The OP has hit the nail on the head. There is good pvp game here somewhere, unfortunately here we are 6 months later and nobody knows when its going to get here.
The plan seems to have been to just put in the bare amount necessary to sell the box to potential pvpers then just string us along forever until they get something together.
It seems to have worked based on the number of sales and GOTY awards.
We have been waiting for 6 months or longer if you include beta weekends for basic competitive features. sPvP is practically dead as it is, and is unplayable due to queue times and farming or money requirements.
Anet for some reason is unable to explain which features will be in what patches and instead just keeps copying and pasting the same promised feature list month after month.
Stop apologizing for Anet.
I assume they are making a good living developing the game and they just won 500 GOTY awards. They can handle some critical forum posts from people who bought the game for spvp with the expectation that spvp would include competitive features that we see in other games.
I mean come on do you guys find this entertaining? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUB677OVIus
Nice find, marketing BS at its finest.
I assume to make that video they had to have the ability to make a custom match, and that isn’t even in the game 1.5 years later. And people wonder why Anet gets so much hate every time they copy and paste their list of promises.
Spvp draws like 150 consistent stream viewers and paid tournaments can barely even find 40 people per region to queue up.
Anet can’t even develop or give us a date on a blog post… good luck with that whole esport thing.
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From common sense and a basic understanding of the work involved. That’s a horrible analogy as everyone uses the same product and it is a mass produced mechanical device as opposed to programming based.
It’s horrifically entitled to assume that it’s easy to fix/implement features like this.
Trust me, I’m not an apologist. I hate a lot of the design desicions here. You’re just being unrealistic and demanding.
Its not unrealistic to ask for basic features like ladder and MMR that were in on day 1 in free to play games, and were in on day one in GW1 seven years ago.
If you bought this game specifically for spvp, you have pretty much been ripped off and strung along. We are 5 months in, not 5 weeks. SWTOR added rated pvp 3 months in.
I don’t expect changes to happen instantly, but it is my hope that threads and posts like this will drive Anet to push spvp development higher on their priority list since it has apparently been at the bottom based on the updates we have seen so far.
Acting like an internet white knight who needs to protect Anet from their paying customers is unrealistic if we want spvp to go anywhere.
I would like to remind everyone that programming is not as simple as you seem to make it out to be when you say “we need x!” and then are surprised when such a feature is not available within weeks. I would also like to remind everyone that people to do such jobs need to be paid and work standard and you simply can’t just dump more people onto a job to make it happen faster.
Where do these apologists keep coming from.
Spvp was released in a highly bare bones / unfinished state, yet was marketed and sold as an esport. The pvp community has been strung along for months and months with very minimal updates and vague promises that seem to change every time we hear from a dev.
If I sell you a Lexus then deliver you a 2001 civic then say you might get your Lexus in 6 months you would probably be pretty angry.
‘When its ready’ is not a valid excuse when you have charged people money and they have spent 5 months doing what amounts to free beta testing.
Multiple choice:
A) When its ready
B) Soon
C) Its our top priority
D) More on this later
E) Its in testing
F) This is being worked on
G) It will be in a blog later once translated
H) We are listening to your concerns
I) Sorry we are on holidays
J) ALL OF THE ABOVE
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At least he admitted that paid tournaments are ‘having some issues’ even though any rational person can tell they are a total disaster.
Its also very good to hear that single matches are in the mix, but again we are hearing “testing soon” and "may look into incorporating if feedback is good’ which in Anet terms means we will be waiting forever. He did say single matches would have lower costs which could help with the ticket barrier that is making the game unplayable for new teams (see Reroll’s post #2).
We are pretty much 6 months in at this point. Players have every right to feel angry about being delivered a bad product then strung along for months with vague info that has new priorities every month.
Rather than spending the next 5 months begging for scraps while Anet sits on its numerous GOTY laurels, spvpers should just stop logging in and kill the mode entirely until there are basic competitive features in place.
@Reroll
Awesome post which basically proves how unsustainable the tournament system is for retaining new teams and players. Its next to impossible for someone to try to learn the game efficiently.
Hardly anyone is willing or can even afford the time or money it takes to queue up for paids.
And Anet is always responding with the same one sentence vague answers because they are paranoid about bad PR when literally every single thread on the sPvP forum is demanding answers. You have a game that sold like 2 million copies, yet can barely find 40 people to queue up for competitive pvp in a game that was marketed as an Esport.
Stop drinking the company kool-aid already.
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There is no matchmaking. The few people who have a team just farm anyone who tries to get into tpvp so all that is left is a few die-hard hold outs begging for people to queue up in map chat.
I and others was critical of the last cast, but this one was excellent. The discussions about the tourney system / tickets / solo queue / transparency were 100% correct.
