Guild Wars 2

Part 2:

My personal oppinion upon this datastructure:
The big benefit is that the player knows his ‘true’ position every 15 seconds, so that the player is able to estimate how much time it takes. A queue-position that goes up and down isn’t really helpful in this topic, to be honest – or at least that’s my oppinion. The big cost of it is the queue-update every 15 seconds (or whatever time you put in this place) which is O(n), where n is about the amount of queued players (and players which dequeued in the last 15sec). To be honest, I do not know how many players are queueing at the same time, but since you can have one such queue per server (i.e., not all queues must be handled by the same hardware at once), but I estimate it to be less than 3000 players per server. Going through a linked list with ~3000 entries and adjusting a hashtable accordingly every 15 seconds is something that really should be feasible. To be honest, I don’t know how it looks like upon bandwith usage; that’s a topic where I’m missing some knowledge/experience. To inform 3000 players every 15 seconds at the same time could maybe be a bottleneck; but I’m pretty sure there are solutions to this too (e.g., each player has an own 15-sec cooldown with a start chosen uniformly at random somewhere in this 15sec-timespace).

If I made any mistakes in my suggestion or if I’m missing something obvious which makes things far worse complicate than I’m thinking, please let me know I love this datastructure-thingie, so if anyone sees an opportunity to improve something please let me know, I’d highly appreciate it
Sorry for any English mistakes, it’s unfortunately not my mother tongue.

Part 1:

CS student over here, and though I’m pretty sure ANet has some capable guys, I’d really like to mention a few possibilities I would think about when implementing such a queue. Because you know, sometimes, as we would say in German, one simply can’t see the tree because of the forest.

Since it was already mentioned that the queue is (or should be) completly FIFO, I simply neglect stuff like higher/lower priority etc.

First of all, which datastructure? At first glance, it makes sense to simply use a linked list, since you’re basically interested in easy insertion (queuing) and remove (dequeuing). However, the lookup of the position is quite expensive; one has to go trough the whole list to get the position, which is O(n). If a lot of players want to know their position at the same time, things can get pretty expensive.

My suggestion: Use a linked list for the queue itself, but use a hashtable for position-lookup. You can also use the hashtable for dequeuing-information (still in queue/left the queue).

Ok, and now how the basic things should be handled:

• A player enters queue:
  He is added at the end of the queue. Cost: O(1). An entry for this player is added in the hashtable, O(1). There is some kind of counter for the size of the queue, he’s adjusted accordingly, O(1). According to the counter, the player’s hashtable entry contains the position in the queue.

• A player leaves the queue:
  His entry in the hashtable is adjusted accordingly (player has left the queue). Cost: O(1).

• “Queue update”:
  This is probably the hardest part or at least the part where things can get difficult depending on the requirements of the queue. If a player leaves WvW and makes space for someone in the queue, should this player be able to enter WvW immediatly? Or is it OK if there is some kind of time inbetween?
  My personal suggestion: Make a queue-update like every 15 seconds or something like this (15 is out of the blue and would be my personal first choice; depending on how much CPU-time and bandwith you want to throw on this topic you can in-/decrease this time).
  What needs to be done: First of all, remove all dequeued players. Go through the list, look in the hashtable if the player is still queued, if yes, adjust his position-information in the hashtable (most likely, you use another counter for this which says at which position in the list you are right now), if no, delete his list-node, remove his hashtable entry and adjust the list-size-counter accordingly. Cost for deletion and hashtable-lookup: O(1). Cost for doing this for the whole list: O(n). Total cost: O(n). What we have now is a linked list and a hashtable that contains only players that are still queued; the position of the player is stored in the hashtable.
  Now new players can (maybe) enter WvW. Compare the list-size-counter to your maximum number of players allowed on one map. Comparison-cost: O(1). Let’s say, p players are allowed now to enter WvW. Go trough the first p entries of the list and let these players play WvW. Adjust the list-size-counter accordingly and adjust the hashtable entries of the players to ‘dequeued’. Cost: O(p) (neglecting the effort to inform those players which is most likely O(p) too).

