Guild Wars 2

funny same thing happened for a match that ended around the same time on foefire. In addition, both teams go stuck on the map for a while, without being able to leave the match. (we were re-directed to map on relog even). Win was counted towards other progressions but no pips

Had 4 games last night in solo q. No leavers. No ragers. No really felt unfair matchups. How absurd!

Sorry for the delayed second post. I got interrupted.
Let us look at the second point: The fights are too confusing owing to too many rezzes.

I think that that there is something here, but I do not think that it has something to do with the mere fact that players are rezzed.
Firstly, I identify the prime reason of confusion especially for somebody who casually watches a game as
a) the fast pace of the action.
b) the fact that there are no clear roles associated with the classes. (i.e. it is easier to watch a game with the holy trinity in place, because you know a monk is a healer and what he primarily does is keeping the tanks and dmg. dealers alive (he mostly does nothing else and his performance is easier to evaluate and watch because of a well defined role)

[Btw, memory might not serve me well, but even though I did not really participate in GW1 PvP I remember watching a few games and thinking: Man, these fights go on forever (not in a bad way.)
And, in terms of confusion. While the game is really fast paced, I find watching a gw2 fight in slow motion extremely awesome. More awesome than anything I have seen in games so far. I do not know how that relate to what I said above, just two thoughts that came to my mind.]

c) For an outside viewer the toons are hard to identify in terms of what class they are, owing to the continuoulsy shifting nature of the fight and the graphics of the toons.

There are probably more reasons, but I will make it short, in saying that all of these reasons are probably much more contributive to the confusion and thus confusion will not really be lessened by taking away or changing the rez mechanic.

However, I think there is a discrepancy between the stomp animation and the rez animation. Thus it is easier to see the stomp than to see a rez: The stomp animation itself is quite distinctive, the fact that somebody got stomped is indicated by a lingering pole on the battlefield, and the stomp animation ends in a clearly seeable particle effect. The fact that a player got rezzed is, however, only indicated that by the fact that he is up and running again. That is something that is more easily missed than a stomp, if for example, a viewer is checking out the map to see what else is happening, or focusing on a different aspect of the teamfight.
One solution here could be to make the fact that a player got rezzed more apparent with animation.

On a personal note though, I enjoy the playing in team fights that are going on for a long time. I usually experience this on Foefire, and the continuous back and forth builds a suspense in me that I find quite enjoyable and provides me with a real sense of accomplishment, if we finally manage to accomplish wiping the other party and cap mid. The sense of accomplishment is far greater than the sense of accomplishment of having stomped a player, to me that is just a means to an end for capping a point or whatever other goal you have in tPvP.
Also, on the rare occasions where a fight is actually really long, I feel my concentration slipping and in terms of game mastery and skill, being able to keep up such intense concentration for a long time is also a measure of skill.

cymerdown.4103:

• Downstate, like it or not, is something integral to Guild Wars 2, and something too tightly woven into the game at this point to ever be removed completely
• The existence of downstate adds a unique teamplay mechanic to pvp not seen in other games and especially rewards teams with good downstate management and communication
• There are currently too many tournament-viable res utilities to manipulate downstate which can make team fights go on too long and make them too confusing to watch

I really like your synthesis cymerdown, I would however like to take a closer look at your last point.

In essence this says that a) teamfights are often too long for enjoyment of play (i.e. there should be more or rather quicker stomps (as in stomps should come earlier in a fight), aka. blood). And the fact that people are rezzed too often makes the fight confusing.

As to the first part of this: teamfights are often too long. And even though ‘too long’ is a vague concept, I think we can say that we will all probably recognize something as too long when it actually is too long. That being said, I do not really see that teamfights are regularly too long at the moment. Be that as it may, my experiences are limited and without proper statistical data (I will take this point up below), we can only hope to come close to what is going on by taking our experiences as a base and try to make plausible claims based on what we can see. [I mean we could go and analyze mistleague videos and get some statistical data that way, but tbh I do not have the heart and time to do it. That is something that Areananet can do. They are the developers. I think that sharing statistical data with us would be an interesting thing to do though.]

Here is why I think that teamfights are generally not too long. I base this on my experiences in soloQ (around 120 games), playing with premades prior to last patch, and from what I remember looking at videos form mistleague.

To give you some background. In soloQ I have worked myself up to about 65% in the
leaderboards. I have started out badly during the first days after the patch and racked up a 22-7 loss win ratio (I think I was around the 20% bracket, if I remember well) and have been slowly crawling out of that ever since. I think where I am at currently is an adequate reflection of my skill level compared to other players.

