Guild Wars 2

What? Who would be stupid enough not to want new content? Well me.. and that’s because I don’t consider it to be new content. It’s kittening boring news!

ANet is working on implementing these right now.
“Custom Arenas are the current focus for my team. ", said JonathanSharp.
So now is the time to give them some input on this new “feature”.
So I create this thread for those who are not thrilled by the announcement of “Custom Arenas”.

Personally I believe Custom Arenas will be completely useless. I don’t think it remotely possible that they would revive the sPvP scene or even improve the current situation in any way.
We don’t need “yet another way” to play one the same maps and the same single kittening mode: conquest.

We need at least some hint that something remotely exciting will come in the future. So far there is nothing that has been mentioned that would make we want to play sPvP again.
ANet, give us a hint of HoH, GvG or Codex Arena returning, for crying out loud! Or at least one non-conquest map!
Building systems around lacking content is not going to help much.

It’s something catered more towards hardcore tournament players, of which there aren’t many. There aren’t many because the PvP side of the game isn’t easy to get into, it’s not balanced, and there’s a lot of basic functionality problems associated with the only game mode and the lack of a proper ranking system and even problems with the score reports.

In GW1, for example, the beginning level would probably be Random Arenas. Click on join and you fight other people who did the same thing, at random. Win enough and the game puts you into Team Arenas, which is the same thing but with organized teams. There were a couple of objective-based maps in these rotations, but most just involved killing the other players, so this system eased new players into game concepts and gave them the ability to make mistakes. More importantly, there were only four players per side, so getting zerged or just spiked immediately was not a possibility. The only problem was the monk system, which obviously is no longer the case. After Team Arenas you could look at Heroes’ Ascent as the next step. 8v8s, organized, on very large maps, with a PvE-style chest reward with incredibly rare skins as the big draw. After this, of course, was Guild vs Guild.

In GW2, there is no such transition. You join hotjoins, get stomped by thief zergs in a demanding conquest gametype, and hear about some sort of tournament system that requires you to spend tokens. To new players, this is rather obtuse and intimidating. Hotjoins are already a pain, after all. And an organized format can potentially be even more daunting? No thanks, say most players.

In addition, PvE accomplishments don’t carry over into PvP, at all. Many players want to know why they should bother with PvP when the game removes all their skins, and the accomplishments you earn in PvP can’t be shown off in Lion’s Arch, and so on. In GW1, you could have PvP skins, but you could also wear PvE gear, so long as it was maxed out. This sort of system meant to keep the two separate just actively discourages people from bothering, when there’s WvW as an alternative.

I personally don’t think the game is going to recover, because it’s obvious that the minds behind making GW1 the best MMO PvP ever made are now gone, and people who don’t understand these problems (or that they are the source of the problems) are now in charge.

Well said, Plague…

Plague.5329:

I personally don’t think the game is going to recover, because it’s obvious that the minds behind making GW1 the best MMO PvP ever made are now gone, and people who don’t understand these problems (or that they are the source of the problems) are now in charge.

This is what makes me sad. It really is a fun game at the core, but it’s just missing so much on the PvP side. PvP in GW1 had great design, but seems to be little more than an afterthought in 2. I want to see the PvP scene succeed, but I’m just about out of optimism.

Plague.5329:

it’s obvious that the minds behind making GW1 the best MMO PvP ever made are now gone, and people who don’t understand […] are now in charge.

I didn’t want to say it. I’m thought the “new” guys might not like to hear this.
I’m wondering though: where are these geniuses gone? I want to play their next game, unless they somehow get control over GW2 back..

Custom servers allows for third-party leagues to come into play, which equates to various and numerous ladders and rankings for teams to work towards. It could stimulate more interest considering there are a number of leagues waiting to start.

demonstrative.9176:

Custom servers allows for third-party leagues to come into play, which equates to various and numerous ladders and rankings for teams to work towards. It could stimulate more interest considering there are a number of leagues waiting to start.

I have a hard time believing third-party leagues could make sPvP look sexy enough to attract crowds.. at least not with the currently lacking core features (modes, maps) and stale metagame..

i like how they are adding custom servers when theres like 14 serious teams that play based on the QP post

as a casual (majority) i have zero interest in custom servers. I want competitive tournament matches based on ranking.

admiralnlson.2380:

demonstrative.9176:

Custom servers allows for third-party leagues to come into play, which equates to various and numerous ladders and rankings for teams to work towards. It could stimulate more interest considering there are a number of leagues waiting to start.

