I love the combat style in GW2, but it honestly feels very zergy with anything over a ten-person brawl, so there should either be an incentive to split your team into groups (I know, points were supposed to do that…) or smaller maps/smaller teams.

I think there is a lot of potential for GW2 PvP. In my opinion, it is always most important to begin by giving players a meaningful early experience. That doesn’t mean there’s no learning curve, it just means that the learning curve can be fun, too. A tall order, but I think the Anet team can do it.

Edit: I didn’t mean for this post to be off topic, but I realize it could be viewed that way. I bolded my reasoning (in the middle of the post) why this issue is important for paid tournament queue times.

Hmm I don’t know maybe it’s just the times you’re queuing up. Been doing paids for a couple of hours this evening and I haven’t waited longer than 2 minutes for the queue to pop. In fact it has been faster queuing than free tourney’s

Wise.8025:

Hmm I don’t know maybe it’s just the times you’re queuing up. Been doing paids for a couple of hours this evening and I haven’t waited longer than 2 minutes for the queue to pop. In fact it has been faster queuing than free tourney’s

EU ? US? somewhere else? what time? ( suppose it was a prime time right?)

NevirSayDie.6235:

But I would argue that there is no meaningful entry-level pvp, which in turn means that there are no PvPers progressing to higher levels of competition.

I agree with this as it adds another barrier to entry. With so many issues preventing people from advancing, improving, learning, et cetera – it is no surprise to me where we are at now.

Funny thing though, I didn’t even mention build wars’ing mid-match against your opponents. That alone irritates me enough for another essay. How much longer must I keep my backpack open? Manually swap entire weapon sets? Have more than one character of the same profession since I don’t have templates that are easily accessible? If the intention was to allow people to alter their builds mid-match, at least let me swap entire templates to make it go faster.

With so many issues commingling into the pvp community…I digress.

The whole tournament system is ridiculously bad for the community. To grow a PvP community you need to encourage the players to grow while also allowing them to have fun. With the tournament system 7/8 teams will not have fun because they lose.

In traditional PvP you would play against another equally ranked team and you would have a 50/50 chance of winning. In GW2 on the other hand you will face 7 other teams, some of which will be far below your skill level, whilst others will be far above you. This means there is no sense of victory, no exhilaration at beating another equally skilled team, no pride. The tournament system leaves you feeling bored and tired.

I would really love Arena net if they would admit their faults and just replace tournaments with either laddered team vs team or best of three’s. The tournaments can be shelved for the weekly, monthly and eventually yearly competitions.

I believe this would create a solid foundation which they could build off..hint hint HA/Tombs.

None of the things here will work because there is zero reason for the PvE and WvW players to ever pvp. Not the same game no connection at all.

I don’t care about the PvE or WvW crowd right now, because we’re having enough trouble keeping the PvP people interested.

How did pve and wvw get into this discussion ? lol

You two really dont understand there is no “PvP” crowd other then a very small existing population thats getting smaller?

I dont PvE much in games but I know the PvE crowd is the population that keep PvP going a large portion of PvEers in all games play PvP at least casual very few people I have ever seen in all my MMO gaming truly only PvP and the majority of people I have PvPed with or against spend most their game time doing PvE.

There is nothing Anet can do to help the population if there is no connection to PvE and WvW.

Thats how it got into the discussion…. its the reality of the situation for a pvp MMO to have a population the PvEers need a reason to PvP.

Also with no population even if you are big fish its nothing worth bragging about being in a small pool. It meant more to be a Big fish in WoW arena because it pulled from hundreds of thousands of players that did arena mostly PvE folks but they did/do Arenas time to time keeping a healthy population.

Point noted and added to the very large wall that creates the barrier to entry. But within this particular game, how would connect the pve and structured pvp? Some of the gear you simply cannot utilize for balance reasons.