So let us look at my experiences in the lower brackets. Rezzing was definitely not an issue there. In fact, I tried to make teammates understand the importance of rezzing in each pre-game chat, because there was not enough rezzing going on. [And if you take the rage that is going around in the lower brackets as a guide to how people react to being stomped, maybe more stomps are not really what we should go for.]
At the level where I am at in SoloQ right now I do not experience teamfights to go on for too long. In fact, I think it is safe to say that the first midfight is usually over in the first 2-3 minutes of the game (except Foefire, but here you could argue long teamfights in mid are a feature of the map.).

I cannot speak for what goes on in the higher brackets of soloQ, but we can look at teamQ where it can actually be argued that coordination is easier owing to voip software. I will limit myself to what I can see on official matches of mistleague, because I have not played in a match using voip ever since the patch and I can only say that I did not experience the teamfights to be too long.

Without doing a proper statistical analysis with clearly stated criteria for when a fight is considered to have started to when it ended, I think we can plausibly claim that (except in Foefire) the initial teamfights are not longer than around 2 minutes in general (Please bear with me, I have not looked over all the matches again, but have only rechecked a few matches. If somebody wants to go over that and do a proper count, please feel free.). So it seems that at most levels of skill teamfights are usually about 2-3 minutes long.

That would amount to at least 1 stomp (or kill of a downed player) every 37 seconds, i.e. in the case only the team that looses gets wiped. In my view that is not really a bad ratio of stomps/player kills. I think it would be interesting to see, how that would relate to the number of rezzes in said teamfight, i.e. to have a stomp/rez ratio.

[Excursion: In terms of game statistics after a game, it would be nice if Anet implemented a team and total game statistic that indicated, among other things: a a) match total of player kills, player downs, player rezzes, player rallies, player stomps, number of caps and decaps for each point, number of minutes each point was held by each team and b) for each player how many rezzes, stomps, downs etc. they completed successfully. I think that would be a great addition!]

And Noob (sorry but i could not resist shortening your name noobftw),

Thanks for reading my posts and I hope that you did not read my post as a criticism or direct attack of yours, my aim was to reply on a more general basis and take your post, as it was the newest, for doing so.

Anyways, I sincerely hope that you do not mean that playing the game literally catapults you into bouts of depression. I would advise not playing it anymore then.

Erebos.6741:

Sorry lynnhood but I wasn’t able to finish compiling my reply tonight

Thank you for reading my posts. I know they were long. And do not fret it too much, while I was looking for your reply today I understand what it means being busy: work, family, friends etc. Whenever you have time. And if for any reason you cannot post, rest assured that your prior posts have done a lot to shape my thinking on this.

Here is my question:

Would a significant increase in the population that regularly plays tPvP (no matter how or why that comes about) trigger more resources being alotted to the sPvP development team?

Eyia Hellhide.7320:

So I totally agree with your a/b/c/d/e points and will add f: temporarily ban for offensive language. Rage is rage and it’s alright sometimes but insulting people and making them feel bad in a game that is supposed to be fun should not be tolerated. That’s what I think.

I do not think central authorities that police well manneredness are the answer to the problem. Although I understand the sentiment. They are willing to distribute bad feelings so why should they not suffer a little bit as well. But if the community is strong enough and has a right compass for countering that behavior, such behavior will diminish. [I know that you can never eradicate it, but that is not the goal, the goal is to keep it manageable, so that the dominant experience is fun and gratifying for everybody in the long run.] I think making people understand that it is in their self-interest (see above) to be nice and helpful (or at least not behave like a kittenbag) is a much better approach.

Eyia,

thanks for your kind words.

Eyia Hellhide.7320:

This is what I think, because once after the next uncalled rage I shared in guild chat “Btw PvP community is very unpleasant” ALL of my guild mates answered “True, that’s why I don’t go PvP anymore”.

Your experience and example underscores something. In your case the game was strong enough for you to decide to tough it out and play anyways. I think that says something positive about the game (and you, of course).

I also think what you describe here is a sad state of affairs on general grounds because of the exemplified obvious lack of human decency that you experienced (and I am sure you are not alone in your experience). But appeals to human dignity and placing value in preserving other peoples diginity are in and off themselves oftentimes futile, especially in the more annonymized environment of the online worlds. But there is also a more self serving aspect to this which I hope to make apparent in the remainder of this post.

Eyia Hellhide.7320:

…. now don’t you think it’s much like Catch 22? PvP will improve if the community grows. The community will grow if PvP improves.

