Guild Wars 2

Because there is no match making in que and for a new player to practice in hot-join is flat out frustrating.

But what do people do in hot-join nowadays? They make it so that it’s 2v1, 3v2, 4v5, and people only join the winning team. Trying to learn crap in hot-join could be very frustrating as a new player because people only fight in uneven terms most of the time.

Also this game has NO INFRASTRUCTURE. NO ONE is trying to capture the point and playing sPvP how it is MEANT TO BE PLAYED. Maybe at the start of the match, make the announcer say “BLATANTLY” and in visible text something such as “capture, hold, and fight for points to win?” Because “hold on to a point, seize theirs” sounds way too vague. Also maybe add bot games or something and give some rewards for it? Like 33% of what you would get in ques or hot-join.

Add a real que like League of Legends with ACTUAL match making and make custom arenas more affordable or something so that new players can try out stuff with friends. Really get rid of hot-join though.

TL;DR It may sound like a bad idea but:

1.) Get rid of hot-join because trying to learn stuff in that is anti-fun anyways
2.) You should be doing Ques so you can get custom arena stuff if you want to test out stuff with friends eventually.
3.) Make custom arena stuff more affordable through sPvP and maybe even through living world
4.) Infrastructure, this game’s infrastructure is NOT BLATANT or obvious enough. Maybe add bot games or something so new players can actually learn? A better tutorial? Anything that will allow this game to move forward.

Amir.1570:

Because there is no match making in que and for a new player to practice in hot-join is flat out frustrating.

But what do people do in hot-join nowadays? They make it so that it’s 2v1, 3v2, 4v5, and people only join the winning team. Trying to learn crap in hot-join could be very frustrating as a new player because people only fight in uneven terms most of the time.

Also this game has NO INFRASTRUCTURE. NO ONE is trying to capture the point and playing sPvP how it is MEANT TO BE PLAYED. Maybe at the start of the match, make the announcer say “BLATANTLY” and in visible text something such as “capture, hold, and fight for points to win?” Because “hold on to a point, seize theirs” sounds way too vague. Also maybe add bot games or something and give some rewards for it? Like 33% of what you would get in ques or hot-join.

Add a real que like League of Legends with ACTUAL match making and make custom arenas more affordable or something so that new players can try out stuff with friends. Really get rid of hot-join though.

TL;DR It may sound like a bad idea but:

1.) Get rid of hot-join because trying to learn stuff in that is anti-fun anyways
2.) You should be doing Ques so you can get custom arena stuff if you want to test out stuff with friends eventually.
3.) Make custom arena stuff more affordable through sPvP and maybe even through living world
4.) Infrastructure, this game’s infrastructure is NOT BLATANT or obvious enough. Maybe add bot games or something so new players can actually learn? A better tutorial? Anything that will allow this game to move forward.

Unranked queue is pretty much what you wanna do to learn the game. It’s 95% of the time 5v5 and I’d give it until the 16th before you completely judge the matchmaking as being whatever.

Lopez.7369:

Now that unranked queue is in the game, ArenaNet really should get rid of hotjoin. Leave the custom servers obviously, but hotjoin is just pointless at this point.

Hotjoin = custom arenas. They’re pretty much interchangeable at this point. Going a distance to ‘remove’ hotjoin seems like it wouldn’t even be successful at keeping new players from doing it.

But I don’t disagree with questioning hotjoin’s usefulness. I don’t see a lot of value in doing hotjoin with perma-imbalanced teams and people leaving/hopping teams every 5 seconds.

However, I think hotjoin/custom arenas are too big a part of their design philosophy. This design was that PvP in GW2 has to be accessible at a moment’s notice.

AFAIK, you can’t queue while doing Hotjoins now, which is what I used to do. What a pity.

Problems:
1, No game modes reduce variety + mean everybody quit
2, Boring balance with specs lasting for ages and no new classes, skills, traits basically since release (with tiny exceptions) – this is almost unheard of when games should receive expansions every year or two to keep things fresh
3, No competitive scene whatsoever – the top players are simply those willing to stick with such a samey experience which has caused everybody else to quit. And play as part of a team with a good comp/proper boring tactics (standing on points)
4, No support for small groups/solo players – improved slightly with solo queue but now back to the starting point
5, Too many lame specs
6, Try harders raging in rosters/not in rosters and ego maniacs all over the community when the game is total childs play and being good = easiest thing in the world because there is no game depth
7, No support for casual players like me – I just want to play and kill people and have fun, not play vs try-hard gw2 geeks in player vs point game mode

Good points:
1, Excellent business model (except no expansions)
2, Stable player base from PvE
3, Good active combat system
4, Not a keyboard management sim like other mmos
5, Clean and responsive controls
6, Go gear grind to shut off new players

Basically the strengths of the game = core strengths which will keep the game alive regardless of where they go from here. Having said that, the game has no competitive scene. Or not one large enough to matter. And depending on their priorities (which seem to be living story for PvE and supporting to esports “pros” for pvp) I doubt the game will grow much.

