Guild Wars 2

I am just curious, perhaps someone is aware of some trends in the matchmaking system. My solo queue win ratio is positive and close to 50%, so I guess ELO system is working as intended (it always “tries” to give all players a “perfect” 50% win ratio). Sometimes I win, sometimes I loose, I am an average player with an average rating and mid-high rank. Yet on some days something very strange happens. I get those streaks. Maybe win streaks sometimes but loosing streaks are particulary painful and so I remember them better.

Today I got my “record” as I lost 12 solo queue matches in a row until I got my 1st win. According to simple probability math, the odds of loosing 12 matches in a row with properly working ELO system is 0,000244 which is 0,02% or 1 chance per 5000 attempts. I just refuse to believe that this is some sort of blind luck getting such chances. So, is there is are there any “of the chart” rules which apply to GW2 queue system? Like for example in WoW being a part of a certain faction and/or certain battlegroup can bend your win ratigs. So maybe in GW2 something funny tends to happen on weekend evenings or other things like that? In the long run the win/loose ratio balances out I guess. But I am curious is there any factor in GW2 PvP which may create those crazy awesome/lame streaks like the one mentioned?

It does look a bit fishy to me, I never had such streaks while playing LoL for example. Having same result for 5 consecutive matches in LoL blind pick would be already extreme (but chances for that are like 3% which means it can happen rarely), yet alone 12.

Bhawb.7408:

I just listed how he could do it. Its 16 stacks of bleeds with a rotation, and then 4 barbed precision procs.

You’re assuming he is completely accurate on the 5 second mark. Its a very rough estimation he made after the match, it doesn’t mean he recorded the match and then took a stopwatch and counted the seconds from the first bleed application till it hit 20 and it was 5s.

Yes, well. Perhaps it was 5 seconds, perhaps it was 6 seconds. As you said, it was my estimation, not an exact math behind this. The point is, he was able to stack 20+ bleeds on me very fast, in few seconds, and that is what made me curious and that is why I created this thread. Large stack of bleeds is not something super rare, but I believe when it is applied so fast, it is. Thanks for all the input so far btw. I’ll make some tests in the mists.

I’ll just leave this here.

Out of 20 last matches I played in soloQ I counted 16 AFK-ers and/or leavers. Sometimes in my team, sometimes in enemy team. 14 out of 20 matches were affected (in 2 cases there were two of them in single match). In case a team had AFK-er or leaver, this team always lost. I will continue to gather this statistic and will see how it will evolve over next months.

I am not really sure if I should be sad or should I rage (probably a mix of both). There is only one solution. Make the penalty for leaving/AFK harsh. Much more from what it is now. I know this goes against the casual and friendly atmosphere of the game, but there is no other option. Whip is the only language some people will understand. When you press the join queue button, you are making a commitment to play a match and to respect the time and effort of other players joining that queue. The attitude of “lol nobody cares, this is teh internets” should be purged.

Hey. Was just fighting a match in a solo queue and I met a necromancer who was somehow able to put over 20 stacks of bleeding on me within perhaps 5 seconds from engaging. He was able to do it few times during the match and I am sure it was 1v1 (at least for the part where the bleeds came in). I dont recall very well facing smth like that before. I asked him after the match but he didnt replied to my whisper. Could someone please tell what sort of build was that? Some shenanigans with scepter and some specific runes? I am just curious.

Greyt.4815:

kitten can we please get a zone tracker for the 13/13 achievement that tells us which ones we got credit for? I’ve been doing this almost nonstop for 3 days and am missing one zone and cannot figure out which one. I would like to do other stuff in the game if my needed zone isn’t up.

I dont want to sound rude or sarcastic but there is this thing known to man since a while. Its called pen and paper. You could try it out one day (digital version called notepad also works).

Rank does matter up to something like level 30 perhaps. It is the time when you get experience. Even a very skilled player who barely started to play and is now on level 5 will have a very hard time vs people with 35 who knows already how the game works. So yeah, low level is something that matters. Past that? IMO r40 and r50 are going against each other with equal chances. Skill and class balance will decide in this case, not rank.

Kwll.1468:

I’m not saying this isn’t a problem because it is (there should be 0 games starting less then 5v5) but my personal experiences is that it is less then 1 out of 10 games that start out uneven. The vast majority of the ueven matches the game starts 5v5 and if somebody leaves its on the losing side when they start getting landslided.

Leaving in the middle of the game is also an offense. I’ve seen many games where one team takes on a decent lead, then one of them decides to go AFK and the score suddenly flips. Of course leavers in the loosing team are even worse since they basically sign a death sentence for their team when they leave. And it is really so simple. Respect the time and effort of your fellow gamers. If you feel like you may need to go away soon. Dont queue into sPvP.

