Guild Wars 2

i know it cant be explained and im not even exaggerating, dont get me wrong i cap points i do crucial kills and i oftenly place in the middle or above score on my team and a lot times first but something makes games turn against me
is anyone else having similar experience ?

the last two weeks have being a dissaster i know i should not care for hotjoins but when you try to win and loose all the time it gets annoying its easier for me to win a solo arena than hotjoin

It’s almost certainly because you’re not playing the *real* game of hotjoin - making sure you’re on the right team.

A large number of hotjoin matches end up being 3v4 or 4v5 all the way through, since nobody wants to join the losing team halfway through the match (which hasn’t got much chance of pulling things back) and then get almost no loot in return for their efforts.

At the start of a match, try to join the team with the players you know are good (probably from their performance in the previous match). People who know how hotjoin goes will tend to join the team they think is most likely to win... and they are often the more experienced folks who will contribute to their team’s success more anyway.
<sarcasm> Hotjoin: It’s super newbie-friendly! </sarcasm>

It’s important to force autobalance if you notice your team is outnumbered:
1) go into spectator mode
2) wait for a few seconds for autobalance message to appear
3) count down from 10 when it appears, spamming your mouse button on the ’join &lt;colour&gt; team’ button for the team that’s currently got more players
4) ???
5) profit!

It’s an exploit, sure - it really is exploiting game mechanics for unintended purposes - but the other option is to keep losing purely by being outnumbered, or to not play hotjoin at all.
I really don’t see the point in anyone playing a 4v5, in which very few skirmishes will be fair on numbers, for the minimal rewards granted for a loss. Unless the 5 are all significantly worse players than the 4 (e.g. the 5 all zerg about chasing 3 foes, the fourth one backcaps everything uninterrupted) the 5 will win almost every time.

You should never lose a game in hit join.

(1) hit play it now until you are on a winning team with more number than your opponent.

(2) if you ever have the chance, to autobalance, do it. This counts as a win and you get bonus glory.

(3) if your team has less players than the other team, hit spectate mode…. Wait for a player to autobalance, evening up the sides, and then transfer over to the winning team.

ugh hot join is a plague, I would recommend solo q but there is skyhammer. I usually just queue in TA by myself.

what above guys told you is true, but hotjoin is generaly just terrible and you wil have a unleasant stupid eperience with it.

1) Play hotjoin untill you can 1v1 reliably ( winning good matchups, losing but holding or runing from bad, and 50/50 on even )

2) try watching a stream or duel servers to improve on point (1)

3) NEVER look at score system. Its literaly worthless for the general showing of skill, some1 holding a point gets less than some1 losing it 3x times for example. Its soo not showing anything useful, that when some1 boasts about score – its a 100% noob alert.

4) Learn general map movement patterns and who should be in 1v1 and who should be in 3+ teamfight

5) Go solo/teamQ. even solo in teamQ. Why?
All above will make u batter hotjoin player. You will farm hotjoin for mindless 100hours and get 5s more per win.

Or u can play the mode where poeple actualy try, earn more money, more reward track, faster ranks – a loss in teamQ > hotjoin win , and maybe ull even have fun gl

edit:
as for hotjoins, use them as a duel/time pass between que times.

@Flumek

You’re wrong about one thing… The score system is great for infuriating people by boasting about it.

First off please never mention personal score as an indication of skill, or a measurement of how much you contributed to your team. Only noobs think it matter, now there are many variables in hj. Though if you are actually trying to win and only winning 1/10 you need to get better.

The first step would be choose a build that can carry the hardest solo, regardless if you team helps you or not. Such builds include staff/dd celest ele, bunker wars, guards, and engi/turret. Basically any thing that can hold a point an fight outnumbered for an extended period.

Now go to enemy home point and camp there, kill anyone that comes if you are able. At the very lest just harass that point and fight there outnumbered. Since its close to enemy spawn they will keep coming.

Most hotjoiners don’t know how rotate or leave a point if they aren’t accomplishing anything. This will makes easier for the rest of you team to keep other points.

