Guild Wars 2

In every thread I see someone complaining about an aspect of sPvP, I see people use the sentence <low playerbase> or something similar. I recently got back into the gamee, so I am not in the know, but from my impression it doesn’t seem THAT small. HoTM always seem pretty active, and there’s rarely more than 2 min queue.

Is it really that dead? If you had to estimate how many people play, what would you guess, and do you think HoT will revitalize the scene?

Yes. All good teams dont care to play. Because leaderboard is broken, and you don’t gain anything from doing it. It’s just solo q “active”, like before. Ranked is the new solo q. Team q is eliminated, and only excists exclusively on esl, where only 17 year olds and a few good teams can remain playing.

Well over 1000 people have played a ranked match in the last few hours so take from that what you will. I would also figure that all the people complaining right after the new ladder was started don’t realise some people still work so of course it might be a bit dead in the middle of the day.

yes it is.
the team don’t listen, things like skyhammer still in rotation,
i haven’t played in 2 weeks because last time i had several suckhammers in a row.

if the team listened then there would be more players.

It depends what your rating is.

If you’re one of the higher rated players, then queue times are pretty awful – about 7 minutes and then it matches you with almost anyone. Since the leaderboard is based on time and not skill, there’s no reason to play a lot, which makes the higher skill landscape even more barren.

If you’re in the middle, queue times are pretty quick, matches aren’t too lopsided and leaderboard means something to you (probably because you haven’t stopped to think about its mechanics).

Your first mistake was taking forum complaining seriously. =P

Chukree.1756:

Yes. All good teams dont care to play. Because leaderboard is broken, and you don’t gain anything from doing it. It’s just solo q “active”, like before. Ranked is the new solo q. Team q is eliminated, and only excists exclusively on esl, where only 17 year olds and a few good teams can remain playing.

This.

No good pugs either anymore in ranked queue because nobody cares. There is literally like 20 people committed enough to give up their weekends playing this game. For everyone else there is zero to be competitive about. I have seen the very best players in the game give up as a result.

True. I can’t even really tell what the future of sPvP in this game is. Introducing a new moba like mode may help since mobas are successful in esports but there are so many other things necessary to make PvP in a game competetive and Anet is ignoring so many of them. In game tourneys, in game leadersboards, leaderboards that arn’t broke, etc.

Chukree.1756:

Yes. All good teams dont care to play. Because leaderboard is broken, and you don’t gain anything from doing it. It’s just solo q “active”, like before. Ranked is the new solo q. Team q is eliminated, and only excists exclusively on esl, where only 17 year olds and a few good teams can remain playing.

THIS

Exactly what people said above…
90% of my games are the same 10-20 players rotating. Im pretty sure i could name every single player i meet in solo queue since there is nobody else playing it lol…

Anet needs to pull their head out of their ESL box and make the game competitive outside these tournaments too (or atleast fun.).

i just waste 2 hours.

2x 4vs5
3 (or 4) pug vs premade (0-100 vs 500)
and 1 build tester (he said "im testing a build for fun)

and others are easy win or lose. thanks for rly bad pvp system.

No. Just ignore these posters. Forum users consist of a minority of players, most of whom are just looking for something to complain about.

Well, I quit for sure. Won’t possibly waste 7 minutes waiting for a match that is likely to be awful for one of the teams.

And the new season with leaderboards? Don’t get me started on that…

Shaogin.2679:

No. Just ignore these posters. Forum users consist of a minority of players, most of whom are just looking for something to complain about.

then whos gonna give the feedback? you obviously dont play this game if u think pvp is fine.

Shaogin.2679:

No. Just ignore these posters. Forum users consist of a minority of players, most of whom are just looking for something to complain about.

No, ignore the fanbois. These are real problems and people like you do nothing but help marginalize the problematic gameplay.

The competitive scene is small, which is an important part for a lot of PvP’ers. Overall, I think Pvp is doing pretty good in terms of player activity.