The only thing which could work would be some severe penalties if you AFK during a match. Like taking away some of your glory, putting a 1h queue ban incrementing with each new offense up to 24h and things like that. People will continue to dont give a kitten until they see a whip over them. Proven rule since centuries.

Another thread showing that rewards for AP was a bad idea. I didnt seen so much QQ about achievements in any game ever as in GW2 since they introduced the AP chests. To be honest, achievements in GW2 should be renamed to something else (feel free to go creative, tasks schedule or smth) as they kill the original concept of achievements in games as we knew it.

It wont help with anything. The problem is with people, not the system. Today gaming community is full of selfish little kittens who dont give a broken dime about other people time or enjoyment. They do what they want and they dont give a kitten about anything else. If it means going offline in a PvP match or trolling you into oblivion, so be it. The response is always “ololol this is teh internets, nobody cares”. Which is btw. one of the biggest fallacies I stumble upon. Why human-human relations over the Internet are somehow less important than direct ones? Becouse I cant punch them in the face when they troll me? Is language of violence the only thing that matters? I had a away from keyboard player recently in a match. After game I whispered to him “Dont queue if you dont have time to play.”. He replies with "Go cry somewhere else ### (starts with f and ends with g). If he would tell that to my face, I would take action.

Bumping this becouse its an issue. I just saw her spawning and then she was dead after 20 seconds. I clicked the closest WP just after she spawned. I have a fast PC with SSD so it loaded fast. Yet I still didnt managed to tag here becouse she just melted in seconds. This needs to be patched.

By binary I mean that they are like 0 or 1. Either they are laughably bad in what they do (ie. heartseeker spam 24/7 with full zerker gear) or they seem to be borderline overpowered (just about the only class with which when I recognize that player understands well what he is doing and is using his skills well, best thing I can do is to avoid him becouse I will never win 1v1 unless I am full bunker and outlast him long enough for my friends to arrive).

Most of thieves I see in sPvP are “bad-ish”. having 2-3 thieves in a team (while other team gets more bunkers or necros and such) more often than not will make you loose. But sometimes (its rare, I can give you that) there is this one thief who just straight out solo-wins the entire match becouse he plays cat and mouse with 3 people for ages and they still fail to kill him or chase away from an objective.

I have an impression that if I have to fight with a thief, he will either be bad and will explode in few seconds or he will be straight overpowered and will demolish me 50 times on 50 attempts. There seem to be no “in between” situations where I can say it was close/gg/etc. Its either stomp or be stomped. Hard.

So whats up with that? Higher skill ceiling? Is thief bad (most thieves are a hindrance for your team, at least in solo Q) or is thief OP (vs a better player of any other class I can at least win sometimes while a better thief will always own me becouse it feels like he always has a counter move for whatever I use and then some more).

Bovinity.8610:

Care to elaborate rather than implying that I am mentally handicapped? If was able to beat her thanks to luck, why loosing becouse of bad luck is impossible?

Because it’s not luck. Once you have the pattern down, you can beat her every single time. If I had the time and inclination, I could probably go in with my Necro and win 100% of the time just because the pattern for completing the encounter is the same each time.

The only thing that’s “luck” about what you did is that you probably just stumbled into “doing it right” one time without knowing it.

I still believe that cosmic orb spawn location is randomized (unlike rifts). Will test this tomorrow on single arena to get conclusive data.

Bovinity.8610:

And yes. It was based on luck. I won becouse I had luck and in previous tries I had not. Therefore I conclude that this encounter is luck based to some extent

No.

Care to elaborate rather than implying that I am mentally handicapped? If was able to beat her thanks to luck, why loosing becouse of bad luck is impossible?

Baladir.2736:

Even if the orbs are RNG and we are not fast enough to get out of the way of the aoe, downed skills can destroy them, so we can rez from the downed state.

I always attack orbs from downed position if they pull me into AoE but from some reason it does not always work before I die completly. Either becouse they take more than one hit from downed skill to kill or perhaps the obstructed glitch/mechanic manifests itself again. Not to mention the fact that getting downed in this fight is a serious blow to your chance of success for some professions specs (assuming you manage to rally). In particular those more squishy ones. Loosing 80% of HP bar becouse of an orb pull may put you behind and soon another KO will follow. I beat her on my zerker thief but she was damaging me with her charge attack for 7000 HP which was more than 50% of my max HP. Therefore my “strategy” for beating her was basically: “keep running around the arena while spamming DPS and waiting for that one try where I get lucky with the orbs”. And that try did come. And yes. It was based on luck. I won becouse I had luck and in previous tries I had not. Therefore I conclude that this encounter is luck based to some extent. Now working on 8-orb on my guardian. From the looks of it I will need massive luck with orbs to complete it. After several tries and doing some math I am pretty confident that all I need now is luck with orbs. Again luck.

