Guild Wars 2

One month later, still an unmitigated disaster.

Fix the queue bugs and allow queuing from outside of HotM to start. Then sort through the rest of the mess you made.

P.S. Won’t leagues just divide the PvP playerbase again? How is that not ridiculous and how would it promote growth? Think carefully here about the real circumstances of Gw2 PvP and its population. Stop thinking in some e-sports vacuum where everything is great and you can all be millionaires from winning some tournament.

Lopez.7369:

Speaking solely from a systems standpoint, this is the worst state PvP has been in since matches required tournament tickets. Honestly, this game is in a disastrous state right now.

But I hope the developers are enjoying their vacations. Although I’m curious about the rationale behind dropping a buggy, problem-ridden set of features before AFKing for a month. I wonder how that would work out at my place of employment.

“We only do things when they are ready” -ArenaNet.

What leaderboard?

Did I just watch a video of the ArenaNet devs working on the December PvP update?

jk nice clip

In my ideal future of GW2, HotM should be deleted, it serves no purpose except to show that people are in a lobby waiting for PvP matches or afking/being annoying in map chat. The few times I’ve tried to form pugs with randoms in HotM, they ended up logging off/afking in base (while the game was favorable or tied). The real teams are formed by meeting people in queues or in the rest of the game world.

The zone seems to have some intended design as a training area, yet it completely fails in that regard. The Chieftain, Svanir, and the Lord are all in different layouts from their in-match locations (plus there are plenty of random people around…) so you can’t effectively ‘train’ on any of these npcs aside from seeing their attacks.

The target dummies are all completely irrelevant in a real PvP match, and the profession NPCs that you can train with are all ridiculous/not relevant to what you experience in game.

Now the devs want us to spend even more time in this zone void of ambience and purpose relative to the rest of GW2, it is just mind boggling.

Harbinger.8637:

Guild Wars 2: Beyond the Point of No Return

At least they got the title right. Not expecting much, hopefully I’m wrong.

QFT. The two guys in charge of the game are going to grace us with their once-yearly appearance as they ceremoniously re-inflate the hype balloon with their hot air. Hope I’m proven wrong.

Yes. This system has improved nothing at all, but has done incredible damage to so many parts of the PvP experience. I once thought that the ‘map vote’ and ‘ready check’ were good features of this update. But now I know them to be nothing more than an annoyance that forces idle waiting, more UI clutter (that cant be moved/minimized), and more clicking/the illusion of choice in the voting.

The matchmaking is worse, the leaderboard is worse, the wait times are similar/but more boring for me (yes I know I can ‘exploit’ by leaving queue and going about my business in the rest of Gw2), there are bugs that didn’t exist before, the perfectly fine roster system has been scrapped for a less functional party entry system, I can go on and on.

People generally have more time for games during this time of year, and Gw2 PvP enthusiasm should be at its highest yet due to the WTS/ESL tournaments. And yet the game is rotting. I hope the so called “developers” will return soon and realize their folly.

I would like to add that having unranked/ranked queues just undermines the system. The population is split up and any improvements in matchmaking are diminished as the pools of available players in each is less (as both modes have the same reward as well)

To salvage this patch, I’d suggest removing unranked queue and allowing entry from outside of HotM. Or keep unranked, but give it less reward than ranked (much less). And remove hotjoin but keep custom arena.

Exactly, thank you for telling your experiences.

Just came from a solo vs premade (premade of top 100 or 200 players on old LB) in ranked. My group of solos lost 500-33. One member on the team said “sorry first time in PvP”, and it was obvious (they even thought we won at the end). And another member was “just trying to do their daily”. Almost every time I solo, I find I’m constantly fighting the top 1 or 2 premade groups queuing at the time.

Occasionally I get a good match, but so many of the games are awful. The solo vs solo games are usually decent, but the premade vs solo are almost always terrible…that applies whether you are the one soloing or the premade (unless you get a lucky pick of top solo players).

For those wondering, I’ve done about 75 games each in unranked and ranked since the update- about 150 total (entering as a variety of premades, duos, premades, etc). Queued at all different times of day except very early morning in NA. My ‘rank’ now is 399, and my queue times go from instant to 15 minutes.

