Guild Wars 2

Hugh Norfolk.2798:

I am really loving the discussion going on in this thread. This is a testament to how awesome our community is! Alright so now that we have flushed out some ideas let me give you some guide lines and let me know if we can design around it.

1. Must be able to be hot join-able
* Not easily griefed and allow players to be able to jump in and out
2. Must fit the 5 on 5 standard
3. Can fit our standard PvP match time (15 mins)
4. (Would Be Nice) Shout castable

Alright let me know how your ideas fit or change with these standards.

Points 2, 3 and 4 are obvious and should be the standard for any mode.

Point 1 should not ever exist, because balancing hot-join is an enormous effort that will fail anyway. Personally I would not waste time and resources and ANY hotjoinable mode since it will never be balanced (you may try by adding NPCs to fit the empty slots on a team and match the number of players on the other team, but those NPCs will be tricked the same way PVE bosses are, unless you mastered some awesome AI skills we are not aware of :P ).

PS: Sorry, this post came out more “aggressive” that I would like to.

Branden Gee.2150:

To quickly recap what you have all been saying, it looks like there are two significant groups that think they have the best solution to this issue.

The first being to scale all of the asuras up to be larger and scale down the charr and norn. The second is to turn everyone in the match into a human.

I think that there are a few things worth mentioning. The ‘generic humans from WvW’ are not like other character models in the game. They have a smaller animation set which would be unable to properly display all animations, which is exactly what the original problem is. The other thing to note is that with SAB the scaling did not make all races the same height.

Hopefully this provides some insight and can help drive discussion on more viable potential solutions.

Then if they are missing animations… add them!! You already have the “moves” from normal human players, there is nothing new to design.

Branden Gee.2150:

How would this idea handle things like cultural armors? Won’t turning everyone into humans cause a loss of uniqueness in the game? Every player has specific facial adjustments, body types, heights, armor colors, and weapons; what happens to these?

I will copy-paste it again:
“Game has already a way to display standard characters: the “Chracter Model Quality” setting.
It has to be “copied” and adapted to fit the SPVP matches so you can see enemies only/all/no one as normalized characters (black face, same armor, standard weapons).
This will also make it easier to see between armor and weapons particular effects (legendaries -.-).”

Branden Gee.2150:

We know about this issue. Unfortunately it is going to take some time to fix it.

When I posted it, no one answered my topic
/sadness

Bug still ongoing after the patch.

Sorry for double post, I wrote it in the PVP section.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Mesmer-clone-bugged-with-outfit/first#post4036711

If you create clones/phantasms while wearing an outfit, your clones will display the normal armor, NOT the outfit. So enemies can easily distinguish the real from clones.

Need a fix asap.

Don’t know if someone already wrote a topic, it was too urgent too check :P

Game has already a way to display standard characters: the “Chracter Model Quality” setting.
It has to be “copied” and adapted to fit the SPVP matches so you can see enemies only/all/no one as normalized characters (black face, same armor, standard weapons).
This will also make it easier to see between armor and weapons particular effects (legendaries -.-).

Branden Gee.2150:

While we’d love to give you a time and date of when we’re sending out the potato, remember that during the development process we may discover that a baked potato would be even better. So instead of getting the potato of your dreams you end up with something completely unexpected.

It often happens that a mashed potato with gravy is even better still, unfortunately gravy requires more dev time. So we end up shipping a mashed potato without gravy to meet our promise of ship time or we push back the time and date of when we are shipping again and again. You get your mashed potato with gravy but it is delivered much later than it was expected.

Worst of all that is when we realize that potatoes are way too mainstream and that yams are where it’s at now. And I think we all know how reactions seem to go when we ship yams instead of potatoes.

So in a lot of cases the best we can do is tell you that we are still in the kitchen cooking things up, we’re reading your feedback, and that we’re excited to get the meal out to you soon™.