JackBeShippin.4159:

This whole thread is rediculous.

Im going to make a slightly exagerated analogy to the real world here.

OP is a 4 year old toddler that wants to earn the same paycheck a PHD graduate has, and he wants it now, instantly, since the PHD graduate gets it somehow, he should get it too, else its no fair.
Not too forget, in this analogy, the entire world except for “the paycheck/reward/this particular achievement” is already cathered to the toddler into the extreme.

You can literally do everything except for something most people with even 1000hours+ playtime and fully geared chars cant and you complain its not fair?

What is your viewpoint of fairness then? Regardless how hard anyone “worked” on their character development/gearing/… they should only be able to achieve the same things you can else you feel like its not fair?

Op you just sound spoiled troughout the entire thread. Hope its not offensive, its not meant that way. But seriously, you needed a reality check.

Reality check is that OP might be complaining that he will not be able to level and gear a character before the event will be gone permanently. That is a valid complain. Anthony confirmed that this is not the case as QG will return in the future. That solves the issue for OP and from the design standpoint satisfies me as well.

Gumby.1708:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Queen’s Gauntlet will return, possibly as part of the activity rotation or even other events. In any case, you’ll be able to complete those achievements at a later date.

So the achievements we did are nothing special, we dont get any title or reward and could have saved our nerves ? Thanks thats very kind

What special? Time restriction (non repeatable) is an awful mechanic. You are only special becouse you were able to be at the right place at the right time. How is that special? When QG will return, people will still need to beat her, its not like they will get their achivement for nothing.

Celestina.2894:

Awe.1096:

Celestina.2894:

I agree with 1 and 2, but the orbs aren’t really random. They go off a few seconds after spawning, granted I never let them stick around long enough to go off anyways.

There are times when they spawn in a place that simply wont allow you to rach them in time before they pull you. This is what I call random. Sometimes they spawn in places which will actually save your kitten by pulling you there. Sometimes they spawn in a manner which guarantees a KO (they love to pull you straight into Shadowfall and post-pull knockback means you cant even dodge that AoE). That is what I call random. IMO they should be somehow synced with the Shadowfall attack or be ranged attackable (would still require awereness to spot them on time, target and kill).

I recall them all spawning in the same spots for me (assuming I used the same arena)

AFAIK they have set of positions they can spawn at and where they actually will is random. Unless someone can deny that with confidence. If so please do it. Orbs are mostly problem in case of Light up the Darkness achievement. In this case Phase 2 cant be really predicted very well as you must focus on getting crystals ASAP. Normal kill is much easier, I just took zerker thief and ran circles around the dome while spamming Unload at her. Its a matter of time before you get lucky enough to not get the “I kill you!” cosmic orb and win.

Celestina.2894:

I agree with 1 and 2, but the orbs aren’t really random. They go off a few seconds after spawning, granted I never let them stick around long enough to go off anyways.

There are times when they spawn in a place that simply wont allow you to rach them in time before they pull you. This is what I call random. Sometimes they spawn in places which will actually save your kitten by pulling you there. Sometimes they spawn in a manner which guarantees a KO (they love to pull you straight into Shadowfall and post-pull knockback means you cant even dodge that AoE). That is what I call random. IMO they should be somehow synced with the Shadowfall attack or be ranged attackable (would still require awereness to spot them on time, target and kill).

displacedTitan.6897:

The final boss took me around 15 tries and while I raged initially, I took my licks, learned the fight and won. I am on a necro so you dont need block/dodge spam to do it.

Oh God! 15 tries! You really had to rage a lot! I suspect your entry to be a “I am awesome” post in disguise. Hint: there are people who tried her hundreds times already and still didnt managed to win.

IMO she is mostly well designed. There are three things to consider.

1) Poor AoE circles visibility. The grate texture makes it hard sometimes and I believe this to be an oversight on devs part.

2) Camera issues becouse of the dome structure. Another oversight I believe.

3) Random nature of Cosmic orbs (other mechanics are not random and OK IMO). Perhaps that is intentional but I would not call a random factor like this a good design.

Archon.6481:

I fail to see why pvp is not valid to this argument. You seem to think that twitch is the ultimate testament to skill. So why not do what requires more twitch skill than anything else: pvp?