• A player wants to know his queue-position:
  Hashtable-lookup of the position; cost: O(1) (neglecting effort to inform the player which is most likely O(1) too but costs some bandwith). You need to inform the player only once every 15 second (see “Queue Update”). The player knows that the position is updated only once every 15 seconds (i.e., add a ‘Update-timer’ to the WvW-window).

There are a lot of good suggestions in this topic; however, I think some people miss the point of the word ‘progression’. In endgame, it basically comes down to one simple question in every game:

• Who has more? (or, more vulgar, ‘Who has the longest?’)

All this talking about housing, build-variety etc. is nice, but it won’t help if players don’t get something which makes them “more shiny” compared to others. In GW1, this ‘who has more’ were basically the titles; in other games, it’s the best gear, the coolest mount, and so on.

GW2 already has some ‘Who has the longest’-Approaches, but they are all not really satisfying. There are tons of different currencies, and there are also the APs. But why aren’t they motivating a lot of players for endgame? APs are good for only one kind of players: The hardcore ones. First, if you want to compete, you must play the games since release, because if you start now, you have missed so many dailies that there is absolutly no chance to get on the ladderboards, even if you’re playing 24/7. Second, you can’t miss any dailies, because it just throws you out of competition, and there are – amongst all those million gw2 players – about a thousand or something like that that can play like that (and also do that or at least something like that, when looking at the AP-ladderboards).
Besides APs, there are titles, but most people I know agree that most titles are just garbage (too easy to achieve or timegated). So what remains in GW2? Right, basically nothing. You can make all the achievements, but you can’t let that know other players (except your AP-number, but for that, see above), you can collect all skins, but besides having no inventory space left, there’s nothing you can really do with all those skins, you can have 100% with all your characters, but 90% of the people in Lion’s Arch have the star anyway, you can get a legendary, but you can also just buy it for a hundred bucks or something like that via Gemstore (besides the fact that there are already a hundred players with legendaries posing arround in Lions Arch).

Please keep that in mind. ‘Progression’ is always connected to this very simple question… who has more? It’s all about this. In every game.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Hi Dominus,

I don’t think the idea is ‘Just’ a Wardrobe. I think it is supporting functionality to an existing system (Skin Collection) that I would like to see expanded upon (Personal Opinion).

I think a lot of play could also come out of Wardrobe functionality. However I wanted to keep my list to 3 macro ideas and I believe Wardrobe would potentially compliment/support them.

Chris

Thanks for the answer
I think a bit a problem of the current skin collection system is that it’s not really rewarding. Skins fill up the inventory (I have so many skins from the LS which I don’t want to throw away but which don’t fit the armors my chars are currently wearing), and if one wants to use them, they destroy either another skin or cost a transmutation stone. It should be just a click, on the fly. Maybe even with other players – like “what you think suits better… this – or this?” (and no, preview isn’t really an option since you only see your own character wearing the armor). And of course, if the skin is already bound to an item (stats), it ‘destroys’ the stats or makes them useless (which is, especially for BiS gear, very expensive).

If you think about a wardrobe like the PvP-Locker, it should be said that this wasn’t really satisfying either (at least for me and my PvP-Team back when we played). Since skins often dropped more than once and it isn’t possible to stack them, there’s a lot of ‘garbage’. And than the problem of twinks; if I pick something out of the locker with one character, it’s not there anymore for an alt. It doesn’t seem like a big problem, but it’s probably one of those little details which can make the difference.

