Guild Wars 2

Hello,

So its not secret that this game’s pvp is very underplayed compared to the rest of the game. We’ve seen many attempts to improve sPvP and bring in players, but most have fallen short. That is not to say we saw no improvement, but when compared to the game as a whole the population improvement seems marginal.

Here are some of the reasons why I think conquest fails as a game mode and is probably the worse out of the new one and TDM.

Problems:

1. Poor Meta. The meta that is produced by conquest design isn’t overall entertaining to watch or play. It does have its merits and is fun, as they say it “gets old fast”. The meta seems to be heavily focused on AoEs. Now the design of AoEs would warrent to move out of them, however thanks to conquest design compared to some map designs, the AoEs are often difficult to move out of. This could be because you can’t let the point get decapped. Another reason could be the frequency and size of AoEs being cast its near difficult to try to reduce their effect.

2. Lots of none combat related skills. The biggest thing to this game mode and the thing that decides if games are a win or lose is map awareness (and from that rotation). Rotating heavily relies on a users map awareness. If anyone here has ever played a dota or anything like that, you know that map awareness is something not a lot of people are good at. The ability not to focus in on one thing at a time. Conquest HEAVILY relies on this. So even if you’re the best player in the world in combat, if you’re not rotating well then you could lose a lot of your games. This frustrates a lot of people. This is also why WvW is so popular. WvW is a lot more based on a person’s combat expertise rather than things like rotating and map awareness. I believe this is one of the main reasons people prefer WvW to sPvP.

3. Hard to carry, easy to ruin. Unlike MOBAs where one person could easily carry a team or in WoW, its VERY hard to carry in this game and this game mode. The game mode is one of the primary reasons, but also the downed state. It is also very easy as one person to completely ruin a game. Someone not rotating well, going after a secondary objective at the wrong time, not focusing, etc; these can easily cost you a game

4. Lack of Big Plays. This doesn’t promote big plays. There aren’t many, if any, big plays that can take place with combat; so all of it relies on movement. Movement related big plays are often less entertaining. Not only this but they rarely happen with conquest. The best map it takes place is Temple of the Silent Storm. Legacy of Foefire it can happen, but it requires a team to take a BIG risk. Many of them don’t do it as a result.

5. The Downed State. The Downed State is a lot easier to manage and a lot less noticeable in WvW than it is in sPvP. Many of the people I’ve played with since release and new ones I play with all have gone through similar train of thoughts when it comes to the downed state. First they either started with PvE or WvW and liked it. Then they got in the fence about it after playing WvW mostly. Then after a lengthy period or prolonged sPvP play the begin to dislike the downed state and agree that it has no place in WvW or sPvP. I find it funny that the people I argued with a year and a half ago about the downed state now talk about how much they hate it.

Suggestions to Fix the downed state in sPvP and WvW

1. You can not heal players by “rubbing” them. You must use an ability or defend them and let them rez themselves up

2. You can not rally off of PvE creatures in WvW

So if we’re going to see the new sPvP game mode bring in players and warrant them playing over WvW its going to need to address that stuff. The downed state may not be the most important, but if we dont’ see a increase in the sPVP population it could be a major reason.

The new sPvP game mode needs to

1. Have the ability to see “big” plays without causing a team to sacrifice a ton, so much so that they don’t want to do it

2. Produce a different meta. With conquest fights were often focus on or around points causing the mobility of some classes and the freedom of movement during battle to be lessened.

3. Can one player make a big difference positively? Or just negatively?

If those things aren’t properly addressed I feel that the continued request for a TDM game mode will continue. The TDM has a lot of merits and could add a lot for the game, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Although we can identify many problems, the one that personally bothers me the most is the following: “infodump”.

The game throws way too much information at you at every single moment. Conditions, boons, “random” passive procs, pets, “random” cleaves, particle effects, and skill spamming. There’s always way too many things happening at once, it’s nearly absurd. Throw into that pot the unsatisfying number of key telegraphed skills, because some weapon sets are entirely designed around being powerful with very quick cast times or animations that are too similar to each other.

I’m not a top player, but I have a hard time believing that even the best players can manage so much information at the same time and react strategically to it. For most of the situations, I feel, it’s much wiser to react instinctively, and you only have some “room to breath” when you pick the OP easy-to-play or hard-to-counterplay cheese.

The information this game expects you to be aware at any given time in combat makes more sense to a turn-based RPG, than to a fast paced RPG like this one where you can lost your entire health from a sudden 3-second burst.