They didn’t hold back and it is very much worth the watch.
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Nice list Felivear =)
Competitive tpvp is dead as the game stands right now. Paids are unplayable due to the rarity of finding 40 players who all want to play at the same time, and the fact that newer teams are just throwing away time and money spent getting tickets. Most players have no reason to be anything more than extremely casual at this point.
Free tournies are still kind of decent, but they do not really count because its pre-mades vs pugs and again most people just see it as a casual diversion. Its not anything better than what we see in games like SWTOR, WoW, and Rift, in fact its a lot worse due to things like lack of maps, lack of stat tracking, lack of rating, lack of solo queue that is not the hot join garbage.
The OP hits all the primary points that we have been demanding for quite some time now.
I have really just come to accept that sPvP in GW2 was a side project. The primary focus of the game was innovating the theme-park pve MMO formula, the only pvp design innovation from GW1 that was retained is instant pvp.
This is why we keep seeing holiday events that last a week while for example capricorn has supposedly been in beta and untouched for 4+ months.
Anet would rather steal WoW subscribers then compete with LoL for pvp. Its probably the safer gamble for them in the long run.
1: With non-trinity gameplay downstate is necessary and I do think it adds another dynamic to pvp that is new to the genre. I will agree that the types of skills and balance can be incredibly frustrating, especially the evade skills which cannot be countered.
2: Very much agree. There are probably 10 or less viable builds that people would use if money was on the line.
3: Have to disagree strongly here. The combat engine is really the only good thing about GW2 pvp. Active dodging and self heal means eveyone has reaction defenses and you cannot just mindlessly spam skills since they will whiff when not in range.
The issue is underpowered weapons, tierd traits, few stat allocation choices (cookie cutter amulets), and the conquest map mode which forces people to play as a burst roamer or a bunker which pigeon holes everyone into the few viable builds we have and causes stagnant gameplay.
4: Dont agree here. If its not waiting for cooldowns, then its waiting for resources like mana or whatever to regen so its all the same thing. Personally I dont find on-reaction skills to add depth to a game, all they add is 30 skills to your bar that are barely used.
GW2 is about reacting to your opponent, not managing macros. I just dont see how someone could claim a game like Aion where the player presses 1-2-3 and watches the game do everything for him is better than GW2 which requires the player to use precise reactions and timing or risk wasting a CD.
Agreed, its crazy that event after event that clearly took a lot of effort to develop and market, yet only lasts for a limited amount of time, keeps coming out while spvp is shifting priorities every month and key features are continually delayed.
They still have not even looked at capricorn which was supposedly a beta map 3+ months ago.
I am beginning to just accept that spvp was really just a side project for the main focus of the game which was innovating the pve themepark formula.
Even if spvp had everything it needed, the vast majority of players in GW2 are always going to be casualcore pve players, which is exactly how GW1 was even if it was pvp focused.
The main issue right now is lack of competitive population and interest. You can’t have an esport without viewership.
There are tons of reasons why we are here, but a lot of people left simply because the game did not release with basic competitive features like private matches, a ladder and MMR.
The tournament system also sucks because it requires 40 people and 45 minutes and an entry fee, resulting in long queue times and downtime between matches which I think is part of why viewership is abysmal.
There are more fundamental issues that people have like the conquest game mode being lame, balance issues (guardian, thieves, mesmers), and lack of overall viable builds.
Promising an esport has backfired majorly for Anet because spvp at release was not even close to ready. A lot of hardcore pvpers gave the game a shot for a few months, but they are now long gone as they have better things to do then wait around for Anet, especially when all they offer are vague promises, unclear priorities, and outright deny legitimate problems like queue times and low population.
Even if they get everything they have promised in, it will be so many months down the line that nobody will care. I am sure some people may come back, but will we see an esport level community develop that far down the line? I am not gonna hold my breath.
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That’s a spoiled brat mentality and you know that. You say it should of been done in beta? Beta is what got the game flowing in the first place because it would suck it the game kept crashing every minute you try to go somewhere. That’s why beta is testing ground just to get the game flowing to get as much bugs out as possible. When the game was release to play for all that’s where the challenge starts and see how far the game can go.
Also for the part where you say players won’t come back. They will come back because one this game has no subscription and they would like to see what have come of the game from when they played it last time. For instance they took a year off so you know a lot has change and they might get hook right back into the game in no time.
No idea where these Anet apologists keep coming from.
We have already been waiting for 3 months + beta weekends (Which we paid for) and nothing significant has happened except for some balancing, and paid tournaments which are unplayable for people who don’t play 40 hours a week due to no MMR, and long queue times. PvP is barely functional at present.
