Guild Wars 2

I would love to see other Match stats besides setups:
- How many caps, decaps and lost caps each team had?
- How many deaths per player and/or team?
- How many rallies per player and/or team?
- Total difference in points of the 2-3 maps.
- etc.

I would do it, but I work all day and I didn’t even had the time to watch more than the first match until now.
I think it would help distinguish the teams performance in a way where everyone learn more about their playstyles, the strong and weak points of each team, and what to expect from each matchup.

Josh Davis.6015:

Aztex.4895:

Josh Davis.6015:

Brix.8461:

We have listened to your feedback and been looking at how we could make changes to the format but still follow our schedule and time available.

We have decided to make the Open Qualifiers on Saturday double elimination. On Saturday play will continue up until top 8. Top 8 will then be seeded into a single elimination bracket that will be played on Monday, the 4 winning teams will have secured themselves a spot in the ESL Guild Wars 2 Pro League. The matches on Monday will also be broadcasted live from our UK studios on http://twitch.tv/guildwars2.

Please keep in mind that this will make the tournament on Saturday run longer than first expected, we’ll do our best to keep delays a minimum and also hope that teams will do their part to have everything run smoothly.

Good luck to all participants

Many thanks to ESL for committing to running a double-elim 32 team bracket. That’s quite the undertaking!

Good luck, all!

Agreed. I’m happy with these changes but I am still disappointed about matches scheduled on Mondays at 18h00 CEST…. Why?!

Good question! There were a number of factors that ultimately contributed to our decision to run Pro League on Mondays:

• All Pro League matches will be broadcast in person from ESL’s Studios – meaning no more seeing Jebro’s dirty laundry in the background of his webcam. This brings two big dependencies:
  • We need a day when Jebro, Heurix, and Storm are all available to cast. These guys are jumping on a plane each week to shoutcast for us and trying to work with their schedule is important when you consider they all have other jobs or school.
  • ESL has a fairly booked schedule when it comes to studio availability considering they’re broadcasting some sort of every single day.
• Another big reason for Mondays is Twitch viewership. After looking at the schedule and viewership trends/data with ESL, we believe we can carve a place out for ourselves on Mondays and make sure we give it an appropriate amount of promotion from both us and our partners. We are exploring the idea of rebroadcasting Pro League on the weekend somewhere so anyone who missed the live cast can catch it. Thoughts?

Unfortunately, there isn’t a single day we could pick that would work for everyone, but we’re certainly trying out best to accommodate as many people as possible. This is why we announced the days that Pro League would take place well in advance of sign-ups – just to make sure people know what they’re getting into.

Pro League is obviously a big undertaking for us at ArenaNet, and we’ll undoubtedly iterate on the experience over the next few months and long into the future. I’m stoked.

Thank you Josh for the great answer. I can now clearly see the difficulties you have for this event.
Considering all the investment in this (besides team rewards there’s also all the logistics involved) I can only guess you hope to have a bigger return and growth for a better future where GW2 can be a choice to be seen on weekends.

My concerns:
1- Even though Twitch is the mother of all gaming stream, are you considering other alternatives? There are other platforms growing like Hitbox, Dailymotions Games, Youtube Gaming, Azubu…
Most of our viewers are gw2 players and fans. With the current number of viewers we have on Twitch, I think the difference wouldn’t be that big if the tournament would run in another platform considering the ammount of viewers growth you can get on weekends. It could even bring you more benefits in a long term.

2- What are the alternatives to ESL studios? Having people to stream in person at ESL studios is the best choice for multiple reasons I believe, but it also brings a lot of expenses and limits your freedom to make the best choices for everyone. I hope you are already searching for easier and less expensive alternatives for streams in future events, without decreasing the quality of the tournament streams.

3- Rebroadcasting is a great idea, but there needs to be some changes if you want to bring more viewers and players to the streams and to the game. As I said for another thread today, the viewers and spectators need to be educated and one of the ways to do it is with replays in slowmotion. Make sure the rebroadcasts have much more content like this, because during the matches is almost impossible for the streamers to do it.

Making the skills easier to understand what is going on is not enough. The way this game was built is literally 10 times worst than seeing games like LoL and Dota 2, which also have times where spectators can’t fully understand what is going on.
The only way to make this possible is by educating the viewers about what is going on, and the only way to do it is slowing it down somehow, showing the relevant moments and decisions of a game, while making each match look like “an awesome moment” for the game itself.
3 ways to make this game become more spectator friendly:

1- A lot of replays in slow motion while the match is on, SHOWING (not saying) the best moves and decisions (replaying them in the time-out between maps and after the match is over with an overview).

2- Give a FULL meaning to each match or leage-stage —--> 1 day = 1 match, because each match has like 45 mins / 1 hour and you can boost each match potential, by giving meaning to each match and concentrating viewer numbers in a shorter stream (there’s a reason why most TV channels have most of their shows have a 45 minutes – 1 hour limit, because viewers won’t be watching that for much longer when there might be other interesting things to see they don’t wanna miss).
This is particularly good for league/tournament stages, because you can have 2 or 3 streams playing different teams and viewers will look for the matches they like the most (best way to see the potential of each team for possible future sponsors and real investments)

3- Timing of the tournament streams should be on weekends.

Josh Davis.6015:

Brix.8461:

We have listened to your feedback and been looking at how we could make changes to the format but still follow our schedule and time available.

We have decided to make the Open Qualifiers on Saturday double elimination. On Saturday play will continue up until top 8. Top 8 will then be seeded into a single elimination bracket that will be played on Monday, the 4 winning teams will have secured themselves a spot in the ESL Guild Wars 2 Pro League. The matches on Monday will also be broadcasted live from our UK studios on http://twitch.tv/guildwars2.

Please keep in mind that this will make the tournament on Saturday run longer than first expected, we’ll do our best to keep delays a minimum and also hope that teams will do their part to have everything run smoothly.

Good luck to all participants

Many thanks to ESL for committing to running a double-elim 32 team bracket. That’s quite the undertaking!

Good luck, all!

Agreed. I’m happy with these changes but I am still disappointed about matches scheduled on Mondays at 18h00 CEST…. Why?!

masskillerxploit.2165:

T raw.4658:

Mondays are fail on so many levels. People with real lives can’t commit to the times they are going with.

If you are serious you need to hold these on the weekends. It’s your job and working an extra Saturday or two to get PvP leagues up and running is expected.

Ok. Let me explain on my kittent phone, why it’s during the week. THE PRO LEAGUE IS MEANT FOR VERY DEDICATED TEAMS. YES, gw2 does have a small competitive scene especially in the highest level, however each of those teams can commit to any day the pro league matches could be on, so making it Monday or any other doesn’t matter too much. If you cannot dedicate time to the pro league then Good luck even qualifying… putting the matches on monday is smart, it weeds out all the casuals.

masskillerxploit.2165:

Guild Wars 2 is finally going to be able to separate it’s Elites from Casuals.