You completely misunderstood. His was not a metaphor.
He meant “hey, we’ll give you a potato in 4 weeks” literally. So whenever there is an upcoming feature, just write “hey, we’ll give you a potato in 4 weeks” on the forum. Potato, yes. No hidden meanings.

In fact this is why I added the part of “all people in same 10 seconds windows should be forced in different matches”.

Coding it SHOULD not be that hard, since the MM is already checking rank, leaderboard rating and other stuff. They just have to add the parameter “friendlist” and “guild” and to be even more accurate, all people in same 10 seconds windows of queue joining are forced in different matches.

I have just played a solo arena match and I was against 3 players from the same guild, Whitelions.
I thought it was fixed.

Annihilation +1

I would like to see a Last Man Standing too.
And Team Tag too :O

Calm down guys.
It is working as intended and will keep working as that.
There is no way to distinguish a case of disconnect because of bad connection or a rage-quit disconnection.
If your connection is unstable, it is ISP fault, not ArenaNet.
Period.

Overall: big thumb up!
There is only one thing that I didn’t like: the possibility to use the appearance from PVE items in PVP.
The problem is that if you buy a neutral equip in PVP and re-skin it, you can only use it in PVP.
But if you re-skin something in PVE then you can use it everywhere. Which is not fair to PVP players, again.
Merging the “skin warehouse” was a fantastic idea, but keep skins separate. Otherwise it is a “forcing” to hybrid players (PVE and PVP) to get an armor in PVE and reskin that one, because it can be used everywhere and not only in PVP.

Solution: do NOT allow the “use” of PVE items in PVP.

I would really like to see the option to “change class” in HOTM without changing character.
Like a “Class choice panel” where you just press a button and BAM! your character is still the same but your class have changed.
It would help a LOT but I guess that coding this would be a nightmare since the original code was not planned to support such feature.

Community is asking for an unranked queue since the solo/team arena was added
And NO, custom arenas are NOT the solution. Not even close.
I’m just wondering why developers choosed hotjoin instead of unranked queue (like every other single game in the world does).

+1 for the topic.
The sad side of this is that point 2 was demanded since… ever, but still nothing.

It may be an extreme idea but what if you simply add the possibility to choose your stats, so all possible combinations will be available.
After that, you have to monitor the meta and if any stat combination is way too OP, it can be removed.
TL;DR: Give us everything, let us try and then nerf what op is. Let us do your job :P

Old but gold

NevirSayDie.6235:

It’s not really that simple. New players have to start somewhere, whether they’re rank 3 or rank 15. Honestly, I don’t think time spent in hotjoin is any indicator of how competent someone trying solo arena for the first time will be.

The tutorials should absolutely be re-designed. There could also be hotjoin rooms with only low-ranking players allowed, and new players could be directed there first. I don’t think it’s good to prohibit new players from doing ranked matches entirely. There are occasionally competent WvW players who come try PvP, as well as second accounts and NA/EU transfers. There could maybe be a restriction of a few ranks, but I wouldn’t want to see <r20s banned from arenas like some people have been suggesting.

I absolutely agree about tutorials. In their current status they are useless since they don’t teach anything about the real game. If a Co-op mode (players vs bots) could be implemented, it would help a lot.
But since re-designing tutorials is a way longer-to-implement solution that an entry barrier, I would prefer the barrier for now (rank 20 is too high, but R10 may be a start).

Justin ODell.9517:

1. Your MMR is on or near the default MMR. When you are near the default you are more likely to be paired with new players. It could be that your MMR dropped, or raised, just enough to put you near the peak of the curve on one day. The more you play the less your MMR deviation should fluctuate, so you should start to see less variance.

And this is exactly why there should be an entry barrier.

Justin ODell.9517:

Ludus Rex.1562:

Getting rid of noobs can’t help a good player win more, at all, ever, but tightening up the matchmaking system COULD make for more competitive (and potentially more interesting/exciting) games.

