Guild Wars 2

theres an ongoing thread in the general discussion forum about Anet’s lack of transparency (and in the case of pvp, utter silence)

Gaile Gray, a veteran at Anet has tried to calm the situation with the usual corporate style spiel, but she also added something which i think was a bit more human:

Can you give me a few examples, where players would really like to know everything, but where there is a level of disclosure that meets the basic info request?

So to you, Mr/Mrs Pvp Dev i would bring up the issue of team swapping in Spvp,
while we’d like to know everything, “are you aware of it? is it intended? is it going to be fixed? when?”
at this point i’d settle for the basic info. “are you aware of it” and “is it intended?”
because since it was added (intentionally or not), it has done nothing but ruin every single match, and not a single word has been uttered by Anet about it.

so some base level communication would atleast give us a shimmer of hope for the future or put us out of our misery.

and to my fellow players i’ll say this before the “its only hotjoin” crowd arrive,
when new players come to pvp do you really think they’ll stick around after several unbearable 3v5 landslides?
hotjoin is what makes or breaks the pvp community, if new players have fun in hotjoin then they’ll stick around, if they don’t, then our community continues to bleed out players without new players coming in to fill the gaps, our community dies away.

The issue is *not* team swapping.

The issue is that entire matches are 4v5 the whole way through, because people don’t want to join the losing team for minimal rewards - particularly half way through a match, when the loss rewards are scaled down to almost nothing by time-in-match scaling.

Anyone who is stuck in a perma-4v5 game should always force autobalance and swap teams. What’s the point in playing a hotjoin game from the start, being outnumbered all the way through, and getting very little to show for it?

So, some possible ways to fix this?

1) Remove the difference between win and loss for hotjoin.
Slightly reduce the win rewards (to, say, 400 rank points/match?) and bring loss rewards up to the same as this.
Without a reward bonus for stacking on the same team, there will be much less incentive to do so. It still feels good to win, y’know, and it’s not like the losing team will be getting anything *more* than the winning team!
Time-based reward scaling should remain in effect, to stop folks from joining nearly-finished matches, decapping one point, and getting the same rewards as someone who played from start.

2) Don’t let players join the team with more points, when teams have equal numbers.
Say we’ve got a 3v3, that’s 70pts to red, 20pts to blue. New player joining will almost always go to red... and nobody will join blue to balance out, in the hopes that another spot will open up on red.
Now we have a 4v3, and the score gap widens. Should anyone for some reason join blue... someone else will almost immediately join red to unbalance things again.

3) Don’t let players choose teams after the match has started.
An alternative to 2) is to just remove the choice altogether. Let people choose teams at start, so they can play with friends if they want... but after that, if team numbers are equal, choice is removed.
This could still lead to permanently outnumbered games, should somebody leave the losing team and those spectating not wish to join it, but it would at least help stop folks from just showing up and immediately joining the winning team to further increase their advantage.

4) Introduce ’sitting out’.
This would be messy to implement, but replacing the current autobalance system with a sitting-out system could possibly work.
If one team has been down a player for several seconds, offer folks on the other team the chance to volunteer to sit-out - much as the current autobalance system works, with a small bonus as incentive and with someone randomly chosen if nobody volunteers.
A sitting-out player can spectate, and their time sitting-out counts towards their match participation time. Their ’spot’ on their team is reserved, so new players can only join the opposing team - and as soon as this happens, the sitting-out player gets brought back in.
Few other issues would need worked out, but it’s an idea.

So yeah, I’ll repeat that first part:

Team switching is not the problem.

That people feel they have to teamswitch to get fair rewards is the problem.

This whole reward system, though with good intentions, just invites too much bad play… Whether hotjoin, SoloQ or TeamQ, I get the same messages;

“I am just here for the reward/armour piece”… Yes, leading to teamswapping or simply AFK-ing…

…

GoogleBrandon.5073:

This whole reward system, though with good intentions, just invites too much bad play… Whether hotjoin, SoloQ or TeamQ, I get the same messages;

“I am just here for the reward/armour piece”… Yes, leading to teamswapping or simply AFK-ing…

…

Average pvp player atm…sad but true..

cheese.4739:

The issue is not team swapping.

