Guild Wars 2

Knowing ANet employees frequent these forums, I hope they will consider reviewing this video. It’s a discussion on Luck vs Skill in game design by Dr. Richard Garfield (creator of Magic: The Gathering). As a GW2 player it is a bit consoling to watch as you can begin to empathize with why certain decisions are made. It also brings to spotlight the paradox of a design that attempts to be casual friendly and maintain a serious aspect (PvE crowd vs PvP crowd for the context of GW2).

He goes into into about how when designing for a less serious audience you want more luck than skill to help maintain the player ego. After watching, you’ll begin to see clearly how sPvP in GW2 has by design not been very serious. It really does give validity to my theory that sPvP in this game has been designed to make the average PvE player who journey’s over to do sPvP every once in a while happy and NOT to create a balanced environment for serious players who want the win to come almost entirely from skill. When you consider the mechanics that have impacted the current meta and the overall design of mixing solo and team queue, tier lock-in for league divisions, etc… It’s all makes sense. If you want serious play, GW2 will probably never be your game because ArenaNet has an obligation to make the PvP side of the game fun and attractive to it’s core player base and it really is a very different mentality the PvE player has. We’ve seen this manifest itself in complaint after complaint about players not understand why after playing x amount of hours they still are stuck in a league division (the concept that you could reach a skill cap limit that would lock you into the appropriate league for your skill and not allow you to rise up any further is one a less serious player will take huge issue with. A more serious player will accept their rank cap and understand the mechanics of how match making works)

This is also a strong argument for why ArenaNet should spin-off sPvP into a new game with a new client, etc… completely separate from the MMO side of the game. If we had that then ArenaNet would be in a position to cater to the serious players and focus on making skill a priority over novelty. Not the other way around as it currently is and will continue to be.

Dr. Richard Garfield “Luck Vs Skill in games”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSg408i-eKw

(the concept that you could reach a skill cap limit that would lock you into the appropriate league for your skill and not allow you to rise up any further is one a less serious player will take huge issue with. A more serious player will accept their rank cap and understand the mechanics of how match making works)

Matchmaking has lots of problems and due to the client side nature of many things the game is vulnerable to ESP, subtly tuned speed and cooldown, and teleport hacks. Matchmaking also forces a 50% win record so you could run into equally or more skilled opposition across the divisions instead of it getting progressively tougher like it should. People are complaining about even diamonds who rush beast early or rush far, or going for lord early when it isn’t even a blowout. You should only go for lord early when the other team is 100 points ahead to try avoiding dipping below a certain point threshold since you will likely lose two pips otherwise.

I think Anet should really remove the 50% win-rate. The 50%-system is actually some kind of a manipulative hacking system which prevents players from having FAIR MATCHES and EQUAL TEAMS WITH SAME MMR. I’ve been playing pvp since league, im now at 12 pips from legendary. I started this evening with 9 pips from legendary, had 6 loses in row => 14 pips from legendary. After the 6 loses the 50%-winrate has been adjusted and won one game so i gained 2 pips. Result now: 12 pips from legendary.

Anet should really stop manipulating the matches in the last tiers of each division, it FEELS A LOT like they want to prevent us getting the new division and with the 50%-system they want to keep in the division where we are FOR WEEKS.

I hope Anet will read this thread and think about their pvp-game for future changes. I’m sorry if this message looks too impolite but they need to watch this video + hear the experiences of pro-players (not the ones who are famous on twitch but the regular ones).