I just wanted to highlight this point. I strongly suggest people keep that in mind when discussion matchmaking.

Theoretically correct but emotionally wrong:
do you prefer to lose in a match with all people of you rank (but bad at playing) or with players of rank 1?

Personally I prefer to lose and think “my teammate were bad/opposite team was stronger” rather than “kitten , another match with rank 1 guys… why there is no entry barrier?”.

PS: Entry barrier is easy to implement and it could help A LOT to improve average player skill in solo queue. (note: I said “improve”, not “make good”; not much but better than nothing)

jimmyimo.2089:

Evan Lesh.3295:

You have only gained dishonor twice from AFK and twice from leaving in the past week. I speculate while you may have behaved like an AFK player, you did not actually get kicked by AFK detection. Could you describe how you ‘tested’ dishonor exactly?

Dishonor caps at 3.

Run around in base saying ,, AFK. " and then everyone going like LOLREPORTED.

And the whole system got trolled hard XD

Josh Davis.6015:

First off, I’d like to thank you for your efforts in broadening the cultural horizons of our day-to-day forum goers. That said, I believe that much of the raw emotion that lives within the original narrative is lost in this translation.

While your version is much more accessible for the everyday reader, I truly hope that they become captivated by the thematic undercurrents and take the time to fully understand the piece in its original form.

I hope you understood how ruined is the PvP player base now. Guess who is the culript…

Gunlaugr.2716:

Oni Link.4621:

Josh Davis.6015:

I think Skullcrack is a good place now. Ideally, all of our high impact skills should allow for counter-play via a clearly telegraphed attack animation. It’s something we’re constantly thinking about when we look at existing skills, and doubly so when we brainstorm new ones.

Agree BUT where are telegraphed skills on other classes? Don’t want to be sarcastic, but Warrior is a “telegraph” compared to other classes.

Mesmer: All greatsword abilities except for the boon removal one are quite telegraphed. In particular mirror blade and phantasmal berserker. Sword #2 is an essential and quite telegraphed ability also.

Ele: Dragon tooth, phoenix (sound), fire grab (extremely telegraphed and has an awfully narrow range), burning speed, dragon breath, ride the lightning…etc

So no, warrior is not the only class out there with telegraphed abilities ^^

It didn’t mean “the only telegraphed”, but the “most telegraphed”. Obviously all classes have some skills with a typical animation, but Warrior is full of them compared to others.

PS: I’m not against “telegraphy”, the opposite. More skills should have a recognizable animation to enable more counter-play.

Josh Davis.6015:

I think Skullcrack is a good place now. Ideally, all of our high impact skills should allow for counter-play via a clearly telegraphed attack animation. It’s something we’re constantly thinking about when we look at existing skills, and doubly so when we brainstorm new ones.

Agree BUT where are telegraphed skills on other classes? Don’t want to be sarcastic, but Warrior is a “telegraph” compared to other classes.

Justin ODell.9517:

I believe there are a few guilds that exist solely to allow you to find people to Team Arena with. I’ll mention it to Josh, maybe we can increase their exposure.

Stop ignoring what people asked for ages: entry barrier to solo/team arena.
There MUST be one.

@XII: Don’t be that general, I absolutely loved Lineage 2 for years and its open PVP is kitten fun

tichorum.2415:

Josh Davis.6015:

tichorum.2415:

HOTJOIN is getting gold? Lol this will be good.

I’m not at the office so I can’t look it up, but if I remember correctly, you get more gold for LOSING Team Arena than you’d get for WINNING a CA/hotjoin match.

No I didn’t mean “this will be good” sarcastically either.

I’m actually glad this has been put in. It will actually give some people a reason to stick to hotjoin to learn how to PvP rather than jumping into solo queue immediately (though, most new people do any they are horrible because of it).

You may be right IF and only if HJ were teaching anything to new PvPers…
I keep wondering why we don’t have a not-ranked queue for this purpose and leave HJs to… whoever likes them.