There are no competitive incentives. No leagues, no automated tournaments, no incentives to create a team as there’s only one LB, solo experience in a teamplay focussed gamemode, crappy LB, etc.
But we have ESL….. -.-

Lol. If you like the game you must be fanbois. Forum trolls gonna troll, what can ya do? And sure the game has issues, never played a game that didn’t. Most the issues are greatly exaggerated by the kids that come here to cry every time something doesn’t go their way. ; P

There’s no way for people to get better at the game! The population is small and this results in terrible matchmaking! Even brand new players will get matched with veterans and games end up heavily one sided! There’s no way for teams to get better because ranks/leagues are nonexistent and tournaments don’t have a tier system! If a newer team is interested in playing in a tournament, they’d have to face the best teams in the world, of which there are like 3 which brings me to my next point of…

There is no competitive scene! It’s like ~20 people in the WORLD! In CSGO a minor EU tournament will draw tens of thousands of twitch viewers and dozens of teams! In Guild Warts a world tournament has 4 teams! Woo! Arenanet should’ve taken that prize money and used it to fund new additions to the game instead of funding some college kid’s beer money!

And then there’s other things like balance, frequency of balance patches, long queue times with nothing to do, boring game mode, etc etc etc it’s all been said before! I don’t think Stronghold will do anything for PvP! The huge surge of players into PvP won’t mean much when it’s just going to be a bunch of WvWers slaying NPCs! They advertised that you don’t even have to be good at PvP to play Stronghold! The only way to breathe new life into PvP is to get more people and incentivize them to stay and actually get better! Without this, you’ll just have what happened before with the reward tracks and dailies: a bunch of terrible PvE-ers come into PvP and don’t care about it at all and just farm for achievement points or reward track progress! That does more harm than good for the PvP community!

Anyway I don’t know why I typed this because it’s all pointless! Everything all been said before and ignored! Oh wells! Back to slaying zambies!

Wahoo! Bye frands!

I can’t even find where to go to que up for it ^^;

PvP is pointless in this game. Bad progression system (nothing after r80 which goes to quick after April 2014 patch) and ladder which requires you to play 40+ games per day.

Most of my friends (and me) stopped playing sPvP, apparently for similar reasons.

The current meta is stale and boring (few viable builds, some professions out of meta completly), weird matchmaking algorithm does not consider individual skill, scoreboard only gives points for final actions (If you capped a point to 90%, then your teammate takes over for you, you get 0 points. Same for kills, downing a player wont get you much.)

The sPvP forum is abandoned by aNet, they never post here and answer wtf they’re doing. As a result, tons of passionate sPvP players are waiting for heart of thorns to see where this will go, myself included.

ArrDee.2573:

There’s no way for people to get better at the game! The population is small and this results in terrible matchmaking! Even brand new players will get matched with veterans and games end up heavily one sided! There’s no way for teams to get better because ranks/leagues are nonexistent and tournaments don’t have a tier system! If a newer team is interested in playing in a tournament, they’d have to face the best teams in the world, of which there are like 3 which brings me to my next point of…

There is no competitive scene! It’s like ~20 people in the WORLD! In CSGO a minor EU tournament will draw tens of thousands of twitch viewers and dozens of teams! In Guild Warts a world tournament has 4 teams! Woo! Arenanet should’ve taken that prize money and used it to fund new additions to the game instead of funding some college kid’s beer money!

And then there’s other things like balance, frequency of balance patches, long queue times with nothing to do, boring game mode, etc etc etc it’s all been said before! I don’t think Stronghold will do anything for PvP! The huge surge of players into PvP won’t mean much when it’s just going to be a bunch of WvWers slaying NPCs! They advertised that you don’t even have to be good at PvP to play Stronghold! The only way to breathe new life into PvP is to get more people and incentivize them to stay and actually get better! Without this, you’ll just have what happened before with the reward tracks and dailies: a bunch of terrible PvE-ers come into PvP and don’t care about it at all and just farm for achievement points or reward track progress! That does more harm than good for the PvP community!

Anyway I don’t know why I typed this because it’s all pointless! Everything all been said before and ignored! Oh wells! Back to slaying zambies!

Wahoo! Bye frands!

Agreed. Great post. And yeh stronghold looks awful to me.

Also on eu we used to have a competitive community before they removed leaderboards. People would try hard team queue. Their obsession with esl and wts is just silly. Only people who can base their whole sunday around it can play which is a minority of people. In addition the number of teams in esl has gone down and further down because there is no where for new teams to test things out

me and my whole team (were pretty high ranked when leaderboards were still ok) quit cause anet ruined pvp. Unfortunately PVP is still the only good part in this game because PVE is kittenin bad and shouldnt be played by anyone. I still can’t believe it is possible to ruin such an amazing game with a few changes and some bad decisions^^

My advice: Play PvE.

It’s a total chillfest where everyone is nice and helpful. It’s fair to everyone, even those that are new or hate the meta.

