Considering there will never be sPvP worthy of the name in GW2, I think a good marketing move for ANet would be to just give a GW1 PvP Access Kit (this product already exists) to everyone who owns GW2.
I’m a GW1 vet (an actual player from the early days, not one of those title grinders from the late years). And, basically, I’m glad that I can still turn to CCP, because my former god (ANet) has forsaken me.
I have no hope of seeing anything remotely interesting PvP-wise in GW2, even in 3 years time. I don’t believe them capable of pulling it off. Even if they decided to start investing some time on PvP, the great minds behind HoH and GvG are probably gone now.
I have a question here; How come Mr.Sharp was so eased on saying “we need to do a better job communicating with the players”, but he has yet to agree with the fact that having ranking/matchmaking at launch would have made the ‘state of the game’ much better than where it’s at now?
I spoke of this on Friday, but let me reiterate.
We could have had rankings, but without tournaments or a way to get teams playing against each other in an organized fashion, they would have ranked…..nothing. Just the pub play matches. That’s why we wanted to set down a framework first, then add in the custom arenas (for practicing/developing organized matches) and rankings. Having rankings without tourneys or a matchmaking system literally wouldn’t do anything…you would just have rankings based on random pub matches where teams would be anything from 1-8 players. Seems bad to me. That’s why we made that decision.
Does that make sense?
J
No, fake. Instead of making the tournaments system, you had the time to make a simple 5v5 ranked, and a solo q ranked.
You are in denial, the whole tournament system was a bad idea, and people told you that before the bwe1, only recently you realized how important was the ranked system, that’s why you changed your priorities, that’s why we don’t have the private servers, because you are now working on rankeds.
A simple elo system with a soloq, and a q for premades was much easier to code, don’t even try to sell us the story that we could’ve rankeds but with nothing else.
You wanted to be different for the sake of being different, and it backfired.
QFE.
Tourneys are based on the same maps as regular sPvP. They did not bring any additional “content”, they were purely “structure”.
Solo and Team queues would have provided structure too. Sure that’s what others games have but at least they would have worked, unlike tourneys and their even more ridiculous extension, QPs.
You wanted to be different for the sake of being different, and it backfired.
Can’t stress this enough.
GW1’s PvP was the best I ever had the chance to take part in.
GW2 is probably one of the worst, if not the worst.
Hopefully the brilliant minds behind GW1’s PvP have not left ANet and can get their respective roles back, so that they can try and replicate what they did 7 years ago within GW2.
The irony:
- in the beginning, there should have been a MM system so that better players and newbies wouldn’t have to face each other
- most people got frustrated by this and left. And now a MM system would mean never-ending queues.
I think it’s in the right place. Imagine if a casual had to win 100 tournament matches to complete it? He wouldn’t even bother trying.
3 tourney matches a day is too much?
Lol of course it is.
10 matches a month is actually quite hard to achieve for most people (given how boring sPvP currently is).
Personally, I don’t think I will bother with monthly PvP achievements.
Q: Will they do it? A: No. I don’t think so.
GW2 is a step back from GW1…
Bye bye GW2.
This.
To be honest, I’m thinking about going back to GW1. I’m excited to, even. So much more fun than this game, which didn’t even reuse one good thing from the first opus..
If the next update to sPvP after the upcoming is a cheap one (as was everything done with sPvP so far) or if they don’t start talking about something at least promising (GvG/HA port or equivalent “big” thing), I’m afraid I will simply kiss GW2 goodbye for good.
sPvP is just too kittening boring overall. One or two additional maps won’t cut it, especially with the crappy structure they built around it.
It’s not a question of solo queue, 2-man queue or whatever.
You’ll still get pawned by a group of 5 solos if they’re above your skill level.
What ANet needs to implement is an actual matchmaking system, which matches you against players of your own skill level (and not this pseudo-matchmaking based on accumulated rank, which is something which can be farmed and does not provide any indication of skill whatsoever).
They could do this at least for regular sPvP (and make them 5v5 max..).
And if they wanted they could do it for tourneys too. They’d need to have multiple tiers of tourneys., with higher tier tourneys requiring that your Elo is high enough and providing better rewards.
This way, “bad” players could still do tourneys and not get stomped all the time since they’d be matched again equivalently skilled players , and thus enjoy it a lot, even if ultimately the rewards are not on par with those from high tier tourneys.
Actually they do prioritize based on the community’s feedback.