Ok, let me explain to you the benefits of having these competitions on weekends, from someone who has experience in coaching sports teams, managing competitive events (mainly in sports) and as marketeer.

Competitive scene
Weekends = More players* (even if a lot of causals) = Bigger Playerbase = More teams signing-up = More pro teams and pro players in a mid/long term = More Sponsors = More Money = Bigger prizes = Back to the More Players stage and all over again (vicious cycle)

Media scene
Weekends = More audience (streams, Youtube, etc.) = Bigger fanbase = More success in the competitive scene (contributes to the Competitive scene cycle with more players) = More sponsors = More money = Bigger Prizes = More Competitions/Streams = Back to the More Audience stage and all over again (vicious cycle)

Arenanet
Weekends = players less worried about lack of money (has a full job after all) = More time to play the game in a competitive scene = more time and money to invest in the game = More interest from the consumer to buy any expasion and gem items Anet throws at them.

PS: I find it funny when people say they can just leave the job 2 or 3 hours earlier every week, when that’s a choice most of us don’t have.

Booms.3952:

1 agreed
I understand they wanted single elim because they expected 100 teams to sign up, but the fact is there’s going to be less than 16 and a double elim would not be that hard for an ALL DAY event.

“they wanted single elim because they expected 100+ teams to sign up” (…) “ALL DAY event” …. These are the key mistakes in their planning, along with post-qualifiers on mondays.

First of all, you have a single elimination qualifier, in a game that is trying to grow in the PVP scene.
If you also try doing many games in one day because is faster and easier, you will only get less teams to sign-up, since very few gw2 players have enough time to stay in front of the computer for so long in one day.
And with post-qualifiers running on Mondays at 18h00 CEST in Europe, is like saying “even if players go through qualifiers, they will have to leave their job/school earlier on Mondays every week” in countries with GMT and GMT+1 time (UK, Portugal, Spain, France, etc.).

Of course they will have much less teams than expected.
This needs to happen on weekends, in different days and with double elimination qualifiers. But now it’s too late to change it, unless they give some kind of motivation for teams to sign uup and postpone the tournament to January (which would be the best solution in my personal opinion).

The questions are simple:

1. As a player – Would you PAY* to play in the next tournament? Why?

2. As audience – Would you PAY* to see the tournament? Why?

3. As a sponsor – Would you PAY* to be a partner of the tournament? Why?

*With real money, even if it’s just 1 €/$ per person.

Such an important competition and they make one of the biggest mistakes when creating tournaments…
I would love to know the reason why the most important matches of the tournament will be running on Mondays at 18h00 CEST!
MOST PEOPLE WORK/STUDY in week days. Explain to me how can they even think about getting more stream viewers/subs, GW2 fans and competitive players/teams if they make the most important matches ON MONDAYS?!

runeblade.7514:

There is no way to ban anything.

In MOBA, if you ban a hero, you ban a hero. There are 50 other heroes to choose from.

If you ban a trait line/amulet, that is like banning 50 heroes out of the 50 heroes.

I agree… but if you ban something that has multiple alternatives without damage to your build…. why not?
Read my post above. If you still don’t agree with me, than I would say you just “want that build because it’s the best at what it does” and there won’t ever be 2nd choices, which means there will always be few options for each role.
But that’s just my opinion.

I would accept a minimum level of restrictions made to the other team if the change actually contributes to a more balanced and surprising matchup.

To do this, a team could only “Ban” ONE of the following:

- 1 Sigil —-—> there are always more than 1 choice in every build and it can tone down a build just a little bit but not enough to make it less viable.

- 1 Trait (btw, a full traitline is too much!) —-—> the same as above.

- 1 Rune —-—> Yes, I agree with those who are going to say it makes a huge impact on builds…. but we all know runes are one of the main balance issues in the game and there are also good alternatives for the same build without changing its role/playstyle… unlike amulets.

Manimarco Devil.1790:

Storm and Heurix are pretty good imo.

Belial.9350:

Manimarco Devil.1790:

For good or bad, Gw2 is too fast paced to really say all of the plays and all the interactions occurring. The viewer must have understanding on how mechanics work beforehand in order to enjoy the game play. If you don’t know the skills being used it is really easy for the uneducated viewer to just see skills being spammed.

Same can be said for a lot of games though…

To an extent but what game do you have in mind when you say that? Games like league of legends only have fights every few minutes and have a handful of skills they need to talk about. Even then they fail to say every ability used in a team fight so a game that has 10 skills per person and those skills have interactions with runes, sigils, and traits is going to be a lot harder to play by play cast.

In general the casters do call out the major skills used like earthshaker, portal, lich, rampage etc. so I’m not sure how much further they can go to address the whole “I don’t know what is happening” crowd.

There are actually a lot of ways to do it. Here’s what needs to be done:
1. The game doesn’t have a spectator mode like other esports (LoL for example) where you can replay the game and slow it down or even pause it to show the audience the great plays and mistakes from different perspectives. That’s why Helseth’s VOD of the last match had so many viewers and was so important.

2. Casters also need to prioritize what is simple and easy to understand by the audience.
2.1- Make videos or simple images of each class showing how they essentially work, because they are much easier to understand than talking about it.
I’ve seen Mortal Kombat ESL finals yesterday and they weren’t too specific about each player. They were simple, fast, with few words and the images said all we needed to know. His name and country, position in other tournies, favourite character and team/clan they belong to. No talking about all the different combos they can do nor other info that is too specifice for audience who knows nothing about the game (just hearing that a player used all the 17 combos in one character and only failed 2 was enough for me to get excited about it).

2.2- Instead of builds break down in the stream of the tournament itself, take a video or screenshots from all the builds before the match starts and use them later for a stream where you can talk about the builds, plays, decisions, etc. with all the time you need, just like Helseth did.
If you want to explain what each player can do, look at point nr 2.1 above – simple, fast and easy to understand by everyone.

Hachiman.2470:

I think many are just used to the old numbering system. To me it seems easier to remember builds. Before I had to reference back to my build sheet because there were many builds where you could use two adept or major traits. Once you got into the Master/Grand Master trait line I could see where some people would get overwhelmed because they had 10-30 possible trait options.

Now when I look at a build it seems much simpler. Instead of 00464 or 60044 AND having to remember what I-XIII trait goes in each tier the builds are:

(assigned from top down, 1-3)
2,1,2
2,2,2
1,3,3

+1.
This is what I did yesterday.

Giving an example for Guardian (keep in mind I’m just making stuff here, these aren’t real builds).
Before you had something like:

• “00266: III, II-VIII-XII, IV-VI-XI”

Now we have something like this:

• “Radiance 2-1-3, Valor 3-1-2, Virtues 1-1-1”.

And you want to do something like this:

• “Radiance II-IV-IX Valor III-IV-VIII, Virtues I-IV-VII”.

The former was too confusing and it’s not so easy to remember (that’s why you wrote them). What you want will lead to the same problems.
With the current system it’s much easier to understand, to communicate and to remember.
I think the check box panel is a very usefull idea though.