Dahkeus.8243:

Your first mistake was taking forum complaining seriously. =P

If it were about any other aspect of the game I’d agree but PvP? Sure it has potential because of combat but Conquest and fairly well balanced but anti-fun meta make PvP the worst thing ever.

Is it dead? Well you can find a match, people still play for the sake of skins and dailies. Is it dead as something not worth taking seriously? Hell yes.

Personally, I kittening hate it with a burning passion. Worst thing ever, kittenes me off to the point where I even begin to hate the game as a whole, forgetting how good the community is.

Avoid!!!

They spend more time and resources on outfits then spvp sad but true, anet should learn from smite now that’s real pvp.

the game needs leauges to segregate players into skill levels.

Legionnaire.8703:

Is it really that dead? If you had to estimate how many people play, what would you guess, and do you think HoT will revitalize the scene?

Guys, gals, please, can we not turn every thread into a random rant about MM/LB/waiting-in-HotM/conquest/passive procs? Legionnaire asked a very specific question: he wanted to know the size of the pvp population. Then you made a dozen of comments, a few being 1-2 paragraphs long, giving no answer. Focus a bit please.

Legionnaire, I’ll try to answer your question. Allow me, in all humility, to quote myself:

In december, during the first test season, I started around 94% on the LB, and climbed up to the top 1000. During this progression, I’ve been at 95%, but never at 96%. We therefore deduce that the top 4% of the LB represented 1000 players. So the total number of players who participated to the first test season in December in EU is around 25’000.

We will probably see a fair number of returning players for HoT, as well as some new players. Will they stay? The rhythm at which Anet will balance the new specializations and the revenant will probably be a decisive factor. We will see.

maybe people play for a bit with whatever class they maintain, then get decent, and play until they get to the mid ranks of pvp. then they find out their build does not really work, so you change to what the meta build is, and then find out that you need a team, because you need to be more organized. Then you find out that your class itself is weak and not even included in the meta. So you switch classes to play “meta”. Then you get bored with pvp even more, because its the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. You think I am joking? Look at that entire tournament today. What classes did you see? You saw 5 +1 classes (thank god a mesmer was in the winning team which allowed for the +1). You saw engi, war, ele, guard, and thief, + mesmer. That has been the meta since this game released. I for one, got bored of seeing the same match up every freaking day, day after day. It started out mixed, but then people learned pvp, the limitations of certain classes, switched classes, until they found the build/class combo that worked, and then that became what was played over and over and over again. It got stale, then they changed the system of matching, etc., and people got bored with wining but losing in points (HOW does that happen? just ask anet.)

5 classes +1: Think the meta will change with specs? nope. It won’t because fundamental differences will remain. What is slow, will remain slow, what is a one shot wonder, will stay a one shot wonder and remain at low to mid levels of play.

Fast paced, fast click defense, will always remain supreme in this game. Things like stealth, blocks, evade, and high damage will always rule over slow casting, hard hitting classes. It is a joke to think otherwise here. dmg + mobility, will rule over Dmg + lack of mobility.

I just want a game mode where there is something between me and the objective as well as no friggin timers. Please I want to feel like I won because I did a thing, not because I lasted long enough with more points until the game counted to 500.

Legionnaire.8703:

In every thread I see someone complaining about an aspect of sPvP, I see people use the sentence <low playerbase> or something similar. I recently got back into the gamee, so I am not in the know, but from my impression it doesn’t seem THAT small. HoTM always seem pretty active, and there’s rarely more than 2 min queue.

Is it really that dead? If you had to estimate how many people play, what would you guess, and do you think HoT will revitalize the scene?

No, there is a huge PvP player base, but the matchmaking system is working perfectly as intended. Ranked is full of solo and partial teams (2-4 players). It may be that tPvP is dead, because I rarely run into 5 man premades anymore and I am sure my skill level has increased. That being said, it may just be that ANet tries to keep the queues separate.

Many players that QQ on the forums don’t know (or like) that the matchmaker WILL keep you at a 50% win/loss ratio. If one queues with a 4-5 man premade, and uses 3rd party voice communications, they will win most matches even with mediocre skill level. Voice communications change everything.

Many of these “PvP heroes” get discouraged when they later queue Ranked in a small team or as solo… Because the match maker will work to bring them back to a 50% ratio by queuing them with complete beginners. Thus starts the cognitive dissonance and the QQing.