Becouse PvP cannot be scripted. The PvE content is a all or nothing case. You either beat a challenge or you do not. Developer will script that challenge to a desired level. At some point this level becomes hard, at some it becomes easy. Definition will vary from person to person, that is why I refered to difficulty of Liadri specifically in comparison to other solo challenges in games which are known among many people to be hard.

PvP requires twitch? For sure! But how much is enough? You need X of twitch to beat Lupicus. You need Y of twitch to beat Liadri. How much twitch you need in PvP? When does the challenge in PvP become complete? If you manage to beat Liadri, thats it, you’ve done it. You are now in the “I beat Liadri” club. Mission complete! PvP? Loosing is part of a cycle for every PvP-er. You win, you loose, you win, you loose. If you win a single PvP match, do you crown yourself a master of PvP? Beating Liadri even once seals the deal, you are now a Master of Liadri. Many people will never beat her while even the loosiest of PvP-ers will still win sometimes. PvP <> PvE.

Archon.6481:

For brevity’s sake lets call that skill you described as twitch.
[… snip …]

So be it. Lets call it twitch. So Liadri requires twitch on levels to which all that I stated in my original post still applies.

You put another example of TF2. Which is a PvP experience and really should not apply as a valid comparison. Especially playing with a spy which relies on deception and playing mind games with your human oponents. Lets just put this argument to an end. Dont compare PvE difficulty and PvP. PvP is always subjective and even best players will loose. PvE is something you can master. Or at least to a level which varies for people. Liadri will never be mastered by majority of GW2 players in the current state of the game. Practice can make you better but every person has a certain skill (or twitch as you call it) ceiling.

Also as to WoW. Overall WoW was “harder” during Vanilla and TBC but specific heroic raid encounters were not. Heroic Lich King in Wrath was just as hard as Naxxramas in Vanilla. Yet none of those required “twitch” on level which I experienced on Liadri. She is not easy. She may be easy for you. But in this case almost nothing in the entire world of video games will be hard for you. Unless, again, we use a totally different definition of hard. I explained what I mean by “hard” and “skill” few posts above. You could argue that even extreme grind can be perceived by some people as hard. It all boils down to definition. Just please stop comparing Liadri to PvP mastery in any game becouse it does not serve any purpose for the sake of this argument.

Archon.6481:

Complexity doesn’t define difficulty? Lets play chess with only pawns.

Red circles shouldn’t be difficult to see. Relying on something like that to define “difficulty” is poor design. That’s like removing the animation from eviserate or kill shot and saying that’s how you make warriors harder to fight.

Their frequency and area coverage is similar to that of lupi, who, surprise surprise, is not hard either. It’s another dodge and reaction check, just like lupi.

I am affraid you dont understand me. I said complexity does not define difficulty alone.

And how would you define “skill” in a video game? Skill and thing to which I am reffering to in case of Liadri is more “physical”. It is defined by your reflex, eye-hand coordination, ability to multitask and see several things at once, good “micro” and things like that. By this definition, beating Liadri is much harder from playing chess. A 110 year old can play chess and still be a great player becouse he has experience and knowledge. Would he get enough “skill” to challenge Liadri in GW2? I highly doubt. If you say that complexity is “hard” than I would say that EVE Online is much harder from GW2 becouse it requires a great deal of experience to be good at. But truth is, EVE Online is played at extremely slow pace and thus it demands nothing close to dexterity skill required by Liadri. That is the “skill” I am talking about.

Archon.6481:

And yes, I do think liadri was easy.

1) Don’t stand in red circles
2) Kill floating orb
3) Don’t stand next the shadowy thingies

Don’t tell this was hard, even WoW has harder and more complex mechanics than that….

Complexity does not define difficulty alone. One of your examples… red circles? OK. But what about visibility of said circles? What about their frequency of spawning and area coverage? What about the fact that they always 1-shot you? In WoW 1-shot mechanics are actually rare even on most demanding HC encounters. If they do happen, they usually have a build-up (so you must complete some task to avoid it happening) or a very significant telegraph. They are not spammed at you every few seconds during the entire fight. In WoW HC raids failure comes when your raid caves in to the pressure over the period of time. Not when they slip by half second with awereness check which happens every 2 seconds.

Archon.6481:

This is just going to turn Ito a thread of people giving opinions and you saying their opinion is wrong and yours is right.

The logic you used for dark souls can be very easily applied to liadri.

A 1v1 wih a very skilled player is harder than liadri. You can use the same strategy over and over again and always beat liadri. A player is capable of adapting in accordance with the situation at hand, liadri is not.

I think being good at TF2 or CS:GO/1.6 on a competitive level is harder than liadri for the same reasons stated above. In addition both those games have higher skill ceilings than GW2…

Difficulty is subjective.

