Guild Wars 2

I want to direct this question both to the Devs and to the community. Personally I see no benefits in having an environment where new players are left free to join what’s considered the “competitive” part of PvP.

The game completely lack any of structure that can hels new players who want to enter tPvP, there is nothing that teach them all necessary factors that make tPvP.

Hotjoin definetely won’t teach them about : team-play , splits , focus fire…they won’t even learn about positioning and ressing strategies.

Now I have a suggestion for the Devs, an idea based on already existing structures.

Gold-Silver-Bronze SoloQ

How would it work?

Players fresh from hotjoin would be allowed to only join the Bronze SoloQ league, every month ( a sort of monthly season ), the top 50 Bronze players will be promoted to the Silver League and the same procedure would be used to promote players to the Gold league.

At the same time, the last 50 of the gold league would be demoted to the silver league and from here again the last 50 would go back to the bronze league.

The incentive would be an effects based emote, EX. a bronze/silver/gold knight if you reach top 50

TeamArena

It can uses the same model, this time the rewards will be another effect based emote, a gold/silver/bronze lion ; furthermore you could add a special armor skin usable in PvE also , for the winner of the monthly team arena tournament to which only the top 8 teams can participate

What are your feelings about these suggestions?

sPvP/tPvP suffers from having a really small population pool… and you want to make it harder for new players to enter the fold?

GrandmaFunk.3052:

sPvP/tPvP suffers from having a really small population pool… and you want to make it harder for new players to enter the fold?

sPvP/tPvP suffers from having a really small population pool because new players can enter the fold too early.

-New players get matched against experienced players, get roflstomped and they quit, they learn nothing and there is no incentive for them to continue
-Experienced players get paired with new players, they lose to more balanced team, they rage and quit also

-edit-
Actually my proposal would greatly improve quality of life for all the player base, new players by joining the Bronze league would only face equally “un-experienced” players.
As they improve they’ll raise through the ranks to eventually reach top 50 Bronze League, they will then join the Silver league and again be paired with equally skilled players overall

Really like this idea! Championship!

they could put a minimum rank to join , i agree having players rank 1 in the team its very bad. some players not even kno wtheu r in tpvp solo que and think its hot join spvp , so yes i agree a minimum rank to join like rank 15-20 at least !!

I like the idea of leagues because it could possibly make matchmaking better. I think the population may be growing enough for something like this to happen in the next couple of years.

In the meantime, I’d like to see better tutorials and better scoring system in hotjoin. What if people got a ton of bonus points for making certain types of plays—for example:

Rezzing/finishing someone while taking damage
Surviving on a neutral/friendly point
Dealing certain amounts of damage
Interrupting someone who is stomping your teammate

What if those things gave you a ton of points, and winning gave a ton of points, but there was no reward for standing in a circle all together?

Population right now is too small to support multiple leagues.

If leaderboard actually works it would spur and encourage more people to play. Right now it promote not to play. Decay isn’t permanent. It resets the second you play 1 single game. Which is pointless as decay is already pretty slow.

NevirSayDie.6235:

I like the idea of leagues because it could possibly make matchmaking better. I think the population may be growing enough for something like this to happen in the next couple of years.

In the meantime, I’d like to see better tutorials and better scoring system in hotjoin. What if people got a ton of bonus points for making certain types of plays—for example:

Rezzing/finishing someone while taking damage
Surviving on a neutral/friendly point
Dealing certain amounts of damage
Interrupting someone who is stomping your teammate

What if those things gave you a ton of points, and winning gave a ton of points, but there was no reward for standing in a circle all together?

This may well be an alternative solution for the current situation while we wait for a possible league system, something that promote good game-play over zerging

One easy step:

Place the button for the Tournaments (and the NPC) somewhere else.

Just imagine there’s a player new to sPvP. He wants to try it out:

If he opens the PvP menu, the first window popping up, shows some statistics. -Who cares?! He wants to play!
So he clicks on the 2nd slide in the menu (the tournamen menu).
-> Great! A window, alsmost empty, but there’s a button joining the Solo Arena, which you can’t miss! Perfect! This must be PvP, here we go!
(…and another rank 1 player in tournament)

Then look at the Server-Browser. The Buttons for joining are placed in the corners and there is some stuff about filters and a list of some Servers.

