Guild Wars 2

so i haven’t really gotten the chance to try out PvP since the patch, because i was busy with stuff. i’ll be the first to admit i’m not the best PvP player, but i can hold my own, and i follow enough of the community (watch the occasional tournament and streams, read the forums, etc) to have a good grasp of the basics.

i start the night replying to someone looking for one more person too set up a team. “what class do you play?” “thief”. no response. at least say you don’t want me in the team…

so i queue up on my own, instant queue pop. that’s a nice change from what i’m used to. and then i’m put against a team that was obviously way above my level, including some “NA celebrities”. that’s after not PvPing for a few months. game lost, no surprise, but i had fun. hopefully the game will put me against people closer to my level next time.

game two we lost again, but it was a considerably more even match.

game three i had team members running naked. patience starting to run short.

game 4 i land on a group of 3 friends that were less than eager to know i’m a thief, but apparently assumed i’d do a lot of stuff that they didn’t clarify even when i asked for instructions (“what do you want me to do?” “get home”, which i did), regardless of my build. the other team, once again, far better than mine. they were pulling coordinated bursts and everything, which meant i’d die before i could react >.> not blaming them for it, but that doesn’t make it any more fun for the ganked thief. to make matters worse, i kept having one of the guys just whine about how bad i was and how i should be going for far (an instruction he gave me 20 points before the match ended). i couldn’t tell if i was placed on a team above my level or not, because they too were dying fairly often, and more than one of them didn’t know the basic rule of “don’t spam attacks while downed, especially if you have a thief on your team”. more than once did someone die for breaking stealth from my shadow refuge while being stomped.

TL;DR: i come back from a break from PvP to be 1- placed on matches against people way more skilled than me, making the game less fun for everyone (and this can’t be blamed on queue range, since the pops were instant. did decay go backwards and increase my rank over time?), 2- trolled and unable to do anything about it because you can’t exactly report “PvPing without armor”, nor force armor on a teammate, effectively wasting ~7 minutes of my time, and 3- screamed at by someone who was doing no better than me and who refused to provide help even when asked, while being focused over and over because, again, i was outskilled there.

makes me wonder how much worse someone that’s actually new to PvP must feel.

1. Maybe not peak time/not a lot of teams at the moment; that is how you get matched up against top teams, e.g. Deku God/Backpack/K Pz (either decent/completely lopsided)… though at the time I was sitting around 400 in Team with top 100 people in party… Try Solo queue. Around 3-5 minute pops.

2. I’m sure you’re concluding from a small sample size. When you’ve played a few hundred games, you’ve seen it all (maybe my horizons can still be broadened). Think I’ve seen things like Rifle/Longbow Warriors, 3 Strength Rune Staff Spirit Guards, Double Power Necro + Killshot Warrior, 5 Eles, 4 Thieves…

3. Blaming other people means you don’t have to recognise your own faults. It’s a convenient ego-saving strategy and you should pay no heed.

Don’t listen to them. If they are a team they can work around you and adjust to your strategy. When my party of 3 plays Team queue, we don’t dog the other two about their performance in the game. If we get shiet on, we don’t say anything. Clearly knowing why we lost is more important to us than finding scapegoats.

If you are P/D, you can decap far/kill the bunker/force them to 2v1 you quite easily. Tell people what you want and do what you are good at.

1- well, 9-10pm server time seemed like a good time to play, and since the queues were popping instantly, i’d imagine it meant it was finding people on my level quite fast. which is odd because before the matches i was listed as 18%, and after the matches i “dropped” to 93%. oh well. as for solo queue, it can be worse. at least on team queues there’s a semblance of organization on top of the badmouthing and namecalling (not always in my direction)

2- this is just the most recent example, and probably the first time i saw it. i have to wonder if the person legitimately didn’t know that armor still counts for your defense, since the new system makes no mention of it.

3- sure, but it’s still annoying.

as for decapping far, i have to wonder how effective that is on a build so reliant on stealth. what i usually did (and worked pretty fine before the sigil changes made everyone burst so hard) was basically skew teamfights in my team’s favor as fast as i could (and theoretically the new runes and traits actually allow me to do it better, with runes of krait and the new trickery GM trait), but now it’s kinda hard to stay alive in one. maybe because of the changes, maybe because i was not meant to be fighting those people. i’ll see about your suggestion and see how it goes.

BrunoBRS.5178:

1- well, 9-10pm server time seemed like a good time to play, and since the queues were popping instantly, i’d imagine it meant it was finding people on my level quite fast. which is odd because before the matches i was listed as 18%, and after the matches i “dropped” to 93%. oh well. as for solo queue, it can be worse. at least on team queues there’s a semblance of organization on top of the badmouthing and namecalling (not always in my direction)

Leaderboard decay is currently temporary only—that is, your rank was displayed as 18% because you hadn’t played for a few months, but your real MMR was probably somewhere in the 500-1000 range. That’s good, because 18% is firmly in the “inactive” region of the playerbase. No players exist at that MMR who could have been matched against you. Instant queue pops are often the result of another team having waited for a long time before you entered the queue, so they are not necessarily a better matchup.

Solo joining team queues is great, and I do it all the time. But the team queue matchmaker is not optimized to “shuffle” solo-joining players between teams, like the solo queue matchmaker does, as far as I can tell; so the chances of getting a lopsided match may be higher.

And yes, unfortunately the last patch was a significant power creep. Literally every build got buffs, at least indirectly; some got massive buffs, some got moderate buffs. Celestial amulet got buffed. It’s somewhat unfortunate, but the sigil changes needed to happen so they could be less arbitrary and confusing for new players. Giving certain runes massive buffs was not a good decision.

