Guild Wars 2

It might not be a perfect solution but if hotjoin is truly meant to be “practice mode” the amount of autobalance manipulation and players who sit in spectate until they can hop on a clearly steamrolling team makes the mode nearly impossible to have a good match in, and a terrible environment to learn how to play as a team.
I have 5k matches under my belt so I am very familiar with this mess of a game mode and how to get my wins. But it’s crap for learning anything other than taking advantage of a sloppy system.

My top suggestions are to remove rewards from hotjoin all together, so win or lose the incentive is not to farm but to play, and take on the challenge of joining the losing team for ones own improvement.
My second suggestion is to remove hotjoin from the overall win/loss ratio on the pvp menu screen, or separate it out so if some people want a cleaner ratio they dont have to worry about practice matches.

Removing hotjoin rewards because you worried about some random guy win-lose ratio? Really?

Rednik.3809:

Removing hotjoin rewards because you worried about some random guy win-lose ratio? Really?

“Practice” isn’t any good for practice when 95% of the matches are steamrolls. I think even if you removed rewards from hotjoin I think some people would still abuse the system just to stoke their ego. Blocking joining the winning team when the teams have an equal number of people would fix a lot of the problem.

Why remove rewards when they can just be equalized so you get the same thing win or lose? No one will “practice” if they are wasting their time in there. People could easily be “practicing” in ranked arena, wrecking the queue for everyone else.

Kharr.5746:

Why remove rewards when they can just be equalized so you get the same thing win or lose? No one will “practice” if they are wasting their time in there. People could easily be “practicing” in ranked arena, wrecking the queue for everyone else.

I thought about this first but it seems it might make farmers even lazier and less inclined to try and win/turn matches around.

I don’t know what the best solution would be but there needs to be something done to make this match mode at all meaningful or useful for anyone other than gold farmers.

eyestrain.3056:

meaningful or useful for anyone other than gold farmers.

AHHahahahahahaha…… Gold farmers, you say? Can we get JS in here to describe how inefficient and slow this method of gold farming would be please? Seriously, if anyone wanted to gather some gold, sPvP would be the absolute last place I’d go to do it. The monetary rewards are just that poor.

Kharr.5746:

Why remove rewards when they can just be equalized so you get the same thing win or lose? No one will “practice” if they are wasting their time in there. People could easily be “practicing” in ranked arena, wrecking the queue for everyone else.

For some reason, there are lots of people in MMOs who have no inclination to do anything unless they get a material reward for it. Its like playing the game and getting better isn’t an adequate reward in itself.

Hotjoin has seriously perverse incentives. It provides a means for players to farm rank and reward track progress with no real consequence.

The main consequence of unranked/ranked play as a relatively inexperienced player is putting yourself out there and inviting criticism. The difficult part is having to face the idea that you aren’t very good and then figuring out how to get better. At times, when you get roflstomped by really good players, its straight up depressing just thinking about the gap between you and them and how to get from here to there.

Hotjoin is a safe way to get rewards by farming people who legitimately want to close that gap. It doesn’t matter if progress is slower than losing unranked/ranked matches. The point it is that you don’t need to put yourself out there. You don’t need to worry about win/loss ratios, you don’t need to perform well or even try.

If you do it right, you also never really lose because you wait in observer, join the winning team and if the opportunity presents itself, you choose volunteer. Never underestimate the lengths people will go to avoid dealing with adversity.

Besetment.9187:

At times, when you get roflstomped by really good players, its straight up depressing just thinking about the gap between you and them and how to get from here to there.

And here lies main flaw of any “nerf hotjoin” topics. For some weird reason you think they gonna work harder to learn arenas and get their rewards from there. But that’s straight wrong.
Majority of people there are casual pve players who just want to do little baby pvp action and close dailies. If you take rewards from them, they not gonna do more work to get same result, they will just quit pvp. And by doing this, they will break one of main ways for casual player to get taste for pvp and go forward to arenas, greatly shrinking base of future pvp players. Guess what will happen with already dying pvp after that?