And if our newbie manages to get to the mists, there’s a 50% chance, that he goes left to the PvP-Browser and a 50% chance that he goes right.
Be honest, who always reads the NPC texts or talks to the PvP-Instructor?

What I want to say: Make the PvP menu more beginnerfriendly.
…Of course, this wont solve all problems, but it should be easy to implement and wont harm anybody.

Allie Murdock.8152:

There were restrictions at one point, but the system was not working and was fracturing the playerbase. One thing that I focus a lot on as the PvP Community Coordinator is helping to get external tournaments going. These tournaments tend to be where the hardcore/higher tier players will compete.

We’re happy to hear any suggestions you have that could help with this, without alienating a huge percentage of players. For now, I will continue to focus my efforts toward promoting the competitive community through tournaments run in custom arenas!

How can you say that you actually had legitimate restrictions. I was playing at the time you guys offered gems for winning and needed tickets to play but 50% of your winnings had to go to tickets. But I still made a bit off gems. The fact you had to spend gold for PvP, which ofc pvp players didnt have, for gems or buy gems with real cash to play in the tourney was the real problem. Not the restriction itself. Free tournies only offered you one ticket, and at the time it was 5 tickets to play one round. I don’t want to sound mean , but that was by far the worst PvP restriction I have ever seen. I mean come on…….how can you say that having bronze league/silver/gold for PvP would be the problem without really giving it thought.

It makes perfect sense actually so the top players no longer have to worry about being paired with new players and vice versa. The real problem is not having incentive to play/rewards/game modes. If you have all those in the PvP, I can guarantee you that a system like that would flourish. It would allow you to see what the meta was and what builds works at a higher teir of competition as opposed to lower tier. I support the OP 100%, coming from your fellow long time PvP player.

Allie Murdock.8152:

There were restrictions at one point, but the system was not working and was fracturing the playerbase.

What restrictions? Are you talking about the gold/gem restriction of tournament tickets?
If so, those were a ridiculous idea from the get go, asking spvp players to spend cash/play PvE in order to play tPvP.

Brutal Arts.6307:

Allie Murdock.8152:

There were restrictions at one point, but the system was not working and was fracturing the playerbase.

What restrictions? Are you talking about the gold/gem restriction of tournament tickets?
If so, those were a ridiculous idea from the get go, asking spvp players to spend cash/play PvE in order to play tPvP.

Yes sadly she is and I agree with you 100%. I just said that too. Mind boggling that she can just sit there and say the restriction itself was the problem when it CLEARLY was not lol.

With a system like this it is less of a restriction, and more of a incentive for, at least some, players to want to get better. I would want to play more, and more every day to get to Gold, top 25, especially if this finally meant the ladder would mean something behind it. Then team Q would have a backbone incentive behind it.

Why do you think this would Alienate players so much? When (if possible) you could use the same promotion system from League of Legends, so players/teams know when they are in a promo match etc.

I really like the idea about seasons and diamond/gold ecc. league it sounds like a progression system and an incentive to do better.

So c’mon…we have this for www and not for spvp lol.

Btw tickets system was the worst designed pvp system ever.

Arheundel.6451:

sPvP/tPvP suffers from having a really small population pool because new players can enter the fold too early.

I disagree with your suggestion as it would fragment the playerbase, but I totally agree with your assessment of the problem. The recent free trial made this painfully obvious, and it was frustrating for everone – both for the newbies and the teammates who had to carry them.

I think people should simply not be allowed to join tournament until they’re rank 10 or something. This isn’t hard to do, it’s only a 2-3 hours of hotjoin, but it’ll at least teach them the basics of capping points and how much more fast-paced and brutal the fighting is.

I also think the tournament queue system should be better explained too though: people don’t understand that if you force-close the game you’ll be dragged back into the match when you log back in, or that if you leave you don’t get replaced, unlike hotjoin, so you’re screwing your teammates over. I ran into a lot of trial people in the past 2 weeks who spent their entire first match trying to quit!

That idea is great but SPvP population is very small and if you split it more its make ppl more angry because they will wait much longer for opponents. I dont see any option how to get more players without radical changes and some massive medial propagation. Lets face it there is very few PvP ppl compare to PvE in any mmo.
One thing what can work is connect WvW and SPvP in some sort of score where server teams will fight in SPvP arenas and get WvW point while they queue into WvW.