Guild Wars 2

Title says it all. I fell like it has potential, but a-net needs to focus on it more. After all, don’t they want it to be an esport?

Hmm not sure how I can explain it, contrary to what most people believe they would like it to become an e-sport, but that’s not their main goal right now.

They want to improve the PvP experience and that’s reasonable, to me it can become an e-sport, but still has a long way to go. Best we can do is provide as much feedback as possible to help them get there.

Incoming #esports spam

no

What do you consider an eSport? Does it have to be as popular as LoL? Dota2? SC2? WoW? Does it need X number of players in PvP? Prize pools that are worth $X?

It has potential to be a good eSport. The game is fairly “simple” to understand: relatively low number of skills per person, easy to get game flow, easy to understand winning conditions. It will never reach the popularity of games like the ones I listed at the beginning, because those are perfect spectator eSports. But it could become decent of size.

Realize that its going to take time though. LoL didn’t blow up to what it is overnight. SC2 and Dota2 are both not only true sequels (whereas GW2 is just a second game in the GW2 universe), but game types that are much more “eSports ready”. WoW is the only MMO that was “eSports”, and that was only because Blizzard forced it by throwing insane amounts of money at the scene.

No.

- Classes are absurdly far apart in terms of depth and risk/reward.
- Without sweetfx the game looks very gloomy/blurry which makes it hard to follow.
- Esports are usually kill oriented. Conquest isnt.
- Adding skyhammer shows they see this as a minigame and not as esports. Filled with trollish 1 shot possibilities. Fun but far from esports.

I don’t see it ever becoming popular enough.

No, it won’t be. ArenaNet should focus on making a game that players can enjoy, (not saying there are not players that don’t) and still have fun being competitive in their own right. Then if there are enough players and the community sees it competitive enough, it might be able to be an esport.

Fernling.1729:

I don’t see it ever becoming popular enough.

popular enough…
no, no, no.
popular again.

These guys lost like the vast vast majority of their playerbase and slow badly made patch after slow badly made patch shot down any chance more than a handfull will come back (if some miracle happens and Anet starts pulling their kitten together).

Maybe, but I doubt it will come from solely working on things like: reworking leaderboard/matchmaking formula every month, custom arenas, and spectator mode (beneficial only to twitch watchers) — as they have been doing. The blog post coming Monday will be very important.

There is a post on this about once every 2 weeks that the answer is a flat no. The main reasons are that balance will never be fair enough to make a sport out of this and any initial excitement or motivation is all but lost. Additional reasons are that conquest is too limiting a game mode and builds can not (will not) be normalized in effectiveness. If you want to closest to esport play a game of online chess or a FPS where you all have the same weapon.

Dont listen to the QQers. GuildWars2 could be an Esport in a month. It’s quite ovbious nobody else here watches state of the game’s. The devs have said that they dont want to ship out a game as an Esport because the Esports scene is ever changing. You cant just bring out a good PvP system and say it’s Esports ready because it needs a base, this game’s community needs to work together & prompt Anet that it is indeed ready for Esports (which shouldn’t be just yet imo) and they could go back to working on PvP a bit more and bam, Esport. Not enough people are into s/tPvP atm to push it though so we need to just be patient. Anet is going to slowly upgrade it so more and more people will PvP until they think it’s ready. I’ve read an insane amount of statements by Anet saying this is what they’re doing but nobody else seems to pay any attention.

gw2 spvp needs more players before it has any remote chance to become a popular e-sports.

given how they allocate their resources into PvE, living stories (more PvE), gem store (PvE again) i say this is impossible. unless they change their monetization policies and focus on attracting more players to play gw2 sPvP.

until more players play gw2 sPvP, it will never become an e-spot.

some external references.
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

Current Players | Peak Today – Game
231,589 | 509,107 – Dota 2
36,100 | 63,810 – Team Fortress 2
18,051 | 48,849 – Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

try achieving an average of 200k+ gw2 sPvP players per day.
then we talk about e-sports.

for comparison, Dota 2 has … lots of heroes, that plays differently, and are unplayable.

how many actual builds are playable for each of the 8 professions in guild wars 2? in sPvP i mean.

aye, guild wars 2 spvp is fun to play, for me, it means the 8 vs 8 hotjoin servers.

too bad gw2 spvp does not have enough players though.