Just with fire, You need 3 components to keep it going:
Heat, Fuel and Oxygen

If any of those three are broken there is no fire.

With PvP you need:
Rewards, players, and enjoyment

With out rewards there will not be any enjoyment which will have no players
With out rewards there will not be any players so no enjoyment

Practice is being used to get dailies done, farm finishers, etc. It doesn’t teach anyone how to PvP (PvP meaning non-practice mode). It doesn’t encourage people to PvP (in fact quite the opposite).

Practice right now is outnumber the other team (5v4 etc.) then watch as the spectate->team change antics begin.

PvP gives rewards, rewards should still exist, just not in practice.

There is unranked where you can go and play and not have any worries about how good or bad you do since it’s not recorded. Unless you are just testing a build (so who cares about rewards) or are specifically going for imbalanced matches (should not be rewarded) why are you even in practice?

Rewarding these sorts of players is not healthy for the PvP community. Rewards in practice should be abolished agreed.

Why don’t you just play Unranked if you want more structure in your games?

Coulter.2315:

Why don’t you just play Unranked if you want more structure in your games?

You’re missing the point… practice rewards encourage bad behavior and discourages players from going deeper into PvP.

I made this topic not to earnestly bash rewards in hotjoin but to invite discussion of how there could be more incentive for players to join the losing team and try hard, rather than this overwhelming trend of waiting in spectate until a spot opens on the winning team (usually because someone on the outnumbered and outmatched team just gives up and leaves the match). Hotjoin is a terribly unfair mode for new players or people who are sincerely trying to learn their build/class because of the rarity of even semi-balanced matches. Consistently winning in hotjoin is extremely simple, but only if you know how and are willing to exploit the system and it has little to nothing to do with actually fighting.

eyestrain.3056:

I made this topic not to earnestly bash rewards in hotjoin but to invite discussion of how there could be more incentive for players to join the losing team and try hard, rather than this overwhelming trend of waiting in spectate until a spot opens on the winning team (usually because someone on the outnumbered and outmatched team just gives up and leaves the match). Hotjoin is a terribly unfair mode for new players or people who are sincerely trying to learn their build/class because of the rarity of even semi-balanced matches. Consistently winning in hotjoin is extremely simple, but only if you know how and are willing to exploit the system and it has little to nothing to do with actually fighting.

I’ve wondered this myself for quite a while. I can’t think of any way to encourage players to do this without adding in another thing that can’t just be taken advantage of and I haven’t heard anyone suggest anything either. IMO best to just do away with the rewards thus remove the incentive to behave this way in the first place.

If they are actually into PvP they’ll learn to play and at least try to play in unranked at some point. If they are just after the easy rewards through bad behavior they’ll leave.

Rednik.3809:

Removing hotjoin rewards because your worried about some random guys win-lose ratio? Really?

The ironic part is simply how I wouldn’t care if hotjoin rewards were removed for a pathetic reason.

eyestrain.3056:

I have 5k matches under my belt…

My main suggestion for improving Practice mode is blocking access to it from people with 5k match experience.

If the goal is to improve its role as “place where newbies can learn the basics of PvP”, it doesn’t matter what the rewards are as long as you let Legendary Champions come in and farm said newbies.

What you guys have to understand is that gw2 is not a dedicated pvp game where everybody that logs in wants to fight and compete. Gw1 had a lot more of competitiveness, sadly it’s not the case with gw2. That being said, the (vast majority of) people who purchase the game and are actually playing it, are not using all their time in pvp matches, and when they spend time on it they want rewards, just like in the other game modes (pve, wvw).

You could say that these people are casuals (in pvp) and don’t care, or better said, don’t want to compete. As someone else posted, they don’t want to risk themselves to be defeated, or even worse, to be streamrolled, they want to have a good time playing, winning (by a lot) and getting loot.

The people who REALLY want to improve end up doing it anyway, cause they spend time playing, reading and watching gameplays/streams. If you ask me, anet should put more rewards/pve loot on hot join and pull out all the people in ranked that clearly needs to improve before even trying it.