They didn’t write in the sales copy that the game would have basic competitive features added a year into release. Its completely understandle that people are angry.
When you dupe your customers then ask for feedback, obviously there will be people who aern’t content with just sitting around forever while all of their friends leave and there is no real plan to get them back.
Hi guys!
After reading through the entire thread, I’d like to apologize.
We did not manage to give the community everything they wanted, we were not able to discuss at least 50% of the most important topics and I for one was “too soft” (I think I let people talk over me 1920182920292 times).
The big thing is that there were a lot of people and very little time so a lot of things had to be delayed until the next discussion, not because we wanted to, not because Chap couldn’t answer X or Y question, but because we had no other choice. We lost ~1h worth of discussion due to technical issues (and I know Frozire still has nightmares about it). During that 1h, a lot of topics could have been talked about. (now it sounds like I’m making excuses QQ)
tl;dr: yes a lot of topics weren’t talked about, but remember that there were 7 people involved and less than 1h to talk because of technical issues. Sorry.
As for the development of the game as an e-sport etc, I think feb/march for observer mode (and monthlies following soon after?) is actually fast enough. If marketed well, the first big LAN could very well be mid 2013 since LANs such as Dreamhack are open to many new games Arena Net would just have to play its cards well. That’d make ~10months before a first event, which is actually a good result for a new game. The mistake was to market it as an e-sport before release, nothing else (then again, I’m almost sure they were told to release it, I don’t think the game would have shipped before October/November otherwise).
tl;dr2: good things are comming at a good pace. The mistake was marketing the game as an e-sport pre-release, nothing else.
Once again, I’m sorry we weren’t able to deliver.
I get technical difficulties, but if 7 people make it impossible to actually discuss the important issues then why have that many in the first place? It comes across as a PR stunt… is Guru afraid of alienating teams or something?
Also please cut down on the endless balance discussions that go nowhere. The problem with players trying to balance a game is that when they win its a LTP issue, when the lose it a skill X is OP issue.
Hardcore players may be in a better position to see when something is breaking the game simply because they have a lot of hours logged and have been exposed to many different situations. They still however do not have access to the numbers under the hood or the aggregate data that is derived from hundreds of people playing.
Also, I think your timeline is overly optimistic to put it lightly. Observer mode wasn’t even mentioned, and there still needs to be private servers, and a stats scoring system which has been pushed behind rating and MMR. There is no way this will all be in in the next 2 months based on the ‘release it when its done’ philosophy.
And where in all this do players get pulled back into the game, form up teams, and have a chance to learn how to compete?
Based on the present population and stream viewership they might as well just write the podcast members a cheque now since they will be the only people who show up.
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I agree Pride,
It seems releasing things when they are ready does not apply to spvp. It was clearly not ready.
The inability to have a private match in a game that is supposed to be an esport is the most glaringly obvious example.
My guess would be that most of the development resources were thrown into pve and WvW which were the main focuses of innovation talked about in the manifesto.
They probably felt that they had spvp figured out due to GW1, and tried to innovate there as well with the tournament system which has fallen flat.
Unfortunately spvp doesn’t seem to have received the resources it needed and I am sure it fell behind which is why they were forced to go with conquest mode even though it sucks, and put premade teams vs pugs in the only competitive mode for the first 2 months. It was all they could manage to get together by the time PVE and WvW was ready to ship.
This is all just speculation based on no evidence, but its the only explanation I can think of for why there was such a gigantic mismatch between what was promised, and what was delivered.
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I’m suprised as to how easy all you guys went on Jon …
I mean it’s understandable from Xephs point considering the strong love-youbalancethisandwetelleveryoneitsagreatgame-love relation TP and the ANet devs have
but i would have expected a somewhat more critical & realistic approach from the other guys …then again i’d probably just have yelled and ranted on for about 30mins so i guess it’s a good thing they tucked it in and went goodguygreg.mode
QFT
48:00 (The last 4 minutes of the show)
“Hey Chap the mists are empty and we have long queue times, aern’t you worried about this?”
Varee – Nah everything is fine, I see more and more teams everyday…I like that we only play the same few teams during prime time the system is fine.
Chap – We’ve got a list, Sorry I can’t go into too much detail…overall numbers look fine, 1 or 2 servers have people traveling to Lions Arch.
Ok, I paraphrased. But come on, state of the game? More like State of the Same tired promises we have been hearing since launch, and outright denial that there is anything wrong.
I will say that Xeph and Lowell do at least seem to be living in the same reality as the rest of us.
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@Xeph, you said it yourself, there was a list of thing that you COULDN’T talk about, but it wasn’t because of time, it was because Anet said ‘’we DON’T talk about this, this and this. That’s why the community is mad, and they have all the rights to be.