Yes, I think these two aspects are related albeit not so much in a Catch 22 manner, but rather as being interdependent:

Anet will alot resources to various aspects of the game based on participating players. In this regard the sPvP community are rather beggers. We do not have much clout or power owing to low numbers. Furthermore, I think that Anet in general would like to alot more resources to sPvP, based on the good-will they have shown the sPvP community. I think the developers really like this aspect of the game they developed. But it is also rational for the developers to not alot that many resources to sPvP, as there is not (yet) too much interest in that aspect of the game. If the number of players who play sPvP on a regular basis increases then this would give the section of developers who are for increasing sPvP resources a good argumentative basis for their case. Anet is after all responsible towards the people who have funded the development of this game.

I think that if Anet would put more resources into sPvP that would help to make the development smoother and less rocky (i.e. patches that jerk the meta around by changing imbalances in the game rather than balancing out the classes, half-baked improvements, which need to be quickfixed, developing nice incentives etc.) and that might help in keeping players playing as well as gaining new players. But there are two issues here, why I think that we as a community should not concentrate or wait on that.

Firstly, it is out of our hands and our control, so we cannot really do anything about that, other than giving constructive feedback.
Secondly, the game is already fun to play as you have indicated, so I believe that the main reason why other players are not coming in every now and then lies somewhere else. And I think the way the community comes across to newcomers has a great deal to do with that and that is something we can change. [Another reason is that after an initial spike of learning about sPvP and learning how to play it, there is a long flat stretch of wondering how to get better and not seemingly improving or knowing how to go about it. I think many players hit a wall in their learning curve and it is hard to garner the more hidden, intricate and deeper aspects of sPvP. Obviously we as a community can do something about that as well, but that is not where I wanna go here. Furthremore, things in this regard are being done already: e.g. the excellent podcast series by sittingonacouch.com.]

I also think that if more and more people are openly friendly, welcoming, and helpful and we as a community are able to tone down the ragers, insulters, and ostensive ‘pwoners’, that will go a long way to build numbers, keep numbers, and also incentivize players to stick around and try to master the more intricate aspects of the game.

Now, lachanche mentioned something that has to be taken into account, and that is the general tendency in online environments to be less well mannered than in real life. In a game that has big numbers I think players will just have to live with that. But I believe that in the case of GW2 it is possible to have an impact by being helpful and nice as the community is so small. The smaller the community the easier it is to change its culture.

And now I come to the self interest part and I hope that players realize that this course of action is in their self interest, because the more we are able to increase numbers, the more pressure we will create on Anet to alot more resources to sPvP, the more love we as a community will get from Anet, the better the game will become, the more people will come.

So we can start the process instead of waiting for Anet to do it.

In conclusion, I hope to have debunked the idea that there are essentialist arguments for or against a downed mechanic based on competitiveness, ‘true’ PvP’ or enjoyability. Any argument made for or against keeping downed state will come from a personal subjective preference on PvP and how it should play out.

That being said, this does not mean that the mechanics can be changed in order to find that sweet spot where it is equally skillful to set up a stomp as well as rez a teammate. Although I think that Anet is not too far off at the moment. Also when talking about the downed mechanic there should be a separation about the downed mechanic and the rallying mechanic they are interdependent but can be altered separately.

Personally, I think Arc has put forth some interesting ways of going about it, which I think would be fruitful to explore. Although the highest priority I think should be to make the downed states of the various classes somewhat more balanced.

That being said, and I will now seg to a completely different issue, but which ties into balancing and commiting resources to sPvP by Arenanet. Therefore it indirectly applies to this as well.
The community of sPvPers is so small that, I think, from a business standpoint it does not make sense for Arenanet to put a lot of resources into it. I honestly think that they have an ideological commitment in that they really want this to work, but they have to content with the hard facts that we are just a small number in the overall scheme of things. Considering this, I think that they have already put a lot of effort into this despite the fact that SPvP is not really monetizing their enterprise.

Now before people start saying yes, but Anet has to do this and that, and then all will be good, while we as a community do not do anything to increase the numbers from our side in order to increase (positive) pressure on Anet to actually commit more resources is working against our interests. I have posted in reply to other posts on this (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/New-player-s-opinion/first).

To stay with the enjoyment of watching and playing games, claims have been made that continuous rezzing takes away from enjoyment, implicitly because it is preferable to see or have players die rather than enjoying a long fight where the possible outcome is always kept unpredictable because the upper hand continuously shifts from one team gaining the upper hand to the other.

Here again some quotes:

Static.9841
“I’m kind of tired of killing the same person over and again in a heated group fight only to see them get raised 4-5 times before someone can actually land a stomp, though also, to be fair, kudos to the team actually bothering to help their own team mate that many times!”
KrisHQ.4719
“In PvP and WvW you should only have one downed state before getting defeated. It’s not exciting to see the same guy rally 4 times, It’s getting rather lame instead actually. The first rally/ress however is always exciting.”