DoYourBestBear.6810:

Point noted and added to the very large wall that creates the barrier to entry. But within this particular game, how would connect the pve and structured pvp? Some of the gear you simply cannot utilize for balance reasons.

GOLD.. ingame money.. its a good currency that is valuable for PVER´s, can be used for PvPer. In fact gems do that for you – the problem is they are not easily obtainable which leads to why? because they also source of money for ArenaNet.
Another ideas could be “Zkeys” from GW1. Simply reward of key. There is lot of boxes (not sure of the name) you get as random drop in PVE.. but key´s are not easy to get or are too rare (got 50 box drops and only like 5 keys). So what if one of reward would be this nice key? then you have something PVErs want..
there are options.. of course …

Then to balance that with those that don’t pve at all?

Aragiel.6132:

DoYourBestBear.6810:

Point noted and added to the very large wall that creates the barrier to entry. But within this particular game, how would connect the pve and structured pvp? Some of the gear you simply cannot utilize for balance reasons.

GOLD.. ingame money.. its a good currency that is valuable for PVER´s, can be used for PvPer. In fact gems do that for you – the problem is they are not easily obtainable which leads to why? because they also source of money for ArenaNet.
Another ideas could be “Zkeys” from GW1. Simply reward of key. There is lot of boxes (not sure of the name) you get as random drop in PVE.. but key´s are not easy to get or are too rare (got 50 box drops and only like 5 keys). So what if one of reward would be this nice key? then you have something PVErs want..
there are options.. of course …

this is a great idea. but my new experience with anet has been shocking to say the least. i highly doubt they are willing to give up their potential profit for our gaming experience. this whole cash shop/ mystic forge/ gems thing is turning GW2 into a disaster. good thing is a lot of pve-ers are getting turned off by the new pve patch and ascended gear, becouse they realized the grind for the best equipment (they worked hard to get) is suddenly not over. maybe they turn to pvp?

edit: i vaguely remember anet stating that their financial model was to sell as many copies and guarantee all players to have the same experience!!! then suddenly we get PAID tournaments, for which u can spend gems to get in… i know you can also grind for tickets, but still… this is just wrong, and anet has crossed pay to play line too many times with the same model as this in pve also.

basically it is like this: you want to play GW2 new content? well you can go grind for months/ years, or you can instantly get in but if you get what you need in game shop… isn’t this also opposite of what they said about having the same chance for all players, and that game shop will only be cosmetic…

crossing the line way too often.

i know this might seem a bit off topic, but i am confident most of problems in all aspects of the game come from game shop. anets motives are not to make good game for us anymore… it is to make money.

community must become aware.

well.. its true GEM´s are probably hidden reason we can´t see or know. But since last update and introduction of “gem lotery” in PvP.. i started to believe in this.. The first idea was great…. but with addition of the lotery instead of properly balancing the entry fee vs rewards.. i trully started to believe that at this point Anet made the mistake of taken easy fast win which will ruin the game for future.

hey.. do you remember Guild Wars 2? You mean the game where you can get killed if you pay for it? yes.. i remember in order to make sure dont install it twice.
im loosing my hopes in good PvP every day.. ..

im also excited to see the price for renting a private room. they are probably gonna put a list of 100 things you need to do to get it for “free” also, but if you don’t like doing it you can simply buy it with gems.

if this happens it will be another attempt of getting people into pvp that will turn out as another obstacle instead. we will have pay to win situation where ppl that spend money on gems get to practice even more to destroy pugs or one time paying customers.

I am worried higher ups at Anet have their short sighted money grabbing hands too deep into GW2, and might kill the game losing all the potential long term profits.

GW1 model was solid I like GW2 but they created a systems that works against themselves or their players with the Gems I see the potential for massive errors on the part of Anet, paying to play any content with Gems even if there are other ways to play that content is going to blow up in Anets face.

I have paid for Gems for bank space bag slots some skins however I will never give gems to pvp ever. Ill enjoy GW2 pve and wvw while I skip the tpvp.