They’re currently implementing custom servers, which was apparently asked for by a decent amount of people a while back.
Problem is it’s not really what the game needs anymore.. Now sPvP desperately need more content (new maps, new modes) to hook some players again, since the vast majority of players have since then lost interest in sPvP. More “structure” wont attract many new players.
ANet probably can’t just stop working on custom arenas now though, as they have invested effort in them. They might as well finish..
Anet said they were going to be adding a lot more stuff for spvp, they even wrote a blog about it twice. They didn’t release to many details on its final state but they are definitely working on improving things and adding more features.
They might be working on sPvP but their choices are not good. Example, they say:
We’ve seen on the forums that new players feel intimidated when fighting more experienced players, and experienced players want to meet up against each other more often when playing tournaments. By having both free and paid automated tournaments, we help those two player bases find what they want more easily.
Seriously.. paid tourneys.. that was the solution they came up with.
To answer this request from the community, what they had to implement was an actual matchmaking system and that’s it.
Now, what’s happening? Paid tourney didn’t fix anything. New players are still intimidated because experienced players play in free tourneys due to paid ones having incredibly long queues… and overall a lot of people (beginner and experienced) are not playing anymore because they got bored.
To me, custom arenas is another epic fail waiting to happen.
Pretty much everyone that complains about the pve and lack of “endgame” or stuff to do get told it’s because the endgame is about pvp, and the game is base/focused on pvp.
Who said that?
ANet said: PvE endgame is simply the same locations you’ve been using to level up. These remain challenging thanks to the downscaling feature.
GW2’s stated goal for longevity has been esport PVP.
A lot of people have been saying this on the forums but I’ve never read/heard ANet say or insinuate this ever.. Can I get a direct quote please?
EDIT: OK found one by Jon Peters..:
We consider it to be one of the primary goals of Guild Wars 2 competitive PvP to make it into an eSport […] We plan to have daily tournaments, monthly tourneys and a yearly world championship. I can’t give out tons of details on these yet, but I just wanted you guys to know that we plan to have these things and support them.
Well…. Let’s just say I don’t take Jon’s words for granted anymore…
I got burnt with the whole “Play your way” thing. I still miss the trait system from BWE1.. And I still don’t accept his reasons behind the new system. I feel so limited in my build choices now, and I mean not just in PvP, but PvE too.
If private servers come out Nov 15th, then it will have taken them 2.5 months to implement one of the many stages required of an e-Sport.
GW1 was an eSport and there were no private servers. The ability to start custom GvGs came wayyyy after its peak.
Private servers are not a “requirement”.
Just saying. I still agree with your main point, which is that they’re taking too kitten long to implement stuff.
I agree, the some posts are really brilliant, no other community has had such great ideas about the game they were playing
lol, come on. Nothing extraordinary has been suggested.
The community has only been asking ANet to use common sense and implement basic stuff that’s been done in other games and is known to work.
Maybe kill points should be awarded on down instead of actual kills. This way players would have the choice to revive or not, based on it being a tactical advantage or not (as in: better to stay down than rally twice and give 3 times the kill points to the opposite team).
In case of a 1v3 where you manage to get one down, this would even things out at least.
yeah…balanced play is so unfun.. so much better when it’s a carrot on a stick gear grind where you can roflstomp people not becuase of how good you are but because you’re unemployed or a kid in school who can spend 14 hours a day grinding out gear. There’s alraedy a game where gear = wins. go back to that.
We’re talking about skins, not stats here, dumb dumb. Of course item stats in PvP should remain what they are……. Noone is questioning that…. Read the whole thread before posting, will you? -_-
Some sort of connection between PvE and PvP, besides you char’s name and physical appearance, is definitely needed in GW2..
sPvP is not appealing and currently dying. And the fact it is sooo disconnected from the rest of the game did not help.
@Kavia, custom arenas may indeed provide a workaround for the lack of a real matchmaking system, sure. But the real problem in my opinion is not the lack of matchmaking system. It might be what drives the people who are half-serious about getting into PvP, but it’s not what drives/drove most players away.
The problem is that new players who try sPvP just get very quickly bored with it, due to the lack of maps and game modes. It’s just not that fun. This is what everyone in my guild says when I ask them, and most of them are competitive gamers.
@Vena, you make a lot of valid comments. But all I’m reading basically is that, regardless of how flawed it could have been, HA was still great fun and was very memorable.