The medi guard build is one of the most balanced in meta builds, you can change it a bit to be more efficient against certain builds but then you get weaker against other builds.
So many people can’t use it because is too glass cannon, but you can do some modifications and get other classes by surprise.

I can use 2p on zeal so I can kill players faster after burning them, but that means I lost my only stability on courage that can be really weak against thiefs and other classes who use their CC well.
If I want to become more offensive, i can have my meditations traited to give fury all the time, but I get even more fragile. I can take this off by making chill appear on hammer crits, becoming more defensive and giving me enough time to recover with LOS.
As said above, using GS intead of Hammer brings another playstyle, but against good players the ammount of burst and CC gets reduced because it’s easier to counter.

One thing I find easy to conter in thief and mesmer is stealth. I’ve practiced so much against it that I can subconciously predict when the stealth players are going to attack me and then I use CC or dmg burst to make them regret their decisions. If you think beeing in stealth is enough to counter medi guard youre dreaming. You need to know when to attack them and force them to use their skills before going for the kill. As someone said before, medi guards are easy prey on long fights.

I have only played necro sometimes and I find it has some potential but lacks something too. My question for all the necros here is what would be the best necro changes in your opinion? what could be a substitution to death shroud? how could you make necro be unique while beeing balanced with other classes and without beeing too dependent on minions AI and/or conditions?

DeWolfe.2174:

Aztex.4895:

become more faithful to this game mode

Now you know exactly why such design decisions are made. To encourage players to try and play all the game modes.

Yes, but it’s something they don’t get ingame and by playing PVP whenever they want, so it has short-term results unfortunatelly. They won’t last for long. Which means, those new players will do this tournament, maybe some of them might even try 1 other tournament, and that’s it. The PVP community goes back to the same issue again in the near future.

Random Weird Guy.3528:

Have you considered the fact that it’s close to impossible for a pure pvper to get a legendary from normal pvp and ToL gives an opportunity for dedicated pvpers to get those?

Did I said anything against legendaries? Everyone wants one, wether it’s from PVE, WvW or PVP, so it’s a good reward for a tournament like this.

Do you know the main reason why 64 teams have been filled in an instant? It’s because they can get Mini pets with 1 win and considering the probability of ending the first match with a forfeit from the enemy team, the chance to get a mini pet is huge.
PVP Players are all about reputation! that’s why most PvP players don’t like mini pets that much, because you can’t show them during a match and it doesn’t really “show” how good that player is (like a pvp unique skin or a glue/gree/yellow/orange/purple title would).
PVE players are all about achievements, collections and cuteness. That’s what mini pets are all about too (like Pokemon lol).
Also, most PVE and WvW focused players know very well they won’t be able to win against the strongest PVP teams for the best rewards. They aren’t on this tournament for the Legendary (even though some might dream about it, getting even more frustrated about PVP after the huge disappointement in the near future).

Now, imagine if mini pets were actually in the PVP ingame and players could get them in a casual way. The ammount of players would grow and the PVP community would be bigger too.
And imagine if there are unique titles and skins that show how good players are at PVP. The motivation for all those players to keep getting better and focus more in PVP has just increased and made them become more faithfull to this game mode, making the community grow even more.

Quoting myself from another thread:

Giving something PVE players want is a good way to make them try PVP, but that kind of reward is only acceptable for casual and ingame playing and it should be something that gives progression. That’s why instead of the current leaderboards they should be creating a league with divisions, where only winning maches in the lowest division could give you mini pets. And Lavish lama only if they are promoted. Take mystic forge off the equation (there isnt one in PvP, so why do we have to use it?)
Anet made a good decision with offgame and serious Tournaments, but chose a bad reward for the target players playing them.

The title system needs to be remade NOW! It’s so useless right now that gives them no alternative to minis when looking for a reward that gives progression. Watch one of wooden potatoes videos about top 10 things he wants for feature pach, where he talks about titles and their potential.
We also need Unique skins and outfits for PVP. They have the same potential.

PVE players want mini pets as they are things who can be farmed in multpile ways, with multiple substitutes and are also visible in PVE and WvW. PVP players want PVP-only rewards that can be won by doing more competitive PVP and require more skill and knowledge about PVP.
I hope ArenaNet makes the right decisions in the future with the data gathered from this ToL3.

There are a lot of PVE items we don’t care about in PVP, but that might also be a part of their marketing towards players who play PVP to be interested in WvW and PVE, which I find wierd since the PVP community can’t “lose” more players to PVE and WvW. They should make the PVE rewards give PVP-only items too…. if there were any. -.-"

I don’t know why they removed the currency we had before, but my guess is the system we have right now shows players the rewards they want and how much work is left to get them, and with the previous currency they only saw numbers and didn’t know how much work was needed to get the rewards they wanted, making it seem like a more difficult task.
Unfortunatelly many chests give 1 good item and 3 bad/useless ones for PVPers, and that’s the problem they should fix since PVE doesn’t neeed more players, PVP does.

No!
You either remove class dailies for a more creative way or leave it this way and punish even more those who leave games. If you make it easier all the “don’t care, just for daily” players from pve and wvw would do it since it would be too easy and the experience from all the players who care about pvp would be even more ruined than now.

Followedbyrocks.8751:

Kousetsu.1627:

Ugh.. all these lamas suck… what an underwhelming and unexciting pvp reward :/

Like, even a title would sound more exciting to me or maybe some proper rewards like weapons skins

This is the dumb thing. There are a lot of PvE players who want these llamas and can’t get them because they’re rewards for PvP where the players don’t even want them. gg anet

Giving something PVE players want is a good way to make them try PVP, but that kind of reward is only acceptable for casual and ingame playing and it should be something that gives progression. That’s why instead of the current leaderboards they should be creating a league with divisions, where only winning maches in the lowest division could give you mini pets. And Lavish lama only if they are promoted. Take mystic forge off the equation (there isnt one in PvP, so why do we have to use it?)
Anet made a good decision with offgame and serious Tournaments, but chose a bad reward for the target players playing them.

The title system needs to be remade NOW! It’s so useless right now that gives them no alternative to minis when looking for a reward that gives progression. Watch one of wooden potatoes videos about top 10 things he wants for feature pach, where he talks about titles and their potential.
We also need Unique skins and outfits for PVP. They have the same potential.

I believe there’s nothing wrong about targeting players who haven’t tried the game mode yet. What they are doing wrong is ignoring the other targets, in particular those already faithfull to the game mode and looking for something to keep them motivated in playing the game, and also ignoring the true reason why ToLs reward had so much impact and now it does not work anymore.

I will give the example of macdonalds in my country below, which had 2 promotion campaigns about collecting things, their failures and their conclusions.