Josh Davis.6015:

tichorum.2415:

HOTJOIN is getting gold? Lol this will be good.

I’m not at the office so I can’t look it up, but if I remember correctly, you get more gold for LOSING Team Arena than you’d get for WINNING a CA/hotjoin match.

I will say it very clear and short: do NOT put gold in hotjoins. It would be a (another) bad idea. Even if it is a small amount, people will find a way to exploit it (ie. jumping from a match to another looking for near-to-end matches and get fast gold).
If you want a not-ranked gold getting method, implement not-ranked queue.

whyme.3281:

@Deimos: we will not agree about that. Why should a PvP player that has nothing to do with the PvE economy more influence (gold) in the market than a PvE player that needs those items, it makes no sence.

PvP is not endgame, it is something you can do, but not that you have to do. You can start PvP with a lvl2 champ (right after you finished the intro) and you can be as effective as someone who player 3k+h and you dont need gold to do so. While in PvE or WvW you need gold to get your gear.

PvP should not be more rewarding than PvE. You should get enough gold, so you dont feel poor after playing 2 month PvP only, but not becomming richer than someone who needs the gold to buy equipment, bufffood, blueprints, …

Maybe you are forgetting that finishers, custom arena kits and custom arena coins costs gems, a good amount of them.
And gem price keeps rising.

As I wrote in CDI topic:

Ranks will be removed imho because they are unnecessary considering what PVP is supposed to be.
There is no competitive game (afaik) out there where you are rewarded for how long you play. Rewards are based on how good you play.
Let’s take LoL as example, since it is the most played competitive game: you have an account level, from 1 to 30, which only purpose is to be an entry barrier to ranked matches. And that is exactly how it should be in GW2 imho.

Players need skill-based rewards, not farm-based ones.

Ranks will be removed imho because they are unnecessary considering what PVP is supposed to be.
There is no competitive game (afaik) out there where you are rewarded for how long you play. Rewards are based on how good you play.
Let’s take LoL as example, since it is the most played competitive game: you have an account level, from 1 to 30, which only purpose is to be an entry barrier to ranked matches. And that is exactly how it should be in GW2 imho.

Players need skill-based rewards, not farm-based ones.

I guess he wants to know when new modes will be implemented.

Make a poll:
http://strawpoll.me/

A LOT of players (me too, if I remember right) suggested in past to remove Stances as utilities and to create Warrior’s F2, F3 and F4 which basically works like standard “Stances” in games.
But this change is too huge for ANet to even consider it.
Your idea to apply stance mechanics to current utilities/Stance is nice but I would to see a true stance behaviour: it stays up until you deactivate it or activate another one.
Of course ALL stance effects should be change and a negative effect may be added to balance it.
Like a stance that decrease condition duration on you but slighty increase the raw damage you receive, just to give you the idea.

Anyway yes, Stances right now are single target Shouts. Lol.

It’s not “Warrior like” as you state, since it’s a copy-paste of Thief healing skill as other stated.

Since Warrior is called like that because he likes to fight, it should be something like (imho):
- small heal per second while in combat state (like now but quite lower, like 200 hp)
- small heal on each successful attack (like 70 hp)
- very small heal when struck (like 35 hp)

Scaling with Healing Power… don’t know really XD This was just an idea I got, but didn’t think about details yet.

Justin ODell.9517:

Everyone’s MMR was just reset. In the eyes of the matchmaker, you’re all newbies now.

And exactly that is why there must be an entry barrier.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Both good ideas! I believe we normalized player models in Super Adventure Box if I’m not mistaken, so it’s probably something we can look at applying to PvP. As far as rewards, gold would be amazing. We’re currently on making rewards in PvP amazing (“Incredible!”), and I’m sure everyone will love it They will roll out in steps, though. So when you see one patch, don’t think that it’s the only thing we have planned.