Again I think this boils to the wish to play a game where killing other players should be the focus (i.e. besting other players) rather than fighting continuously over achieving goals as a team and strategizing and moving appropriately as a team for that. Note that this seems to be a question of where a game focuses on, of course, often games have a little bit of both as does GW2. It seems to be a bone of contention where the focus lies. Some people like the former and other people like the other, but there are no ‘objective’ arguments for either preference and basing claims on a narrow understanding of competition is not helpful. It obfuscates the subjectivity behind the claims made. (Also note the use of the verb “killing” for “downing a player”. This ties the comment made by static to the discussion about viewing downed state as an integral part of the fight rather than actually having achieved the goal of killing someone. The use of the verb killing provides a false idea of what getting somebody into downed state is, i.e. downing equals killing. For a counterview see above.)

Finally, there some of the posts above imply that there are instarezzes out there, where with a quick push of a button players are rezzed. Most rezzes take time and to land “Signet of Undeath”, for example, after you realize a player has been downed, not shortly before, is difficult in a fast paced game, i.e. it takes skill to land it before a stomp starts and decide not to use it if the stomp started already (i.e. skill and management of resources). Also players with rezz utilities can be interrupted or cced once a teammate goes down to prevent them from using rez utilities (adding strategy, skill, and team coordination). Quick rezzes (or so called insta rezzes) come about from a concerted effort by a team to rezz a teammate (I view rez here as opposed to rally for this argument). Players can like that or not, but there are no insta rez utilities out there.
Note:
Stomp: 2 seconds to cast
Signet of Undeath: 2 seconds to cast
Battle Standard: 2 seconds to cast
Illusion of Life: 1 1/4 seconds, have to kill an opponent (as argued by opponents of downed state too difficult).
Glyph of Renewal: 3 ½ seconds to cast
I probably forgot something, but this is just to give you an idea.

In an offspin to this, there exists the idea that making a mistake should result in death and players hide behind downed state to cover up their inadequacies when the team covers for them and rezzes them and that therefore GW2 is not really competitive.

The underlying idea here seems to be that competition is defined from a perspective of measuring individual player skill vs. individual player skill and that is the only true form of competition, because it allows an individual to shine and that is what competition should be: a platform for individuals to stand out by killing opponents. In return being killed is a measure of inadequacy. Here some quotes to that regard:
Erebos.6741
“This is down to personal opinion, but I think based on your (presumed) enjoyment of other aspects of combat, that you would also enjoy transposing your time elsewhere. e.g. say, besting more opponents ”
Calae.1738
“Mandating team play takes away from the individual; limiting the effectiveness of oneself; depriving otherwise achievable glory and satisfaction
This is ridiculously important when it comes to competition and is the exact reason why I don’t participate in sPVP.
Everyone can agree that team play is extremely important and is what wins games. When it comes to the fans and the spectators; they’re looking for super heroes. Super heroes are athletes with extraordinary abilities.
GW2 doesn’t have athletes because the game doesn’t allow them to exist.”
This comes down to what you want from PvP, but the claim that besting individual opponents is the only real aspect of competition is untenable. A case in point: all the team oriented sports where teamplay is rewarded. They are still competitive. And soccer teams like Barcelona while employing players like Messi who are superstars equally gained renown and admiration for playing an enjoyable to watch fast-paced game where the whole team moved as one in incredible ways and dominated other teams (and thus enabling Messi to shine above them). It was a pleasure to watch (they are slacking at the moment).
However, I think it is valid that people like game modes that emphasize individual besting and I agree that Gw2 currently does not focus on that (even though it still plays into it, e.g. in far point assaulter vs. defender and people who like besting should maybe opt for playing that role similar to let’s say a striker in soccer). Maybe one solution to that would be to come up with other game modes for Gw2 where this type of gameplay is focused thus diversifying sPvP rather than only going one route (either a downed mechanic or not). For the future of the discussion here I think it is helpful, if players indicate from what type of competitive philosophy they are coming from because it determines considerably where their opinions on the downed mechanic lie.
Another claim that was made in the quote above is that a game mode that promotes heros is more pleasurable to watch than a game mode that does not do that. The fallacy in the above quote seems to be that besting other player as an individual is the only way to stardom. Many team oriented sports show that this is not really the case.
The problem (for putatively emerging heroes) in GW2 rather seems to be the fast pace of the action in teamfights, where it is often not really clear to whose actions the fight can be attributed most of the merit for winning a teamfight, i.e. (to make it brief albeit skewed) the thief soccer equivalent of striker, many stars e.g. Etoo) who effectively downed many players or the guardian (soccer equivalent of midfielder (many stars: e.g. Zinedine Zidane)) who protected the thief efficiently and stomped the downed players.

