Showing Posts For evilinc.7023:
Guesting is a stealth PvP update because now everyone can guest over to Anvil Rock.
How does the development team prioritize changes to the game? Do you prefer to create new content (such as new zones, new dungeons, etc) or to further iterate on old content that might not be working the way you want it to?
A team vs team game mode seems silly unless there’s some sort of official ladder or rating or otherwise a real reward attached to it. Custom servers will make it obsolete quickly as teams will have their own servers for scrims.
If you want a bandaid fix to increase the amount of high level play, decrease the amount of tickets you need to play paids so it does not take too long for teams on a losing streak to play.
Don’t waste your (very limited) time on a new feature that will quickly become obsolete.
I think that previous posters have mentioned very important ideas that should be recognized. Here are some quick things that in my opinion, could help to solve some of the issues we have currently.
1) Paid Tournaments
I think that there is nothing structurally wrong with the tournament system, but changes must be made to refine it if there are issues of which there are plenty. It can also survive alongside a rating-style serious competition mode, as tournaments are more casual.
Premade teams, with their superior organization will most certainly defeat pick-up teams. Paid tournaments are supposed to be the go-to place for premade teams, but they are not serving this purpose at the moment. This causes premade teams to leak into the free tournament system, ruining it for players who want to solo queue and ultimately making competition more difficult. A quick and easy change to promote teams into doing more paid tournaments would be to reduce the tickets required to enter, while reducing the amount of ticket and gem rewards that you receive to reduce the cost of entry. This allows teams that are not good to be “relegated” to doing free tournaments for only a round or two before they can get back to the real competition, or only have to farm tickets for a day or two to be able to do paid tournaments for a week.
2) Quickjoin vs Tournament
I think that quickjoin (8v8 mostly) and tournament modes require different strategy which is detrimental to success. People play quickjoin to farm rep or to test builds, so things like point strategy (eg: very little new players do not know that it only takes one person to cap a point and any additional players do not speed up the capture) are completely thrown out the window in favour of joining a zerg to farm points. This makes it difficult for new players to compete at a higher level in tournaments as they pick up bad habits from quickjoin.
The addition of 5v5 quickjoin games was a very smart decision. However, with less players it makes the loss of one or two players very important, and if there is no buffer of players ready to jump in at a moment’s notice, the loss of the extra person at key moments makes the game mode frustrating.
3) Meeting other like-minded players
The lack of meaningful cross-server ingame communication makes it difficult for a true community to be constructed, as there is no easy in-game way to be connected to the entire community pvp players on different servers ingame. It’s rather difficult to form premade teams if you are not on specific, high-PvP population servers, can find a good (or large) cross-server guild, or are lucky using out-of-game methods.
In order for a proper community to be formed, the PvP lobby should have districts of cross-server players, rather than the current system of grouping players by the server they are on. This allows for servers that don’t have quite an active sPvP base to connect with the community. I remember in the early days of GW2, there was enough population in my server (Maguuma) that this wasn’t quite a big issue, as there were teams forming left and right. However, it is now barren in non-US time and in US prime time, there are no groups advertising for a group and there are not enough people looking for one.
This is already implemented with overflow servers and shouldn’t take much development time to get up and running for real.
Overall, the fundamentals of the sPvP system are good, however the sPvP team needs to iterate and make constant changes in order for the existing system to be fun. New features like custom servers, new maps, and observation mode are grand, but what needs to be changed the most is what is currently broken.
The sPvP team needs to communicate better with the community, no matter how much “rage” will result of it on the forums. The bottom line is, actions speak louder than words. We hear you loud and clear.
No each class does not have a “bring the class” benefit. None of those things are “bring the class” skills because none of them allow one single class to accomplish a specific task when no other class can come close.
This whole argument fell into the water where pointed out how a thief can repair the treb in a similar time frame as a mesmer.
Yeah sure it is easy to just say uh huh huh lawl durrr it takes a thief at least twentyy!!1 seconds longer to do that but that is all you have ..nothing really.
As per your example
A mesmer does not have to walk all the way up to the treb to place the first portal it can place it at the baseok
By the time a mesmer even reaches that spot a thief is just one corner away of picking up the kit , teleport skill and all , and no CD’s and fast ini regen and a 25% passive speed boost.
By the time the mesmer even arives the thief is already able to look up at the treb.
When the meser finally goes through his potal he still has to walk around (unless you want to place the portal in the middle of the entry point at the trebs base for everyone to see) and up around to the treb.
I have a thief , i have a mesmer and 4 other toons.
My bet is on the thief actually arriving there faster but lets humor you and say it actually arives 3 seconds later,it makes the mes not the unique “bring the class” class for treb repairs.
So again no, a mesmer is not unique in this role.
That will be all ,lol.
It’s not all about speed.
A thief has to make the run back with their location being announced, without weapon skills, and can be jumped as they run back to their treb. A competent team could discover which route you are taking back to the treb and have a roamer intercept you mid way through before you reach it.
A mesmer can just portal back the second they pick up the kit and be vulnerable (no weapon skills, location known map wide) for a much shorter amount of time. It is difficult to intercept a mesmer who portals back unless you stay on them at all times while they make the run there, or you camp their exit and can stunlock/push them away from the trebuchet, forcing the opposing team to dedicate a player to stop you.
A mesmer skips most of the difficult part of running back the repair kit, any other character has to run back and forth. Some characters can teleport back to a certain extent to mask their location, but not as effectively or at such a large distance as a Mesmer can.
I wouldn’t necessarily blame the engine for GW2’s struggling PvP community. GW2 has good character balance, even though some would say there are issues with certain classes and skills, and mechanics in general are an improvement to GW1. Builds are kind of cookie cutter in 8v8 in my experience, but at least every other character or group you face isn’t IWAY.
What made GW1 so great was the fact that there was so much variety in what you could do, in terms of team builds, maps, game modes, etc. If you were bored of GvG, you could go stomp on the HoH/HA for fun, or you could test builds in RA, or you could practice 4v4 in TA and still feel as if you are doing something productive in terms of PvP development. In GW2, you have 4(3 in tournament) maps on repeat and you can either do 8v8 by yourself which serves the same purpose as RA in GW1 but with an added glory grind, or 5v5 with your friends against randoms. Rating/Rank grind helps you get through the rough spots, but when all that is left is to grind rank until new features get released, people just burn out.
There was also a way to separate the best teams (Those who could hold HoH/HA all day long, top GvG teams) from the rest. Currently, there is no way to do this. Paid tournaments will help to solve this as bad teams will just lose all their tickets, as will custom servers to allow for third-party tournaments, but Anet NEEDS to develop a rating system similar to GvG that will help to distinguish teams. Even a Hall of Heroes-style informal rating system of “dethrone the best team online” could work. But until there is a way for high level teams to face off against eachother consistently, and to be able to distinguish who the high level teams are, they will just burn out after going up against 5 man pugs and the occasional good team all day long for no meaningful reward. Gear is nice and rank is an alright way to distinguish who the better players are, but there is no easy way to tell who the better teams are, because rank and glory do not necessarily mean skill.
It’s a good start in terms of basic game mechanics and I’m glad that ANet is working on making things better, but the current sPvP/tPvP system is quite simply lacking any lasting content and no decent PvP or “e-sports” community will form until these issues are resolved. The options we have compared to GW1 at release are rather lacking. And sadly, there is no way to tell how soon these game essentials will show up, whether it will be a month or a year or longer and it is frankly disappointing to wait weeks for a update only to be told that they will be working on features that should have been included with release.