That is what hot join is, a jungle where apes (pve/wvw) fight each others, as intented. The only way to improve the situation is to make a gw2 pvp standalone game (kek) or maybe put more structured arenas in between unranked/ranked or something

GrandmaFunk.3052:

eyestrain.3056:

I have 5k matches under my belt…

My main suggestion for improving Practice mode is blocking access to it from people with 5k match experience.

If the goal is to improve its role as “place where newbies can learn the basics of PvP”, it doesn’t matter what the rewards are as long as you let Legendary Champions come in and farm said newbies.

Seems like if only “noobs” enter and no veterans are there to help or force learning then no one will learn or rather learning would be a snails pace.

Julian.2971:

What you guys have to understand is that gw2 is not a dedicated pvp game where everybody that logs in wants to fight and compete. Gw1 had a lot more of competitiveness, sadly it’s not the case with gw2. That being said, the (vast majority of) people who purchase the game and are actually playing it, are not using all their time in pvp matches, and when they spend time on it they want rewards, just like in the other game modes (pve, wvw).

You could say that these people are casuals (in pvp) and don’t care, or better said, don’t want to compete. As someone else posted, they don’t want to risk themselves to be defeated, or even worse, to be streamrolled, they want to have a good time playing, winning (by a lot) and getting loot.

The people who REALLY want to improve end up doing it anyway, cause they spend time playing, reading and watching gameplays/streams. If you ask me, anet should put more rewards/pve loot on hot join and pull out all the people in ranked that clearly needs to improve before even trying it.

That is what hot join is, a jungle where apes (pve/wvw) fight each others, as intented. The only way to improve the situation is to make a gw2 pvp standalone game (kek) or maybe put more structured arenas in between unranked/ranked or something

So you agree that many practice players are there just to 5v4 and team swap to get rewards? Yea… I have zero sympathy for those people not getting rewarded. They actively discourage people who are interested in playing PvP with their behavior. I’ve talked to so many that went into practice and got in a 5v4 team swap match and never went back. This is far too common.

Aberrant.6749:

So you agree that many practice players are there just to 5v4 and team swap to get rewards? Yea… I have zero sympathy for those people not getting rewarded. They actively discourage people who are interested in playing PvP with their behavior. I’ve talked to so many that went into practice and got in a 5v4 team swap match and never went back. This is far too common.

Im not saying it’s fair and im agree it’s a kittenty behavior, but as i said, due game disign (it’s an mmo) you need a place where non pvp players can feel happy and mighty when winning a 500-100 4v3. If you put more restrictions in the game mode, you have the risk that casuals/farmers will stop playing pvp at all, and ofc anet doesn’t want that.

jbrother.1340:

GrandmaFunk.3052:

eyestrain.3056:

I have 5k matches under my belt…

My main suggestion for improving Practice mode is blocking access to it from people with 5k match experience.

If the goal is to improve its role as “place where newbies can learn the basics of PvP”, it doesn’t matter what the rewards are as long as you let Legendary Champions come in and farm said newbies.

Seems like if only “noobs” enter and no veterans are there to help or force learning then no one will learn or rather learning would be a snails pace.

I still have a lot to learn outside of my main class/build and I use hotjoin as a way to warm up before unranked/ranked matches since I usually play like kitten my first few fights of the day. Having a place to try new things, experimental (and sometimes outright stupid) builds and be allowed to kitten up with minimal consequence is important for everyone.
And since you don’t know me you have no reason to trust this but I always autobalance and do everything I can to make a comeback for the down and out team (often so well that it becomes the steamroll team and I get autobalanced back again… lol).

ps- in case that gets misread as kitten waving I openly admit i am only a little above average player even at my main. Hence why i continue to practice and also enjoy spectating players better than I am!

Julian.2971:

Aberrant.6749:

So you agree that many practice players are there just to 5v4 and team swap to get rewards? Yea… I have zero sympathy for those people not getting rewarded. They actively discourage people who are interested in playing PvP with their behavior. I’ve talked to so many that went into practice and got in a 5v4 team swap match and never went back. This is far too common.