In the old leaderboard (North America), I was:
Team Arena: 1305-550 (70.35% win)
Solo Arena: 1649-908 (64.49% win)

Should be patched out. This game mechanic is not apparent to new players (not reflected in any tooltips). It pushes players to either carpal tunnel syndrome or macroing to keep up, neither of which I would laud as something “skillful” that should be kept around. Furthermore it is ridiculous to watch as the shoutcasters constantly pan the camera to (insert high level dd ele) spamming lightning whip 100 times without being near any target.

Spirit watch is a fine map, some methods of running or interrupting the orb are annoying though.

Part of a development effort to prevent the rare 4v5 (guess what, there are still 4v5).

The developers have punished the entire playerbase (and, I’d say, reduced the amount of people queuing at any given time) by making us all wait in the Heart of the Mists. Queue times commonly reach 10-15 minutes for me entering solo, and then I still find people quitting or afking to make it 4v5. Or I’ll fight a premade team with a solo group of randoms, and it is no contest anyway.

They need to realize that you cannot expect to solve a user issue (afking, quitting, not putting forth effort into your match—-4v5) by programming in hard restrictions that punish the entire Guild Wars 2 PvP community and deter potential casual PvPers.

I can forgive the majority of this awful PvP ‘update’ if they will let us again queue from anywhere in Gw2.

Impatiently waiting for the developers to set this game back on the path of greatness.

As long as elementalists can be viably played at the top level (ideally with multiple builds), I don’t care what the amulet is. Same for all professions.

Are there free refills of popcorn for this thread? Extra salt please.

Just had a match of all solos vs. all solos (as far as I could tell anyway) in ranked.

Final score: 500-499.

A really fun match. Reminded me of my Solo Arena days. Such a good thing we got rid of Solo Arena, right? eyeroll

Another day of “Leave Queue” button not working, and soloing (often 5 solos) into 5 man premades.

All I want for Christmas is for pre-December PvP back…All of it. The quality of Gw2 PvP has degraded so significantly since then that it just sickens me.

The ONLY people who seem to be happy are:

A) People who didn’t really PvP before and don’t know any better.
B) People who couldn’t achieve a certain rank before, and now can in the new “leaderboard” (congrats, clearly this means you’re improving!!!)
C) Mediocre players who are farming solos all day with their premade and finally feel like they are the best.

Acandis.3250:

Eh, the biggest issue right now is that the new queue system does nothing to support teams with solid mayhmaking whatsoever. Making it extremely hard for good teams to get better and bad teams to get good…

It’s been fun watching ANet slowly dig their own grave and this last patch has been one of the surest first nails on its coffin.

There needs to be a serious change in management for this game to crawl out of this one.

^^

Yeah this has happened a lot of for me and my friends too. I’ve spent 10-15 mins of changing characters, maps, logging in and out (the other party members doing the same), just to attempt to queue with my party. Then sometimes 5-10 mins later you’ll get a queue pop and you won’t even be in the same match as your party.

At least with the old roster system you could generally know what the status of your queue was and which of your party members had accepted. But somehow the removal of the roster was touted as a ‘feature’?

Realistically, have the December updates done anything positive for PvP? (Major tournaments aside…which are independent of all of this)

I won’t quit, and I probably won’t even play less. I’ve been hooked on Gw1/Gw2 games and their PvP for nearly 10 years now. But I am not kidding when I say my enthusiasm drops quite a bit each time ArenaNet sabotages their game.

Agreed, this update has been full of worst possible ‘solutions’ that ended up making the game more miserable.

I could put up with a lot of the bad changes if I could just play the rest of the game while ‘waiting’. There should be no feeling of waiting in this game.

Almost every game I have while soloing is either:

A) Against a premade.
B) AFKers/clueless team mates (double/triple capping empty nodes, no rotations, etc)

Only occasionally I recognize someone I am teamed with.

Thank you again for destroying a working system and replacing it with a terrible one.

40 minutes and counting for ranked queue solo.

I have been trying to be optimistic about this update, but I can’t anymore. The quality of the matches since the update have been the worst I can recall experiencing in Gw2. There is more waiting than ever, and less competitive play than ever. The only thing amusing me is that I can play skyhammer, spirit watch or courtyard with my friends in queue now.

The old system was perfect, you only needed to work on addressing issues like 4v5, the incredibly flawed leaderboard rewarding inactivity and mediocre records, and the game’s balance.

Time to end the E-Sports honeymoon and actually consider the health of your game here. Has anyone’s PvP experience really improved since the update?

p.s. These queue times are on a weekend! People are mostly home from work and school.