The issue is that entire matches are 4v5 the whole way through, because people don’t want to join the losing team for minimal rewards

if they fixed team swap then the matches would have far greater balance and closer scores, removing the need to sit out of a 4v5.
obviously a landslide will happen some times because one team simply outskills the other,
but generally it would be far more competitive so people would’nt feel as inclined to pass up a 4v5 which they are very capable of winning.

also i can’t speak for everyone but i personally don’t play hotjoin for the wins, i play it for fun, if i have a 5v5 close game and lose i’ll still have far more fun than a 3v5 landslide win.

Liewec.2896:

hotjoin is what makes or breaks the pvp community, if new players have fun in hotjoin then they’ll stick around, if they don’t, then our community continues to bleed our players without new players coming in to fill the gaps, our community dies away.

Yes. This. Well put.

just be thankful that we can still fix hotjoin issues ourselves by using the spectator mode to force auto balance.

if you are in a team with more players, just enter spectator mode yourself to balance the team, or join the losing team to help them out.

In My opinion The time You can be in hotjoin without moving and doing anything is also too long
They should kick Out AFKers After maybe 30 seconds or even less that new players can join The team faster

“Exploit”. Lmao

Proposition:

When a player selects to join spectator, they are locked into spectator for 1 minute.

Problem:

In Hotjoin matches, players who are in Spectator are considered “active players” by the server architecture.

Example: So lets say there are 10 total players in the server, 1 in spectator, 4v5 playing. the “play now” feature automatically searches for low population matches that have just begun.

This server now becomes exempt from the “play now” feature, and this is one of the primary reasons for 0-500 4v5 matches. The only way more players will join the server is if the match is within the first couple minutes of starting, or if they manually select the server from the server list/browser.

This needs to be addressed first.

Liewec.2896:

cheese.4739:

The issue is not team swapping.

The issue is that entire matches are 4v5 the whole way through, because people don’t want to join the losing team for minimal rewards

if they fixed team swap then the matches would have far greater balance and closer scores, removing the need to sit out of a 4v5.
obviously a landslide will happen some times because one team simply outskills the other,
but generally it would be far more competitive so people would’nt feel as inclined to pass up a 4v5 which they are very capable of winning.

If they fixed team swap, unless both teams started out with 5 players it’d be pretty uncommon to see matches that were even remotely fair.

How hotjoin usually goes for me:
- match starts, with 2-4 players.
- one team gets upper hand early on, or is perceived to be better (higher skill/more experience) by spectating players.
- spectating players (including most of those who have just entered the map) will try to join this ‘winning’ or ‘better’ team, and ignore the other one. The team that got early lead ends up being 3v2 or 4v3 or 5v4, because those spectating don’t want to join the ‘losing’ team – even if they could balance things out or even bring it back.
- should it eventually become 5v5… the lead gained by the team that started well is usually too great to give losing team any chance of a comeback.

Removing the ability to swap teams just locks players who got the unlucky team into a near-certain 4v5; it doesn’t fix the problem of players trying to join the team more likely to win, and leaving the other team short on numbers.

Zietlogik: oh yes, this is a fair idea, too – and it’s easy to accidentally lock a server into 4v5s by being afk in spectator mode.
At the very least, the game needs to only consider players currently in the map (and not spectators) when bringing in players from ‘play now’.

This is a multi-faceted problem, with several base issues at play, but at heart, I think this is the core reason: the 4v5’s and team swapping is happening because people don’t want to be stuck on the losing team. Not only is it not fun to get stomped on, but you also get less rewards.

Now, there’s two main ways you can fix this. You can either punish the offending behaviour, or you remove the reason why people want to join the winning team in the first place.

Punishing the offending behaviour can work to some extent, but bear in mind that introducing things like Dishonorable for forcing Autobalance or stopping people from waiting in Spectate may not actually solve the problem. I suspect that all it will do is result in more people simply ragequitting the moment they see that their team is losing (which then, of course, either leads to Autobalance anyway, or a steamrolling effect where every single member of the enemy team quits too because “why bother?” I see this all the time in competitive FPS games).