No, it won’t be an esport. They had their chance, but you just can’t bring stuff back from the dead. Criss Angel they are not.

Amar.1547:

Title says it all. I fell like it has potential, but a-net needs to focus on it more. After all, don’t they want it to be an esport?

Do they want it to be an esport?

Yes.

Is it going to be an esport?

Oh god…no, casual friendly games can’t be esports by definition, end of the story.

They will have to balance the professions much better before spvp becomes an E-sport.

Back in the day when I used to watch WoW arena tournaments, some of the class imbalances could be clearly seen, but for the most part every class had a viable comp they could run.

Well this games balance is 5x worse than wow arena. Not to mention there being only one game mode… that promotes AoE spam.

They will really need to work hard to make this games pvp competitive and esport worthy.

Acandis.3250:

No.

The ship sailed a long time ago; the PvP system had great potential but the staff ignored top tier players (even those in core) for far too long and just released bad balance patch after bad balance patch as they saw fit.

Little by little, top teams started leaving, and soon there were no more than 3 good teams by the time they decided to start throwing money into tournaments. By that time, they had messed up the meta so hard that the rest of the top teams left.

I still think the game has great potential, but I think that’s where its going to stay. It will take them approx. 2 years after release to have a workable competitive system, and by then there will be other games of the same genre that a) listen to their players, b) have a competitive system from the start, c) release balance patches in a timely manner.

I’m ok with this game not being esports, though; it’s fun to play for now.

Actually this ^

There was a time, few months before pax that balance was actually pretty good. Warriors were a little underpower but not totally weak..There were a lot of competitive teams and pretty much a lot of stuff going on….
I believe that the downfall started at the dhuumfire patch..They made huge mistakes in that patch..

Dardamaniac.1295:

Actually this ^

There was a time, few months before pax that balance was actually pretty good. Warriors were a little underpower but not totally weak..There were a lot of competitive teams and pretty much a lot of stuff going on….
I believe that the downfall started at the dhuumfire patch..They made huge mistakes in that patch..

The game was only running on hope at that point.
Legitimate esports teams left month~ before doomfire.
Large chunks of the playerbase were falling off, since conquest/exc. blew.

The meta wasn’t terrible, but the way GW2 was setup… no teamwork short of shouting who is where in vent… you had to struggle to get any social gameplay…
(SPvP forced you to not play with friends, the only alternative is to Q as a team in TPvP… I’ve seen so many groups of friends, rank 1-10 get roflestomped left and right since Anet made ‘premades’ get a large MMR boost)

People QQ when a game is unbalanced, people only ever leave when they are bored.
Friends make things not boring.

The game really had/has nothing good going for it.
The ‘flow of combat’ is nice… but utterly slaughtered by badly made skills, terrible particle effects and near instant or unstoppable CC/imob/high-dmg attacks.

Even without doomfire, the game wasn’t improving, the game was teeming with issues that Anet couldn’t fix… that would(and is in the process of) driving everyone away.

Not with this balance.

I personally feel it will, but it’s not going to happen overnight. I obviously have a bit of a biased opinion when it comes to this subject as a shoutcaster, but I personally feel we have made huge strides since launch. If you guys remember about a year ago it wasn’t even possible for us to have player organized tournaments and now we are having 2-3 per week. We’ve had hiccups over the past few months, but I feel we have started to recover tremendously:

• Balance is headed in a good direction (in my own opinion at least)
• New teams are showing up weekly
• We had about 1500 viewers for a 2v2 tournament!
• There are two or more tournaments every week

We have great competitive scene starting to brew, and I know there is a lot more in the works for the coming months that you guys should definitely be getting excited for. If you guys really want to see this game go #esports, all I can ask is that you guys support these tournaments. Bigger viewership numbers will allow us to rocket the scene to new heights, and we need the entire community to help with it. As I said, it isnt going to happen in one night or even one month from now, but I personally feel that we as a community can take this game to a level where we can see it at Dreamhack, MLG Pro Circuit, and other huge events. The only thing limiting it is time and how far the community wants to see it go.

:)

Bhawb.7408:

What do you consider an eSport? Does it have to be as popular as LoL? Dota2? SC2? WoW? Does it need X number of players in PvP? Prize pools that are worth $X?