I’m genuinely interested in watching this, but I and many other NA players may not be able to watch it live because the time is very difficult (though understandable because Beijing is hosting).

I have a feel for how NA and EU play (though I can’t decide who has the edge anymore), but it will be interesting to see how the Chinese teams approach the tournament now that they’ve had the game for a while.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

I thought in this regard the old system worked fine. There was a 2 minute countdown before the match started, which, it seemed to me, was enough time for everyone to get into the game.

Would it be frustrating if AFK players caused you to wait 2 minutes at a time when the match is ready only to place you back into queue?

Respectfully, I would be much less frustrated by these AFK players resetting the queue if I could be out in PvE/WvW doing something while I wait. I’d consider increasing the Match Ready accept time from 20 seconds to 1 or 2 minutes. I’ve had groupmates rage at me for resetting the queue as I went into literally the room next to me to get a drink (taking only ~30 seconds) while waiting for the queue to pop for several minutes at that time.

If necessary:

-Remove players from queue if they enter a dungeon/personal story instance (simply because these may cause a conflict of interest for the player, causing them to delay or ignore the queue altogether).
-Remove them from queue if they change zones (ideally I don’t think it would be necessary, it only takes me a few seconds to load personally).
-I think Vistas/Scouts are fast enough? Or could the popup window be given priority and appear onscreen during these?

I hope you’ll agree that it is important to find a solution here.

oneply.9586:

Celtus.8456:

Ready check button before match (though it doesn’t seem to work for all?)

this existed before the patch as well, just didn’t have the “look at me” value it does now.

Sorry, I meant the new ready-check used before the match is created to check for AFK people.

My impressions of the patch in the first day:

Good:
+Ready check button before match is created (though it doesn’t seem to work for all?)
+Map Voting
+Displaying queue-pop while tabbed out.
+End to pre-buffing with weapon sets/utilities that players did not intend to play the match with.
+Bank/TP in HoTM.

Undecided:
~Unable to swap characters
~Reinvented the PvP UI for the millionth time.
~Removal of Solo Arena.
~The matchmaking
~Leaderboards/ranking

Bad:
-Split the PvP population into more divisions (practice/unranked/ranked)
-Need to be in Heart of the Mists to queue and wait for matches
-All of the bugs…which I expect will be fixed.

P.S. To all the people who have always whined about matchmaking. The matchmaking before, as I knew it, was fine. The only problems happened from decay and how decayed players were treated like top-tier pros on the ladders and in their matchmaking.

In team arena you’d always get matched with the closest rank team that was also queuing. In Solo Arena, though the teams were a mix of varying skill levels, they were usually evenly distributed based on the current leaderboard position of all players queueing at that time.

I did not notice any similar thread, so I made my own.

Not happy about the requirement to be in HotM to queue. This doesn’t help to improve PvP growth if less enthusiastic players are forced to sit in the boring PvP lobby instead of playing PvE and WvW while they wait for match. I think many of them will simply queue less. I personally love to roam PvE and WvW while I queue, and I know by watching streams that other players do too.

Since a pre-entry ‘ready-check’ is being added, why do we need this other inhibitor? I’m sure in the old system it was occasionally a problem if someone became involved in their WvW or PvE play and decided to skip their PvP tournament queue pop. But now with this new ready-check it is no longer a factor.

Please let us queue for tournaments from anywhere.

(I would advocate adding a PvP build/gear tab to your PvP statistics page though, accessible from anywhere in the game…so that players can ensure that their PvP half is always ready)

Everything else is great thanks

Interesting stuff. But, I really disagree with having a ‘practice mode’ (hotjoin). Unranked arena will likely be casual enough, that I see no reason to have unranked arena and hotjoin. I can imagine people maybe exploring the map and afking more in ‘practice’ mode, but honestly who cares if they do it in unranked.

Further, we will still have custom arenas I assume. Let custom arenas be the new hotjoin/practice areas for those who want such a thing, and then just have unranked/ranked queues. I was under the impression that ArenaNet was opposed to splitting the player base into too many segments. Why then would we create this unnecessary split?

Hi.

In before more than half of the rewards go to:
-People with less than 100 games played.
-People with less than 50% winrate.
-People with 0 wins in the past 1 month to 1 year.
-The “I’ll wait til I decay off the leaderboard and then play 1 match to go higher in ranking” person.

My record in NA Solo Queue is currently 1560-854 (64.62% winrate). I realize the great possibility that I will not attain any reward.