We speak about PvE content. Surely beating a world champion in 1v1 PvP will be harder. But PvP and PvE are two entirely different beasts so comparing them is pointless.

I get it that people operate on the classic rule of “everything I can do is too easy and everything I cant do is too hard”. Same as “all who did something I cant are no-lifers and all who cant do what I did are noobs”. I get that, I am sometimes also guilty of that.

Will I complain that Liadri is too hard and must be nerfed? No. At least not yet. I’ll give it few more weeks to see. As the matter of fact I already managed to beat her on my thief and now I am trying to get the 8-orb challenge on my guardian (which for now seems to be impossible for my skill level, but who knows, maybe I will come up with something later).

I just wanted to address people who say that she is quite easy (yes, you can find such posts, look around the forums). Saying like they defeated her within 10 tries and how lots of player must be “terrible” at this game and “entitled”.

Well. For what it is worth, I believe that Liadri is the hardest “skill” challenge in any MMO released in the past decade. I played a lot of them and some on highly competetive level. People say that some heroic raid content in WoW is hard (HC Ragnaros, Sunwell, HC Lich King etc. etc.). Truth is, none of those are even close to Liadri in terms of reflex and multitasking requirements from a solo player. Big bulk of HC raiding challenge comes from the need of coordinating 10 or 25 people. Now imagine closing 25 people in 25 domes, each with his own Liadri. And they all must kill her together or a single KO will reset it for everyone. Although I dont play WoW since over a year, I had my fair share of cutting edge content, and nothing, absolutely nothing from their hardcore content was even close to Liadri in terms of how much skill it demanded from me.

Single player games? I believe for example that infamous Dark Souls is easier from Liadri. Mainly becouse it punishes mistakes but it is easier to master over time while Liadri is still a mess even on the 200th try. No area or boss in Dark Souls challenged me so much as Liadri does atm.

The only game I played and I believe it to be harder from Liadri is I Wanna Be The Boshy by Solgryn. I played it a bit for amusement and eventually I gave up. But Boshy (or Touhou Project series) is a joke indie project. A game created solely for the purpose of being as hard and sadistic as possible. Its sole purpose is to kill you 5000 times and laugh at you while doing so.

Do people beat all games? Sure they do. Every single game these days is ripped apart and dissected by speedruns posted on Youtube. Some people are extremely talented. That is their benefit and rightfully so. But I would really ask to stop alluding that Liadri is easy. If someone beat her easily, it means he is very skilled or very lucky. Either way good for him. But please, tell me what other content in MMO games in the last 10 years (or mainstream single player games) was clearly harder than this (speaking about skill here, not required grind)? Please tell me becouse I will be glad to argue with that. Nothing so far in GW2 was even close as hard as her (Halloween JP was a joke in comparison). Nothing in GW1 ever was even close in terms of difficulty as well. Liadri is a huge step-up from that. She is one of the hardest things I have ever done in video games. And I am playing games hardcore since more than 20 years. Is it nice to have such a challenging niche content in a game? I guess it is. Is it nice to call people “bad” and “horrible” becouse they cant beat her? Not by a long shot.

I believe each champion aside from the hammer guy is soloable. And perhaps some professions can also solo the hammerdin, I dont know.

I am still struggling a lot (trying 8 orb achi). What kills it for me are two things.

1) Poor red circles visibility (thats tied to camera issues).
2) Random nature of cosmic orbs. I cant count how many times I had a very nice try and suddenly I got zipped to the other side of the room, straight into 1-shot AoE. The orb even knocks you down which means you cant dodge immediately.

I tried to tune my monitor setting as much as I could, I tried different options. But no matter what I do, AoE circles vision remains to be very poor. That grate texture just kills it. And orbs? Its sometimes random. Nobody cant deny it. There are times when I can spot them spawning right away and 1 second later I realize that there is nothing I can do to avoid being downed. Will keep trying but I am already way beyond my treshold.

This thread mostly concerns hotjoins. I know that hotjoins dont matter that much. I agree with that. I also dont like them but I still play them sometimes while waiting for my queue to pop. And I am thinking lately about something that became more apparent after recent surge in Necro popularity. Does stacking minion builds is the I-win-way for hotjoins (ie. big zergs?). Honestly when I try to remember, I think that if one team has above average Necro representation (and specifically with builds with pets) it is 99% guaranteed to win in hotjoin environment where all that matters is zerg versus zerg and a zerg with 17 entities will easily beat zerg with 6 entities due to clutter, projectile blocking, targeting issues and generally lower skill cap for hotjoin players. So, is minion stacking completly OP in hotjoins or am I seeing things wrong? Its not a nerf or QQ post by no means. I agree that hotjoin balance does not matter. I am just curious on other people opinions on this.

