Guild Wars 2

first, the scoreboard popping up at the end of the match. definitely number one. it gets in the way of good fights more often then not.

second, custom arenas and spectator mode. please. disable. spectator. team. switch. people fair weather to the winning side as soon as its clear which side is going to win. making it so people can still join spectator but not team switch would be a huge improvement. it wouldn’t fix everything, but oh my god it would be so nice.

third is a bug. when you die in custom arenas then join spectator, rejoin your team, sometimes you are put into permanent down state and cant respawn.

last is a suggestion for improvement. in custom arenas, its often the case that one side will have bandwagoners that stack every match and roll the other side. its not healthy or fun for either side to experience landslide matches for 4-7 matches in a row. perhaps giving increased rewards for a member of the winning side to join the losing side would be a decent incentive to equalize the teams and create better matches for everyone. ofc you would have to work it so someone cant join losing side then afk in spawn or spectator. which, combined with the possibility of the losing side getting a not so skilled team switcher, makes this idea not so great! idk though, it would be really nice to have something to make players want better match quality.

EDIT
big mix up lol! I meant public servers, aka anet automated servers, not custom arenas made by people! ugh lol, sorry!

Why not just queue for ranked or unranked?

Shaogin.2679:

Why not just queue for ranked or unranked?

Maybe he does and sometimes he just wants to play a little hotjoin. I enjoy hotjoin and I would love to see some improvements to it as well.

Anyway, this thread is clearly about custom arenas, so let’s keep it on that topic. Asking why he doesn’t just queue for ranked or unranked only serves to derail the thread.

This has has been an issue with hotjoin forever, and with the number of people playing in “regular” rooms being so low I doubt they will ever fix it. That said the fix is pretty easy. Just prevent anyone from joining the winning team until the losing team has an extra person. They could also require playing the entire match to get credit for a daily won. Some people just like to steamroll/stack and that wouldn’t effect them much however.

Zintrothen.1056:

Shaogin.2679:

Why not just queue for ranked or unranked?

Maybe he does and sometimes he just wants to play a little hotjoin. I enjoy hotjoin and I would love to see some improvements to it as well.

Anyway, this thread is clearly about custom arenas, so let’s keep it on that topic. Asking why he doesn’t just queue for ranked or unranked only serves to derail the thread.

Derail? No, I am legitimately curious as to why he would rather play Hotjoin when he could just play Unranked or Ranked and avoid those issues altogether. Is there some benefit to playing Hotjoin that Unranked/Ranked doesn’t provide? The only thing I can think of is jumping straight into a match, but that doesn’t seem like much of a benefit when Unranked queue times are short as hell and provide much better matches.

I do play unranked, but to say “do this because this isn’t working as good as it could be” isn’t a very good argument.

its true custom arena population is really low, and so the benefit to improving them would be pretty minimal. as I don’t know anything about programming, I have attempted to put forth a couple “quick” improvements that could go a long way for those who do play them.

I would even go so far as to say that some custom arena problems have over time led to its eventual demise. I would also like to say that improvements to the mode could lead to a small revival, although again it would most likely be improbable and minimal. however, I personally don’t substitute probability for hope.

Evan Lesh.3295:

I personally don’t see the benefit of spending time trying to make hot join a different experience when we’ve already done all the work in unranked and ranked arena. Custom arenas support a casual, low-restriction experience and blending that more with the rated arena experience will only appeal less to the intended audience.

I do not agree with this.

I played hot-join when I first started PvP. It was very unfun for a casual like me. I just don’t see how constantly spectating to force team swapping is a good experience for anyone. I think it is already not restrictive as players can join and leave a game at will. Allowing player to keep swapping team is just making the whole gameplay meaningless.

Yeah, you can say that we should just go play unranked and I agree with that. But saying the current custom arena structure is actually decent for some sort of casual experience is just lying.

But why play hotjoin? Custom arenas I can get, but with a custom arena you shouldn’t have team swapping issues if you are using it to fight with your team against another team.

New players will likely pick Unranked or Ranked since they are the big buttons in your face that put you in a PvP match.

I just can’t understand the desire to play Hotjoin matches.

are you got not going to say anything about the annoying pop up at the end game? that is 1 of the most obnoxious features in pvp.

i edited the OP. i believe i have intermixed some terms that are in error. sorry!

@shaogin

myself and others play hotjoin for the social aspect of it all. its not about srs bsns meta build player vs point. its about having fun and good fights.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Exciton.8942:

Yeah, you can say that we should just go play unranked and I agree with that. But saying the current custom arena structure is actually decent for some sort of casual experience is just lying.

When I say casual, I don’t mean new players. I mean players who don’t care much about rules or rewards because they use the platform for things like dueling and trying new builds against something other than dummies.

Custom arenas are a tool that allows players to self-regulate and I would personally like to remove all of the baked custom arenas from the browser. People who own arenas would just turn off auto-balance if they don’t like people abusing spectator team swapping or use the ban feature.

On a similar note, can arena owners have the ability to remove the “Ready Up” mark with the character portraits? For the custom servers that do operate like this, it just gets in the way. Otherwise have it as an option for each individual player to toggle?