Another implicit claim that is often made that being downed is a necessary and direct reflection (or consequence) of the intellectual capabilities of the downed player.

Here two quotes:

matjazmuhic.1649

“I used to argue that down state was important and needed and all that. But now I’m just starting to think that it’s a bad excuse for letting people make stupid mistakes.”

Erebos.6741

“If yes, than the core of the problem lies in the lack of player capability and/or failure in design to cater for human debility.

If no, than you got outplayed, which normally inflicts a penalty (death) to advantage the player towards winning the match, promote skillful play, and give meaning to/reward combat!

[rant]

Instead GW2 implemented down-state, which degrades the capability of the afflicted, which means the fight is biased; not appointing to skill! Or a corrupt loss due to unfair vantage set up by the downed player; also not pertaining to skill!

This demotes skillful play which in-turn degrades combat and befouls the fairness of competition."

[/rant]

The idea underlying this claim is that everything that happens to a player in the game is actually preventable by him/her and failure to do so means he is not intelligent enough. This claim is equally untenable in regard to the following:

In any fast paced competitive team oriented game there are instances where things just happen, i.e. everything that happens in a fight is not planned and under some players control. Especially in teamfights the resulting dynamics of individual player actions are not completely under player control and being downed is not in a necessary relationship of cause and effect with skill or intelligence. (Arguably the number of times being downed in the long run over several games is somewhat reflective of game awareness and positioning, but not every single case of being downed means the player is dumb or made a mistake.)

The issue with downed state comes up now and again on the forums. I wish to tackle a few issues that are connected to the idea of a downed state and cited as reason for its removal on a general basis.

One claim that comes around in various disguises is that a downed player got outplayed and deserves to die. Here a quote from Erebos (it is his signature in one of the posts above) and Erebos is probably the one person who is pushing really hard for removal of downed state (If you are new to the discussion and to see the discussion he led check the link in his signature.)

“Down-state aims to counterbalance my mistakes; punishing those that outplayed me,
and snares my capability, in fairness of vantage…”

The perspective underlying this claim is that getting the opponents health bar down to zero before he/she gets down yours down to zero equals outplaying the opponent and is a measure of your skill and this is where it should end. Anything that comes after in downed state is not a measure of skill. This is, however, a question of definition and where you draw the line, rather than a hard and fast fact. While I think it is a valid claim for somebody to say that that is what they like to play, I think it is hard to keep up the claim that everything that comes after downing is a not a measure of skill. Basically I am saying that having downed a player does not mean that you have outplayed him/her rather only once he is dead you have outplayed him/her in that you have managed your resources during the fight before you downed him in a way that you can still take some damage by him without being downed yourself, have some utilities that counter his downed skills to prevent you from stomping or dodge them (i.e. reading the downed state animations). Generally being able to finish off a player is also a reflection of your skill, your skill before downing him (managing your resources, i.e. strategizing for after downing) and your skill after downing the player. The fight is not over until its over and it takes skill to finish somebody off right to the end. The fight before and after downed state are not two separate entities but have to be taken as a whole when evaluating skill. Defining away one section of this whole as not being skillful does not do the game as it is played justice from an argumentational point of view.

There will be further posts coming.

Plus I think we do not want them to go back to hotjoin, because we need bigger numbers in sPvP to help matchmaking and create more pressure on Anet (in a positive way) to commit more resources to sPvP.

Or you could say something like this to the player after the game: "I do not think the build you are playing really works out. You can go to “intothemists” and look at a few guides. This one is my favorite (link). If you have any questions about some of the builds there please feel free to pm me in game and Ill help out as I can."

Derek,
you kind of make my point there. If you are mad at the game, why cuss out the player? In a way that is even more rude than cussing out the player because his play/game angered you.
Secondly, I do not think that people who rage tend to know what they are doing. Some do, some don’t, some do sometimes. And I state again, raging does not help anybody. But starting a conversation will. Not that rage or anger is not a valid human emotion and understandable, but it still has no value whatsoever. And in light of the small player base matchmaking will always suck, no matchmaking system will be able to match a bunch of disparate players in any a good way. I think we need to get the player base numbers up, so that the matchmaking system actually has a good number of players at any time to pair up. The minimum you as a player can do is to help other players or at least suck it in, so that players are willing to come back and learn instead of being put off.

Plus, you make it seem that helping other players out is a huge workload. Typing in a few constructive lines in chat is not work and everybody in team chat can read it and maybe learn that way as well.