What A-net is trying to do is giving the same reward over and over again, after they already lost the interest of a big ammount of players who actually participated in ToL. They have a lot of reward choices for players (chests), but it’s not harder to obtain them and they aren’t exclusive to PVP. They have other things they could use for good rewards, but they kept doing what worked the first time. And they also keep their Leaderboards going for too long (3 months? really?).
All of this for one target (which isn’t very efficient since they will lose interest fast) in the cost of their other targets. If the expansion and Stronghold weren’t announced, this mode would have a lot less players than it has right now.

SobeSoul.6910:

If you need motivation to get better then you’re not competitive to begin with.

Ideal thoughts like this are not what reality shows. The most competitive persons in all areas of expertise, including sports, have the “highest rewards”. If football (soccer in NA terms) didn’t have the possibility for players to live from it (and to get rich), it wouldn’t be the biggest sport in the world. Even in gw2, if ESL tournies and WTS didn’t give higher rewards than the normal PvP ingame, than there would be no teams to play and there would be no esports for this game.
Times have changed a lot and nowadays the belief of some people doesn’t mean it works in reality. And if that reality “needs” a bigger and bigger ammount of people to become successfull, than it also means it needs to motivate players to try it ans become competitiva for a reason. And the main reason for something to become massive is by giving the right rewards for the rights efforts.

“Anet’s way of motivating players after so much work is giving a special mini pet”
And with these words he left the esports convention with a trail of competitive players from other games laughing on the ground.

A-net, do you need suggestions for good rewards? If your goal is to motivate players to keep playing gw2 and have a bigger pvp community (which it should) this is not working as intended.

They still spend too much time on features and mechanics that most players I know don’t vive a **** about.
I think they should listen to one of the last wooden potatoes videos, where this feature is one of the top 10 things he’s waiting for feature pack 3, which probably is BEFORE the expansion. Besides, this is one of the top wanted things even when the game was still in devellopment.

Nova.7261:

No, it may be so for competitive e-sports but gw2 doesn’t have the player base to start splitting up players into tiers. Also, players get better by losing to strong opponents. A great player will mimic/ counter their opponent till they can surpass them and in turn their opponent has to do it to them. By making the best play against the best, away from the worst, new players and those that need experience will be at a loss to acquire it.

First of all, there are at least a 1000 players in each region in the current leaderboards who clearly look focused in becoming better in sPVP. That’s not small at all.
And it’s true they need to fight against stronger oponnents, but if the skill gap is too big it will achieve the contrary. This is basic knowledge to sports formation and coaching. That’s why divisions are good. They keep a healthy competition between teams with a close skill gap but still big enough to make them get better and have the chance to win against stronger oponents. By doing so, they go to the next league and face even more stronger oponnents, but are extremelly motivated even if they lose too much in the beguinning.

There’s a big difference between the system I talked earlier and a dungeon.
Dungeons give rewards with replayability, they can be easily done by any player and have no competition between players.
The system I talked ties both motivation and reward with skills and players competing for a place in a better league. It’s a system used in many other esports.

This is the only way of a game trully becoming an esport, because there’s no other way to attract a massive ammount of players into a competitive PVP without showing the right rewards for players who are giving their best to become a better player in a PVP environment. Of course, this only works if they can also get demoted when they stop playing PVP or when there’s the chance to lose their place to more skilled players.
Basically, it goes like this:

• lvl 1 reward for making PVP (daily) / 4th league -> Bring players to try PVP
• lvl 2 reward for making into the 3rd League -> Motivate players to spend more time in PVP and get their interest.
• lvl 3 reward for making into the 2nd League -> Motivate players to get better and to consolidate their interest in PVP.
• lvl 4 reward for making into the 1st League -> Motivate players to become a “good” player and turning their main focus into becoming one of the “best” in PVP; usually already member of a team or looking for one.
• lvl 5 reward for making into the S League -> Keep players motivated in staying the best and reminding them that lower leagues also have lower rewards, lower skill players, less organized teams, etc.

This is a necessary thing!!!!
Present consumer behaviour indicates that most of us only do things for the right rewards, because without them we don’t even feel motivation to keep doing it for long. That’s why ESL gives money to the teams that have good results in their tournies and also why WTS has the prizes it has.

I sort of agree with you. For example, most sports in most clubs can only achieve to get enough professional teams/players if they feed the interest and motivation of kids/teens enough to stay and to even search for a future in playing it.

But I also agree with keeping the “not-interested-in-getting-better” pvp players outside of the leaderboards.

The main problem you see here is the PVP system itself.
If we had different “leagues”, players were scattered by their skills.
If the next league having a greater reward that you couldn’t have before, the players would get motivated and try to be better while leaving the “not-interested-in-getting-better” players in the lowest league(s).
If we had “Great PVP-only Rewards”, other players might find a motivation in learning more about sPVP and the community will grow considerably, helping the game growing for esports too.

But there’s nothing like that and that is why most players don’t stay for long in GW2, the pvp community doesn’t grow and the competitive scene of gw2 is so fragile and small.
The current leaderboard is clearly a mechanic for small-term results: motivating players to play the most games they can each day. But it hurts much more the PVP side of gw2 in a mid/long-term.
IMO even if the leaderboard was balanced, it would had too small of an impact to keep players motivated and to grow the community.

As I said on another thread, I agree with making considerable changes in colours and other stuff if we want gw2 to be a successfull esport.

But I also believe that it’s close to impossible to have a “real” (like LoL, Dota 2, CS and SC) esport from this game, simply because there are too many things to learn about it. It’s too complex and will scare spectators when they want simple things to understand.
I mean, look at it, in one match spectators will try to see and understand:
- minimum of 100 skills
- how all those skills work
- all the best individual combos of all those skills
- 10 trait builds
- all the major and minor traits effectiveness on each of those builds
- all the best group combos and how they work (basic knowledge of all their skills and traits combined required)
- Each team strategy (most of the time you can see many different strategies/tactics in only 1 match)
- each player movement+action = if it’s a good or bad choice?
- Who is each team?
- who is each player and what can he do?
- the map they are in and what are its objectives.
- many other stuff.

This is one reason why I think Stronghold is also not the “salvation” of gw2 for esports. It’s a better concept for spectators because it’s much more simple to understand player rotations and decisions, but it still has too much going on.

That’s one of the things that this game needs in order to help less skilled/new players and teams getting stronger and to create new individual and group objectives.

First of all, we need to know everything about everyone in both teams, because right now we only know individual stats.
We also need the below stats:

• How many deaths, kills and assists everyone had.
• How much time untill respawn
• How much time each player stayed on a point while capped, decapped and capped by enemy team (this stat shows the influence of bunkers in a game)
• How many caps, decaps and lost caps each player witnessed (standing on it or at least 1200 range of the point) (this stat shows the effectiveness of the team)
• How much damage, outgoing Heals and CC’s each player did. (this stat shows the effectiveness of each player)

For Match Individual Scores, I would change it in one of 2 ways:
1-Remove them and show the complete numbers of the stats I said above.