As a player with over 15,000 matches, about 12,000 hj matches, of which about 9,500 are wins, it is my experience there are a few thing that can be done to win consistently:
1. Be good: it’s not good enough to be good at 1v1s in hot join, you have to be good at fighting in groups and against groups. A large amount of players will tend to choose to “Zerg” instead of play smart.
2. Play with friends: bring one or two friends with you who are good and this way you are likely to control the flow of a Zerg and have better odds of not being zerged.
3. Volunteer: if your team is zerging it is likely people on the other team will quit take the chance and volunteer to the other side,free win.
4. Be able to quickly judge other players skill level: if you are unable to follow #2, make quick judgements on the skill level of the players in the match and try to be on their team.
The most important thing is to have fun. Even if you don’t win if you are playing with friends you will have fun. My friends and I don’t even try to win, we just slaughter the other side into rage quitting and win anyway.

Had a fun experience last night, several times in a row, got autobalanced off of the winning team and we managed to turn it around after I switched.

Tips, mostly like ScaredyCat’s:

1) Remember always not to get caught up into combat in the middle of nowhere. This is a plauge in HJ games, just run away instead of wasting time. Avoid any big fight, unless it’s on a point.
2) Don’t just join automatically: The first time you’re in a server, look at the team comp: It can be as simple as just choosing after the first people join. If one team has an engi and one has a thief, go with the engi. The thing I avoid the most are multiple rangers and multiple thieves. Multiple rangers CAN be good, but it’s risky. Multiple thieves usually means the team is gonna lose. dont’ wait too long or you might get locked out!
3) At the end of the first game, look carefully at the scoreboard and use that info to try in with the best players from the last round. Score can be a little tricky for that, some classes (rangers) get inflated scores.

I’d avoid Single Q though. It’s just as likely to be unbalanced as hotjoin (which is worse, team hoppers or locked 4-5s?), but people are generally more chill and fun-loving.

If you’re losing hot joins it’s probably because you’re either a PvEr or new to the game. Its fine, just practice more and you’ll get the hang of it, but really hot joins aren’t the best place to improve skills. You should really just TeamQ by yourself. I would recommend TeamQ because above top 200ish TeamQ it’s a bunch of ransoms that are actually worse than SoloQers. Once you get to a certain level hotjoins are incredibly easy to win. When I do hotjoins I literally Zerg to every point, wipe the enemy regardless of what class/spec they’re playing, and then Zerg to the next point. I can 1v2 half the time.Too easy :P.

nekretaal.6485:

You should never lose a game in hit join.

(1) hit play it now until you are on a winning team with more number than your opponent.

(2) if you ever have the chance, to autobalance, do it. This counts as a win and you get bonus glory.

(3) if your team has less players than the other team, hit spectate mode…. Wait for a player to autobalance, evening up the sides, and then transfer over to the winning team.

hotjoin cancer 101.
if only Anet would fix their kitten game.

Liewec.2896:

nekretaal.6485:

You should never lose a game in hit join.

(1) hit play it now until you are on a winning team with more number than your opponent.

(2) if you ever have the chance, to autobalance, do it. This counts as a win and you get bonus glory.

(3) if your team has less players than the other team, hit spectate mode…. Wait for a player to autobalance, evening up the sides, and then transfer over to the winning team.

hotjoin cancer 101.
if only Anet would fix their kitten game.

This very much.

The other thing is ‘although 1-10 sucks and is annoying don’t be Nektraal’. I actually call out people team jumping so everyone knows. It’s kind of obnoxious and starts some fights sometimes, but it also hopefully will discourage the behavior.

It’s a bit of ‘if Anet won’t police us, maybe we can police ourselves’.

When players encourage others to exploit game mechanics, you know something’s wrong. This should be a bannable offense, at the very least.

Windsagio.1340:

The other thing is ‘although 1-10 sucks and is annoying don’t be Nektraal’. I actually call out people team jumping so everyone knows. It’s kind of obnoxious and starts some fights sometimes, but it also hopefully will discourage the behavior.

It’s a bit of ‘if Anet won’t police us, maybe we can police ourselves’.