I have a hard time believing third-party leagues could make sPvP look sexy enough to attract crowds.. at least not with the currently lacking core features (modes, maps) and stale metagame..

Regardless of missing features or whatnot, the casual crowd likes rankings—and it’s easy enough to get into that they can be a part of the rankings. In any case, it would offer a reason for more people to start streaming and getting the game back out there if they are playing competitive teams more consistently.

Gotta agree with Plague. You can really tell that Anet’s heart was set on pve and WvW this time around. And, at least in terms of WvW, it’s the best game out there atm (RIP daoc and WAR).

But the spvp….they’re pushing esport features when the core gameplay is fubar in a number of ways. You need fun core gameplay, fun for your ENTIRE pvp player base before you push esport features. At least that’s the way every other successful eSport did it.

i like how they are adding custom servers when theres like 14 serious teams that play based on the QP post

This, this, and this again. There’s just not enough interest in the competitive scene, and that’s due to core gameplay issues in spvp.

I kinda like the idea of private matches where i can finally do 1 vs 1 with my friends without being disturbed. I find that it’s a useful aid while learning a class, you can pick up a bunch of friends and try different things without worrying of winning/loosing a match or ppl complaining about you joining just to try out a new build.
So this is what i think of custom arenas.

What i think of pvp in general is a bit different.
Custom arenas, which i’m gonna like a lot i think, wouldn’t have been my first choice. It wouldn’t even be a priority for me i think.
I’m not going to repeat what a lot of people already said but GW2, which pvp system has a huge potential, has a terrible need of new pvp modes and maps.
Conquest mode is boring imo, and having to do the same thing in the same maps again and again is one of the causes of my turning towards pve nowdays.
I know it’s not very useful thinking about other mmorpgs now but, in my past experience i always found (no need to hide it, i think that WoW battleground + arena system was far better that the pvp system we have now in gw2) that at least 3 or 4 game modes were available: some pure deathmatch games, some conquest, some ctf style objectives and so on. Frankly, sometimes i see ppl with tiger finishers. I don’t know how they got there, i’m rank 20 and i’m almost got bored of playing pvp for more than an hour..

So who else doesn’t want custom arenas..? I want them, i just hope (i know it for sure i think, i know ANet guys) that it’s just the beginning of improvements and that we’ll see quite soon new game modes and new maps. GW2 is an awesome game, it just lack that spark that makes pvp a unique experience.

We want GvG and HA not other arenas…they’re fine as they are, hot join like old random arenas, and tour like old team arenas. Time to put something more tasty on the table.

Archaon.6245:

We want GvG and HA not other arenas…they’re fine as they are, hot join like old random arenas, and tour like old team arenas. Time to put something more tasty on the table.

Honestly?

Get over the fact that GvG and HA aren’t coming to GW2.

I know….for sure HA is a dream, but GvG would be an obvious add on for pvp…there are guilds, and right now they’re pretty unuseful with no guild hall or stuff, they’re good just for talkin’ and it’s quite ridiculous…imo

Archaon.6245:

I know….for sure HA is a dream, but GvG would be an obvious add on for pvp…there are guilds, and right now they’re pretty unuseful with no guild hall or stuff, they’re good just for talkin’ and it’s quite ridiculous…imo

Of all those things I only want a Guild Hall. It would benefit every guild equally. Everyone who’s done HA know what kind of blasphemy it spawned. I’d much rather them finish balancing and pleasing the tournament scene before they catered to casual guilds though. As much as I would like my own private beach.

Archaon.6245:

We want GvG and HA not other arenas…they’re fine as they are, hot join like old random arenas, and tour like old team arenas. Time to put something more tasty on the table.