2-Balance the numbers, making the stats of all players visible:

• Kill=5p; Assist=2p; Death=-5p
• Time on owned point=1p for each 2 secs (does not count when decapped or when outside of the point)
• Cap=10p; Decap=5p
• Foefire Boss Kill/Assist=30p
• Lord Kill/Assist=150p

Good Idea. Now, I hope this is a success, so we can have one like this in Europe!

I agree with everything said here.
The problem I see is that spectator mode in Arenas is made to GW2 players who are there trying to learn more about the ones who are playing, focusing most of the time in 1 or 2 players because of their skills and/or classes. There’s no “spectator mode” build for esports competitive scene and this game needs one.
- We need Replays: showing the “best” moves, skills, combos and decisions and it would help knowing what are the “plays” of the game that need to be focused on.
- We need MORE Team Colors: making it with 4 or 5 colors (only blue and red is not enough), to distinguish teams and even making fans of each team identify themselves with the team colors.
- Chosing Characters: The thing with LoL is that each team has to carefully chose their champions while restricting the other teams on how they play. This not only gives spectators some more “unexpected things” to look for (which is what makes any sport and esport competitions be succcessfull in media) it also encourages teams and players to be more creative with their decisions and team setups.
- Better Camera: I agree with you on the minimap and I also agree with Nathaniel (post above). I made my girlfriend (not a gamer, except for Sims) learn how this game works by watching just the minimap alone, because she didn’t understand anything that was going on before and hated it. I also know the only time spectators from other games understand what’s happening is when they show the map right at the beguinning of a match. So, like Nathaniel said, we need a view of the entire teams playing from above, with better colors and saturation it would be easy to understand what’s happening everywhere, AND the close-ups could be made when the teams/action are all in one place.

EDIT: With a camera from above, replays would show the best individual skills and moments, making players understand what is really happening and what was a good or a bad decision, what a skill can/cannot do, etc.

With all this talk about Launch and Knockback, I kinda wonder…. Why can’t we Launch/knockback Turrets? That would solve the problem of Turrets with skills. That way, Turreteers would have to spend time putting their siege in good places (at least minimum skill required here) and still be completelly useless if the enemies attack turrets first, launching them away from the point and making engies require more skill to survive.

Hello Anet.
Since HoT was announced, me and my friends are waiting for more information about the Guilds.
After the CDI about Guilds, 6 months ago, everyone is eagerly waiting to know more about Guild halls, Guilds Raids and, more importantly in my personal view, all the changes that the guild system might have in logistics and QQL like the 10 changes listed here.

So, to the questions:
1.Are there any news you have to give us?
1.1. If yes, how long do we have to wait for their announcement?

2. Will the GvG bring something even more interesting to the Guilds system (like changes in UI or Alliances)?

Thanks for everything! Playing the game since betas and can’t seem to play anything else, so keep up the good job!

Remove or nerf the traits “Metal Plating” and “Autotoll Installation” and I think it would be much more balanced. I would remove Metal Plating and would change Autotoll with +2 secs interval.

Forsaker.9213:

Kolly.9872:

at the moment even with a full anti condition build you cannot stand against a condition spamming build.
My suggestion:
- remove dot conditions from every autoattack or at least give it an internal cd
- remove torment from the game (we already had burning and bleeding, no reason for adding another strong dot in the game)
- reduce condition stacks to 10 in pvp or totally remove stacks, make conditions stronger but reduce their application over time, so there would be a reason to bring a condition cleanse
- Conditions should help the physical dmg or make it easier to deal it, should not be used as the main source of dmg. (in this way we won’t see anymore full conditions spamming teams)

Wont happen , devs would have to completly rework some classes , runes , sigils, traits , utilitys….

Unfortunatelly I have the opinion that this game’s worst problem is the ammount of boons and conditions in the game and how they are spread amongst all classes.
Don’t take it wrong, I think the combat of this game is the best there is in MMORPGs, but the bad side of it are conditions and boons because there’s no control over who does what and the ammount of shared information is so big that is the main reason why it’s so hard to master this game, why it’s so hard to understand it as a spectator of the game who never played it, and why there was so much lag in the game in the past (and I think they still haven’t fixed… in fact, they made it worse with adding even more conditions).
But I guess that’s just a dream. They will never do it because that’s changing the game itself.

Kolly.9872:

I think it could work just by “banning” 1 trait or 1 weapon or 1 utility for every class.
for exemple:
-For Warrior: a team must choose if banning longbow, cleansing ire or berserker stance
-For Thief: sword, sleight of hand or shadow refuge
and so on..

Thanks.

But I think banning 1 thing for every class might be too much indeed.If you ban only 1 thing it already might change a lot in a teams build, but it also brings a lot of new things to the game. Imagine that you just ban a greatsword, it might already influence 5 skills in 1 or more players of the opposing team, which is HUGE.
That’s why Daishi talked about banning only runes or amulets, because those don’t inflict too much of an impact in the gameplay of a build but it’s big enough to make it weaker.

VOLTCIEAGE.3029:

we just need balance patches to keep everything balanced to something like this

Do you really believe Anet will be able to balance all the classes without having metabuilds?!

I don’t… you know why? because any player base in any game will always be faster in finding out those metabuilds then the game devs will ever be able in balancing the game. It can work for many games with few variables to tweak at some point, but in games like MOBA’s, MMORPGs and such where there are buffs, debuffs, CCs, etc., every time something is tweaked by the devs for one thing it will influence many other things.
Since this game (and most MMORPGs) has too many variables across all classes, Anet spends months trying to balance the game and the GW2 player base spends just a few days (2 weeks tops) to find the best metabuilds after all the work Anet had.
And then this type of games never grow in competitive play comparing to other genres because everyone feels like it’s always the same thing for months… untill a new patch comes in and the cycle restarts again.

A balanced game is impossible in these type of games because the players always find ways to disbalance the game…. unless the player base itself learns how to counter their own findings. Which is what happens in MOBAs. They gave their player base all the tools to break the game AND to counter their own findings themselves.

But yes, you’re right… in 15 posts only 1 was positive to this idea. Let’s hope Anet is able to balance the game or, at least, to find a way to make the game balance itself.

Anton.1769:

1. “Guyz they 2 thieves and 1 mesmer, go ban berserk amulet” = 5×2 because all others suks at this profs.

Well, that’s the interesting part of competitive play. If the other team has good players they will know how to play with those professions without berserk amulet right?! If they don’t, then they need to train more or find other solutions.

Anton.1769:

2. As result “giving a new option for players to control the balance of the game” LOL WAT? Players will abuse this and create 10 times more disbalance then now. Just look at 1.

Abuse this? how since every team can use it in the same way?!
Creating more disbalance? In my opinion it’s creating more opportunities to balance the game by searching for the enemy teams weakness in their strategy, something very usefull in competitive play. It also helps the players to improve themselves and search for different options while using the same professions.

Anton.1769:

3. 1 min before fight + at least 30 sec to bans + 2-3 min to let people change builds. Maybe start?