I usually call out when I do it, and encourage everyone else to do it too.

Do you really think people ought to keep playing to the end of the match on a losing team, that is only losing because it’s outnumbered, with zero chance of pulling it back – or even of getting some fair skirmishes – since nobody else is going to join partway through for time-scaled loss rewards?

Do you really think that the people who skill-stack at the start of the match are playing fairly? Or those who camp in spectator mode until one team has a clear upper hand?

These are the folks who’re really playing unfairly, not the poor sods who entered the map and immediately joined the hilighted team that was 3v4… only to have someone immediately join the already winning lot who’s been camping spectate.

Windsagio.1340:

Had a fun experience last night, several times in a row, got autobalanced off of the winning team and we managed to turn it around after I switched.

Tips, mostly like ScaredyCat’s:

1) Remember always not to get caught up into combat in the middle of nowhere. This is a plauge in HJ games, just run away instead of wasting time. Avoid any big fight, unless it’s on a point.
2) Don’t just join automatically: The first time you’re in a server, look at the team comp: It can be as simple as just choosing after the first people join. If one team has an engi and one has a thief, go with the engi. The thing I avoid the most are multiple rangers and multiple thieves. Multiple rangers CAN be good, but it’s risky. Multiple thieves usually means the team is gonna lose. dont’ wait too long or you might get locked out!
3) At the end of the first game, look carefully at the scoreboard and use that info to try in with the best players from the last round. Score can be a little tricky for that, some classes (rangers) get inflated scores.

I’d avoid Single Q though. It’s just as likely to be unbalanced as hotjoin (which is worse, team hoppers or locked 4-5s?), but people are generally more chill and fun-loving.

Multiple thieves usually means the team is gonna lose. dont’ wait too long or you might get locked out!
I don’t want to burst your bubble but I have won matches with multiple thieves in it. Depends who is playing.XD
There is no final say as to who and what will be a winning factor in a HJ, just because it’s so messed up at the moment. I have joined a loosing team (40 to 180 score) and turned the match around. What I am trying to say is anything is possible in a HJ, sometimes you’ll even be part of a really awesome match that ends up 499/500. Sometimes it’s a total disaster but it will be in 80% of the cases because of the current free, unforgiving system in place.
I have even won a few handicapped matches of 4/5 and boy did it feel great. Of course those matches are rare xD.
It’s a harsh environment to start with if you’re new to GW2 and I am sure the new team is already at work on this.
Back to the topic. Just grey out the spectate button to anyone already in a match Anet and problem solved.
Or if that can’t done put a debuff on the player(s) that unbalance a match. Something like minus 50% to all stats.

hotjoin is screw around have fun mode. If you’re worrying about winning you are doing it wrong.

I win most of my hotjoin games just doing w/e is fun at the time. Sometimes the games wont go your way but oh well~ 1 out of 10 is a bit much tho >>

I suggest trying to carry harder if winning is important to you. Call targets, don’t zerg with your mates, pick your battles. Don’t go run into a point and engage 2v1 while you have no c/ds expecting to have an awesome turn out…

cheese.4739:

Windsagio.1340:

The other thing is ‘although 1-10 sucks and is annoying don’t be Nektraal’. I actually call out people team jumping so everyone knows. It’s kind of obnoxious and starts some fights sometimes, but it also hopefully will discourage the behavior.

It’s a bit of ‘if Anet won’t police us, maybe we can police ourselves’.

I usually call out when I do it, and encourage everyone else to do it too.

Do you really think people ought to keep playing to the end of the match on a losing team, that is only losing because it’s outnumbered, with zero chance of pulling it back – or even of getting some fair skirmishes – since nobody else is going to join partway through for time-scaled loss rewards?

Do you really think that the people who skill-stack at the start of the match are playing fairly? Or those who camp in spectator mode until one team has a clear upper hand?

These are the folks who’re really playing unfairly, not the poor sods who entered the map and immediately joined the hilighted team that was 3v4… only to have someone immediately join the already winning lot who’s been camping spectate.