Be that as it may, it means you should re-evaluate your build. P/d thief is a very strong duelist, but you may need to update your trait, rune, or sigil choices, and you may need to re-think your general strategy.

You should also consider solo queue. The population has risen dramatically and the matchmaker is more effective for the type of playing it seems you’re interested in (i.e. solo queuing). It seems you’re likely in the ~90% MMR range, which means there are tons of people around your level on. Solo queues should pop quickly and give you pretty decent matches.

NevirSayDie.6235:

BrunoBRS.5178:

1- well, 9-10pm server time seemed like a good time to play, and since the queues were popping instantly, i’d imagine it meant it was finding people on my level quite fast. which is odd because before the matches i was listed as 18%, and after the matches i “dropped” to 93%. oh well. as for solo queue, it can be worse. at least on team queues there’s a semblance of organization on top of the badmouthing and namecalling (not always in my direction)

Leaderboard decay is currently temporary only—that is, your rank was displayed as 18% because you hadn’t played for a few months, but your real MMR was probably somewhere in the 500-1000 range. That’s good, because 18% is firmly in the “inactive” region of the playerbase. No players exist at that MMR who could have been matched against you. Instant queue pops are often the result of another team having waited for a long time before you entered the queue, so they are not necessarily a better matchup.

Solo joining team queues is great, and I do it all the time. But the team queue matchmaker is not optimized to “shuffle” solo-joining players between teams, like the solo queue matchmaker does, as far as I can tell; so the chances of getting a lopsided match may be higher.

And yes, unfortunately the last patch was a significant power creep. Literally every build got buffs, at least indirectly; some got massive buffs, some got moderate buffs. Celestial amulet got buffed. It’s somewhat unfortunate, but the sigil changes needed to happen so they could be less arbitrary and confusing for new players. Giving certain runes massive buffs was not a good decision.

Be that as it may, it means you should re-evaluate your build. P/d thief is a very strong duelist, but you may need to update your trait, rune, or sigil choices, and you may need to re-think your general strategy.

You should also consider solo queue. The population has risen dramatically and the matchmaker is more effective for the type of playing it seems you’re interested in (i.e. solo queuing). It seems you’re likely in the ~90% MMR range, which means there are tons of people around your level on. Solo queues should pop quickly and give you pretty decent matches.

yeah, i know decay is temporary, just found it weird how high and how fast it bumped me, despite not actually having won any matches.

don’t get me wrong, i agree with the sigil changes and think they should’ve happened before. it’s just making it a tad harder to find my place on the team with the new situation. i’ve been making some tweaks to my traits and sigils, and met moderate success, making it easier to down players (and way easier access to weakness on top of that) at the cost of losing shadow’s rejuvenation.

i was actually an advocate of solo queue and didn’t go for team queues unless i actually had someone to play with, but despite my build being, like you said, more of a duelist build, i prefer teamplay and some coordination over “outplaying” individually to win. i feel sad inside when i try to coordinate a plan with random strangers and they’re like “just kill them and don’t die”. team queues are more likely to have groups that will actually play smart over “just get good 1vX builds and win skirmishes”. also way less 4v5s and quitters.

BrunoBRS.5178:

i was actually an advocate of solo queue and didn’t go for team queues unless i actually had someone to play with, but despite my build being, like you said, more of a duelist build, i prefer teamplay and some coordination over “outplaying” individually to win. i feel sad inside when i try to coordinate a plan with random strangers and they’re like “just kill them and don’t die”. team queues are more likely to have groups that will actually play smart over “just get good 1vX builds and win skirmishes”. also way less 4v5s and quitters.

I hear you there. Hopefully the woes of solo queue will get fixed soon, because it really does have a better matchmaking process in theory.

Gotta say, your 3rd reason is my main reason. No matter the rewards, or incentives or improvements they add, there is one MAJOR thing that ruins the experience and that is the TOXIC members of the pvp community, that tend to be fairly common. In any other game type I could say it is RARE to have some kitten make fun of you or grief you publicly or privately, in spvp its like 25%-33% of any solo queue will have someone harassing someone. If I was a new player, it would ruin the game for me.

BrunoBRS.5178:

why it’s hard to not say “screw PvP”

Why fight it?

Ralkuth.1456:

3. Blaming other people means you don’t have to recognise your own faults. It’s a convenient ego-saving strategy and you should pay no heed.

Externalising criticism as ‘a convenient ego-saving strategy’ is a convenient ego-saving strategy.

Sir Arthur.8905:

the TOXIC members of the pvp community

Okay Britney.

entropy.9613:

Why fight it?

I believe in his benevolence…

entropy.9613:

Externalising criticism as ‘a convenient ego-saving strategy’ is a convenient ego-saving strategy.

Under the premise that the team he played with used criticism as a convenient ego-saving strategy.
Would it be so bad to externalise criticism as “a convenient ego-saving strategy” to conveniently save himself some ego when everyone else is trying to do so?
I could be wrong, but I was trying to give our frand here a pat on the back and keep going.

Though taking criticism the right way is key to improvement, you’d also want to take the right criticism. Don’t think people whining about how bad he was could turn into anything contributive… “You’re bad” -> “L2P” -> “Get good”? Substantial indeed.

Sir Arthur.8905:

the TOXIC members of the pvp community

Don’t think I want to fight negativity with more negativity. That word won’t scare them away. Though I don’t know what truly will create an adverse event to talking down on people. Maybe buy a thesaurus and frighten them with your learnedness?