Since we’re talking about ranked/tournie games, I don’t think that spending 5 mins creating and improving a team is bad. These difficulties help each player and each team to improve with each match they fight.
If there’s a good UI for this to work fast and smoothly, 5 mins is perfect. but that’s my own opinion though.

GOSU.9574:

Thank you for not taking appropriate criticisms and instead embracing anyone that at least half agress with you.

You communicate just how opinionated you are when you can’t accept criticism.

It reflects just how dead your suggestion is received.

Saying “no, because I don’t like it” to a suggestion is not a criticism, no matter how many words or different ways you use to say that. It doesn’t help to reach any conclusion about the suggestion since it just clearly says “No.”

And, about your previous post before this one, A-net can still work on the balance of the game, but giving a new option for players to control the balance of the game is one step closer to help Anet understand what exactly needs to be worked on instead of giving them multiple threads and posts talking about how OP or not one Build is, making them confused about what exactly in that build is wrong.
Imagine this: once a said rune/amulet is banned all the time in games, they know exactly that thing needs to be worked on with facts.

@Daishi, ty for beeing the only person who picks up this idea for what it really is, a possible sollution that needs to be improved and perfected for the game that is GW2.

See people, when you pick up a suggestion just do it like him: see the possibilities of that suggestion in multiple ways untill you see if it really works or not instead of saying it wouldn’t work without never testing it before.

About switching classes: I don’t agree with it also. Whether or not they take it out, this suggestion is a possible sollution for both situations because not every player knows how to play all classes, in fact most players only know to play 1 or 2 classes good enough and this sollution already helps to counter that a little bit.

About testing it on my own: most players love to have all the good and easiest options in their favor if that means winning something. Unless the game makes everyone follow the same rules, changing the rules inside an Arena has no real progress because outside of it things haven’t changed and players know that. If the game changes that to everyone things might work for better or for worst because everyone follows the same rules, that’s why you see the 4vs5 problems in hotjoins or the switching classes problems all the time, it’s a good and easy decision to lvl up in ranks and the game allows those rules.

btw, just because this isn’t a MOBA it doesn’t means it can’t take something from MOBA games. The same goes for any other game that contributed to how GW2 was made, or you wouldn’t had hot-joins, you wouldn’t had guns, you wouldn’t had dodge and Jumping Puzzles and many more.
Open your minds a bit.

And one last thing out of context because you seem to clearly want to know about me: I don’t like MOBAs very much and the only one I liked to play more than usual was Smite. But I know what to look for in competitive gaming and what works in them. I like MMORPGs and played them for much more than a decade. And because of that I will always look for ways to improve GW2 which is the game with the best potential and gameplay untill now. Now that I’ve talked about myself enough, lets focus on the idea and the many possible ways of doing it to see if it works. thanks.

@Tanztante, lol… this is a suggestion to improve the competitive side of the game and the problems many players see in this game. I’m not whining about anything. Learn to know the difference.
Besides, I play and always played Guardian so I know that I could very well be in the worst position ever with just one restriction in one my builds. And I know very well that’s necessary because in this game if we want it to become more competitive in all sides (soloq, teamq and even tournies) we have to start making players know the easiest ways don’t always work. You know that works in MOBAs very well (unless you would find it fun to see the same champs and teambuilds in all matches with nothing new to show) and players still talk about some of the champs beeing OP. In this game there’s no restriction at all to give the enemy team so most players will never learn to get better if they find the game broken (according to many complaints about this game, so this already is a reality.)

I don’t believe that Benjamin. This idea can be worked in a way that you can’t restrict all 5 players and their builds, but limiting the stronger meta-builds is very important for players to learn their characters more than just those same builds. Besides that, in competitive play you will see the best teams knowing other teams and playing according to those.
And I don’t believe that players will be satisfied with beeing good and equal to everyone else. They will always look for the best builds, even if they’re weaker, or even create new ones that no one expects to.

This suggestion was probably mentioned before but couldn’t find it in search. So I’m sorry if it’s the same idea all over again.
Here goes in detail:
Many players are always talking about Meta builds that ruin their game. Builds that are so OP that it ruins their soloq / teamq ranks because the only way to be in the top100 is by using those builds. I remmember people saying that you just need to be Engie with crate’s build and you are top 100 soloq easy, so imagine if you’re a very good player with that build.

Well, one thing that many players know that works a lot in ranked matches in MOBAs like LOL is the “3 Champion ban” feature before each match starts.

I know that we can’t ban a profession before a match, since there are only 8 professions, but we can ban other things, like runes, sigils, utility/elite skills or even one weapon (3-5 skills that can’t be used) and that will completelly change the competitive side of this game.
Besides that, it also gives A-Net more hints and information about what really needs to be tweaked, making their job easier when balacing professions and when creating a player-friendly feature to change builds fast.

Just think about it. Take Dagger from your enemies choice and their thiefs and elementalists will need to know their class very well if they want to be effective with other weapons. Or take the Engie’s crate from their choice and you will suddenly stop seeing the engie’s soloq build beeing so effective.
Or even the players community will learn that only limiting one rune or sigil = changing a lot of builds, maybe too many of them, and A-net will know what needs to be changed.

Getting back to this game after beeing absent for almost 1 year, I still see the same problems inside this game. When we’re talking about combat, GvG, sPVP, WvW and e-sports, all I have to say is this:

- Due to a few but big and unfortunate flaws, this game’s combat is made for small-medium quantity of players (10-40 players). It’s the best combat I’ve seen in any mmorpg, but some core decisions the devs made in it (before AND after game launch) made combat with a big ammount of players (+40players) to be a zerg-fest which many computers can’t stand due to the ammount of information shared during those fights.

- GvG with 30-40 players: could be very interesting in this game if it had many objectives and separated the guilds groups due to the tactics/strategies involved.

- sPVP as GVG: First of all, sPVP is still completelly broken in terms of a competitive game, BUT it seems to be starting it’s first steps in the right direction: gathering the interest of it’s players in that game mode and pulling a huge ammount to play that feature.
Of course there are always consequences: the environment becomes more toxic (full of flames, “kids”, “noobs”… well, exactly like LOL); the quality of the players tend to go very low in its overall in the first months because the ammount of unskilled players is too big.
Now there’s only one way to make this possible. Create an ingame structure that brings the players together into teams that can become competitive. We still don’t have it yet (if we had there wasn’t so many complaints about hot-joins and 4vs5’s because players would be much more focused on ranked games… because “hot-joins are for noobs ya know!?” * says any LOL player ever*) but Anet can’t be late to introduce that structure in the near future.
If sPVP becomes competitive, why not turning it into a GvG-kind of competition?! You do know that most competitive and popular teams in the world are known because they have a small ammount of their big chunk of players playing well?! just look at football (soccer for u US players) where the biggest clubs in the worlds are know because only 11-14 players play in a match even though the professional team has 20-30 players in it and they also bring some Junior players when they want to.
The best Guilds could also be the ones who have 2 or 3 teams of 5 players who happen to be in some of the best teams in the EU/NA/World.