Even if the top players can somehow manage this infodump, it still creates a massive skill gate to most of the playerbase, which turns the entire learning experience into a “I don’t even know what the hell killed me, again…”. And no, it’s not only about “L2P”, before someone throws this excuse. If the first impressions (and second, and third) of this game’s combat system is that of a mess, and if you need to study hard and dig deep to even understand what the hell is happening on the screen and on the UI versus each meta build, it won’t motivate many people to keep investing on, when there are other pvp games in the market that are equally complex, possibly deeper, but with much, much clearer gameplay.

The same problem applies to spectators, who can’t even understand what they see.

To me, this is my biggest problem.

It does seem contradictory that they want us to watch character models for tells and react to the combat but then make combat extremely focused on cooldowns that force us to watch our skill bar as we wait for an important skill to become available.

This alone is pretty manageable though, it just becomes more difficult when you add in condition damage. I think a big reason condition damage gets complained about so much is because when you start taking on a lot of conditions your eyes will be drawn to the toolbar, which means you’ll be missing any tells from the condition user as they use their own vital skills. It’s a lot easier to dodge a power build’s burst because your eyes are naturally on your opponent, but conditions force you to divide your attention between your opponent and your conditions/boons bar.

The game doesn’t lack “big plays” because they’re too risky, but because they are not rewarding enough.
The reason why the combat is boring to watch is because there’s too much of everything: too many abilities, too many short cooldowns, too much self-sustain, too many cc-abilities, too much stability, protection and regeneration.
Instead of these being exclusive to certain classes and situations, boons are flying around everywhere, in return their effects are nowhere near substantial. If the new game mode reduced the amount of skills on the skill bar and focused more on single-target dps and made crowd control abilities have massive cooldowns, but in return removed stability providing abilities from most classes.
If only they made protection negate 75% of the damage taken, but made it a guardian-only single target ability on an ally, the game would see more “big-plays” where you need to know who on your team is getting focused and take action.
They can also buff regeneration and give it to eles only on a 40 second cooldown.
Stuff like this makes a game competitive, when you have to think about the skills you use, rather than spamming all your buttons and regenerating the health you lost due to bad positioning.

It’s not just infodump. It’s extremely easy to be in a situation where you plain cannot do anything. Build related, one of the most frustrating things a new player can face is those immortal bunkers, or a dodge spam thief, or a clone/blink spam Mesmer.

Imagine a new player in that situation. He’s supposed to be a Zerker build, and yet he cannot really even drop the target HP under 90%? Why? He doesn’t understand at all and nothing in the game explains to him the problem.

As for the OP, you mention that one of the most important things in the mode is non combat related. Map awareness and proper rotations. I don’t think it’s a problem as much really because MOBAs actually do it, and many many noobs play them anyway. Heck, if you were a complete ultra noob to DotA, never player it and never ever looked at tutorials, how do you imagine understanding the concept of laning at all? And yet, even in the lowest of the lowest level, most players get it. Most players lane somewhat correctly or at least try to.

Map awareness is trained, proper rotations can be learned. In fact, I’d say the fact the game depends on those skills is better because it’s not as twitch and so it won’t bother too much the older gamers. But what’s the point if the new player just gets destroyed in combat? Completely destroyed, wrecked, and he doesn’t even have the minor idea on why, how and what he should do instead? And combat is the first impression he’ll get of PvP in the first place.

When it comes to map rotations, mobas (at least LoL, the only one I’ve played) do it in a way that is more friendly to PUGs.

With clearly defined lanes, rotations and roaming are usually done by the jungler, or by a laner who gets the opportunity for it. Meanwhile, it might come at the cost of farming and turret breaking, so it creates a nice balance between comitting to your lane, and rotating and roaming through the map. There’s a risk/ reward in here, like in almost everything else in the genre, anyway, which is why it is the esports that it is.

Conquest Mode is too circular/ cycling in nature, so pugs have a natural tendency to roam through the map like headless chickens, or to stay at a point far longer than they should. Conquest is really pug-unfriendly, and is a game mode that is far more enticing to coordenated teams.

I have been playing sPvP GW2 since the first day and yet I still haven’t find the “FUN” part in conquest. The more I want to play better at conquest the more I have to yell at myself “Don’t stick with him(friend) and go cap point somewhere else.”

I mean I want to play and have fun with friend by fighting along side with him but this game mode disagree with me if I want to get the real job done.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Although we can identify many problems, the one that personally bothers me the most is the following: “infodump”.

The game throws way too much information at you at every single moment. Conditions, boons, “random” passive procs, pets, “random” cleaves, particle effects, and skill spamming. There’s always way too many things happening at once, it’s nearly absurd. Throw into that pot the unsatisfying number of key telegraphed skills, because some weapon sets are entirely designed around being powerful with very quick cast times or animations that are too similar to each other.