The devs are good. They made a great game. And guys like Justin seem to really care and put in a ton of work. So the game is in good hands. But I doubt it will ever become what some people want it to become. It will always be a casual game because that is how it is designed.

Their best bet is to keep things fresh with large skill/trait/weapon additions and new game modes. The esports thing is kind of killing the game and has been for a while. (remember no balance changes before PAX – lol). Nobody cares about the tournaments. Nobody watches them. Yet they are always rammed down our throats at the expense of regular changes to balance to keep stuff fresh. I didn’t even watch them when I played this game and was semi try-hard.

Hi,

Many good ideas here. I’d like to try arenas with bots, too.

As for hotjoin, i.e. “Training”, I have a different opinion, and don’t think it should be removed. While I agree it does not help much in teaching Conquest mechanics, I believe it is the perfect place to learn about new classes and builds. When I join unranked arenas, I expect people to at least have decent mechanical skills with their class/build. YMMV.

It’s true that hotjoin has issues: people abusing the spectator system, unbalanced fights, large variation in levels of players… But then again, hotjoin (IMHO) isn’t for serious games, I see it more as mechanical training. I don’t understand why experienced players would go there with mastered builds, when the unranked arena offers a better gaming experience (unless there is some bad ego involved, i.e. fear of getting owned in unranked arenas, pleasure to crush players of lesser skills…).

Also, hotjoin is more laid back, so can accommodate some players personalities. There’s a lot of rage there, but at least it’s amusing. The rage you find in serious games is way more toxic, and can somehow negate the pleasure of the game.

Regards.

Hello frands! Vee Wee here, retired #1 Engi NA and world first rank 80!

New people can’t get into the game because there are no new people! It costs $40 and many of the recent GW2 reviews and the current PvP playerbase show dissatisfaction with the quality of the game with good reason!

There is no demo! Vee Wee personally believes Guild Warts 2 is a gr8 game! But who’s going to take Vee Wee’s word for it! There needs to be a demo like World of Wartcraft to show people what they’re going to be spending money on! One weekend trial period every 6 months doesn’t really cut it! Back in the day when this game still cost $60, Vee Wee used to try to get people to play this game! None of them wanted to play without playing a demo first! And then Vee Wee’s frands that started playing with Vee Wee at launch all quit! Because of the next reason! Frandless

There is only one game mode! How can you get new people to come play this game if the game is old and stale! When people think PvP, they think about competing against other players! They don’t think about standing on points for the entire game! Seriously conquest is just old and boring! It became old and boring 2 years ago! It’s not esports even if Anet hands thousands of dollars to the same players every 6 months! There’s no competition at all! Arenas would be so easy to implement! The maps would take way shorter time to design than conquest maps! But Anet is content to outsource this game mode to ESL and Mistpedia which is a huge joke! And again there’s no competition whatsoever so the same people win these things time and time again!

There’s also no tiers for these tournaments, so you have average teams facing off against the best teams in the world for the prize! Yeah nobody wants to do that, especially on stream where twitch chat is the most disgusting place and you’ll be publicly ridiculed in front of thousands, wait sorry hundreds, of people! That’s a pretty big reason why you don’t see many new teams forming! Why bother going through the hassle of finding four other like-minded players only to get 500-0’d by the best team in the world just because the population is TOO DAM TINY for this game to have ladders!

Hope that helped! Wahoo! Bye frands!

As I got into pvp hot join helped me. Just for learning basic stuff like maps and fighting for points.

I think the “learn,play,ranked” was a good step forward for new players.

There are many things missing, without question.

Anybody seen a tutorial? (Don’t answer)

It’s easy. Just be FREE for the pvp only. If u want to enter PVE world or WVW, pay money.

I use hot join to see how well a build I am testing can stand up to 3 or 4 enemy players beating on me.

I think Vee Wee hit the nail on the head and only recites my own thoughts regarding the game’s PvP. There’s more of course, but those are the big ones that glare at most people in the face.