Just an idea what I would really like to see: If an item drops, one can bring it to some kind of asura tech genius. For a small fee (maybe depending on the item), he gets the ‘skin-plan’ out of the item and gives it to the player. The player can now apply the ‘skin-plan’ (together with some other asura tech device or whatever; just to explain it) on any item, as often as he wants. This applies the appearance of the (destroyed) item to the item. The skin-plan itself is stored in some kind of panel that shows which skin-plans the player already has and which are missing. It would be even more awesome if the player could learn through this interface where and how to get the missing skill-plans (“legends tell that this incredible weapon has been seen in possession of boss X in dungeon Y”), but that’s more a nice-to-have.

I think something like this could really keep people busy in the ‘endgame’. My personal example is Pokémon, where people tried to complete their Pokédex, even though they were fighting with the same two or three pokémons all the time anyway. It’s about this ‘Can I get them all?’, the ‘Who has more?’, the ‘Who has the most?’. And it’s always about such questions in MMO-endgame, right?

Chris Whiteside.6102:

I certainly think that Wardrobe is a very important QOL improvement for Horizontal Progression if that makes sense?

Chris

I think it can or should be more than just a ‘QoL-Improvement’. Every MMO has or should have some kind of ‘core’, something outstanding compared to other MMOs, and that’s what GW2 is lacking right now. You maybe remember the GW2-Manifesto, where it was said that GW2 should have no grind; a lot of players interpreted this the way it used to be in GW1 – that BiS gear is something very easy to achieve. It turned out that this is not the case, or at least it’s not as easy as it was in GW1 (ascended didn’t really help in this topic).

Maybe this is the holy Guild Wars (2?) grail: That it’s all about collecting skins. You maybe remember how people farmed “Gate of Anguish”, and it was bascially only for skins (of course, some people farmed for gold, but they only obtained it by selling the skins to others). I’m sure you could do something like that again. To make collecting skins the ‘endgame’. That grind (in opposite to many other MMOs) means not to farm for better stats, but that grind (and sometimes non-grind-content too) mean to collect skins. What’s the very cool thing about it? It’s very casual friendly since hardcore players don’t have any kind of advantage in stats; they just “look better”.

So yeah, maybe it’s “just” a wardrobe, but I think you could go even further and make some kind of ‘unlock-system’ that allows the player to switch skins without wasting any inventory space or having to mind about stats.

1) Some kind of Skin unlock system. Permanent. Accountwide is even better. Gotta catch’em all.

2) Revamp of Title system: Something with ‘grind-titles’ like GW1 had.

3) Full focus on skins: No need to put better stats in the game (ascended), there are already thousands of games that have such a progression. GW2 should be niche as GW1 and set the full focus on skin/appearance only. You can’t make everyone happy anyway.

There was some talking about “Hard Mode "(HM) here; just to say that: The original GW1 Hard Mode gave the player another instance with harder monsters. That was all, technically speaking (besides some slightly better loot). More important were the titles that needed HM; for a lot of titles, there were two versions of it – one for normal mode (NM) and one for HM.
So I think talking about ‘messing up events because some players have activated HM and others not’ isn’t really needed here, except you’re talking about an absolutly new HM that has nothing to do with the HM from GW1.

GW1 had a very time-consuming HM-title: Kill all monsters in a map in HM and it’s counted as ‘conquered’, conquer all maps and you get a shiny title. Whether an area was conquered or not was visible on the map.

How GW2 could do that: As soon as you have reached 100% from a certain map (e.g. Metrica Province), you can go to an NPC that lets you enter your own instance of Metrica Province with activated Hard Mode. The monsters are harder (lvl 80?) and, most important of all, they don’t respawn after death (and no events spawn). There is a counter that says how many monsters are left. Happy slaughtering. The rest can be the same as in GW1; a title that requires conquering all maps.
This is very time-consuming (good for hardcore-players), doesn’t give you any advantage in stats or whatever (good for casual players), and gives you a shiny title that shows how hardcore you are (this is really missing in GW2; most titles are just utterly garbage compared to the titles one could achieve in GW1).

