Guild Wars 2

As a PvP dabbler, I am often hesitant to even wade into the kiddie pool, and some of the attitudes within the community towards both their teammates and competition in formalized matches (or even just practice for that matter), make it a little daunting to decide if I’m actually ready/suitable to try out an unranked match. Running into a lot of dragon ranked or titled players in practice mode only further reinforces my hesitation to move beyond it :-)

I’m curious what the bar is for many of the people in the community as far as their expectations for their teammates and themselves in an unranked match vs a ranked one.

I’m going to be blunt with you; everyone in the mists is salty to some degree.

Either they are lightly salted like a decent pretzel or downright Dead Sea toxic.

The bar for me is general team structure and personal state of mind.

If I have a good team, I’ll do ranked.

If I’m going with a pickup group, I’ll do ranked unless there are premades saturating the matches, at which point ill do unranked.

If I feel the toxicity of people screaming and not being heeded, people giving up and dancing at spawn or just otherwise dont feel up to the competitive air saturating ranked, I’ll do unranked and not give a kitten or duel.

It all depends on what you have, and what you can deal with, as a player.

Dont worry about player ranking/Titles. The people with high rank finishers are often bad players that have just been bad for a long time.

The people you should fear are players with Toymaker titles running deer or rabbit finishers.

As a newbie to PvP myself... I did hotjoin for about 10 games then went into unranked and haven’t looked back. There is an MMR so for the most part you’ll be paired up with people at about you skill level (in theory). I’ll do ranked when I meet enough people to do a full premade.

As far as the people go... In the few games I’ve played (<80) I’ve only seen one person rage in chat. Just remember to have fun. I’m just above a 50% win ratio, but I don’t focus too much on that. Play your role, work on your mechanics, and help your team and everything will be fine.

Probably different opinions here, but I’ll offer one:

Unranked – Know how to play your class/build, know the basics of other classes and common builds (elite skills, important cues, mechanics, CC skills), understand the scoring system and unique mechanics of each map, and know how to communicate.

Ranked – Understand your role in a team, have a firm grasp of how to play your build, know which professions counter you, know how to counter other classes/builds, know how to synergize with other classes, understand rotations and how to really read the map.

Titles and rank aren’t very important, they can be acquired by grinding without actually learning how to win against good teams.

Edit: Rising Dusk makes a good point that the most direct way to learn is to go straight into ranked, since your MMR will settle to reflect your skill you will eventually be facing equal opponents. However, working through the entry points I outlined will put you on better footing when you initially enter the queues.

I recommend always playing ranked. Dive into the tougher competition and strive to get better. You will learn more playing against better players, and in turn will become better yourself. The matchmaking algorithm will also do its best to pair you with people reasonably matched against your own skill, unlike practice mode where everyone faces everyone.

This isn’t even considering that ranked has the best competitive assortment of maps, and the generic player models work there so you can actually see what smallest-scale Asura on your enemy team are doing.