OK. I am… surprised. Never was so clueless in a video game since a long time. I watched all the videos and read all guides here I could find. Some people make it look so easy. I came to conclusion that I dont understand something important but frankly I dont know what, perhaps someone could help?

I had 0 problems with any bosses before Liadri. I managed to do the 5 gambit achievement after few tries and tuning a build. Never had significant problem in anything in GW2 before. In fact when I think about it, after trying it around 50 times, for me Liadri seems to be the hardest game boss since a LONG time. And I had my fair share of multi and single-player stuff in the past 2 decades or so.

Phase 1 is easy to learn. In fact after some practice there is nothing to fail unless you have really bad luck. I think I can now reach P2 in 9 out of 10 tries. No problem. And then comes P2. I dont know how many times I attempted it. 40 maybe. Each time with same result. I cant take more than 25% of her HP and most of time I am dead 30sec tops after P2 starts. When I watch some movies, I see people just running around kiting her and chipping away her HP. But… omg… HOW?

I have to deal with 1-shot zone covering half of the room. Would be no problem if not the fact that I am crippled all the time. Use condition removal? OK, I did. Few seconds after, she cripples me again. Keep her at distance? Nope! She will charge me with her move which seems to have barely few seconds cooldown. On top of that the cosmic spheres will sooner or later pull me into the 1-shot field of doom. Cant even kill them becouse they spawn at the other side of the room (so I cant reach them since half room is covered already with red circles of doom) and are immune to ranged damage. Shadows are just an inconvenience, I could kite them all day long if not for the aforementioned problems. Basically, P2 is P1 + bigger death fields and Liadri being active. Bigger death fields I can deal with. But how on earth am I supposed to deal with constant cripple and the fact that I cant keep Lidari away from me (her spammable charge attack) which keeps reapplying cripple until I am dead. I tried it with engineer, warrior and gurdian. Each time same result. P2 starts, I am dead. I dont see I am making any progress with this. Perhaps there is some gimmick solution/profession to deal with the cripple? Should I level up something becouse of this lol?

Hmm. You bring an example of permanent arena teams from WoW. But didnt WoW just removed permanent teams in most recent patch? It now works like in GW2, you can queue with anyone without need of forming teams. I guess Blizzard had their reasons to make this change?

It just shows how late solo queue feature got implemented. It should be there from the start. It was not, lots of people were waiting for it. Meanwhile they played hotjoin (or did not played at all) and it shows. The amount of people who operate on the FARM GLORY principle is staggering. Match starts, 4 people going to cap close node. Situation normal. Half way through match, people zerging middle of nowhere fighting for kills. Situation normal. Hotjoin as is works like a cancer for competetive sPvP.

Introducing solo queue was a great and necessary move (albeit late). Now it is time as a form of polish to balance the rewards. People are fixated on farming their glory? Fine, let it be so. Not for me to judge what goals they have in game. But the solution is simple. Make it so that winning a match in solo queue (or team queue as well) will be the best glory/hour activity or at least equally best with some other ways. There is some organic work to be done and people must learn, they must be trained. Dont wait another year with it. Keep on with the flow and do it asap.

It must be some bug. I have a very fast computer. Before patch my “loading” times on respawn were pretty much instant. There was no loading actually. Now I need to wait like 10 seconds or so after I press the ress button.

They wont admit that but this whole temporary contant spam is their way to keep people playing. It is a rather low and dirty trick but they will keep doing that. Someone at Arena calculated that this will provide higher player retention. Player retention = more potential profit. And this means customer satisfaction becomes a secondary merit. If they can earn more despite less satisfaction, they will do it. I dont blame them that much tbh. But deep inside I hoped that Arena will be better than this. I end up dissapointed.

QQ train. I am an engi with full exotic (3 ascended) knights gear (all pieces are knights only weapon is zerker). Was standing on the point in WvW capping flag. And then something happened. Fast. I stared at the monitor (???), then checked combat log.

Steal (2500) -> C&D (6000) -> Backstab (14000) -> C&D (3000)

Dear thieves. I really really really dont want to hate you. Please show me how. Explain me the math behind this. I am sad

JustTrogdor.7892:

I miss dailies all the time and I certainly don’t feel forced to do them. Sometimes I’ll have 4 out of 5 done from normal game play and don’t bother to do the last one because I don’t feel like playing anymore that day. I don’t feel like missing out on a few laurels is going to destroy my game play. I log out come back in a few days and my characters are still there with all their stuff and I go about my business playing as usual.

