Guild Wars 2

I thought it was well-known on this sub-forum that shortly post-release Anvil Rock became the unofficial gathering point for sPvPers on NA (with Desolation being the equivalent on EU).

This mostly developed because Heart of the Mists is frustratingly segregated by server, which means that sPvPers congregated on a single server to facilitate pre-made tourny formation and random PvP chatter.

Anvil Rock was a good a server as any for sPvPers to gather, considering some of the sPvP dedicated guilds who thought GW2 would actually have an e-sports scene (sigh) congregated on Anvil Rock.

As someone who came into this game almost exclusively for the sPvP, Anvil Rock was a good place to be a few months ago. Constant teams forming in Heart of the Mists, devs dropping by to talk shop, etc. It’s unfortunately not what it once was, but I still guest there now and then to try and get a premade going.

Rawr.5930:

Haldunius.7864:

I just honestly don’t believe this about TC. KN has some good guilds and have provided some good GvG’s. TC barely GvG’s. The few times they have it has gone very poorly. These are times when numbers are even. You can’t hide behind walls or show up with twice the numbers and brag about steam rolling a few guys. It’s about who’s “better” because the baddies die. If you are genuinely curious and believe a certain group is “competent”, then put it to the test.

It’s called wvw mate, anet has spvp for the l33t like you

I’m sure you’ll own everyone there no?

_Why is Anvil Rock dominating that leaderboard?_

I thought it was well-know that Anvil Rock is the go-to server for dedicated sPvPers. It started this way since BWE when some of the sPvP dedicated guilds who thought GW2 would actually have an e-sports scene (sigh) began to congregate on Anvil Rock. This includes Team Paradigm, Alpha Collective, and a few other solid sPvP guilds transferred there.

As someone who came into this game exclusively for the sPvP, but who has since branched off, Anvil Rock was a great place to be a few months ago. Constant teams forming in Heart of the Mists, devs dropping by to talk shop, etc. Now with sPvP in such a bad state, the community is kind of dead, but it’s still where the few remaining heavy sPvPers stayed.

Went to submit an application. Upon completion, I got a message saying “module is not available.” I’m not sure if my app was submitted or not, but lemme know if you all didn’t get it.

The comedy of errors that is this last patch has exposed the glaring need for a Public Test Server. Several balance changes flat don’t work, features of the new map were bugged at launch, and the patch notes are incomplete.

To the folks at Arenanet: please explain the rationale for why there is no Public Test Server.

For the uninitiated, this would be a server that is used to test patches before they are released. It would receive an advanced copy of the balance changes (and any other changes such as new maps, zones, etc.) pushed out first for testing. It would be segregated from the rest of the game, and folks who sign up to the PTS know that they are entering into a test server that may be full of bugs, unbalanced skills, etc.

The advantage is that patches come out more smoothly because they’ve been thoroughly tested and discussed. Players who enjoy the “beta testing” experience can go in there and identify bugs/balance issues all day.

Volted.2451:

wow man, HA realy? HA was the most stupid, new player unfriendly, rank discriminating system ever introduced to MMO, infested by gimmick builds that require no skill at all.
By the way all serious gvg players went there only to get rank emotes and once got phoenix all left and never gone back there again.
GvG on the other hand was well and working, I don’t understand why Anet decided to kill the guild system of GW1? GvG monthly were great and real fun, thought it had some problems as-well.
Peace,
Volted.

I was a serious GvG player and I didn’t go there only to get rank emotes. I went there when GvG was dead, when a full guild team wasn’t on, when my guild wanted to practice builds, when we got whispers from PvE’ers asking us to go in there and get them favor so they could run Underworld, to conduct guild tryouts, or because we wanted to play with friends from other guilds.

Old school GW1 player here as well… always fun to jump into a nostalgia thread!

Hall of Heroes had some problems, but it, combined with the GvG and Arenas that were bundled at launch were lightyears better than what we have now.

Even though GvG was the “serious PvP mode” – the most fun I have ever had was playing Hall of Heroes. Clashing with another guild you knew in battle, watching as two two joined up against yours because your team was well known, then seeing your team’s name go up over and over for the world to see when we won a tourny, all were very cool. I still have screenshots of whispers we would get from thankful PvE’ers or other PvPers congratulating us, and it was very cool and really integrated the community and built recognition.

Over time Hall of Heroes became a bit less interesting. One problem with Hall of Heroes was that a lot of guilds like mine had to resort to that mode as in imperfect way to test out builds for GvG (there was no scrimming option in GvG, and the other resort for practice – starting an alternative guild was heavily frowned upon because low level guilds would then get rolled).