Furthermore, some will accept the tip others won’t. That is just human nature. But creating a pleasant environment will go a long way in the long run.

[NUMBERS on which above post is based: According to my estimations there are currently around 3330 ranked players in soloQ. This is a very low number compared to PvE in Guild Wars 2 and other games with PvP. How do I get to this number: in two guilds I am in which are basically a list of players doing sPvP and quite numerous (AotM and eSPT) the cut of point for the highest percentile ranked player is in the low seventies => 1000 players equal 30% of ranked players => 2330 players = 70% of the players => a total of roughly 3330 ranked players.]

Eyia Hellhide.7320:

These 10 days I’m PvPing I was called a noob, kitten, loser, idiot etc for a first time in my life. If I was a bit more emotional I’d left so far. Seriously people what’s wrong with you? This is a game, relax, have fun. Your opponent in this game may happen to be your teammate next game, don’t hate them. Your aggression hurts people who don’t deserve it and if you can’t control it, I’d say it hurts people who are more decent than you.

Firstly, thanks for staying with sPvP despite the obvious hate flowing your ways for basically just starting. I do not know how many players tried out sPvP and were seriously put off by the culture of cussing and belittling other players that is apparent in many games in soloQ.

Secondly, 0thanks for pointing out that this game is fun to play! There is so much negativity here – no balance posts, complaints about rewards, complaints about game modes etc. – that one aspect that Anet did well, and which I think is the most important aspect, sometimes gets lost: This game is fun to play, despite all the issues. I do not necessarily disagree with the complaints, but often they are so despondently phrased that I wonder about the actual value they provide.

Thirdly, and this is more general and addressed to the sPvP community, the sPvP community in NA is so small that I do think that all the cussing and swearing is actually counterproductive. It will not make better players out of newcomers or people not really knowing how to play, it actually might scare away newcomers and have them descide not to come back, thus not increasing the numbers. But increasing the numbers of sPvP players is important for so many reasons:

a) MMR and matchmaking will improve.
b) Anet will take more notice of this aspect of the game (At the moment I think Anet is ideologically committed to sPvP, i.e. they really want to make it good, but they are constrained by numbers (PvE is just so much bigger as a player base) and the resources they have. They are a business after all. I am just assuming here though.)
c) The meta might develop into something more diverse. The more people play the more people try out new stuff, the more compositions and tactics we might witness.

So as a community, we should make this into a more welcoming and fun environment for everybody. To twist Kennedy: Do not think about what Anet can do for you, but what you can do for sPvP. I would say that with a reputation as a fun and welcoming section of the game it is much easier to attract new players than with a reputation of being (predominantely) a bunch of egotistical wannabe pwoners that have nothing better to do than spill hate onto the other players (Hyperbole to make a point).

Here are some things that might help and everybody can do:
a) Do not cuss out players for mistakes you think they made, rather indicate the mistake and a better course of action. And if you are on the opposing team, nothing hinders you to whisper after game to point out a few mistakes your opponents made against you and what to do to succeed the next time. I do not think that things do have to be sugarcoated but “You are stupid!” “You suck!” etc. does not help at all. "You did something stupid just now, you should have done ‘this’ instead to achieve ‘this’ " is helpful and does not attack the player at the core of his character.
b) Speak up against people who have hate to spill, defend the attacked player. Defending does not mean that you cannot point out the mistakes, but there is never a reason to cuss somebody out and the ragers should feel that their contribution to the map chat is not appreciated by the majority. And without having any evidence I believe that most sPvPers are decent folk, but who unfortunately keep quiet most of the time in map chat. We should not let a minority of ragers dominate the discourse, cause in my experience that is the case (at least in soloQ) and it reflects badly on sPvP in general.
c) Take newcomers under your wings during the game, i.e. help them out wherever and whenever you can through direction, peeling etc.
d) Indicate hotjoin as a way to learn the maps (if nothing else) before coming into tPvP.
e) Discuss and talk about strategies pregame. I do not think there is anything wrong with asking a thief: “Can you take care of the condition spammers on the ledges in midfight when you are around there?”. It is much better than spilling rage during the game on the thief, because he did not have a clue what to do in midfights.