Chris Whiteside.6102:

[..] feel free to discuss Horizontal Progression systems you have enjoyed in other games.

Chris

An example most of us probably know: POKÉMON!

This game(s) showed probably more than any other game that people can be entertained for a very long time with horizontal progression. There is also vertical progression of course; the pokémons have levels and need to be trained seperatly, but most players have two or three ‘favourited’ pokémons they’ll train and with which they make most fights. The main aspect of the game is what the poké-hymn “gotta catch’em all” says: Collect all pokémons together, no matter how hard some of them are to catch. The player can keep track of the progression easily with the ‘pokédex’ and knows always which are missing and which he already has.

And how to translate that to Guild Wars 2 now? I think the same thing can be done here with skins. Make some kind of ‘Skin-Index’ (skindex? lol, sounds like asura technology) that makes people keep track of their already obtained and still missing skins. There must be some kind of ‘reward’ for collecting skins; e.g., that you can switch to already obtained skins every time you want. Or that there’s some kind of “inspect”-option for other players where they can see the collections of skins another player has etc. Or titles that can be gained by how many skins are already obtained. There are so many options how to expand this (as I already mentioned once, you could give items levels which unlock special shiny armor-parts or additional dye-slots or whatever) that you basically can keep players busy for a very long time (just like Pokémon).

GW1 was already great in focussing skin-acquirement; GW2 could expand that now and put the main focus here. GW2 already did some stuff in the way i mentioned above; the zenith/hellfire/radiant-panel is basically such a “skin-index” as I mentioned above. For some reason, this was never expanded, in my oppinion, it would be awesome to do so.

Just an idea: “Item Appearance Level”

What about special “item levels” that require something to do or spend skillpoints into them, and that unlock special shiny slots for them? E.g., that a part of an armor does only shine if the item level is above 5 or whatever. You can bind those levels on different requirements, like spending skillpoints, doing x events while wearing the gear, spending a certain amount of certain mats in it or whatever.

What’s the idea behind it? People would get something they could grind for, but it wouldn’t be in the way of any ‘casual player’ since there is no influence at all on stats.

To go even further: You could “unbind” those unlocks from the gear itself, i.e., that stats and appearance are something completly different (and no, Transmutation stones aren’t really the solution to it).

There was some discussion about RNG and about people enjoying it and not. I think it’s important to distinguish between two different situations where RNG takes place:

a) You open a chest, and there’s a certain chance to get the uber-drop which is especially available in this chest. In GW1, e.g., there was the Voltaic Spear in the chest at the end of Slaver’s Exile. A dungeon/quest/whatever may be even farmed to especially loot this chest in hope to get this one drop out of it.

b) There is always the chance that you get the uber-drop, by every kill, by every chest. It can drop, but chances are very low, but it can happen all the time. Like precursors in GW2.

I remember how awesome it was to loot a chest in GW1 – always this little adrenaline-spike in front of the big chest, in hope to get the uber-loot this time, even though it didn’t work the last 50 times (and if it doesn’t, there were at least quite often some goldies or some nice mats). And the curiosity what the other teammates may get. In GW2, it’s totally boring. Precursors can basically drop everywhere, and chest loot is almost all the time just garbage.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Is it fair to say that regarding Ascended Gear we would like to see more ways to earn it and in terms of drop rates, a higher percentage chance of acquiring them through this method?

Chris

I think that would be Ok. Just make sure to announce something like that about two weeks before the actual patch, so that people don’t make their ascended weapons five minutes before the patch and are cought on the wrong foot when reading the patch-notes a few minutes later.
The question is: Why is ascended gear needed than, when it’s “downgraded” to what Exotic was before? Progression makes only sense if there’s a reason to ‘progress’, progression for the sake of progression is horrible design.

As far as I’ve read in this thread (besides the oppinions I already know from people I play gw2 together with), it’s general consensus that Ascended Gear, as it’s currently implemented, is a bad idea and doesn’t satisfy any kind of player.