Here’s my plea to the current PvP team gor GW2 – we know you can’t recreate GW1 PvP because you’re too entrenched in this current morass… but please understand the elements that made GW1 PvP so memorable and implement those here now: these include a diversity of game modes (no more conquest variants please), recognition of excellence, the value of team builds and team roles, and global integration of lobbies for a PvP community to form that wasn’t server-segregated.

Source: Member of Eternum Pariah back in GW1 days (successful GvG guild held #1 on ladder for most of season 1, official guild of the week, and most of whom came back to play GW2 but quit after a couple months of frustration).

Hi thanks for doing this!!
I have a set of sPvP related questions, which are pasted below:

1. Is the PvP team working on any new game modes for sPvP besides the current conquest maps? Many of us are bored of this game-style, and would love to see new game modes. The Holiday events and keg-brawl show off some really new and interesting PvP game-modes. Can these be built out into formal modes? Once new modes are added, this could then be built into the tournaments such that one tournament would feature 3 rounds of different game modes (ala Hall of Heroes from GW1).

2. Has the team re-considered the idea of removing Server-fragmentation from Heart of the Mists, and instead making a single unified Heart of the Mists with multiple channels for overflow? This will allow for easier grouping (certain servers have very empty Heart of the Mist lobbies) and a more robust PvP community to form.

3. Will sPvP achievements ever have some impact on the PvE/WvW aspects of our characters, perhaps by awarding karma, allowing for gear skins to transfer to PvE, etc.?This will allow sPvPers to feel like they accomplished something outside of their niche Heart of the Mists game lobby, and to get their PvE friends to come out and sPvP more.

4. In the current tPvP game mode, what exactly is being done to reduce the bunker-roamer meta that is so prominent on these maps?

Just to clarify, I don’t believe Sharp said they have only two people working on PvP… he said they have two people working on the BALANCE part of PvP. Balance is a very specific role limited to balancing skills, traits, damage and class functions, etc.

I really don’t think only two people have been able to design the new sPvP map, the PvP mini-maps for Halloween, coordinate all WvWvW activities, make bug fixes, etc.

rather than engage the community and outline steps of improvement, devs/mods are moving to cover-up mode. They’ve begun to merge all the angry and well-thought out posts regarding bad tPvP into one main post with an innocuous “GW2 PvP Feedback” subject line…

sigh.

While I admit Portal is OP (at the least, it should have some CD if you don’t put down an exit portal), here are some current counters to Portal:

1. There is an animation delay between when he goes through portal and when he fights. Punish him during that time with AOE’s, condi damage, knock-offs, etc.

2. Send a knockback bunker to his point. Mesmers don’t run stability (mantras… lol) and often like to kite/stealth in between shatters. Hence, you can push him off point, pressure him to kite off the point, and then neutralize the node.

3. When mesmer is cheating towards mid point, pressure him. He doesn’t want to engage because he wants to keep high health in case he portals back. If he runs away, good for you. If he fight, wait till he takes some hits and burns his heal, then person at his guarded point steps on the point to show him swords on his map. Mesmer will now portal at 75% health with CD on heal, and your teammate has a major advantage in the 1v1 fight.

great stats. were your numbers pulled from Tournies or Hotjoin or both?

initial poll results updated.

JonPeters.5630:

We are doing some underwater balance work as well, but it felt pointless with all the sharks anyway so we removed about half of them

My two cents is that trying to balance this is a waste of your very valuable time. Focus on regular combat balance. Leave underwater combat in Hotjoin/WvW as a casual mode, but it is going to be a big dev time sink to try and fully balance this for competitive play.

Just a simple poll to see what the community prefers. Do you prefer:

Choice (1) – tournament queues split into Paid Tournaments & Free Tournaments (the current option)

-OR-

Choice (2) – tournament queues split into 5 man Premades & Solo/Duo Queue.

Please vote (1) or (2). I will try to tabulate votes regularly. If you feel like you need to make an argument, feel free.

UPDATE:

So far the prelim results are:
Choice 1 – 2 votes.
Choice 2 – 1 vote.
OTHER – 4 votes.

It seems like a popular alternative (most of the “Other” votes) is to keep Paid Tournaments in place, but then split Free Tournaments into premade versus solo/duo Q.

My personal opinion is that this seems like this might fragment the player base too much, if you’re going to do a premade/solo split, you need to do it for all tournaments.

Splitting up the tournaments into Paid versus Free is a terrible division… it should be Solo (or duo) versus Premade groups. I’m pretty much done with sPvP until this happens, as it’s not a lot of fun being on either side of the Solo versus Premade stomp.