Picking a good team is different than abandoning your team in the middle of the fight when it’s losing… especially since trying to skill pick with people you don’t know can fail utterly. I also don’t blame people for joining the winning team when first coming into the match. Everyone does that, just about.

Jumping breaks things severely, it makes a losing side lose worse, and it’s breaking expectations. Changing the team in the middle of the game because you’re losing is one of those things nobody ever expects, all the way down to kindergarten.

Windfury.3598:

Multiple thieves usually means the team is gonna lose. dont’ wait too long or you might get locked out!
I don’t want to burst your bubble but I have won matches with multiple thieves in it. Depends who is playing.XD

usually :p

It’s pattern recognition. I’ve noticed that teams with a lot of thieves tend to have trouble, compared to (say) teams with a lot of engineers. I wanted to include rangers there, but ranger combined fire is a mitigating factor when you get right down to it.

Trying to predict the winning team is always a gamble in hotjoin (the teams change a lot too, and it can be hard to tell who the winning factor was), but you can hedge your bets a little bit :p

i get it now you can press spectator mode any time you want and break the whole match

jihm.2315:

i get it now you can press spectator mode any time you want and break the whole match

i would not call it “breaking the whole match” especially if the match is 5 vs 4 to start with. it would be re-balancing the match if the losing team ended up with more players after the re-balancing.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

jihm.2315:

i get it now you can press spectator mode any time you want and break the whole match

i would not call it “breaking the whole match” especially if the match is 5 vs 4 to start with. it would be re-balancing the match if the losing team ended up with more players after the re-balancing.