Wanting HA…

HA was a broken format from the time it was called HoH to the abomination it currently is. It was terrible, it was pugs vs. premades vs. top teams with everyone running the same cancerous builds like IWAY!, ViM, NR, and so on. It wasn’t good PvP, half of the maps were objective based rather than death match (requiring vastly different builds and obviously favoring one team over another based on build mechanics), Twin Spiral being a piece of crap 1v1v1 where winning amounted to which teams the idiot team didn’t pick to fight while the other team cruised to victory with no opposition, and the Hall required “bunker” builds more than anything else. And Ghostly Hero…

There’s some very obvious rose-colored glasses effect going on here with GW1. The best PvP that game ever had was at and around its first world tournament, and that wasn’t until close to half a year into its life (the golden age). Prior to that, you had:
- Farm PvE for PvP with the majority of the player base being kittened out the door if they didn’t spend hundreds of hours farming ettin for Superior Runes. Want to change builds? Screw you, go farm Ettin.
- Unbalanced maps that favored certain build types over others. Degenerate rush tactics (Hello, WW spiking your GL because 100+ dps from one single skill.)
- Above mentioned garbage in HA with entire builds being rendered useless by one skill (NR). And boy did that take forever to balance.
- And then everything went to kitten when Assassins and Treewars were introduced.

That’s not to say that the sorry excuse for PvP right now is good but at least I don’t have to spend 200 hours farming runes and weapons for serious PvP. The thing I find dumbest of all is that they showed us a good format PvP in the Halloween event. Use it. Expand it a little (it needs to be sped up a bit) and add it. Its ALMOST GvG, why are they so scared of simple death matches? They have all the ground work laid out for death match formats or even just GvG, they don’t need to do any serious reworking to make GvG-styled 5v5 but they aren’t doing it…

Heck, they aren’t too far from making a viable Conquest style PvP if they are that hard set on it. But they need to balance the classes out for it to work, and they need to add a more lax structured format for Conquest where you’re not either steam rolling randoms or getting crushed by top ranked teams. What is this thing? Its called a ranking system based on either: rank of leader or rank of guild. Why… that reminds me of GvG.

^ GW1 had its own problems. Point being, GW2 should be an evolution of GW1. Not a step backwards and an attempt to reinvent it completely.

For any problems HA or RA or TA or so on had, they were still intensely popular during the height of the game. Those popular builds like IWAY were frowned upon but helped strangers coordinate with one another, because there an instant understanding of what their role was and how to run it, that allowed them to compete with more organized teams. But anyway. Point being, it was not a broken mess by any stretch of the imagination, and it was very successful for a very long time. The only exception may be TA, simply because most people went RA because it required less time, and if you wanted an organized fight, you would probably just go to HA, where you could actually get real rewards. TA offered the same rewards as RA did, but with more difficulty associated with it, both in and outside the game. Players asked ANet to improve this by making the rewards better, and the system easier to use. ANet responded (modern ANet that is, when the game started going downhill) by just removing it from the game. And that’s how ANet works now. They really just don’t know what they’re doing anymore.

They just need to improve on the old systems instead of mucking around with these new unpopular game modes that obviously are not bringing in people the way they wanted. If they want to be an e-sport in GW2 like they were in GW1, they need to understand what made GW1 PvP so great. Hint: it wasn’t paid tournament, ladder systems and so on. It was the core behavior of the game and the ease of entering PvP.

While most people are pointing out the good things custom arenas will bring for the more hardcore in the pvp community I think there are benefits for everyone. I think finally having 5v5 hotjoin like PvP is a positive thing for casual PvPers. I am sure there will be several open servers run by game community sites or guilds where players will get a more serious experience than hotjoin but not have the wait times or pressure of a tournament.

I also think these servers will have the potential to build future teams. People that play on one custom server will get used to playing with one another and might consider playing in tournaments etc.

I do not think that custom servers are the answer to all of gw2s problems but I think it will help a lot in the short run.

Plague.5329:

^ GW1 had its own problems. Point being, GW2 should be an evolution of GW1. Not a step backwards and an attempt to reinvent it completely.

Part of my point was that they have made positive steps forward, particularly the removal of all of the grind (GW1 still has a grind for a brand new player because you still have to unlock).

As for the old formats vs. the new formats, TA was never a popular format. HoH was only ever popular because of its easy builds and /rank. Random Arenas was the bread and butter of introductory PvP and that is (balance aside) what the 8v8 format is doing (with a spicing from AB). The problems with it at the moment are no different from the problems faced by RA: imbalanced teams, builds, and classes (and that 8 people are fighting on 5-man designed maps). Its a kitten around format.