I do not really know what class you are playing and I am too lazy to go through the post again. But here are few points in answer to your questions.
1. Unclick the autotargeting system in your options.
2. Depending on situation try these:
a) Watch out for cc of pet (e.g. wolf), it can knock you down while you stomp. Rangers can still control pets while down. If you are knocked down you will have to start stomp again with considerable delay (i.e. you have to stand up again). So you should dodge the knockdown. (I have never tried to blind a pet to avoid that but it should work.)
b) CC the pet with whatever you have (immobilize, knockback etc.) and bleed the ranger out by applying damage, e.g. while capping a point and ranger is off point too far away to stomp.
c) Use poison if you have, cause that will slow their healing. Dodge their pet cc and stomp. You should be able to get the stomp off.
d) With your teammates you can AoE the area and that should take care of the ranger and his/her pet.
3. In the achievements tab of the Hero panel (press h) there should be a drop down menu with titles that you have gained. Choose the one you want.

I have somehow come to terms with the MMR and the matchmaking at the moment, because I believe that any matchmaking would suck if it has to deal with the numbers presented by currently active players in solo sPvP.

If you are in a guild with a lot of sPvPers you can extrapolate the number of players that have played more than 10 matches from where the breakoff point of the highest percentage rank is. In two guilds I am in it is currently at roughly 70%. This means that 1000 players (Ranked 1-1000) make up roughly 30% of ranked players in solo join. Therefore there is a total of around 3330 ranked players in the NA region (I am based in NA). If you divide that over the time zones, consider the fact that some players have second accounts and that not everybody is playing everyday, I am not surprised that the matchmaking sucks. With these numbers any matchmaking system would suck (or queue people up for long amounts of time with no guarantee of a matchup).

In order to deal with this as a sPvP community I think that one way forward is to be friendly and communicative in game, i.e. discuss tactics and plays prior to match, whisper players of your team or of the opposing team (it should not matter) after matches to indicate possible misplays or bad decisions they made and what would have been a better course of action, take newbies under your wing during matches (i.e. do not let them go off alone) and generally create a very positive gaming experience. This way new players are not discouraged and are more likely to come back more often and thus slowly building the numbers that allow for proper matchmaking.

This is in difference to the culture of cussing out and name calling I have witnessed. Calling somebody stupid is not constructive and will not better the player addressed in any way. In fact if he is new he might be discouraged from coming back.

If the dominant attitude is of a communal competitive experience instead of a a pwing competitive experience, I believe that the numbers would slowly grow (despite balance issues, development issues and sPvP being somewhat secondary in GW2). I know that this is cheesy, but we as a community can take action to grow the number by being friendly and creating a reptutation for friendlyness and helpfulness. The numbers being what they are at the moment do not really allow for being careless with your fellow sPvPers.

mjharrison.3209:

Ostricheggs.3742:

What you’re asking for is a reversal of years of work on the game. The downed state works as it stands and is (almost) perfectly balanced. A sudden removal of the downed state would literally kill the game without massive changes to both classes and game type. To have such a huge overhaul when the game is so close to achieving something resembling what it should be would be incredibly stupid.

You are clearly not familiar with software engineering. It would be less than a day’s work to take downed state out, then another week to test it. Disabling features is much much faster than writing them, building assets for them, etc.

As for being close to something, the level of interest in sPV kitten till abyssmal. There are auction house streams getting more viewers.

I do not think Ostricheggs is talking about the mechanical implementation of taking out a feature such as the downed state. In any ways, this is not how I read him. He seems to be talking about the fact that the downed state is integrated into the game and its other features in an interdependent web of balanced design and game play. Taking the downed state out of the game would then need a huge game design overhaul that would take considerable time and make GW2 into another game.

I personally like the downed state, and I integrate it into both my PvP as well as my PvE play and tactics.

IGN: Nanieta Thorne
Main Profession: Elementalist
Alternate Professions: Necromancer
Account name: lynnhood.8270
Practice Availablity: Day, times, time Zone: Monday-Sunday, EST, around 8:00-12:00 pm
Current PvP rank (Not Leaderboard): 29
Level of Desire: example (Active Tournament Play, Casual Play, Leaderboard hogs): I do not really care about a mode in particular, I just want to play and play good. Since I do not care about leaderboards, probably not the latter.
NA or EU: NA

OP, Build Viablity, Team Composition, and the discussion about balancing

I am an avid reader of post about PvP and I would like to thank all those players who are much more knowledgeable about sPVP than I am for taking the time and posting here (or any other forum for that matter). I have decided to make a post now, because from a strictly ‘forum consumer’ perspective I was starting to miss a certain aspect of the game when reading posts that deal with classes being OP and balancing: team composition and more specifically build co-ordination in a team. Without combing through the posts systematically, I am under the impression that many contributions implicitly take a 1 v 1 point of view when talking about balancing. [I am not talking about comments that explicitly run an argumentation along the following template “Other classes can do this better than I and I want to be able to do it too.” I am of the opinion that those usually miss the point of team sports. It is as if a small, skinny guy wants to play a central defender in soccer and then wonders why he sucks at it (For NA readers, central defenders are usually burly and tall in order to get those headers out of the penalty area when the ball is passed in.)]