Normalized players models? O.o I’ve never seen that till now…
Imho making everyone same size is not the best solution since every race has different animations.
Adding an option to see everyone as human with default armors and weapons, that would be the best solution (of course the option settings would be “None”, “Enemies only” and “All”, same as team colors).

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

Every player with a little intelligence had already known from the first day, that Hotjoin will be the cancer of PvP.
It created a big mass of people having no idea about the concept of conquest. It created a zergfest, a brainless grind. It created skyhammer farmer (the reason why people instantly call you a skyhammer-farmer if you have a rank above 50). You took away an indicator of effort and skill with hotjoin. Rank is meaningless, due to the fact hotjoin exist.

One of the worst decisions you guys made in PvP.

Already said it in past but it’s never enough. So rather than typing it again, let’s just quote the simple truth.

fodem.2713:

Why not ?
It will avoid all matchmaking problems because matchmaking will be the same for everyone.
And leaderboard rank will not be a matter of who plays the most according to you…

And, it’s a new idea , you are the ones to decide if it is reasonable or not…

It is not reasonable and the reason of that is pretty simple, no need to explain.

Anyway, back @Devs: as often suggested, the point of a non-rated solo queue is not to have another leaderboard based on wins, no one wants another leaderboard.
We want a non-rated system similar to rated one and the difference from HJs is HUGE, since you would not be able to enter an ongoing match nor leave it before the end.

hooma.9642:

Oni Link.4621:

1) …. Nothing more, nothing less.
…

not really. u did some evaluation. necromancer has life force to eat dmg as example

You did like… the worst quote ever: taking point 1) with a sentence from point 2…

Anyway, what is your point? You are off-topic. I mentioned Aegis just as a side information, not as something to take into account, because I avoided evade frames from skills and Death Shroud too.
The only point was a list of dodging capabilities, not if they are balanced or not.

The Necromancer statement was personal as I wrote so you may argue with my opinion, not with the sense of the first post.
And seriously, you keep quoting and arguing without a goal or anything. Just arguing for the sake of arguing.

Personal note: I’m not a Necromancer user as I said above, but from experience do not every try to say to a Necro that he can compensate the lack of Vigor/evades with DS or he will insult you right on the place without thinking twice.
Currently DS is just a “skill to delay death”, not a damage reliever (common opinion which I feel correct).

1) I should write “easier” rather than “easy”. My mistake. The lack of permanent Vigor can be compensated with Aegis though.
2) I didn’t assume anything. I never talked about when or what to dodge. I just wrote the dodge rate. Nothing more, nothing less.

Personal note: dodges/evades should be toned down, not up. Of course same goes for AOEs, CCs and whatever has a poor risk/reward coefficient.
Adding dodges would lower the skill floor even more. And that would mean the final blow to SPvP.

PS: I considered only class mechanics. It is worth mentioning that popular Sigil of Energy increases the dodge rate by a noticeable amount.

Zeon.8239:

you get two dodges every 20 seconds

This is wrong. If we skip the two (three for thief) initial dodges, this is the dodge rate:

• Mesmer: permanent Vigor (Critical Infusion) = one dodge every 5 seconds
• Guardian: permanent Vigor (Vigorous Precision) = one dodge every 5 seconds
• Engineer: permanent Vigor (Speedy Kits + Invigorating Speed) = max one dodge every 5 seconds
• Elementalist: permanent Vigor (Renewing Stamina) = one dodge every 5 seconds
• Ranger = permanent “half-Vigor” (Natural Vigor) = one dodge every 6,66 seconds
• Thief = 30% return of Endurance (Feline Grace) + 53,3% Vigor uptime (Vigorous Recovery) = average max dodge every ~5,5 seconds
• Warrior = mainstream Hambow build has 16,6% Vigor uptime (Balanced Stance and Berserker Stance + Vigorous Focus) = max one dodge every ~8,58 seconds
• Necromancer = nothing to improve it = one dodge every 10 seconds

And I did not mention ANY skill that includes evade frames, which would increase the evading rate even more.
It seems very clear to me that Necromancer has a serious issue :/ (never played it though, just guessing).