That being said, ANet should give us more to do while waiting for a match. I’ve become really good at the TP and trade while waiting in queue, but it would be nice to have more to do.

The current system makes it hard to tell if you are getting better or not, so ANet should find some way to show you how you are doing.

choovanski.5462:

the game needs leauges to segregate players into skill levels.

Already mentioned that few times back in 2013 and 2014.. :<

PvP is a joke.

Match 1: I get put into a team with 3 sub 1000 AP against a full premade. Why? Because I was on a winning streak that’s why. We got destroyed.

Match 2: I won Kyhlo by sitting at my treb and spamming W all game. Occasionally their Engineer or Necro would come and I killed them both by pressing 1 because power Necro with Air/Fire procs is balanced. Most boring kitten ever.

Match 3: We had 2 MM Necros, AI won for us. The only highlight was that I kept 1 shotting their pewpew Ranger with Lich all game because kitten that lame build.

Best game. 11/10.

The player base is actually pretty large. You just have a lot of people who just say it is small to try to justify the poor matchmaking system in place.

hey it could be worse, you could be playing NWO

style.6173:

The player base is actually pretty large. You just have a lot of people who just say it is small to try to justify the poor matchmaking system in place.

I wish people would stop saying that the player base is “small” or “large”, because it gives no indication whatsoever, since it is subjective. It is small compared to WoW, and probably large compared to other less successful MMOs (I only play GW2 lately, sorry).

Around 25’000 players played in ranked between december 2014 and january 2015. Whether this number is small or large is a matter of opinion.

Depends on what you’re comparing it to. Relative to other MMOs it’s probably fairly substantial.

Still, as at stands PvP is boring and broken because despite having most classes balanced rather well between themselves, the meta builds are all over the place because they simply offer too much. As a result they don’t have a clear role.

Either that or we have cheap cheese like pewpew Rangers and Air/Fire power Necs which is basically a Ranger with cooldowns and less range.

Funny thing that’s how GW1 balance used to be. Either we had a team comp that did too much of everything too well, or a cheap low skill floor strategy that could get you wins with minimal effort.

It’s more fun when all the roles have a clearly defined, specialised purpose and the combat is built around one role countering another.

Spirigo.2897:

Depends on what you’re comparing it to. Relative to other MMOs it’s probably fairly substantial.

Still, as at stands PvP is boring and broken because despite having most classes balanced rather well between themselves, the meta builds are all over the place because they simply offer too much. As a result they don’t have a clear role.

Either that or we have cheap cheese like pewpew Rangers and Air/Fire power Necs which is basically a Ranger with cooldowns and less range.

Funny thing that’s how GW1 balance used to be. Either we had a team comp that did too much of everything too well, or a cheap low skill floor strategy that could get you wins with minimal effort.

It’s more fun when all the roles have a clearly defined, specialised purpose and the combat is built around one role countering another.

That’s certainly a very valid opinion, but I fail to understand what the link to the population size is.

To be fair it’s mostly an indication that something went horribly wrong with how they designed the whole thing, so as a result the player retention simply isn’t there.

The combat is cool for an MMO but really that’s about all there is to PvP right now.

In order to have any relevance in the esports scene a game has to have a large following, as well as a wide selection of dedicated pro teams. Lack of thereof proves that there is indeed a problem and that players’ concerns are warranted.

Sorel.4870:

style.6173:

The player base is actually pretty large. You just have a lot of people who just say it is small to try to justify the poor matchmaking system in place.

I wish people would stop saying that the player base is “small” or “large”, because it gives no indication whatsoever, since it is subjective. It is small compared to WoW, and probably large compared to other less successful MMOs (I only play GW2 lately, sorry).

Around 25’000 players played in ranked between december 2014 and january 2015. Whether this number is small or large is a matter of opinion.

That’s actually very small considering how other MMO’s/Games are doing. Most of them get that in 1 day – 1 week… Most Guild Wars 2 players are in WvW and PvE though, there’s the biggest part. PvP is not attractive enough and nothing’s there to actually reflect their skill after. Bring back SoloQ and MMR based LeaderBoard! http://strawpoll.me/4445203/

Terrorsquad.2349:

That’s actually very small considering how other MMO’s/Games are doing. Most of them get that in 1 day – 1 week… Most Guild Wars 2 players are in WvW and PvE though, there’s the biggest part. PvP is not attractive enough and nothing’s there to actually reflect their skill after. Bring back SoloQ and MMR based LeaderBoard! http://strawpoll.me/4445203/

Keep in mind that these numbers give no indication on how regularly these people play the game.