- WvW: to me it was fun for many months, but half those months were also a pain to play because of it’s flaws, some of them due to combat and others due to how the maps and the access to them were made. It’s a good way to have fun, but we all know that if Anet creates some kind of GvG or Mass-PVP which is much more challenging and competitive, WvW would die in an instant due to the lack of PVP players in it. We all know that without the PVP players persistance, WvW “epic-moments” would be non-existant right now.

- e-sports: Well, when people say this game is not a LOL/DOTA/SC/whatever, they also don’t remmember that those games didn’t became competitive just because of their genre or because they are “easy to watch”. They became competitive because they were able to increase their player base significantly enough to make that possible and then they had/created a structure to make their competitive level to rise while keeping the interest of the most players they had. They had a plan and they had the right timing, structure and ideas for the plan to work. Not all games of them same genre get to that level and you all know it’s true, because they lacked something among those things. And people had to learn how those games worked in order to enjoy them and that’s only possible if the player base of that game increases a lot. Do you know how many people who play games don’t understand s**t about SC and hate it?! we can say the same about LOL, DOTA and any kind of game. And it’s funny to see those same players looking at GW2 combat and become completelly amazed by it. The problem is always about the ammount of players each game has and the plans the games Devs have for it to become an e-sport.
GW2 had those issues. Right now it’s rebooting itself again in sPVP by bringing a lot of players to the feature again. Let’s see if it works or not.
I doubt it can work, since A-net is stubborn as hell, but if they surprise me, they will surprise everyone else I know who plays/played this game.

GW2 has a very unique style to it.
It is a lot more casual friendly than any other game (which doesn’t mean is less hardcore friendly). The GW2 mainly targets players who like to do things with less restrictions as possible, who want their freedom in playing the way they like without someone telling them that it’s wrong.
With the B2P model, it’s easier to get many players into the game which probably caters to many players who play much less then the usual MMORPG player we see in other games – aka casuals.
Playing GW2 for the first time is actually really exciting for almost everyone. The main reason is that you can do whatever you want without restrictions upon you. You can go do PVP with the highest lvl right at the beguinning, you can go to WvW and just (get) kill(ed) right after the tutorial and you have no griefing at all in the game to disturb you on your choices. And you can do PVE and your own story because you want to and not because you have a list of things to do.
As I’ve talked about freedom, this also includes other things that were good ideas at the beguinning but – and I’m saying my opinion here – right now they bring many problems we weren’t expecting to.
I will start with the multi-guilds feature which was a great idea to have a more connected and social environment inside each server, as the guilds would know each other better and players could chose to do what they like with players with the same tastes without leaving the other guilds and the other things those guilds do. This was a great idea to make server communities better because players are fighting for their server pride in WvW, but this didn’t actually worked so well fo WvW as it did for PVE and sPVP. Most servers lost their good communities because of guesting and PVE (something I’ll talk later) and because in most situations guilds would lose their sense of pride, their players wouldn’t be there all the time as the game didn’t forced them to. On the other hand, guilds who would make “represent only” rules would always get a lot of troubles because players would always see how other guilds work and sooner or later they would leave to other guilds OR stay in the guild and criticize the other guilds they’ve been to. This didn’t happenned only because of the “multi-guild” system but it was the key for this to happen.
The other thing is also related to the problems we had in guilds and communities inside servers, which is the lack of a line that clearly separates PVP-oriented players from PVE-oriented ones. This is completelly related to the “Guest” feature and the lack of restrictions players have when playing what they want and how they want. Because each server is basically PVX, so are most of their players and that makes it impossible to control the quality of each server when playing WvW. When WvW Achievements kicks in, PVE players go to WvW and basically ruin everything the WvW community of the server was trying to accomplish. Ultimatelly, many WvW oriented players were sick of this and left, many WvW guilds lost their players and tried to recruit more players from the PVE/sPVP side and, guess what, Guilds couldn’t play WvW the way they wanted to because they are constantly teaching 60% (at least) of their guild.
Sooner or later players who know their main focus in the game would get sick and tired of this and would try to make their own way of doing them, the result was predictable and it just ended exactly the way we are right now: Too many small guilds and less big guilds as the time goes.
And I won’t even talk about sPVP here.
The difference with GW2 is that players don’t know what to expect from it but have the freedom to do whatever they like to. That leads to not knowing exactly what are the bad things of the game and, you guessed it, we don’t know exactly how to counter them.
GW2 also didn’t had everything they promised when it launched. In fact, only now (2 years later) we are seeing many of those things to become a reality, but still don’t know how they work.
In my opinion, the true GW2 experience starts with this April patch, but for many of the player base it’s too late, for others it’s just something they will enjoy casually because some of the concepts it has won’t work unless there’s a radical change.

I will play them both, but I’m not fooled by other player opinions nor influenced by words like “too old” or “too casual”.
I was excited for Wildstar, but was afraid of not liking the first lvls (critical for me in any mmorpg). Thank god it didn’t happen.
I know exactly what I want to do when I play Wildstar and I know exactly what I’m looking for when I play GW2. I hope all you do the same because they both give different feelings for different tastes and different goals.

(Sorry for the double post guys. Won’t happen again!)

I’ve been playing GW2 since Betas and have tried Wildstar as well. These are the conclusions I got about them.

First of all, Wildstar brings the “old school” / “traditional” style with some new things brought from the evolution of the genre.
It is a lot more hardcore friendly than GW2, which shouldn’t mean less casual friendly but it is because of some concepts in the game.
It gives much less player freedom to the players than GW2, but it brings a lot of important things that I’ve been appreciating in an MMORPG and feel were lacking in GW2. The pride of belonging to a Guild, separating the PVP and PVE audience with PVP and PVE servers respectivelly and the sense of carrot-in-a-stick (which I abolished for so many years but now I understand the need for them in this kind of game) seem to be there with some new twists to make it better.
There are still many things to make it better, as the Quest system needs to become less overwhelming, the focus of the game is more oriented towards end-game and it’s not so good to entertain the players when they pick the game for the first time. Just like WOW and other “traditional” games, that’s something they MUST change, but coming from a game that haves a sub-or-CREDD system in place, we already know they are looking ofr players who know what they want to do once they get to higher lvls.
Many players call it boring, but I noticed that if you play with friends it gets much better than when you’re playing solo. This and the fact of having 20-40 raids (wether for PVE or PVP) gives me the feeling that this games is looking more to create communities build aroun 4-5 big guilds in each server for each faction, who know exactly what their goals are because they can fulfill them without any help of other people from the server, and focus less in smaller guilds who only want to play together as friends and do what they like/can.
This kind of situation is very common in mmorpgs of this kind and thanks to it the player base already knows what are the bad things it brings. And because they know them so well, they also are better prepared to counter them.
One thing is true for Wildstar though: all the system they promised are in the game.