Oh, yes, I know that some of this traits will be chagned on Dec 10th but I wanted to make a list of current situation.

PS: I calculate the best possible dodge rate. In some cases it easy to reach (like “vigor on crit” traits), in some is harder (like Warrior stance usage and Engineer kit swap). In harder cases I wrote “max” to point this out.

I know that a lot of people asked for that before and I know that you have recently answered with a “I was not in dev team long enough to know that” but can you please ask the dev team to set the Glicko2 value as visible? It will help a lot to analyze the situation from a player perspective and it will solve a lot of question before they get posted on forums.
If you don’t want to set it to visible, then a “league” system may be fine too (similar to LoL current league system). Personally I prefer a public Glicko rating but it is just a matter of tastes.

The only concrete problem with this feature is the Mesmer issue as stated above (and the color-based solution seems perfect to me).

Complaining about “reducing team communication skill” seems ridiculous to me:

• In Solo queue you do NOT have time to type while fighting, nor to read what other writes. Since this game has no built-in VoIP, this feature is a must.
• In Team queue you are most likely using a VoIP program to communicate so you don’t need it at all because you are speaking which provides better and faster information. Should we nerf VoIP programs to improve “team typing skill”?

PS: If you are not using a VoIP program for team queue then you are playing in a soloqueue-like environment. So what is the point of playing team queue? The biggest advantage is the higher communication between members.

hooma.9642:

yeah cause not knowing what skills do is clearly the problem… just lol

Oh kitten , mine was an ironic example. Why can’t you interpret what people writes?! And yes, I found a lot of guys that don’t even know how their class works. So what is the point explaining them match mechanics if they are smashing random buttons?
And since getting to rank 10 is pretty fast, it is very likely that someone can reach it without understanding completely what he was doing.
If you were lucky enough to don’t met those guys during the 10-matches qualification, good for you.

hooma.9642:

we not necessary need the mmr.. position or % on leaderboard would be enough to quickly calculate if the match is balanced or not.

Wrong. Two players may be distant in leaderboard but have similar MMR. This may easily happen if most of players get around the same MMR which is very likely on the long run since skill cap is low.

hooma.9642:

just lol post.. so a guy with rank < 10 has no experience.. but after they ranked up in hot join to 10 they suddenly got all the experience needed to play tourney?

i hope u understand that u just move the numbers. if they would implement your suggestion at some point ppl would complain about lvl > 10 < 20 newbis and start to cry for a higher entry…

Instead of being sarcastic you should read it for its purpose. I NEVER said that above rank 10 they know how to play but at least they know what their skills do.
It was so plain obvious that I didn’t think it was worth explaining.

kirito.4138:

Oni Link.4621:

Justin ODell.9517:

Acandis.3250:

I find it hard to believe that getting matched against really low ranks.

Well, you’re right on the curve where we stick new players.

We’ve talked about putting the default MMR to a lower number, might be something we want to do for the upcoming MMR/leaderboard reset.

Why don’t you simply put an entry rank for arenas? Rank 10 should be fine to avoid completely new SPVPers.

Because that might make Q times for r1-10 really long?

I guess you misunderstood: entry rank means that you can NOT enter rated arenas if you are not equal or above rank 10.
It won’t make queues longer but it will avoid newbies to ruin matches with their inexperience (caused also by those kitten hotjoins, but that is another topic).

Justin ODell.9517:

Acandis.3250:

I find it hard to believe that getting matched against really low ranks.

Well, you’re right on the curve where we stick new players.

We’ve talked about putting the default MMR to a lower number, might be something we want to do for the upcoming MMR/leaderboard reset.

Why don’t you simply put an entry rank for arenas? Rank 10 should be fine to avoid completely new SPVPers.