The problem is that there is really no calibrated middle ground. tPvP and pPvP are good ideas on paper of “good teams go to fight good teams” but it skips over the steps of teams ever becoming good because there’s a severe lack of middle ground for training and playing against equally skilled opponents. Like I said at the end of my post, they need to introduce an aspect of PvP, lets call it rPvP (for ranked PvP) where you are faced against players based on ranks either of your team leader or guild.

CA may be able to address this problem based on how expensive (or not) the renting of servers is, though it really shouldn’t be the solution. Arena themselves need to introduce the ranking system not wait for others to do it for them.

And, as always, I don’t see see why death matches are bad.

Vena.8436:

Archaon.6245:

We want GvG and HA not other arenas…they’re fine as they are, hot join like old random arenas, and tour like old team arenas. Time to put something more tasty on the table.

…with everyone running the same cancerous builds like IWAY!, ViM, NR, and so on.

Do you mean everyone that was unable to play a proper balanced maybe? GW1 HA required more skill to just pass UW than the whole GW2 spvp, tournaments and wvsw together…..if i’m wrong please tell me…

I think a lot of people in this thread are acting like spoiled children on Christmas opening a gift and stamping their feet stating “but it’s not what I wanted!!!”

Look – custom arenas put the control over the future of the sPvP community in the community’s hands. Servers could create their own ranking systems, ladders, etc. They could create map rotations that do not include Raid on the Capricorn (zomg!). They could customize the server cap to create that random 5v5 atmosphere that other thread says is absolutely necessary for the survival of the game (melodrama much). The birth of esports (or any sport for that matter) has to come from organizations that will gather teams, create match-ups or opportunities for match-ups, and administer rewards (even if it is only street cred or the satisfaction of a job well done – I don’t play in an indoor soccer league every Tuesday because I am going to get some prize at the end – I play to hang out with my mates and have some fun kicking a ball around).

The best thing ArenaNet could do to quickly address the ranking/ladder system is release Custom Arenas, as they are planning. Undoubtedly, if they created their own ranking system and league there would be a whole bunch of people complaining about its flaws. Instead, they have released the creative control to us, the players. What thanks do we give them? A bunch of whiny posts on the forums about how we don’t like our Christmas present.

Archaon.6245:

Do you mean everyone that was unable to play a proper balanced maybe? GW1 HA required more skill to just pass UW than the whole GW2 spvp, tournaments and wvsw together…..if i’m wrong please tell me…

No, I don’t mean only scrubs. When NR was NR, everyone ran it. Why wouldn’t they run it? It shut down every single enchantment in the game and made Protection (the strongest line of skills in the game) weaker or unusable. Remember, more so, that this was during a time when Protective Bond and Ether Renewal were not nerfed. When NR was axed, you should have fond memories what happened to every format because of ER -> Elementalists became Prot Monks with infinite energy and Heal Party spam that could reach across the entire map. More over, IWAY was a build that not to rarely actually won in Halls (though it had no holding capability and would usually last only a few rounds at defense). ViM was hit or miss, if it could reach Halls and win, defeating it was like pulling teeth. It was a bunker build to make all bunker builds blush because it exploited the simplest aspect of Halls: the Ghostly Hero needed to cap the altar. Good luck capping it when he runs into 100 traps and dies instantly while every ranger instantly regenerates all his energy and health and proceeds to spam every single trap + spirit on his bar (and then good luck managing your energy with QZ up).

HoH was a fundamentally flawed format because it had maps like Twin Spiral in its rotation along with varied objectives, some of which (Halls itself) encouraged the most degenerate form of game play: turtling. It should strike you as odd when HoH games amounted to several minutes of standing around waiting for the timer to be almost expired, and every opposing team bum rushing the middle trying to get their Hero on the pedestal to cap. The team that evaded on interrupt won. Rarely was a Halls match anything more than this. (That isn’t to say that some of the best fights of memory were here because some crazy stuff could happen on certain maps that brought on fond memories, but the best PvP was rarely found here and was consistently found in GvG.)

And again, I am not saying sPvP is better than GW1 (GvG reigns superior) but introducing HoH into GW2 isn’t going to help GW2’s PvP. You don’t need to do that much to band-aid save GW2’s PvP (add death matches and introduced team rankings, the latter being far more important). Conquest is not a bad format (there are better formats) but there exists no middle ground on which to foster growth at the moment. You have: basic sPvP with premades steam rolling randoms, and tPvP of elites facerolling everyone, because there are no match making criteria aside from: “Needs 5 players. Are there 5 players? Yes? Good. Let them fight.”