(continues in next post)

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’ve actually been re-working this pipeline a bit lately in the background to try and speed it up (thus 2 releases in a row with 2 weeks separating instead of 4) but it still makes it really hard for us to give exact dates. A little peak behind the curtain how development works, there are around 300 folks working at ArenaNet, but a lot of them have nothing to do with building the feature, and instead provide all the support required to get that feature live. It’s why very few live games do frequent updates to their products, but we’re trying to find innovative ways to buck that trend and update more frequently.

I completelly understand the amount of work and time it takes to implement things into the game with the less issues as possible, but it’s also true that you have made a lot of content and updates that becomes useless, and there’s so much hard work and time invested in those.
And you still make things up that go in the same direction.

Example 1: Season content gives so much work and becomes useless.
Many skins were made for special seasons like Halloween and Christmas and now you can’t even buy/sell them at TP or craft them.
Epic Jumping Puzzles and good instances that disapeared but everyone loved them.
Why don’t you make those things more meaning in the future updates, but with a “catch” (change the theme in the JPs and instances, along with rewards)
The idea of making things for special seasons is great, but if you are going to take away those things completelly, then many players will always blame you guys for not spending time on more important stuff (like creating GvG and duels asked by so many players since the beguinning).
Instead, you should create the things players are asking a lot for those special events as a way of testing it. If the feedback is good, then just give it a little touch and when the season is over release it as the new feature.

Example 2: So many changes in WvW were made…. oh wait, they weren’t, if you compare them to PVE, that has a lot of new maps, dungeons, and events, most of them become useless too after a while. Even sPVP has new maps.
WvW only gets 1 thing: balance updates. Since the beguinning, you only take and put things in the game only in the name of balancing. Even WXP is for that same purpose. The (not-so-)funny thing is, every time you try to make it better, you just give yourselves even more work to do in terms of balancing WvW.
In the beguinning, the balance was made between Players damage (skills, traits, gear, guild bónus and foods), NPCs and Siege weapons.
Then you put WXP, which means more balancing between all the things influenced by that.
Now you are making Traps.
Although I like those things, you are still creating more balance issues to be included in all the work you have to do. I’m not surprised WvW doesn’t get new maps or a radical change of the ones we have right now. I’m not surprised you don’t know how to balance “blobs” issues (like skill lag) vs smaller groups in the way. I’m also not surprised you make this “balance” updates all the time, because the amount of work the WvW team has to do is so big that they can only do minor things.
Finally you bring some things to the table: more Rewards and a new matchup. But it’s still the same, balance issues beeing the main reason for WvW biggest updates.

Example 3: Talking about sPVP, you are creating new maps that are awesome… but why keeping the Conquest Mode in all of them? You don’t see most famous PVP games getting better by creating the same thing over and over again do you?
One thing you must know as a gamer. When you feel something is repetitive in a game, you start losing interest. If the game releases new things with the same repetitive things, you start considering leaving the game. When you find another game that gives you what you want, you don’t need to think twice.
Now, take the examples of FPS games, , take the examples of MOBA games and take the examples of other MMORPG’s. With those, look for the many Modes out there that are enjoyable and think about what you have been doing, because capturing points is becoming stale and boring.
And keep in mind: if it wasn’t for the new Arenas (after 5/6 months of talking about them, and meanwhile you were creating new maps -.-") and the spectator mode, sPVP would be much worst right now. But if you continue with the same Conquest mode of capturing points when creating new maps for PVP, it won’t become much better than it is right now, because players are already a bit tired of it.

Now I greatly appreciate all the work you’ve been doing in the game, but as you can see you should focus on creating meaningfull content that has a bigger chance to stay in the game as a feature forever, instead of creating content with a very short term.

That’s just my opinion. I hope it helps.

Guys, in case you haven’t noticed, my idea it’s not about removing zergs, nor about trashing them. I’ts about giving a consequence to them as a strategy used in exageration. That’s why I said “fixing”.

Right now, it’s like this:
- the bigger the zerg, the less-to-none chance enemies have against them, no matter how confusing and unskilled players it has.
- rolfstomping everything is faster, gets more rewards and with less effort than capturing at least half of the same things in smaller groups.
- the roflstomping zerg of 60+ probably wiped out most of the smaller groups (15~20 players) along the way.
- most of the times it’s not even worth upgrading things outside the prime-time of a server, since the enemy zerg can just roflstomp many keeps and towers faster than anyone else when we don’t have an allied zerg around – which gives too much advantage to servers that have zergs 24/7.
- people talk about AC’s beeing anti-zerg right now. Well, if zergs can’t handle the damage, then smaller groups can even less.

My ideia just gives one consequence to zerg: the more people it has, the harder it gets to capture a point. It gives a sense of balancing difficulty based on the number of players participating in the event.
What’s so bad about it? Do you still want to zerg up, use skill 1, no intelligence and no skill, killing everyone while roflstomping maps easily? With no challenge at all? and still call it fun?
That’s not massive scale PVP, that’s “carebear” PVP (I’m using this expression the same way many PVP players like to use it for PVE players because “PVE is easy”)

This idea also gives a chance to smaller groups to be more effective in many ways.
In the end, if a zerg can’t take out a Keep / Tower because it was too difficult and just a small group there could wipe them, then you can say they weren’t good or organized enough and they suffered the consequence of that decision – they lost so much time while they were at it that the enemy servers captured a lot of points from them.
BUT the consequence itself gets smaller if the attacking zerg is very organized and has very few useless actions, because they know what to do as an organized group of X people.
It’s like Dungeons: if you know what to do, you can do it in 15 mins. If you don’t, you could take hours.

Good post OP.

@rmBossa creating a new mode for GvG outside WvW would separate even more the community, if done badly. There are other modes of GvG in other mmorpgs that work very well and would be a good addition to this game without destroying the WvW mode.
Take the example of Perfect World International. The GvG (aka World War) feature was great for guilds. It was rather simple (with LOL-like map and objectives), but it gave a lot of motivation because it had a mass scale PVP for Guilds (up to 100 members), it happened only once a week, it had PVE incorporated (attacking an unclaimed map would lead your guild to a PVE instance), it gave rewards to the Guilds (which would split them through their members if you were in a good guild) and it had strategic choices (to attack a new map, to defend the ones we have, or to do both with less strengh in each one).
Something like this would only take guilds from WvW once a week and I believe ArenaNet would do something much better in terms of maps and objectives.

@Christos de Soufre, GvG with 10+ players would be awesome. sPVP = 5-10 fights, but GvG should be about all your members participating in a large scale battle as a guild and not as a small part of it.

EDIT: there’s still a problem with the Represent feature though. It had to be limited at some point.

The problem seems to be with the Commander tag. It was happening the same thing to my guild with all the siege weapons and then we figured out it only happened when the commander was involved in the process of creating/building the siege weapon. Then he removed his tag and everything worked as usual.
Try to see if it’s the same thing with you.