I’ve always thought “e-sport” was a funny term because it makes me think of fat people who can’t walk a mile so they have “e-sports”.

The extremely negative community hurts that effort a lot. Also nobody plays on NA, which is weird because it’s very active in PvE and WvW.

You’d have to make it appealing for the PvE and WvW players to do PvP, which means rewards and game modes they want to play.

I don’t really care how anybody takes this, but Conquest is way over the heads of most people. They just don’t get it, which is sad, but Anet made the game too top level for the majority of boom headshot kittens.

Relentless.7023:

I don’t really care how anybody takes this, but Conquest is way over the heads of most people. They just don’t get it, which is sad, but Anet made the game too top level for the majority of boom headshot kittens.

This really does seem to be a pretty big issue. A lot of times questions about how many enemies are still on the map/what nodes/rotations are met with silence or bewilderment. I think people really just want to kill each other and not focus on nodes :p

No because it barely comes down to skill but which build you are using

BLUna.7928:

I personally feel it will, but it’s not going to happen overnight. I obviously have a bit of a biased opinion when it comes to this subject as a shoutcaster, but I personally feel we have made huge strides since launch. If you guys remember about a year ago it wasn’t even possible for us to have player organized tournaments and now we are having 2-3 per week. We’ve had hiccups over the past few months, but I feel we have started to recover tremendously:

• Balance is headed in a good direction (in my own opinion at least)
• New teams are showing up weekly
• We had about 1500 viewers for a 2v2 tournament!
• There are two or more tournaments every week

We have great competitive scene starting to brew, and I know there is a lot more in the works for the coming months that you guys should definitely be getting excited for. If you guys really want to see this game go #esports, all I can ask is that you guys support these tournaments. Bigger viewership numbers will allow us to rocket the scene to new heights, and we need the entire community to help with it. As I said, it isnt going to happen in one night or even one month from now, but I personally feel that we as a community can take this game to a level where we can see it at Dreamhack, MLG Pro Circuit, and other huge events. The only thing limiting it is time and how far the community wants to see it go.

:)

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

gw2 spvp needs more players before it has any remote chance to become a popular e-sports.

given how they allocate their resources into PvE, living stories (more PvE), gem store (PvE again) i say this is impossible. unless they change their monetization policies and focus on attracting more players to play gw2 sPvP.

until more players play gw2 sPvP, it will never become an e-spot.

some external references.
http://store.steampowered.com/stats/

Current Players | Peak Today – Game
231,589 | 509,107 – Dota 2
36,100 | 63,810 – Team Fortress 2
18,051 | 48,849 – Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

try achieving an average of 200k+ gw2 sPvP players per day.
then we talk about e-sports.

for comparison, Dota 2 has … lots of heroes, that plays differently, and are unplayable.

how many actual builds are playable for each of the 8 professions in guild wars 2? in sPvP i mean.

yes, having more players to draw from helps. the core issues though…

for this type of game, professions and combat are not good at all for any type of pvp, and is barley digestible in pve. there is so much more potential to make the core of this game better, but very little to no effort goes into making professions and combat a high quality aaa experience. until they start going back to the drawing board for professions, no one who cares about having a rich, deep, diverse, flexible, customizable, balanced… character system and wants a quality combat for the sake of combat experience, will ever take the game seriously.

it’s been more than 1 year and still people ask if GW2 will become an esport.

Relentless.7023:

The extremely negative community hurts that effort a lot. Also nobody plays on NA, which is weird because it’s very active in PvE and WvW.

You’d have to make it appealing for the PvE and WvW players to do PvP, which means rewards and game modes they want to play.

I don’t really care how anybody takes this, but Conquest is way over the heads of most people. They just don’t get it, which is sad, but Anet made the game too top level for the majority of boom headshot kittens.

Uhm.
You do realize LoL is basically the definition of a game that is ’ too top level for the majority of boom headshot kittens’…
Yet it is the biggest esport out there…

GW2 just made a bad game.
Of course the community is going to be negative… they expected a good, enjoyable competitive game (like GW1 could deliver) not something far worse in every way…

GW2…
It’s complicated and lacking in entertainment.
It’s complicated and not even deep…

It has like nothing good going for it, at best it’s a casuals SPvP/zergers game and its not even decent at that.

Dardamaniac.1295:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztVMib1T4T4

LOL best response ever. Kudos!

no it will not. there are too many passives builds that practically play themselves that are too effective.

First and foremost, Guild Wars 2 is marketed as an MMO with 2 types of PvP. And certain people in A.NET tries hard for the sPvP to take off as a rocket of its own. But in this regard, that GW2 has also other player bases (RPers, PvErs, Hardcore WvWvWers), it seems like sPvP can’t take of on its own. The cake is being halfed or quartered. Compared to LoL which has no MMO side, GW2 sPvP surely doesn’t look like what people expect it to look like.

What will work as a PvP in this game is WvWvW-> GvG. Because it is Guild Centric. It carries the Lore. And 20v20 carries the Massive-ly in the MMO genre. And the community that it will create will shoot off to the moon. For Guilds are social avenues. It is a community. If people will see in a community ran ladder that this guild is the best, people would wanna join it just for the sake of carrying the guild tag. People will talk about it. Guild drama will ensue. Guild rivalry will be forged. And since the gauge to prove that which guild is the best is played massively, people will be enticed to make gvg team A, B, C. See that’s 60 people already involved. And in business perspective, numbers count. higher number the better.

It is also not far that RPers will RP the guild rivalries based on GvGs. Guild members who are exclusively PvE would provide even the pot money when time comes that WvWvW GvGs will be lucrative to betting.

The current state of rewards in sPvP is very individualistic. The ladder is only 1 person per place. It is so egocentric. Guid Wars 1 had guilds on the ladder. And Guilds are composed of more than 1 person. So you are rewarding more than 1 person under the name of the top 1 guild.

And you are boosting the egos of more than 1 person if your Guild is popular, notorious etc.

So yeah, it seems like RP/PvE and WvWvW GvG are the most compatible pairs for Guild Wars 2 to go to the Next Level. And sPvP is just a novelty avenue. It could be chipped off from the package and let it be run like LoL. sPvP, to be able to stand by itself and prove that it is a good PvP game, must be separated from GW2 and be a Free To Play game. How to monetize it, follow the LoL model.

That’s how sPvP will become an esport. But it doesn’t offer anything groundbreaking so it has to compete in the same playing field with LoL.

It should stop parasiting on the real cash cows that is PvE and WvWvW/GvG.

Or come to think of it, for now it is better for sPvP to stick with the package with PvE+WvWvW because it looks to me that it can’t take off as its own.

A game is e-sport when the casual/standart player start to care about.
When the normal player wanna play it and trie to be the best. Than he start to watch the best players and trie to copie and wannabe like his heros with top win/lose ratio and so on.

But normal players dont come and play spvp when there is nothing “Important” to win or to archieve.

In league of legends you get points you can buy new champs someday – this is only reason why normal palyer play Lol, its the progress they make and after some 100 games they start to care bout higher targets ….

We need some similiar here in GW2 like supercool special skins only for top 100 per month. Or some meta monthly archievement where everyone can get some special reward for doing things like 25 tournament wins – 100 stomps …. whatever

Gw2 has potential – we all know the combat system in this game is just nice – its the best form all game on market right now (even wildstar or teso – i tried beta^^). Gw2 need more fokus on PVP BALANCING – maby split complete from the other modes(pve/wvw) so they can balance faster/more radical and react to OP mechanism.

the reward system is on the way so lets hope it will bring more players in spvp

No E-sports here, only bad domination maps.

Anet has already give up esport. Look at all the new passive skills n traits and casual players giving serious talk on balance.
Following the trend in jan 10 patch you will see
1. Lyssa nerf
2. Thief new trait invisible nurse, immune to Condi in stealth.
3. Ranger new trait Pokemon power, immune to Condi when pet has 80% hp
4. Mesmer new skill Imaginary chuck Norris, summon chuck Norris who is just gonna be totally awesome, in the meantime immune to Condi for 10 sec.
In feb 10 patch, imaginary chuck Norris will be replaced by signet of chuck Norris, for casual player complains it’s to hard to time the skill.

no.

reason: hubris

explanation: the game is great in a lot of ways. mechanics and balance? Not fun at all.

gw2 tried to innovate on a lot of frontiers, and they crossed a line here they shouldnt have. now they should take it back, but there’s no way they’ll swallow their pride and admit it.