As a more general side note: ANet, you have so many years of experience with GW1, this game was awesome and you know it. Why do you guys want to invent the wheel new for everything if you already know what works (and maybe also what works not) from what you’ve done in GW1? It seems so pointless.

Make people unlock more skins in the Zenith/Hellfire/Radiant-panel, like for doing LS-content, other achievements or other, newer ways. There are a lot people that like the “GOTTA CATCH’EM ALL”-grind (because you know, collecting things for prestige is more cool than getting new gear which makes old gear worthless and will be worthless too as soon as there’s newer gear), and let people show their stuff in some kind of Hall of Monuments.

Joining this thread late and haven’t read most likely a lot of important posts, so my own post is maybe a bit ‘out of the blue’.

What GW2’s problem with progression is imo, it tries to offer progression in too many ways. In GW1, the progression-thing was more or less clear: It’s not about stats, it’s not about levels, it’s all about titles and shiny gear. That’s it. And with this principle, it was really a niche game in the MMO-market, there was (or at least I’ve never heard of one) never another game that followed this principle as straight as GW1.

Of course, there were a lot of players that didn’t enjoy this kind of progression, so they moved on to other games. In GW2, Ascended Gear seems to be the try to keep those kind of players happy while the GW1-veterans shouldn’t be bothered too much with it since it’s “only an advantage of a few percents”. As far as I’ve read in this thread and as far as I know the oppinions from GW2-players I know, this try was (and still is) a fail.

My oppinion: GW2 should return to the principles GW1 had; that it’s all about titles and shiny gear. That stats should be something absolutly irrelevant (maybe even more irrelevant than in GW1 since there is still room left in this topic, even in GW1). And why? Because it would be one of the only MMOs that follows this kind of principles while there are hundreds if not even thousands of MMOs that already have the stat-thing. GW2 would be niche, as GW1 was, and with that it would most likely address a lot of players that were happy with GW1 but not so much with GW2 (or any other MMO).

Just my 2 cents. Sorry for my bad English.

Why is everyone talking about ‘gear’ and such stuff as reward? My warrior looks already as kitten as possible with his Heritage armorset I earned by playing GW1. Ok, my ele and mesmer could maybe use some nicer skins, but that’s definitly not something I’m really concerned about.

‘Reward’ in PvP is actually more about prestige, glory and honour and less about shiny stuff in my oppinion. ‘Reward’ like a lot of gold (in GW1: massive amounts of zKeys, good PvP’ers were often as rich as whole PvE-guilds together) is actually a nice surplus, but it’s definitly not what PvP should be about. And in GW2, it was always impossible to get any kind of prestige in PvP since ranks were broken and leaderboards were on an extern website that doesn’t even allow to search players if one wants to look them up (not even mentioning their other flaws).

But let’s see what this ladder-thing will bring, maybe this will solve the whole ‘prestige-problem’.

This whole issue with the decay and leaderboard AFK’ers wouldn’t be an issue at all if GW2PvP would be ‘competitive’. I mean, imagine this in GW1 for example; some “top-guilds” think it’s enough if they play only at MATs (necessary ATs are neglected for the sake of the example) and win there even though they haven’t trained/practiced/buildwars’d in meantime. Pretty sure this would have been their last appearance in a MAT for a long time.

Problem of GW2 is, there is no competitive scene anymore (if there ever was one). Everyone that tries/tried to be competitive gives up some weeks (sometimes months) later because there’s so less that makes it possible to play competitive. And we’re a year after release, and ANet didn’t really make anything to make the stuff that’s needed for competitive play better. Sure, we got leaderboards, sure, we got observermode, sure, we got CAs, but everyone knows their flaws, no reason to repeat them over and over again. But the main problem isn’t even the flaw of those features; it’s all the cheese, spam and particle-supernovas on screen.

ArenaNet’s Servers: 5v5 only.