Obviously getting GvG in GW2 would me tons better, but I would settle for something like HA, just to get something to get excited about in GW2…
I started playing GW1 five months after its release. And I was simply overwhelmed with PvP content: Random Arenas, Team Arenas, GvG, Tombs. All this accounted for probably more than 30 PvP maps total.
I really don’t see GW2 getting an equivalent amount of PvP content (and I’m talking quality, not just quantity) in a 2.5months time, given the rate at which they’re updating things. More like 2.5 years…
They’d need to revive PvP first. But well I agree there could be more options.
Just one thing:
-Tokens to trasmute PVE armor into PVP (no stats, just aesthetics)
-Tokens to trasnmute PVP into PVE and wearable outside Mists
These 2 should be free and have been implemented right from the start… (or at least the first one, considering how terribly easy it is to get gear in PvP…)
if you want to look good when you are doing pvp maby go WvWvW?
Not so easy to stand out in those zergs. Especially when a good amount of players become invisible because there are too many people at the same location.
Anyway, if only looking good was the only issue about sPvP. We’re going out of topic here…
Custom servers allows for third-party leagues to come into play, which equates to various and numerous ladders and rankings for teams to work towards. It could stimulate more interest considering there are a number of leagues waiting to start.
I have a hard time believing third-party leagues could make sPvP look sexy enough to attract crowds.. at least not with the currently lacking core features (modes, maps) and stale metagame..
it’s obvious that the minds behind making GW1 the best MMO PvP ever made are now gone, and people who don’t understand […] are now in charge.
I didn’t want to say it. I’m thought the “new” guys might not like to hear this.
I’m wondering though: where are these geniuses gone? I want to play their next game, unless they somehow get control over GW2 back..
What? Who would be stupid enough not to want new content? Well me.. and that’s because I don’t consider it to be new content. It’s kittening boring news!
ANet is working on implementing these right now.
“Custom Arenas are the current focus for my team. ", said JonathanSharp.
So now is the time to give them some input on this new “feature”.
So I create this thread for those who are not thrilled by the announcement of “Custom Arenas”.
Personally I believe Custom Arenas will be completely useless. I don’t think it remotely possible that they would revive the sPvP scene or even improve the current situation in any way. We don’t need “yet another way” to play one the same maps and the same single kittening mode: conquest.
We need at least some hint that something remotely exciting will come in the future. So far there is nothing that has been mentioned that would make we want to play sPvP again.
ANet, give us a hint of HoH, GvG or Codex Arena returning, for crying out loud! Or at least one non-conquest map!
Building systems around lacking content is not going to help much.
If you do, you get more Glory points than Rank points, so the correlation between the 2 stops.
The “Symbol” (Rabbit, Deer, Dolyak, …) seems to be based on glory points, not rank points.
Hence why you got Deer, before reaching rank 10. Happened to me too.
I played GW1 for years and its PvP was awesome.
But GW2 is just seriously lacking in sPvP features, modes and maps. It doesn’t feel much more than an afterthought right now.
Not to mention the RNG rewards which do not entice me to participate at all. Actually I find there is just too much RNG in GW2 in general (PvP and PvE). I’m getting sick of all these worthless chests.
Hopefully ANet will pick up the pieces and make something out of the current mess in sPvP.
A review of the current systems and the introduction of guild halls/GvG (or at least other PvP modes) could save the PvP scene but it has to arrive very soon…
I gave up on the clock-tower as it was a tiny bit too hard but not for the right reasons (jump difficulty). Indeed I feel like sometimes collision detection in JPs gets weird (probably amplified by client-server sync issues) and you get bumped down even though you thought you made it (the opposite being true as well).
The MK mini-dungeon though was quite nice. This idea of a mostly vertical layout needs to be reused in future dungeons or mini-dungeons!
Scoreboard
The scoreboard now shows player ranks at the end of a game. It’s another way people can see how awesome you are at sPvP.
Sorry but rank in sPvP is something that you farm… Having a very high rank does not mean you are “awesome at sPvP”.
Same with tourneys. You get tournament tokens from free tourneys. And now, in paid tourneys, you get Qualifying Points.
So again, the more you play, the more QPs you get.
Between 2 people/teams of equivalent skill. The one who plays more often will get more QPs. I don’t really see the point.
Can we get something that actually measures skill?
WTB Elo rating system…
That’s why we made that decision.