GW1s PvP had a similar issue. You literally had bad and great because of the nefarious grind introduced by having to farm PvE for PvP to the point where you just couldn’t be competitive if your whole team was fresh out the gate in any format except for GvG when you were (hopefully) ranked against equally noobish players. And, again, we’ve come full circle to what the problem is with GW2 PvP: a ranking system for s/tPvP. Add the ranking system to the format and make pPvP have no or lesser ranking restrictions therein people who play that format play it expecting good players but play the lower tier formats expecting roughly equal footing but a lower reward.

There was a pretty terrible lul in GW1 PvP at around… the same time as we are seeing now, because of terrible design decisions. It picked up when some smarter decisions were implemented into the game and was very strong when PvP was rewarded with PvP rewards.

@Kavia, custom arenas may indeed provide a workaround for the lack of a real matchmaking system, sure. But the real problem in my opinion is not the lack of matchmaking system. It might be what drives the people who are half-serious about getting into PvP, but it’s not what drives/drove most players away.

The problem is that new players who try sPvP just get very quickly bored with it, due to the lack of maps and game modes. It’s just not that fun. This is what everyone in my guild says when I ask them, and most of them are competitive gamers.

@Vena, you make a lot of valid comments. But all I’m reading basically is that, regardless of how flawed it could have been, HA was still great fun and was very memorable.
Obviously getting GvG in GW2 would me tons better, but I would settle for something like HA, just to get something to get excited about in GW2…

If by custom arena’s they mean maps customized by players I am all for it

bcbully.7289:

The funny thing is, is that custom arenas are just like WoW wargames. The same wargames that failed in Cata.

War games failed for an entirely different reason. One of the major ones being that WoW’s arena doesn’t take as much technical skill when you’re only running 2v2s or 3v3s in a very small area and your focus is only to murder one person on the enemy team. That can get very boring, very fast, and you would be taking up the time of other players with your practice that can only go so far.

Custom maps would be useful for teams who want to perfect their strategy on certain maps, or do dry runs of new strats to simulate. Test damage against live people, or even organize a 5v5. Whatever.

Haku.5068:

One of the major ones being that WoW’s arena doesn’t take as much technical skill when you’re only running 2v2s or 3v3s in a very small area and your focus is only to murder one person on the enemy team.

That’s arguable.

At a micro level, the amount of individual skill required to actually make the first kill against a competent team is, imo, above and beyond what it would take to do the same in a GW2-era TDM environment.

For one, with the sheer amount of AoE and reactive proc damage in this game, players take tons of splash damage over the course of any given team fight that more often than not sees teams say things like “lol I just got here and already almost killed myself” or “hey swap to this target cause he’s almost dead even though we were never really focusing him in the first place”.

You never really saw that kind of thing with arena. Everything was deliberate. Every swap was time critical. Every cc chain was planned and had to be perfectly executed because of diminishing returns. Things like target of target and focus cast bars allowed players to make more informed decisions about what to do, when to do it, and who to do it to. Positioning was arguably more important cause eat a cs at the wrong time or fail to cleanse a root on your melee fast enough and your team was either done or far behind. Cancel casting and juking in general is/was a bigger part of arena than it is here. The kind of TTK that exists in this game from single sources is generally only possible in arena via setup from multiple sources (few exceptions apply that were all patched relatively quickly). So on and so forth.

At a macro level, the comparison is irrelevant if you’re trying to place GW2’s conquest maps next to arenas. You’d need to place them next to RBG’s, where the amount of technical skill required in terms of creating and executing strats is more or less equal.

IMO anyways.

Vena.8436:

Archaon.6245:

Do you mean everyone that was unable to play a proper balanced maybe? GW1 HA required more skill to just pass UW than the whole GW2 spvp, tournaments and wvsw together…..if i’m wrong please tell me…

And again, I am not saying sPvP is better than GW1 (GvG reigns superior) but introducing HoH into GW2 isn’t going to help GW2’s PvP.

At last people would finally learn how to play like a team…actually only few experienced players know how to cooperate here in tourn, most of players only set up a zerg fest and cry because they lose…..the only zerg i can remember in gw1 was iway, and everyone knows that iway was well…pretty much the most unskilled sht out there…