TDM needs expanding , also add a capture the flag mode with Two capture points and two flags , two side routes create maps that are sized inbetween the size of courtyard and a conquest map not too big not too small.

then you will have 3 game modes TDM , conquest two cap , conquest 3 cap , TDM (tweeked into a custom map can make GvG 5-10man) making the mode Multi changable for all the maps will Greatly widen the options of the type of game on what map ect.

many many Combinations , then obviously for Tornaments they will have Strict maps and types of games to play to by league/tornament standards.

that will bring in many many more people being able to play TDM on spirit watch with ledges ect will split players up to deal with the situations at hand , and forcing a zerg ball on the bigger conquest maps to split up or risk there lord dying.

adds a whole new lvl of play split deal with the problem or risk your lord , just like gw1 gvg mainly for 8vs8’s.

things will improve anet needs to be faster and add more Medium sized maps.

plz no capture the flag. immob stacking says f yu

Wahoo! Bye frands!

Because there is no rank segregation, spvp will continue to stay at this poor state.

New players enter Training mode, got thrashed by veteran players = Quit/ Exit Match
Veteran player teaming up with New Players in soloq got kitten d by premade team 10-500 – veteran fed up and Quit

Yeah, hence explained why the REAL pvp player population are so tiny.
I agree with that engineer, only one game mode is also the problem – Boring.

Esport? Its only a dream.

The progression of a new player through PvP:

• Start in hotjoin
• Can’t ever learn effectively because 10% of matches (not even an exaggeration) have any semblance of balance
• Rather than mechanics, player learns to pick out who’s good and try to stack with them every game
• Rather than team fights, player learns about spawn camping since every match is severely imbalanced
• Player feels finally ready for arenas after abusing autobalance to get win% back to 50%
• Joins arenas knowing little about actual 1v1/team fighting or conquest mechanics
• Gets raged at by teammates to gtfo because of skill disparity
• Goes back to hotjoin try again
• No balanced matches, no effective practice
• Another potentially active PvPer ends up dismissing community as toxic and unwelcoming, leaves PvP (or whole game) entirely

tl;dr—New players have no real place to begin since hotjoin is currently a cesspool of everything not to do in a real match.

Proposed ideas:

• Remove hotjoin entirely
• Eliminate the rewards for hotjoin (0 rank points) to eliminate farming
• Change win/loss rewards to match participation reward (maybe 300 points?) to reduce incentive to stack and autobalance

I just bought a friend an account (with the $20 special offer recently). He loves it. However, I am not sure how he would have fared if I hadn’t been there to teach him the basics, in some ways spvp is fairly complex.

I don’t think hotjoin should be removed, we went there for a few practice rounds and he seems to like it because he can just mess around fighting and having fun (after he plays for a while he will probably hate the unbalanced teams and start to queue unranked more though).

One problem is that it is actually pretty difficult to get the hang of rotations – which is the key to winning games. Even if you know how to rotate, if the rest of your team is doing something else you get crushed. That is also the biggest “problem” I see in unranked now- its difficult to anticipate where team members are going, because they are often doing unexpected things.

Lets put it this way
Conquest= You only need to prevent your enemy getting/gaining point.
and no need to remove something working as intended.

Chapell.1346:

and no need to remove something working as intended.

How is autobalance farming/stacking teams/5v4 meta working as intended…?

I guess it’s also wrong to give new comers actual fair matches if people are saying hot-join should stay. When I mean fair at least get rid of the 4v5s or uneven matches that NEW PLAYERS HAVE TO PRACTICE IN HOT-JOIN by promoting ques and punish leavers first so we can actually get people to have even numbers people AT LEAST.

Because hot-join right now? All it does is provide anti-fun. Ques will save this game, just trust me.

I mean I understand they still need to market sPvP properly but my god at least make the game less cancerous before you try and market this game.

Punishing leavers in hotjoin doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to be, but I guess since you can still immediately get in, there would still be meaning in having Hotjoin.

Leavers should never be an issue if people are not discouraged from filling the missing spots.

As I said before, lower the rewards and change it to just participation points to turn it into more of a “sandbox” for people to practice and experiment, and discourage farmers/stackers.

Chaith.8256:

Punishing leavers in hotjoin doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to be, but I guess since you can still immediately get in, there would still be meaning in having Hotjoin.

When I meant punishing leavers I meant for ques, I didn’t word that part correctly. I really think people should do ques instead of hot-joins though and actually play the game how it is meant to be played and that custom games should be something that people CAN work for.

But yeah, okay so what would you do then so that people will actually do ques more? Or are they actually doing ques more than hot-join already and is fine as it is :x?

Would be great if a dev could pull up some statistics I guess if there really ARE a significant amount of people in normal ques.

@OP – because Conquest is terrible compared to GW1 PvP.

New players? dunno but whenever i play a new class i feel like a new player as well, an I’ve had no problem learning on the go during matches, i don’t feel that the PvP community in this game is hostile towards others expect for a few players that feel like they came over from League, but that happens in every game

the problem with unranked queue is possible that you are matched to top teams .