Build viablity, build co-ordination in a team and team composition
Be the tangent as it may, I think that looking at balance in terms of classes individually is a very valid approach, but I am missing a discussion of viability of certain builds in combination with other classes and builds. That is a dimension of the game that is not very often touched upon in the forums.

To give you an example:
This are the thoughts on focus by Blowi in his post on “How to Mesmer” from http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/46560-how-to-mesmer-spvp-read-info-please/

“My thoughts on Focus: The mobility this offers is great, but besides that it’s not worth running around with. The 2nd activation on focus is amazing though, you can really mess with peoples mind when you use that, combined with some time AoE damage it can leave people with very little health. However, unless they change the #5 I think it’ll stay like this for a long time.”

Granted, the post is somewhat dated, but I want to mainly illustrate a point: The post primarily takes a look at what Focus 4 can do in terms of mobility from the perspective of the Mesmer. But I have played a team once that used Focus 4 in combination with a traps ranger in order to pull the enemies (us) into the traps in a big team fight. I thought that that was very ingenious and it really messed up our team.
So here is the point, I do not see many Focus Mesmers in tPvP, and they are probably not really good for solo join or non pre-made teams, but played well in combination with a traps ranger they allow for an interesting gameplay and tactic that can only be achieved through build co-ordination, which can make some ‘underpowered’ builds viable. This is a point rarely explored in the forums. And I would love to read about team composition in terms of build co-ordination and what builds work nicely together as well. (Any links or pointers to where I can read about it would be welcome).

Balancing
This aspect also leads to balancing the game, which I feel it is still in need of, but I wonder what the balancing vision of Arenanet is, since I have never read a statement regarding this other than they do not want to balance any game section of the game (WvW, PvE, sPVP) on their own. But no clear statement in terms of what kind of balance they want to achieve for sPvP has been issued. In my view, one could balance the game so that top notch players who have explored many avenues (from a profession perspective and from a team perspective, see above) are balanced in gameplay. This does not necessarily mean that at lower skill levels all the classes and builds are equally viable, especially if teamplay is not yet mastered. One could also balance the game targeting mainly lower skill levels and balance for more forgivable play and putting less importance on building for a team tactics, and focus more on professions individually. Given the goal of always keeping WvW, PvE, and sPvP on equal footing, I intuitively think that achieving both at the same time will be really hard and I have a feeling that Arenanet implicitly aims for the second option at the moment. This is just an intuition, however, and not based on any real data. But aside from what Arenanet thinks about this, I also feel the discussion about balancing rarely explores tPvP from a pre-made team perspective in which builds are specifically co-ordinated, instead of the players functioning as their own autonomous units (i.e. balancing from a profession perspective). I think the discussion on balancing would benefit from comments aimed at build co-ordination in a team as well.

Enzo Kensei.9850:

I think we all see the necro as a condition/ minion master guy, not some rampage guy that destroys everything in its path. Necromancer in Gw2 would be cool to have more related weapon skills that involve summoning minions to attack the target and spamming conditions while maintain the high hp pool. Think as 3 skills in the 5 of the weapon skills involve sending minions to attack the target and then disappeard, while the other 2 skill could be the same as we have, the condition dmg..i think that woul be better than the current minions that we have…
I think it would be an awesome update on the necro, what do you guys think?

I think you are onto something here Enzo. Although I would find it a little limiting to only have Minions as temporary spells. Necromancer as a Minion Master would feel bland to me. I would enjoy a Necromancer who has more active control over his Minions than he has now, i.e. actively send them out to attack a target. I currently accomplish that with Staff 1, but that only works neatly, if I place myself right and am the only one in the fight. I loose all control over Minions in more massive combat, because placing and using skills to indirectly control Minions is out of the question. I think one way to deal with this could be creating a set of F2-4 skills that will allow sending Minions to attack a certain target on top of their AI.

Hey Ari,

I have the same problem. It happens most often to me, when I keep the right mouse button clicked to change the camera perspective. This is most annoying during a fight, and I sometimes die because of this. GW2 is the only game where this happens and I sent an in-game ticket to GW2 during Beta. Unfortunately, I have not found a solution yet and your post is the first I have heard about this problem plaguing somebody else. This gives me reason to believe that this is not a result of some weird configuration of my display options that I am unaware of, but could be something of a more general problem. Since it happens only with GW2, I believe it has to do something with the how the client runs and is currently outside of my control. If I find a solution or hear something. I will repost here.