Im not saying it’s fair and im agree it’s a kittenty behavior, but as i said, due game disign (it’s an mmo) you need a place where non pvp players can feel happy and mighty when winning a 500-100 4v3. If you put more restrictions in the game mode, you have the risk that casuals/farmers will stop playing pvp at all, and ofc anet doesn’t want that.

I disagree that you need a PvP place where non-pvp people go to purposefully imbalance teams. There is WvW for that sort of thing already though.

I’m fine with the team imbalance type farmers not playing in PvP. Casuals can still play in unranked and be rewarded, they just couldn’t behave in such a kitten way and get rewarded for it.

Heck I even do this rubbish for the daily if it’s a class I don’t normally play, but it’s not right to get stuff for acting like a kitten.

Why stop there? Why should there be any rewards at all to try to coerce players that are not primarily concerned with just PvP?

Simple answer the mode can’t support itself without the influx of players that would normally avoid PvP. If you don’t think this is the case then why did they feel the need to have a pvp 101 section added to the Point of Interest? How much of an issue would the PvP community have if they added a skill/use discussion section of ready up completely focused on PvE? I can’t see it going well (as some don’t even like the inclusion of wvw in the Ready Up focus).

Bran.7425:

Why stop there? Why should there be any rewards at all to try to coerce players that are not primarily concerned with just PvP?

Simple answer the mode can’t support itself without the influx of players that would normally avoid PvP. If you don’t think this is the case then why did they feel the need to have a pvp 101 section added to the Point of Interest? How much of an issue would the PvP community have if they added a skill/use discussion section of ready up completely focused on PvE? I can’t see it going well (as some don’t even like the inclusion of wvw in the Ready Up focus).

Ironic since this behavior pushes people away from playing PvP unless they are just there for the imbalanced team/swap rewards…

Seems like a no win situation then. The mode isn’t sustainable, so we will have to see if stronghold will work better for them. I think they’ve set themselves up for trouble when they completely focused on conquest (the whole do one thing well didn’t work out) from the beginning and then finding that mode doesn’t set well with enough players.

Bran.7425:

Seems like a no win situation then. The mode isn’t sustainable, so we will have to see if stronghold will work better for them. I think they’ve set themselves up for trouble when they completely focused on conquest (the whole do one thing well didn’t work out) from the beginning and then finding that mode doesn’t set well with enough players.

Not rewarding bad behavior in practice =/= game mode is not sustainable… it’s not as if people didn’t PvP before the reward changes in the first place. The rewards are better now.

Sure the total numbers in PvP would drop a little in the short term because the bad behavior players would stop, but it’s better for the long term health of PvP. Gw2 PvP is not dependent on 5v4 practice types existing.

Doing the change just before HoT would be great since people will go and check out the new mode and there will be a resurgance in PvP then anyways.

No matter what system is in place as long as there is some sort of reward there are people will try to exploit it.

Do you have a source beside opinion on what would happen to the playing of pvp with such a change. For that matter if pvp matters that much why not play unrank/rank instead of practice?

Also on rewarding bad behavior they never did anything to players using exploit in the any tournament they just eventually got around to fixing it. What does that say about bad behavior?

Aberrant.6749:

I disagree that you need a PvP place where non-pvp people go to purposefully imbalance teams. There is WvW for that sort of thing already though.

I’m fine with the team imbalance type farmers not playing in PvP. Casuals can still play in unranked and be rewarded, they just couldn’t behave in such a kitten way and get rewarded for it.

Heck I even do this rubbish for the daily if it’s a class I don’t normally play, but it’s not right to get stuff for acting like a kitten.

Again, everything you said may be true, the issue is that any decision in order to change a game mode or alter the game in any way is made, in the very first instance, by an economical approach. If you put restriction, people could get angry/pissed for not playing in ez mode, then the numbers/pvp poblation will drop and some will stop playing, that mean less gems sold, a less appealing game for potential buyers, less active community, complains qqs, bad press, etc. You can make a list of disadvantages that could potentially lower the profits of the game.