I played with 2 colleagues that decided to give GW2 a shot. Both less then 50 games played. Unfortnately the new matchmaking made them go away again.

The problem was we lost 3 games in a row. All three games were fun. We lost 4xx to 500 and my colleagues were like ok go, lets win the next one. prefect we had fun even if we lost but the games were great.

After three good games we got a top guild and they roflstomped us 33:500. After this game we got a team with top 100 soloQ players (I know the names because I played often against them). 5:500. After this game the motivation was near to the bottom and we got a game vs a pug with the No.2 player from the ranked queue.

Now both are waiting until the beta is over because I promissed them that the matchmaking will be better. But I have only little hopes.

New player should not be matched to player with >3000 games expiriance. I know it is hard for ANet to match a group of 3 people (I played ~2000 games and my skill good enough for top 200 EU soloQ and 2 very new player ). But to match us vs a 5 people group with top players is not the answer.

Prior to getting into PvP for GW2 a few months ago, I took peoples ( what seemed to be “good” ) advice, and started off in Hot Join like many others. After about a week, I was tired of the crappy matches and decided to delve into SoloQ. I got wrecked.

In my opinion, the only thing Hot Join provides to new players, is a layout of the map. Sure, you can test builds there but why would you want to test how great your build idea is, against players that aren’t really good/new or, are just there for dailies? After spending a couple of hours on sites like Metabattle, the wiki, and YouTube, I came away more knowledgeable and a better player than I had from the week I spent in Hot Join.

I personally don’t think Hot Join does enough for anyone other than ANet, for it to even be in the game. I get people ( and ANet ) like to say people should start off there, but I think that’s a horrible idea given my experience doing just that. If they really want people to care and learn to PvP other than just diving right in to Conquest, I think offering more game modes with mixed PvE elements would be a good starting point a la Fort Aspenwood and Jade Quarry from GW1 as those two modes were a lot of peoples starting point before moving up to RA, Teams, HA and GvG.

Copestetic.5174:

Prior to getting into PvP for GW2 a few months ago, I took peoples ( what seemed to be “good” ) advice, and started off in Hot Join like many others. After about a week, I was tired of the crappy matches and decided to delve into SoloQ. I got wrecked.

In my opinion, the only thing Hot Join provides to new players, is a layout of the map. Sure, you can test builds there but why would you want to test how great your build idea is, against players that aren’t really good/new or, are just there for dailies? After spending a couple of hours on sites like Metabattle, the wiki, and YouTube, I came away more knowledgeable and a better player than I had from the week I spent in Hot Join.

I personally don’t think Hot Join does enough for anyone other than ANet, for it to even be in the game. I get people ( and ANet ) like to say people should start off there, but I think that’s a horrible idea given my experience doing just that. If they really want people to care and learn to PvP other than just diving right in to Conquest, I think offering more game modes with mixed PvE elements would be a good starting point a la Fort Aspenwood and Jade Quarry from GW1 as those two modes were a lot of peoples starting point before moving up to RA, Teams, HA and GvG.

Very good ideas.

However, I believe unranked queue with a friend or solo should be the starting point for new players. With a focus on even teams, and with matchmaking tweaks that are coming, it’s going to be a much smoother and balanced learning environment.

Hotjoin should be for intermediate players to test how big a number they can 1vX survive against or practice combo’ing players to learn a new build. Or people who just don’t give a care whether they win or lose.

I just started playing in September and I’ve found PvP to be just fine. The last thing I want to see is this amazing game watered down.

“1.) Get rid of hot-join because trying to learn stuff in that is anti-fun anyways”

I trained in hotjoin to get good enough to compete in regular queued matches… found it much easier than the prepatch solo and team arenas.

“2.) You should be doing Ques [sic] so you can get custom arena stuff if you want to test out stuff with friends eventually.”

I do not understand what you’re saying here.

“3.) Make custom arena stuff more affordable through sPvP and maybe even through living world”

Not sure what you’re talking about here either.

“4.) Infrastructure, this game’s infrastructure is NOT BLATANT or obvious enough. Maybe add bot games or something so new players can actually learn? A better tutorial? Anything that will allow this game to move forward.”

I agree that the tutorial pre-lobby area is the worst I’ve probably ever seen (why would we need to re-learn how to revive someone..?). Bot practice matches might also be beneficial, but the AI would need to be significantly better than anything I’ve yet to see in the game to come close to being a challenge (as opposed to the rofltargets in heart of the mists). I don’t agree about the structure not being ‘obvious’ enough, though. The PvP menu is pretty straightforward — I never had problems finding stuff or getting around even on my first day using it.