I’m not a top player, but I have a hard time believing that even the best players can manage so much information at the same time and react strategically to it. For most of the situations, I feel, it’s much wiser to react instinctively, and you only have some “room to breath” when you pick the OP easy-to-play or hard-to-counterplay cheese.

The information this game expects you to be aware at any given time in combat makes more sense to a turn-based RPG, than to a fast paced RPG like this one where you can lost your entire health from a sudden 3-second burst.

Even if the top players can somehow manage this infodump, it still creates a massive skill gate to most of the playerbase, which turns the entire learning experience into a “I don’t even know what the hell killed me, again…”. And no, it’s not only about “L2P”, before someone throws this excuse. If the first impressions (and second, and third) of this game’s combat system is that of a mess, and if you need to study hard and dig deep to even understand what the hell is happening on the screen and on the UI versus each meta build, it won’t motivate many people to keep investing on, when there are other pvp games in the market that are equally complex, possibly deeper, but with much, much clearer gameplay.

The same problem applies to spectators, who can’t even understand what they see.

To me, this is my biggest problem.

I agree too. However I think that’s more of a problem with the skill system. The combat log doesn’t help at all too because so much crap is going through it, it’s impossible to see what happened where and when. Since well never see them split skills and changing the game to prevent infodump is too risky (WvWers and PvErs along with some sPvPers may like it a lot), the only way I see them fixing it is by introducing a game mode with reduced players. Max I see working is 3v3. 2v2 would probably work to. Do a 3v3, 2v2 arena type game mode like in WoW and I think it could do some good things for the game. Then maybe do a heroes ascent type a thing with all the game modes.

Interesting. People feel like pvp failed because of the combat system requiring an extremely high level of awareness and game knowledge.

This makes me wonder if top GW2 pvp players could transition to any other game and pick it up rather quickly giving top players in other games a run for their money.

If this happens to be true, maybe Guild Wars 2 could be marketed as the varsity or pro level of esports.

One can dream, but other games pvp is just too boring to even try such a thing for me.

I am all for conquest mode once its 10vs10 or 15vs15 with 5 nodes on bigger maps. Maybe not so competitive gameplay, but very fun to take part in, and many players would migrate from WvW to it.

There could be some utility skills that allow to bypass downed state under some restrictive conditions. It is completely fine as long as they can be double edged swords, meaning they can backfire and do more harm to the predator than to the prey. I think haste skills were supposed to be something like that, but they are underpowered and not worth using at the moment.

Having more than just 5v5 would help a lot. In terms of seeing more variety in builds and in strategies taking place.

Having those extra few people to fill in gaps would change a lot I feel.

Shockwave.1230:

Interesting. People feel like pvp failed because of the combat system requiring an extremely high level of awareness and game knowledge.

I don’t have nothing against high level of awareness and game knowledge, but there’s so much information you can show at once before it starts have a negative effect on the overall quality.

It forces you to play more instintively, and demands you to have a stronger notion of the game (heavily based on experience and knowledge of the opposing build) to get a subconscious idea of what the hell is happening to you in more busy situations (and there are a LOT of busy situations).

It’s worth noting that if that amount of information was decreased, it wouldn’t dumb the combat system. Quite the contrary, it would open up more strategical plays, because players would have the time required to read and react to all the details that are occuring.

There’s other problems with this too:

• Casual spectators will be unable to understand what they are viewing in streams;
• The more number of players on the map, the worse the infodump scales, greatly restricting the potential of GW2’s pvp;
• Most of the playerbase – and I feel this is very important – does not feels a sense of progression most of the time. They either play with easy cheese, or are forced to master as well as possible a hard build to have a chance. There’s no middleground here. You are either win masterful, or you win with cheese. If you are merely “good”, chances are, the hard-to-play build you’re using will get destroyed by the meta easy-to-play cheese a random player decides to take from the internet. But this is worth a discussion on this one. Sense of progression = weak in this game.

Mostly agree with you DiogoSilva – People STILL can not rotate correctly

5v5 Conquest puts way too much of the burden on individual players to make correct rotations constantly. It just does not happen – the barrier of entry for this game is actually pretty high most people like to think this game is brain dead passive play – which it can be during combat.

The thing is that conquest is actually a lot more than just combat. Which is why the formats that offer strictly combat like WvW + Hotjoins are infinitely more popular than Team Q. I think 5v5 is a mistake it needs to be 2v2 death match or 10v10 conquest – less of a burden on every single teammate making the correct rotation

I think the conditions/boons were done terribly and fully agree with you that it should have been limited to certain professions. If only a guardian could use protection like in your example or only a necromancer could use poison etc we would see much bigger/clutch plays