If there are people that want something else, there is still the option to use custom arenas. There are already enough empty CAs now that will close the gap when ANet takes their 8v8+ servers down (or converts them to 5v5 only).

I think this video says it all: http://de.twitch.tv/ostricheggs/c/3023189

The ranger is, sorry, as incompetent as possible, eating every single CC that’s thrown at him, making him smell the ground 24/7, not able to do anything at all. And who wins? The ranger of course.

One of my best PvE-experiences in any game up to now was probably the ‘War in Kryta’-story in GW1. The concept behind it is/was probably the same than the one of the living story, but in opposite to most of the living story content we’ve seen so far, I really enjoyed ‘War in Kryta’. I played every quest of it with every character I had (10, one per class), it was just awesome. ‘Winds of Change’, it’s follower, had also some very nice quests, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as WiK since there were a bit too many quests in the sense of ‘kill them. x/y left’. The good thing about WoC was that there was also a hardmode version of it, letting the player face challenges which belonged definitly to the hardest content available in GW1.

I think the major difference between those questlines and the living story (or stories) is that those questlines felt authentic, or at least I felt that way. The white mantle was always a threat to Kryta, it wasn’t something completly new. And the ‘Ministry of Purity’ was introduced very slowly, letting the player in the dark about it’s true intent for a very long time.
In GW2, it’s every four week something almost totally new: One week it rains pirates from the sky, than there are big crabs invading an island the player has never heard of before, and another week there is suddendly a new big toxic tower in the middle of a lake where some kraits and quaggans lived before. For me, it seems totally unrelated, I really do not see any connection between it.

What I personally would like to see as ‘living story’ is the ‘rise and fall’ of the different ‘evil forces’ Kryta already has: The sons of Svanir, the Inquest, the Nightmare Court, the Flame Legion, the Dredge, and so on (without any fancy alliances which seem to be out of the blue). I can imagine a lot of cool storyquests/instances the player could be sent trough, leading to the deafeat of the enemy forces at the very end. This doesn’t meant they are gone forever, they can rise again (this allows you to build content in a way that it doesn’t interfere with any personal storyline). Take WiK as an example – let, for example, the sons of Svanir gather, defeating various Norn-outposts on their march to Hoelbrak, and, as big final, the final battle for Hoelbrak itsself (just like the final WiK-quest, the battle for lions arch).

This is just an example, there are plenty of other possibilities. But please, stop delivering new super-villains with new mega-evil-plans every two weeks/month, because like that, people just forget about them after having done the achievements, because there’s already a new super-mega-evil villain with new achievements waiting that have to be done.

PS: Sorry for my bad English, tried my best but it’s not my mother tongue.

@Darnis: No, I’m Swiss. But your comment just shows the problem we would get with such finishers, and that’s why I really do not want to see something like such finishers.

5+ min. But I think better matchmaking can’t solve the 4v5-problem alone, there must be further instruments against this.

I personally think the way Dota2 handles this issue is really good. It happens so often that someone doesn’t accept a match or doesn’t finish loading the map for whatever reason (it happens every now and then that I have to press this button myself, so I don’t blame anyone for doing so), and when I think that this would always result in a 4v5-match it would be absolutly horrible.

In my oppinion, queing in GW2 should/could work like that:

1) Press Queue-button.
2) Match is ready: Accept/Don’t accept (you can’t queue again for ~1min, but nothing else happens), ~15sec time to do that. If you don’t press any button in the given time, you can’t queue for ~2min.
3a) Someone didn’t accept: Everyone except the refusing player is queued again automatically (after being informed that a player wasn’t ready)
3b) Everyone accepted: The map is loaded instantly and everyone is in spectator mode (not able to chose a side), seeing the list of players with classes. Now it’s time for strategy and rerolling classes. A Ready-button is available. There should be info like ‘Loading map’, ‘Ready’, and ‘Rerolling class’. It would be incredible awesome if one could swap the character directly from this menu without returning to the character-screen and doing a detour over the mists (or any other map where the character currently is), but this is more a detail. The whole thing can take up to ~2min, if everyone pressed the ready-button, the match is started earlier. Make sure that nothing else except waiting and rerolling the class can be done in meantime so that noone has to wait the full 2min because of the one guy that wants to finish his hotjoin-round.