But I agree, pvp is not GW2’s main selling point. I also agree that MMR-based LB were better (I was an intense defender of those back in the days were the forums complained about them). However, I doubt soloq reflect a player’s skill. And the population was not larger back when soloq was a thing (or the LB for that matter).

Sorel.4870:

Terrorsquad.2349:

That’s actually very small considering how other MMO’s/Games are doing. Most of them get that in 1 day – 1 week… Most Guild Wars 2 players are in WvW and PvE though, there’s the biggest part. PvP is not attractive enough and nothing’s there to actually reflect their skill after. Bring back SoloQ and MMR based LeaderBoard! http://strawpoll.me/4445203/

Keep in mind that these numbers give no indication on how regularly these people play the game.

But I agree, pvp is not GW2’s main selling point. I also agree that MMR-based LB were better (I was an intense defender of those back in the days were the forums complained about them). However, I doubt soloq reflect a player’s skill. And the population was not larger back when soloq was a thing (or the LB for that matter).

Ye, we got more pvp’ers now due the rewarding and LB being a farmfest + the title/r80 farmers.

I also agree the Solo LB wasnt really accurate towards skill, but it was very accurate on Team Arena. LB based on MMR are still more accurate than LB we have now. The higher you go on Leaderboard, the less the w/l ratio is atm, which is very sad to see imo, appart from the few exceptions ofcourse.

Luckily we just had the world championships. Dont know what the numbers were, but if advertsed on their site the feed did not go over 20k spectators world wide, then yeah i would state spvp as an esport is essentially dead.

No idea about the number of views thou, they might have gone over it.

The numbers are low in comparison to other “esport” titles but I wouldn’t call it “dead”. Not in the slightest.

I’m 27yo and been gaming for quite a long time. I’ve been in communities where a certain pvp population lowered to about 10 players or less. GW2 PvP is far from this threshold. The game has tournaments for crying out loud. Anyone who says this game is dead needs a reality check.

Lets not be overly dramatic here, saying things that’s far from true.

Apolo.5942:

Luckily we just had the world championships. Dont know what the numbers were, but if advertsed on their site the feed did not go over 20k spectators world wide, then yeah i would state spvp as an esport is essentially dead.

No idea about the number of views thou, they might have gone over it.

There were around 1.5k viewers at the same time for ToL EU, which is roughly 6% of the active player base. It is more than any other MMO (WoW included), and similar to most pvp-oriented games.

E-sport in GW2 is “dead” because of the small player base, not because the player base is not interested in e-sport.

style.6173:

The player base is actually pretty large. You just have a lot of people who just say it is small to try to justify the poor matchmaking system in place.

The player base isn’t large at all… If you look in HotM you can always see the same people every single day. Not only that but look at the leaderboards. You can be a freaking nobody who loses every single game but get on the leaderboards because there’s barely more than a thousand people that play PvP. What’s even more funny is that there are more people in daily servers than are usually playing ranked at any given time. Seriously go look at the daily servers, there are like 6-7 of them that are all full of PvE players. Unless something has changed within the 2 months since I left I’m pretty sure PvP is still dead.

It’s easy to guess the player base by just looking at the leader board during last season. Count the number of matches played over the course of 8 weeks. The players who play every day or every other day are at most the top 500, the rest between 500-1000 play maybe 1 match every 3-4 days and everyone else play maybe 1 match a month.

Elitist.8701:

style.6173:

The player base is actually pretty large. You just have a lot of people who just say it is small to try to justify the poor matchmaking system in place.

The player base isn’t large at all… If you look in HotM you can always see the same people every single day. Not only that but look at the leaderboards. You can be a freaking nobody who loses every single game but get on the leaderboards because there’s barely more than a thousand people that play PvP. What’s even more funny is that there are more people in daily servers than are usually playing ranked at any given time. Seriously go look at the daily servers, there are like 6-7 of them that are all full of PvE players. Unless something has changed within the 2 months since I left I’m pretty sure PvP is still dead.

I agree daily servers are so active and it’s even hard to get in at times, even unranked is more popular than ranked, spvp is full of pvers who simply take advantage of the system. They get the same rewards as pvpers so why join ranked? For some llamas? Lol what a joke. There isn’t enough pvp progression with good rewards. Glorious armor pvers can farm that ok got my skin time to say good bye.