Maybe I’m odd but I never feel forced to play a video game. If I start feeling that way at some point I’ll probably reevaluate what I’m doing with my expendable time.

That is not the issue. Of course if someone realizes that GW2 is taking control over his life, the conclusion of reevalution can only be one. He needs to quit playing GW2. But is this the answer? Should games be designed in a way that they are pushing some people into that reevaluation? And to regain their sanity those people must quit playing this game? By same standard you could say that cigarettes are 100% fine and the only problem is that some people are willing to smoke them. Sure, some people may support such viewpoint but I for one strongly disagree with it.

Mammoth.1975:

I don’t want glory farmers in my team zerging from point to point, getting crushed at group fights and backcapped when they avoid them. For regular players the glory gain is better in tournaments, for hotjoin farmers the glory gain is better in hotjoin. Perfect.

No it is not. For regular players glory gains will NOT be better than in hotjoins. Unless you have 100% win ratio which is unrealistic. Count the queue times and waiting times in, you will get less glory in tournaments than in hotjoin no matter how good or bad player you are.

And as to avoid glory farmers in tPvP, that is why I suggested to boost the win bonus glory. If you will just run around to farm glory, you will loose a match and cripple your glory gains. I would like that playing AND WINNING tPvP to be the best glory gain. This would encourage more objective oriented play and boost queues in solo arenas.

Target Wars 2. I dont like this aspect of sPvP in GW2. In no other MMO I had so much issues with targeting in competetive PvP. It is not debilitating (in other MMO targeting is not an issue at all) but it certainly is annoying if enemy team stacks necros, mesmers or spirit rangers. It will take you a moment to figure out what to target (and even more in case of stealth professions). A moment which will give your enemy an advantage. Having to go 1v1 vs. a pet class seems to be fine. The moment they start to stack, its getting out of control.

Romek.4201:

why care bout playerz before it even started? SoloQ will have alot playerz and i dont see the point why YOU wanna change something when theres no need.

Hotjoin is fine and when you dont like it just ignore it and dont trie to change ppls mind which playing it for fun.

What would be the downside of this? Hotjoin doesnt even have queue, it just keeps populating more servers when there is more players. If glory gain from tPvP and hotjoin would be roughly same (as opposed to now when glory gains in hotjoin are MUCH better), how would that interfere with your desire to play hotjoins (if that is the case?).

Now that the solo arena is coming I was thinking about the problem with hotjoin. Still a lot of people play hotjoin zerg games since that is the most effective glory/hour activity and a lot of people are probably still operating in the mindset that more glory = more ranks = how it is ment to be played.

Now for solo arena to be healthy and with lower queue times, we need more people trying it and sticking to it (this would also benefit team arenas in the longer perspective). But I am affraid that once people realize they dont get as much glory as in hotjoins, some go back to mindless glory zombie farm. Hotjoins not only give you more glory from killing stuff in big zergs, there is also no queue and pre-match times which overall pushes the glory gain disparity even further.

Wouldnt it be a good idea to boost the bonus glory you gain for a win in solo/team arena so that assuming the 50% win ratio, the glory per hour gain would be AT LEAST same as in case of hotjoins? This would probably require a significant boost from current 200, but why the kitten not?

There is still a lot of QQ around the community on thieves. To be honest I am also one of people who occasionally nerd rages about them. What is interesting, I dont actually think that thieves are OP. In fact I think thief is a middle of the pack class in terms of overall PvP contribution with the only aspect of the game where they are broken and probably a bit OP being WvW roaming.

Then again as I said, I keep getting thrown off balance after some encounters with thieves when I want to smash my proverbial keyboard. I think the reason of this is the fact that a thief class due to its specific can still make a winner out of a rather poor player. While in case of other professions getting any results with simple play will be much harder. Before you start sharpening your pitchforks, no I dont think or say that all or even most thieves are nabs. I encountered several skilled thieves during PvP and I acknowledged that in my in my post-fight chats with them. I can see when a thief is good and I know it. That being said, generally if a player performs rather poor, he is easily countered. Most of the times. This also applies to thieves in several cases. But due to how bursty and single-focused they sometimes are, they can still yeld results even with very minimal effort. For example I might be distracted by something for a moment, happen to have my stun breaker on cooldown or endurance depleted. What happens? BOOM! Backstab, heartseeker, heartseeker, heartseeker, shadow refuge, safestomp, win. This sort of playstyle requires very little effort and can still dominate even a very good player if you have a bit of luck. The same principle also applied to 100b warriors but in that case it was much more gimmicky and prone to failure if warrior missplaced the 100b wheres in case of the thief he can continue to spam and still end up victorious.