This whole thing would increase the time needed until a match is ready by about ~1-2min. But it would allow you to punish players for leaving or afk’ing even harder because they explicitly stated that they’re ready for the match about 2min before it started (and not about ~3-10min like it is the case now). It has also the nice sideeffect that situations where you have 3 bunkers because all of them showed up in the last few seconds aren’t possible anymore.

For gods sake, please no. There’s nothing worse for a pvp-community than patriotism/nationalism. And that’s what it looks like when you would use such a finisher as a team, even if you just want to use it to show from where you are.

Patriotism is your conviction that your country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
~G. B. Shaw

Does it even matter whether GW2 was announced as eSport or not? Fact is, top-players either already quit or are totally upset with the way ANet is treating (or not treating) GW2-pvp. And from my ‘random guy casual tpvp point of view’, I kinda understand them actually.

And I think the next patch won’t solve the problems. There’s a lot of number-tweaking going on, which is for sure nice at some points, but I think the problem of GW2 is more fundamental. It’s all the cheese, spam and particle-supernovas. In my oppinion, this can hardly be solved by simple number tweaks and/or swaps of traits, there are more fundamental changes in design-philosophy needed.

First of all, very good job, I like this kind of preview. It’s not only about the ‘what exactly’ but also the ‘why’. This is awesome.

Second, I do not really understand why you don’t just meganerf the current meta. It caused so many players to leave, the players that remained are either trying to tell you that the current meta is nonsens or are randoms like me (telling you a lot of different things). There are a few nerfs of course, but even I see that it won’t be enough to kick passive playstyle/AI-builds/bad ‘risk/reward’ from PvP, which seems to be the main reason for all the quits of competitive teams and players.

Third, 10th december. Why so late?!? It’s nice that you want discuss it, but can’t you just throw out such balance patches more often? Like every two weeks, as you do it for PvE? Of course, you can’t change the whole meta every two weeks, but slight adjustments every now and than seem to be far better, or at least I think so.

PS: Sorry for my horrible English, trying my best but it’s not my mother tongue.

I think this MOBA-thing could actually work in GW2. And since it’s really one of the most popular pvp-modes, it’s really worth a try in my oppinion.

Please don’t think too much about balance and other problems that could occur in new gamemodes. If you just make the new gamemode available as an option for the CAs, the community can test it and give you some feedback about it. I think this was also a bit the problem when there were new maps – instead of making them available for tests in CAs first, they were just thrown into the rated matchs.

• Items that we can get from the LS-Achievements. We only get one item per account, so there’s no way alts get the item too, and if one doesn’t like the item from begin, it’s just a waste of inventory space, but throwing it away is also not really an option because who knows, maybe in a year it’s the most fashionable thing one can imagine. My suggestion to make this better: Instead of giving us a chest with one item (or skin), let us unlock a slot in the achievement-panel so that we can get the skin as often as we want and when we want, just like the Zenith-skins.

• Living Story itself: To be honest, I thought for a long time that there’s a connection between everything the living story showed us so far, but it feels more and more ‘random’ to be honest. I don’t want to blame anyone, but for me, it feels a bit like a very bad story which is told even worse: ‘now this happens, and here that happens, and well this happens too…’. It doesn’t feel like GW2 should feel for me somehow, it’s not authentic. Of course, you can’t let us kill an elder dragon every two weeks, and that’s ok, but there are other threats too, like the sons of svanir, inquest or nightmare court. They don’t need new villains like Scarlet with her aetherblades to be dangerous, they already are, just let them smash something and make the players fix it. I think it would be a lot easier to make the story more authentic. But who knows, maybe you already go in this direction with the next release, at least that’s what I was thinking when I saw the changes in Kessex Hills.