State of the Game Discussion with ArenaNet, was a farce, they NEVER had any intentions of answering those questions in the first place.
Anet behavior is shady at best, don’t trust people that don’t share their plans, the thing they say about ‘’not making empty promises’’ it’s fake, they sold this game as ‘’the next eSport’’ and the pvp is very far from being an eSport.
Yes, so many people feel duped.
We did everything we could short of playing 40 hours a week to make the game work – pre-ordered collector’s edition, formed spvp teams and entire guilds, played a ton of hours in the present system, heck I even bought gems for boosters and tickets.
Here we are 3 months later with barely any development beyond bug and balance fixes, and paids tournaments which are unplayable for most people.
And all we have are vague plans that don’t even seem to focus on the things players want and are obvious fixes: solo queue and single rated matches.
I can only assume its because Anet is trying to figure out how to monetize everything because the present entry-fee based system has completely failed.
Jonathan seems like a good guy, and I am sure he is doing what he can with the resources that he has. That doesn’t change the fact that spvp is barely functional right now.
Maybe if enough of us rage on the forums, in videos and yes even in podcasts we can give him ammunition which he can take to his bosses / executives to fix the freaking game.
Did it give a decent view into the road ahead for GW2 PvP? Certainly. And that’s all it was meant to do.
Try to keep the criticism constructive and polite and future interviews will only get better
Since release I have attempted to play with and build up 3 separate ‘competitive’ teams all of whom have quit. I was also in a guild that had 5 or 6 spvp teams that consisted of high ranked WoW and GW1 players that planned to run its own internal league, and all but a few of those players are long gone.
These were all people who wanted to take the game seriously, but just got fed up with the lack of basic pvp features: no ladder or rating, long queue times, requires farming for tickets, pugs vs premades in frees, 45 minute tournaments with downtime, inability to play a private match. I can’t even just play alone in a set 5v5 solo queue.
I am fed up with siting around and hoping Anet gets around to fixing the game they promised would have competitive potential.
Meanwhile players leave in droves and you have to wait 20-40 minutes for a match to start where you just end up getting stomped in 8 minutes if you are not a hardcore team.
While critical posts may not be nice or popular, its better than siting around and letting other people dictate to us how we should spend our time and money.
This podcast was the first time we have heard from a dev about the future of spvp in a long time, and its incredibly frustrating to people like me when critical issues are glossed over or avoided.
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In your orginal posted you said “that this is the problem with having a host from a fansite and wanna-be esports heroes”, I am sorry if I fail to see how this isn’t insulting to the people on the receiving end, because I found it insulting to myself.
I asked people to discuss the video, not take personal stabs at the people participating, if you wanted to you could’ve avoided that exact wording and said it differently, and thats what I found “disgusting” was the fact that you choose to put the host and the people who took time out of their day to bring you that show in a bad light and for no reason, apart from the fact that they didn’t ask the questions that you wanted.
I will concede my wording was overly harsh, but please stop acting like you did this show purely out of charity for the rest of us.
As a team aspiring to become ‘pro’ and get paid to play this game you need publicity to attract sponsors, which you get from doing shows like this which devs are on. As such, you are unlikely to publicly criticize Anet when there are obviously massive problems with spvp and potentially hurt your image / privileged relationship with Anet. Its the same for Guru.
Please just stop acting like a victim here.
I saw this post and I felt like I just had to comment on how disgusting I find it to be; you start by insulting everyone that took the time of day to bring you this podcast, grouch is one of the nicest people you could have the pleasure of meeting and I see no problem in him hosting the event and all those wanna-be esport heroes probably care more about the game than you do, so show a little respect, that was completely unnecessary, and really illustrates whats wrong with the competitive community.
You question why it is that we don’t ask all the hard questions ?
Well simply said the event was only going to be 1 hour long, there were 7 people at the event its self, so if we were to ask any of the hard questions we would find ourselves pressed for time, so it was decided that those questions would be avoided and that we would ask questions that could fit into the time parameter, instead of having a podcast that accomplishes nothing.All in all, I really don’t care what you think, just don’t take a personal stab at the people that worked really hard to bring this to you and the rest of the community, it only helps to discredit you as a person.
I didn’t insult anybody, you said yourself on the show what your ‘endgame’ plan is. I am sure you are all great people, but you still all have a vested interest in having a cozy relationship with the devs, especially Guru.
I heard a lot of talk about who should be balancing the game, Anet’s design challenges during the holiday season and in general, minor bugs and EU internet service providers yet pressing topics like solo queue and single rated matches were hardly touched. The ticket monetization scheme which currently punishes new teams was also not even addressed.
Xeph I will give you credit for actually asking some real questions in the last 10 minutes of the show. