Guild Wars 2

I realize there are a lot of threads out there on this subject, but in my perusal of them I haven’t seen one theme that always comes to mind when I’m in yet ANOTHER completely unbalanced match: there are no consequences for those who are willfully screwing up the competitive game play.

I know people have strong opinions about class stacking, rewards/loot for matches, points earned, pvp as part of the daily requirements etc. Personally, I don’t care about any of that. I just want easy access to some competitive game play regardless of what the rewards are.

If the game allows people to do things like afk, switch teams, spectate until they can join the winning team, how is the match ever going to be remotely balanced?
I don’t understand why there all these loopholes to work around having to play on a potentially losing team? While the concept of auto-balancing may look good on paper, all the loop-holes make it pointless.

I’d like to see people be more accountable for signing up for hot-joins.

-No team switching during a match.
-Teams are never unbalanced in numbers. People can join midway into matches as long as there’s somebody else in queue to join the opposing team
-Random assignment to team color
-Afk (with stricter qualifications for being afk than currently used) players get replaced by somebody in queue, AND they can’t queue for another match for X amount of time. Increase the amount of time for 2nd offense etc. within a set time period.
-Same penalties as above for people who leave match early

No, this isn’t going to guarantee that matches are going to be balanced, but at least it might cut down on those players willfully ruining the experience for others trying to have some fun.

Don’t play hot join or unranked.

Shiyo.3578:

Don’t play hot join or unranked.

That as a solution is flawed, in the sense that there should be somewhere you can practice playing your class before you go ranked.

Unranked is ok for practice I guess, but even there people for some reason expect you to be able to play your class perfectly and call out if you don’t.

Hotjoin is just a hideous mess where you will very rarely get any practice (note how the panel reads “Practice” for hotjoin?) because the matches are 90% of the time total blowouts one way or another.

I wouldn’t be opposed to forcing random teams at the beginning and no team switching. Players joining mid-game would be placed into a queue and when two of them join they’re randomly dropped into both sides, at the same time. If a player leaves the game before it’s finished he gets the dishonor debuff. At the same time the last player to join from an opposing team is put onto the queue until there is another player in the queue to replace him (if there is none right away).

Those measures would already make the game much cleaner and would encourage players to try their best until the very end.

Hotjoin is intentionally supposed to be so bad it shouldn’t exist. I actually don’t know why it’s still in the game. Anything but unranked is basically unplayable.

Shiyo.3578:

Hotjoin is intentionally supposed to be so bad it shouldn’t exist. I actually don’t know why it’s still in the game. Anything but unranked is basically unplayable.

So you’re suggesting it’s ok to queue for 3 minutes and then wait another minute and a half in warmup just to test out a new build?

I do agree hotjoin at its current form is a joke, but my suggestions above could make it much better without removing much of the quick-play aspect.

Shiyo, please stop trolling. The developers didn’t intentionally create hotjoin to be so bad that nobody would play it. That makes no sense. But I do think in their attempts to make it accessible to more players that they left so many options available that they’re essentially exploits.

It’s not trolling, hotjoin has always been REALLY bad so they tried to phase it out completely.

Shiyo.3578:

It’s not trolling, hotjoin has always been REALLY bad so they tried to phase it out completely.

What do you mean “tried to phase it out”? I am unaware of any period where hotjoin was not available. Have I missed something?

If they wanted to take it out they just could take it out. Apparently they don’t want to do it.