• Less timegated content/achievements, more replayability. This was already mentioned quite often, just want to support it because to be honest, it feels like grind for me, and that’s exactly what GW2 should be not, in no way.

PS: Sorry for my bad English, I tried my best but it’s not my mother tongue.

Valentin, don’t take it personal, but maybe you’re just bad? I have to admit that MMs totally suck though, they can stand there and have to do nothing while their enemies (or at least me) have to put in quite a lot of effort to bring them down.

Nevertheless, saying as a spirit ranger that MM is OP… sorry man, but that’s really hilarious. Because almost everyone thinks the same about spirit rangers. Staying there and… well I hope you get the point.

Spirit Ranger complaining about MM Necro?

MM Necro is not as viable as spirit ranger, nevertheless it’s just a totally annoying build that needs a nerf-to-death. Builds with AI should get removed from PvP completly, without any sort of compromise in my oppinion.

I know it probably doesn’t belong to this thread, but since there was the question for suggestions:
What about something like Random Arenas in GW1? As far as I remember, it was the most-played PvP-format GW1 had, and it was probably the most ‘newcomer-friendly’ format since there was always the chance that the enemy team had a newbie too or a disadvantage due to unlucky combination of classes etc.
It doesn’t have to be deathmatch as in GW1, it can be the same as soloQ, with the difference that after a win, one can either leave safely (in case one doesn’t want to play anymore) or can play ahead with the same team.
Difference to soloQ: No MMR/Leaderboards, but points for a title for a win (and more points for consecutive wins).

Advantages in my oppinion:

• Easy to understand for newcomers
• Competition: Playing “good” is rewarded with better chances for win (HJ now: spam AoE for tagging as much players as possible while zerging to get as much glory as you can)
• In opposite to soloQ, a defeat (maybe even due to DC/4v5 etc.) isn’t that bad since there’s no MMR

Disadvantage:

• Same as in GW1… there were horrible PvP’ers (I am and was horrible too from some point of view probably, but most people here from GW1 will know what I mean) which had really high ranks, but this is probably a smaller issue than the gloryfarm-problem in GW2 right now
• If one has only 5min or something like that, it’s not really possible to play this format (in opposite to HJ) if one doesn’t want to risk to let the team down after the first half of the match
• Ragequitters, AFK’ers. soloQ and GW1-RA have this problem too, a hard ‘Dishonored’-punishment is the key to victory here I think. Valve for example solves this problem in Dota2 pretty good in my oppinion; “dishonored” players can still play, but they don’t get any reward anymore (and are in a different matchmaking-pool) for 24 hours.

This doesn’t solve the HJ-farming-problem of course, but it may be some kind of solution to have something that is not as “competitive” as a rated match with an MMR behind where every defeat counts, but has still some kind of motivation to play competitive/trying to win instead of playing mindlessly as it’s the standard right now in HotJoin.

I think when it comes to the current state of the game/meta it doesn’t really matter whether one belongs to the 4%, 10% or 90% (where I belong). Almost everyone (at least everyone I know) agrees that the current meta is horrible cheesy and that the last patch didn’t really change much about that.

But it probably is a difference when it comes to the question how to change things for establishing a new meta. Of course, condispam and AI-stuff need nerf, but then what? What needs to be buffed? How will the new meta look like after the nerf? Will it be better/less cheesy?
I can’t answer it. And this is probably the “4-10%-business” Sensotix is talking about.

1) Balancing (and, most important, kill builds with very low skillfloor)
2) QoL-Improvements (saving templates, tone down AoE-effects for making matches nice to watch)
3) Gamemodes! (don’t worry about their balance, just make them available on CAs for testing)