Thief class has some potential for a very spectacular and effective play. A bad thief player who only spams his 1,2,2,2,2 will probably not win a match. In fact he will not. He will also probably die often and be a liability for your team. Yet in the meantime he may still randomly gank some unsuspecting players (since that is what he tries to do most of time, at some point the “crits will align”). And those players may get really kittenhurt when they check the combat log and realize what the thief done to them (or rather, what he did not done). I know I do. I rage about eating a 8k HS even if we just stomped their team and won the match. This leads to hate on class which we can observe in community pretty much since the release of GW2. Meta and actual strenght of each profession will not change that. So as long as this issue prevails, I dont think that trying to prove that thief is not OP (becouse as I said, overall I dont think it is) will do any result. People will keep raging on thieves for exact reason I outlined above.

I am getting so stressed from being industry farmed by premades in sPvP on pretty much every single day. I was wondering, did someone experienced ratings levels low enough where when you queue solo, actually the majority of matches you get to play are against other PUGs? I was thinking to let my rating tank by playing wonky builds and classes I dont feel strong at (added benefit of learning) so that maybe I can fall low enough that I will not get a premade match in 2 out of 3 queues. I dont care about my rating, I just want to have some fun and balanced matches and that does not work right now. But I am not even sure if going into the rating oblivion will help somehow? Is it worth it? Someone was very low and have some experience to share?

The whole idea of “achievement rewards” was smelling bad for me since the very first day when they announced it. Reward for doing achievements should be achievements themselves and thats it. Using them as a form of currency to obtain shiny stuff undermines the whole concept. I guess I look like a whiner since I complain that Arena delivered some “free stuff” and I guess there is some truth to that. It just an opinion however and mine is that the game would be better if they would never introduced those AP chests. I also agree with OP here. To each his own I suppose.

This thread. Another proof that implementing rewards for achievement points was a dire mistake. Before that, hardly anyone gave a kitten about harder achievements. Right now there will be dozen of QQ threads about every single achievement which is harder from “Talk to Ellen Kiel”.

If Evon will loose it does not mean he will vanish. He may still be around in the living story and pull some strings. Different people have different reasons to vote for their candidates. I always try to ask myself “what my character would do?”. Sort of like RP. And in this regard voting for Evon wouldnt make any sense. So yeah, I vote for Kiel even though I agree that Evon might be more interesting. But the integrrity of my in-game character is more important for me.

Kiel is a good girl. Evon is a greedy kitten Charr. This is a computer game. Lots of people playing games like kitten characters. It quite simple.

I vote for Kiel btw. Slight RP as my main is a human who still distrust Charr after the Ascalon invasion.

Edit: Kitten pun not intended. Insert there some strong word as you see fit.

Aza.2105:

Way too hard for content that is temporary.

It might be hard if your party is not great. But try it solo, its really easy then IMO. Scaling for groups seems a bit over the top.

I am holding Jonathan on his word about the “soon” part of solo queue implementation. However, I would also like to comment on this gem:

Thedenofsin.7340:

Eventually Trion fixed this by implementing queue systems that prevented this kind of match up…. which eventually killed pre-made teams due to a lack of competition.

OK. So… what you mean is that in Rift premade teams got killed becouse they lost a constant stream of newbie PUGs to farm (served roasted)? And that was the lack of “competition”? Please tell me how stomping disorganized PUGs can be called a “competition”? If the game lacks people to form the competetive scene of skilled teams than I would say there is some underlining problem with the PvP system but this is a whole different issue from solo queues. If there are not enough organized teams to fill the team queue then Arena should think about how to bring more competetive players into the game. Matching PUGs with full premades and sending those PUGs like pigs to the slaughter is not an answer and never will be.

Confirming that this is easier to solo than in group. Did both T4 solo. Theoretically the best way to beat it is same for group and solo but since HP of all mobs scales linear (I think so) with amount of people you join with, it is much harder to quickly burst plunderers while shaking off aggro of other mobs.

As for guardian, might be a bit harder since scepter damage is a bit low. At least from what I tried it is in fact better to go full burst instead of survival. You need to stomp that plunderer before he leaves his spawn zone or alternatively when he is returning back with the loot. If you venture too deep, you will die or loose more plunderers due to stuns and overall clutter in your way.

I would suggest to lower the HP scaling of mobs in this event. It should not be 500% for full group (I am just asuming that value). Perhaps something like 375%. Coordinating burst is obviously more difficult than executing skills alone. People should not be punished for trying it in group. I am glad that this thing can be soloed since this gives us a choice and supports all the community hermits. But if anything, group method should be easier, not the other way around.