And if you slap Dishonorable onto Hotjoin too, well, then you may as well simply get rid of Hotjoin altogether. It would be indistinguishable from Solo Queue, and why would people bother playing Hotjoin then when Solo Queue offers much bigger rewards for essentially the same work? Do you REALLY want all the newbies and IPHIW players in Solo/Team Queue?

Getting rid of rewards altogether is also a big no-no. No matter how you feel about it, the undeniable evidence was that PvP became a LOT more popular after reward tracks were introduced. And the PvP scene NEEDS to have this huge influx of players if it is to survive in the long term. You can’t have any PvP scene solely consisting of a few well-known teams playing each other over and over. Viewers will get bored watching it, and the teams themselves will likely get burnt out (or get bored and move on to other games). It’s crucial that you have new blood that can step up when that happens, or the entire game mode will stagnate and die.

So my solution? I’ll post it in the next post.

My solution: If you pick “Random Team” when you join a match, you get a special buff that DOUBLES the rewards at the end of the match (capped at the winner’s normal reward). This means that if you picked a random team, and your team ended up losing, you’d still get the same rewards as if you’d lucked out onto the winning team anyway. This has the following benefits:

1. There is no incentive to hop teams. You’d get the same reward staying on your random original team as you would switching to the winning team. This discourages Autobalance Wars.

2. Because rewards are calculated based on the length of time someone is in the match, it encourages people to join the match at once instead of watching until it becomes clear which team is superior. This discourages waiting in Spectate and should thus help solve the issue of 4v5.

These changes means it’s most profitable to instantly hit “Random Team” the moment a match starts, and then see it out to the end, win or lose.

Now, to ensure that winning still has some meaning, if you pick Random and lose, it won’t give you credit towards the appropriate achievements (Genius, Phantom etc.) Also, to incentivise people to move up to Solo/Team Queue when they get experienced enough, I propose increasing the rewards of the two modes to 3x Hotjoin rewards (for Solo) and 5x Hotjoin rewards (for Team). The maximum daily gold reward limits for Solo and Team Queues remain the same. Note that the Random Team buff only applies to Hotjoin; it does not appear in Solo or Team Queue.

So all this should mean that Hotjoin remains a casual, “lite-PvP” mode that anyone can join and slowly work on PvP ranks and reward tracks. But if you want to earn your ranks/tracks faster, as well as gain renown and leaderboard ranks, you’ll need to move up to Solo/Team Queue.

Carpboy.7145:

“Exploit”. Lmao

Exploit: “to take advantage of (a person, situation, etc), esp unethically or unjustly for one’s own ends” – the dictionary.

congratulations, you’ve learnt something new!

Liewec.2896:

Carpboy.7145:

“Exploit”. Lmao

Exploit: “to take advantage of (a person, situation, etc), esp unethically or unjustly for one’s own ends” – the dictionary.

congratulations, you’ve learnt something new!

Pretty much like pulling ppl down on skyhammer…

Archaon.9524:

Liewec.2896:

Carpboy.7145:

“Exploit”. Lmao

Exploit: “to take advantage of (a person, situation, etc), esp unethically or unjustly for one’s own ends” – the dictionary.

congratulations, you’ve learnt something new!

Pretty much like pulling ppl down on skyhammer…

In the context of this game (and others), it tends to be used to mean “doing something that gives you an advantage that is not intended design”. Like FGS#4 spam, or doing the failtrain in Frostgorge Sound, or swapping teams in hotjoin when it’s not meant to be possible.

Anyway: Zaxares’ solution is another good one, and I can totally get behind it.

Basically, we need to remove any idea that choosing the ‘right’ team at the start gives better rewards – it’s hotjoin’s biggest problem.
If everyone who joins at the start is going to gain the same rewards anyway, there’s no need to choose the ‘better’ team and so people will be much more willing to join the ‘worse’ team when it’s down on numbers.