Of course that there are advantages in removing rewards, putting restrictions on swapping or similar restriction that could improve the level of pvp in general, but you really don’t want to risk now when the expansion is comming up.

Remember that gaming is an industry, there are millions on it and people is risking a lot of money. Sure, you need to develop a good game to win in the longer run, to create a good reputation etc. but sometimes you need to opt for the “lesser evil” to please the majority of the population and protect your brand, even when it’s not optimal in entertainment wise.

Im pretty sure (i want to think) that the developer pvp team would have done a quite lot of features different, having/hiring more people working on pvp content, patches, changes, if they where in charge. But they don’t make the decisions in the end.

Don’t remove hotjoin rewards.

Slightly reduce win rewards, and make loss rewards equal to win rewards.

Suddenly, it’s far better to join matches immediately and play all the way through, than to camp in spectate and join the team that looks like it’ll win - since rewards are reduced for not playing for long enough in a match.

The reduction in win rewards devalues ’rank-farm’ servers a bit, and the removal of win/loss reward difference would hopefully fix one of hotjoin’s biggest problems - join the right team at the start, force autobalance if you picked wrong, enjoy your 4v5 if you failed at both of these.

Bran.7425:

No matter what system is in place as long as there is some sort of reward there are people will try to exploit it.

Do you have a source beside opinion on what would happen to the playing of pvp with such a change. For that matter if pvp matters that much why not play unrank/rank instead of practice?

Also on rewarding bad behavior they never did anything to players using exploit in the any tournament they just eventually got around to fixing it. What does that say about bad behavior?

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t discourage it as best you can.

So I take that to mean that you’re fine with rewarding bad behavior in other words? If so I disagree.

Julian.2971:

Aberrant.6749:

I disagree that you need a PvP place where non-pvp people go to purposefully imbalance teams. There is WvW for that sort of thing already though.

I’m fine with the team imbalance type farmers not playing in PvP. Casuals can still play in unranked and be rewarded, they just couldn’t behave in such a kitten way and get rewarded for it.

Heck I even do this rubbish for the daily if it’s a class I don’t normally play, but it’s not right to get stuff for acting like a kitten.

Again, everything you said may be true, the issue is that any decision in order to change a game mode or alter the game in any way is made, in the very first instance, by an economical approach. If you put restriction, people could get angry/pissed for not playing in ez mode, then the numbers/pvp poblation will drop and some will stop playing, that mean less gems sold, a less appealing game for potential buyers, less active community, complains qqs, bad press, etc. You can make a list of disadvantages that could potentially lower the profits of the game.

Of course that there are advantages in removing rewards, putting restrictions on swapping or similar restriction that could improve the level of pvp in general, but you really don’t want to risk now when the expansion is comming up.

Remember that gaming is an industry, there are millions on it and people is risking a lot of money. Sure, you need to develop a good game to win in the longer run, to create a good reputation etc. but sometimes you need to opt for the “lesser evil” to please the majority of the population and protect your brand, even when it’s not optimal in entertainment wise.

Im pretty sure (i want to think) that the developer pvp team would have done a quite lot of features different, having/hiring more people working on pvp content, patches, changes, if they where in charge. But they don’t make the decisions in the end.

I don’t mind that people who are doing 5v4 and team swapping for rewards leave gw2. They are not a healthy part of the population. I also disagree that 5v4 teamswap hotjoin is a good selling point of GW2. If you showed potential buyers the state of gw2 practice in a video, how many people do you think would see that and go “Yea I wanna buy that game”?

I haven’t had a single good hot join match in ummm… at least a year. I don’t play it often because of this.

I think the solution is easy: don’t allow players to join a match until someone else clicks join. The only exception would be if teams are uneven you’d be instantly placed on the team down by one member. This also would stop you from joining specific teams. Save the farming free for alls for custom arenas. Yes, this makes it hard to instantly join a match (which is the appeal of hot join), but it prevents people from hopping onto teams just to farm.

Hot join is not enjoyable for most people and is yet another reason why most people are put off by pvp.

MailMail.6534:

I haven’t had a single good hot join match in ummm… at least a year. I don’t play it often because of this.