Yeah but who spec’s out to balance teams? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it.

~~~

To the guy who suggested blockign the spectate button, it would be better to just make you gain 0 points if you had to go into spectate once you’ve been on a team. There are legitimate reasons to go spec (phone call, answer the door, etc) so we want it possible, we just don’t want it to be a way to get more points.

Agreed 3 engis can tip the balance.

Why I am for blocking the spectate button once in the match is because if it is not, you will still have people pretending they are on the phone, etc… and misusing the feature. Even if they are blocked from joining the winning team they will still leave the loosing team and sit the match out in spectate mode. Hence the need to completely disable the button. If one needs to really leave for genuine reasons the only option they should have is to go back to the lobby I feel. And if you were to leave for actually re-entering HJ on another server then boom a stat debuff would apply, again here what would someone queuing up for a tourney do in this situation, enter it with a stat debuff? lol. I know it sounds rigid but this game needs a serious clean up where pvp is concerned. The more I think of this issue and the more I try to find a solution, I ’m starting to think that it is almost impossible to correct this system unless it is scrapped entirely for a new system and I really understand the dilemna the devs are facing here.

After you are auto balanced and get the win bonus.. go directly into spectator mode to force another auto balance to get back on the winning team.

you should only be able to volunteer if you are one of the top 2 players on your team in terms of score.

Otherwise everyone else is locked to their current team even if the balance shifts.

I realize these numbers are typically arbitrary but at at least it’s somewhat based on “credit to team”

but team balance in general shouldn’t be a lone factor to only win 1/10 games. Maybe if the team struggles because of incompetent play by an individual you unintentionally make the value of the game a 4v5 and suffer because of it?

@OP did you find it less difficult to win hotjoin matches when it was 8v8?

The state of hotjoins is really miserable atm. If Anet truly wants to promote e-sports, they need to remove them at all (leaving only no progression custom arenas) and add unranked queue. With all the benefits of queues (no team jumping, leaving penalty, MMR, etc) but without that “pressure” that “new players” get from losing points on leaderboards.

Isslair.4908:

The state of hotjoins is really miserable atm. If Anet truly wants to promote e-sports, they need to remove them at all (leaving only no progression custom arenas) and add unranked queue. With all the benefits of queues (no team jumping, leaving penalty, MMR, etc) but without that “pressure” that “new players” get from losing points on leaderboards.

Well the problem is more that players will gleefully suggest cheating on the forum :p

There’s a lot of advantages to browsable servers for players, mainly in that it’s easy to find games quickly. It would be better to fix spectate and swapping than to make play on full servers less available.

Hot joins are very easy to win. Normally the team that caps their home and mid points first will win. You just have to make sure to hold the points long enough though. The sooner is the match that you can get a decent gap in the score, the more likely you are to win.

An additional thing you can do is hedge yourself by joining the other team when there’s a forced auto balance. Occasionally the other team does pull themselves together or they get someone that has a clue about what they’re doing. Not only do you gaurantee a win but you’ll get additional points for volunteering.

Windsagio.1340:

Well the problem is more that players will gleefully suggest cheating on the forum :p

This really isn’t the problem. It’s a symptom.

The actual problem, as I keep saying, is that so many matches end up 4v5 and there is very little reason for players who just entered the map to join the losing team.

So they don’t.

People tend to try to join the team with the higher score, meaning that it’s often got an advantage when the second team is waiting for their next player to even things out.
After one team gains a few more points… who’s going to join the other one?
Sure, there’s the challenge of pulling back a potentially losing game, but there’s also the much higher chance of getting worthless loss rewards. Much more worthwhile to join the team that already has an advantage, since there’s a high chance of keeping that lead and winning outright.
It only gets worse as the match goes on, so that a 50 point lead at the start snowballs to 300 – and by this point, the poor losing team are probably just getting stomped outside their base.

We don’t want to punish people for being stuck in an unfair 4v5; this will only make things worse (and especially will discourage people from sticking around in PvP). Making unfair teams less likely to happen (with random team assignment or by making the loss rewards a lot better) is so much better than making players who are stuck on outnumbered teams lose out.

Prevention is better than cure, and all that. Especially as the cure you support is “punish them more” and doesn’t actually help anyone but those who were already winning and already getting winner rewards.

cheese.4739:

Prevention is better than cure, and all that. Especially as the cure you support is “punish them more” and doesn’t actually help anyone but those who were already winning and already getting winner rewards.

How is that? My suggested cure is ‘make spectating out not an attractive option’.

My advanced cure would be to expand the forced rebalance to include a ‘murder rule’ where you get the volunteer rewards if you (legally) flip to a side that’s behind by more than 100. There’s a lot of edge cases and gotchas with that though, so one needs to be careful.

Windsagio.1340:

cheese.4739:

Prevention is better than cure, and all that. Especially as the cure you support is “punish them more” and doesn’t actually help anyone but those who were already winning and already getting winner rewards.

How is that? My suggested cure is ‘make spectating out not an attractive option’.

So you force people to stay in their losing team, which has been outnumbered all game, and get minimal rewards despite having been there all match?
A player who joins the winning team a couple of minutes in (after they’ve gotten their small lead) gains better rewards than someone who joined a random team at the start and ended up on the losing one.

You’re stopping people from dealing with the problem (sucky outnumbered matches and minimal rewards for them) without actually fixing the problem (that people join the winning team over the losing one, and so make it outnumbered in favour of the team that was already winning).

cheese.4739:

Windsagio.1340:

cheese.4739:

Prevention is better than cure, and all that. Especially as the cure you support is “punish them more” and doesn’t actually help anyone but those who were already winning and already getting winner rewards.

How is that? My suggested cure is ‘make spectating out not an attractive option’.

So you force people to stay in their losing team, which has been outnumbered all game, and get minimal rewards despite having been there all match?
A player who joins the winning team a couple of minutes in (after they’ve gotten their small lead) gains better rewards than someone who joined a random team at the start and ended up on the losing one.

You’re stopping people from dealing with the problem (sucky outnumbered matches and minimal rewards for them) without actually fixing the problem (that people join the winning team over the losing one, and so make it outnumbered in favour of the team that was already winning).

Yes, you have to force the people to stay on the losing side, your suggestion doesn’t change that either. We have to disincentivize teamjumping, that’s essential to the whole deal.

The murder rule solves the ‘losing 4-5’ though, because fairly quickly people are going to get rewarded for joining the losing team. Even if you join the winner, why wouldn’t you follow volunteer rules and go to loser? In a 4-5 situation it’s all of a sudden 5-4 on the other teams side, and that’s a potentially HUGE swing in a map.