Great links in OP. That is pretty much the attitude I have in Solo Queue…

There is water in that map, therefore it must be fake.

ArenaNet should make the higher level game much harder (and rewarding…unique skins,etc) now that a learning curve has been forced into the leveling experience. Take advantage of that learning curve and keep escalating it, now assuming that all players have been adequately exposed to game mechanics.

No. Some people actually like this game and realize that spewing negativity all over the public forum will probably do more harm than good.

I don’t think the patch is that bad. The main frustration I have is that they decided to prioritize resources and time to this instead of developing endgame/pvp.

Did anyone watch ToL finals? …

Heals for 6570 in spvp (pretty sure it always healed for this amount), seems to be unaffected by healing power, despite the tooltip amount varying with your healing power amounts. So, yeah it is just a really inaccurate tooltip.

Same problem on my human. I think it is related to the introduction of the miniatures section of the wardrobe. Previewing minipets seems to alter the view in the hero panel to the view we now see.

Well this particular issue has existed since before the patch. We will just have more people tagging up now. The most practical solution (which is apparently needed in all of Gw2 now) would be a toggle option on minimap to turn the display of commander tags on/off.

Agreed with Aussie.

“Being able to see your boots was too confusing for new players, so we disabled that feature altogether.”

Just kidding, same problem here. Seems to have happened after I opened the minipet section of wardrobe (previewing minipets changes the view).

Some good pieces on each set, not sure I like the overall set designs though. Regardless, it is armor that can be obtained in game and without gems so that is a positive.

I would like to see all pre-match buffing removed. Remove all boons/etc. and reset all cooldowns when the match begins. Then, if people still want to do a pre-game group buffing, it will need to be outside the gate (with the clock running) and with only their intended weapon sets.

The longer you are away from the game, the more the system treats you like the leaderboard God. Example: randoms going 8+ months without a win, return and lose a game, given r1 (despite still 0 wins in 8+ months). Meanwhile, I can go on a 15 game winstreak within the top 25 of soloQ, and still not get r1.

It is better to look at the overall career of someone on either ladder (win/loss record and winrate). But even teamQ is somewhat inaccurate as many of the top players will pug/play with partial or joke teams and lose rank. Others will only play with serious top teams which are almost certain to win in the time they are queuing. And you also need to consider people playing alts or testing. In short, it is a flawed system.

Actually, on certain maps it is possible to be hit by grenades and other attacks while standing at the spawn point (definitely on Skyhammer).

This gave me a better idea: make a sort of “SAB” that sends people to a Gw1 style world. Then we can really have good PvP.

Elona.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Lion

Sounds good. I’m skeptical, but at least ArenaNet seems to be committed to improving all three parts of the game (albeit slowly).

Good show. It was nice to hear their thoughts on the issues raised. Hopefully ArenaNet was listening and uses the feedback to fill the glass up.

It happens to me all the time. A couple of days ago I pushed back into the top 10 of SoloQ on a nice winning streak. My entire team for the next match had never been in top 1k on either ladder. We started off with a 2-cap and 50-100 point lead, but then one of my party members decided to go offline, and another one went afk. So that was GG.

The SoloQ matchmaking really isn’t to be taken seriously. Sometimes you get good matches, but more often it is just a bad mix of varying levels of skill and care. Surely that match meant much more to me being the top 10 than it did to the casual players on my team who had never been ranked. But until we get either a better matchmaking system, a greater population, or both, these problems will continue.

I am confident that it is possible, and that Anet would profit greatly by introducing the race-change service.

The common arguments seem to be:

But it interferes with the personal story! So reset the player’s story to level 1 of their new race. If we are being honest, the story is not very personal anyway.

What about the cultural armor? Just convert the player’s equipped cultural armor to a common armor skin which they have unlocked on their wardrobe (or one of the starter skins). The player would have already wardrobe-unlocked the purchased cultural skins, and would have received Emperor title credit. So there is no real investment loss and nothing to complain about.

“Well they could simply pay the same real money to unlock a new character slot/craft-level/gear the character up.” This becomes very expensive (though we haven’t established an agreeable price for a race change), and requires a lot of effort and time. Additionally the player would then need to take their new character through map completion, skill unlocks, etc. While this is often fun for many people (myself included), it is simply too much of an inconvenience for most people that they won’t bother. The player with $10 or $20 or whatever amount to spare, but without the patience to go through with this whole ordeal, would likely spend his money on a race change but not on the former process described.