Thank you for some communication. However, I still want nothing to do with this cesspool of a map… trying to balance underwater PvP is a joke and the cannon is more trouble than its worth.

tOss.9024:

If you don’t think it causes imbalance, then you shouldn’t have to switch unless you want to. Implying people have to switch to perform well also implies imbalance. If a team runs a group of balanced builds, then they can counter a team switching between two extremes.
Build swapping can be viable, but not necessary, and once the meta game shifts I think more will realize this.
As with any competitive game, there will be trends of “Must dos.” This is just another trend if the moment imo.
I wouldn’t doubt you will see non-switching, fast moving, teams that take advantage of the down time needed to run a switch game At some time should switching become extremely common.

I think you have a misunderstanding. You can do these swaps on the fly, with little to no time lost. You can keep running, press I (or have inventory pre-opened in the corner), swap weapons, use buff skill, and swap back all without breaking the run. Same can be said for trait changing. No down time.

That being said, as anyone whose been plunked by a ranged weapon while their swapped weapon is equipped will tell you, there is a risk (albeit very small and rare) that you’ll get caught in in combat with the wrong weapon. But out of hundreds of games played, this has only happened to me a handful of times.

One of the best threads in this forum in a long time. Good, healthy discussion.

Back during BWE’s, I always thought weapon and utility swapping mid-match was a temporary bug that would be fixed. As an Engi/Mesmer player, I am probably as used to weapon/utility swapping for out of combat buffs as anyone, but I have to admit it’s gotten absurd and will only get worse.

Now we have engis swapping utilities for a slick shoes speed and to drop med kits, then swapping out. We have mesmers changing certain traits out of combat to be able to use skills like blink twice instantly. Doing this feels clunky and non-intuitive. I recognize that I need to do them to keep up with the rest of the players, but I hate that this is what we have to do.

All swaps should be confined to within the spawn point, and that’s it. Weapons like Guardian Staff, Mesmer Focus, and various other utility skills will have more viability now than just being out of combat swaps.

alcopaul.2156:

I get the community continuity within a server. I bet a.net wants something like anvil rock got the best pvpers and this is why they own at wvwvw as well. Or something like that. It’s a tribalistic approach which is good

Problem is, you’ll never have a server with “all the best pvpers.” I was on Anvil Rock for a while, their HoM lobby is just as dead as the rest.

I absolutely agree that a district system is needed!

I know the Anet dev’s have specifically said (based on Jonathan Sharp’s chat session a few weeks ago) they don’t want a district system because they want to promote community continuity within a server. This is actually counter-productive, and I strongly believe having a district system would in fact promote more continuity amongst PvPers.

A district system would help all dedicated PvPers (regardless of server) have places to congregate and collect. All the folks from the top teams would know to meet up in District 1 or 2 or what-not. promoting community. If you don’t get in District 1 because it’s full, you go to District 2 knowing that those people are also dedicted tPvPers. There would be an abundant and diverse pool of PvPers to draw upon when forming tournies because you can interface with all PvPers rather than just the small selection that happens to be in your server. It just makes sense.

Right now, there are four bad options for finding a PUG to fill out your team (or conversely, finding a team that needs a PUG):
1. SPAM Heart of Mists LFG in your own server. You are limited to only the PvPers in your server seeing this, which is what 5% of the total pool? I’ve even seen groups purposely go to different servers, so they can increase their pool when spamming LFG. That is absurd and counter-intuitive.
2. Use a third party LFG system – IRC #gw2ringer was created specifically for this as anyone across servers can obviously use this. I’ve snagged a couple folks and joined a couple groups using that IRC channel (some of whom are now guildies or on my friends list). Unfortunately, that channel is not well known and is fairly inactive.
3. Search your friends/guild list. This worked well in the first couple weeks, but there’s been a huge drop off of players on my friends list. I don’t know if this is indicative of general PvPers leaving, but this option has been tough going. This is also why a lot of PvPers are in 5-6 dedicated PvP guilds, so they can have a bigger pool to draw upon for groups (which is again not promoting community).
4. Just submit with an incomplete group and hope for the best. This is a crapshoot. Maybe you’ll get a good player, or maybe you’ll get a HB warrior who only knows one combo and never chats. Thankfully, the ability to change your class before the match starts make this bearable, as my group can just change classes to suit whatever the 5th guy wants to run.

The district option would absolutely be a better option from those 4 above. You get all the people that want to find a group or player in one spot, regardless of server. Over time, you’ll have regulars hanging out in specific districts, promoting community. People can find and hang out with well known players – allowing for informal or scheduled chat sessions. I would LOVE if we can get this implemented, and it is one of the biggest things I miss from GW1.