I think the solution is easy: don’t allow players to join a match until someone else clicks join. The only exception would be if teams are uneven you’d be instantly placed on the team down by one member. This also would stop you from joining specific teams. Save the farming free for alls for custom arenas. Yes, this makes it hard to instantly join a match (which is the appeal of hot join), but it prevents people from hopping onto teams just to farm.

Hot join is not enjoyable for most people and is yet another reason why most people are put off by pvp.

Another would be to have the teams formed before the match starts. Either instantly by RNG means or well if I typed player choice that would be a bad idea.

eyestrain.3056:

My top suggestions are to remove rewards from hotjoin all together, so win or lose the incentive is not to farm but to play, and take on the challenge of joining the losing team for ones own improvement.

You really want all those farmers to spoil your unranked/ranked games? Because losing a unranked/ranked game gives as much reward as winning a hotjoin game. If you remove the rewards from hotjoin they come to unranked/ranked to afk, voluntarily loose and so on. I’m quite happy that they stay away from my matches.

Shylock.4653:

eyestrain.3056:

My top suggestions are to remove rewards from hotjoin all together, so win or lose the incentive is not to farm but to play, and take on the challenge of joining the losing team for ones own improvement.

You really want all those farmers to spoil your unranked/ranked games? Because losing a unranked/ranked game gives as much reward as winning a hotjoin game. If you remove the rewards from hotjoin they come to unranked/ranked to afk, voluntarily loose and so on. I’m quite happy that they stay away from my matches.

I’m super jealous that you haven’t experienced these people in unranked/ranked. That being said, I don’t believe they should take rewards away for hotjoin. Every game mode and sub game mode should be rewarding in some way. They should simply put an end to team loading like I suggested.

I was always surprised it’s possible to join the clearly winning team when the numbers are even, since for better balance one should always be put on the losing side to give it an advantage/handicap. Really any system of handicap (more experienced players being pushed to play with newbies) would be better than watching two or three earnest but clueless newbs getting rolled by the stubborn veterans who don’t want to party with them.

Coulter.2315:

Why don’t you just play Unranked if you want more structure in your games?

Well, in my case, it is because I don’t want to waste a third of my time just waiting around to play. With a 3 minute queue, 30 seconds to click “accept” and roll map, another minute where people can’t click “I am ready” and you’re up to nearly five minutes of standing around. With a match that lasts, say ten minutes, that is a third of your time gone.

Suggestion: Random arena a la GW1 with no teamswapping and dishonorable for leaving.

I know this sounds like an Obamacare type of idea/solution but….

If the intent is to remove “dailies & wins farmers” from a competitive format, why not just create a new format (pvp tab) ONLY for “dailies & wins farmers” with no difference in rewards. In that way, why would anyone interested in a farm pollute a hotjoin/solo/team venue by joining? Those “real” PvP venues would then VERY LIKELY become more “pristine” (although predictably less populated by a statistically significant amount)

I cranked out the track for the Glorious skin this last Saturday and Sunday and didn’t notice people sitting around waiting for lopsided teams aside from a couple of matches with guild premades. I automatically volunteered to switch as soon as it came up and noticed others doing the same, likely for the same reason as I did, more people to fight and to contest and flip points. I got rewards and the skin I wanted, and sometimes I’d switch teams just to fight another thief who was clearly better and I’d ask them about their game play, it’s a nice setting for that pace but not for more than a couple of matches without some reward otherwise the man-child guild pre-mades would wear thin pretty fast.

doomfodder.2906:

I know this sounds like an Obamacare type of idea/solution but….

If the intent is to remove “dailies & wins farmers” from a competitive format, why not just create a new format (pvp tab) ONLY for “dailies & wins farmers” with no difference in rewards. In that way, why would anyone interested in a farm pollute a hotjoin/solo/team venue by joining? Those “real” PvP venues would then VERY LIKELY become more “pristine” (although predictably less populated by a statistically significant amount)

Honestly starting to consider this option after meeting a few too many people like this, every day. They obviously don’t want to be in pvp and I don’t want them in pvp either.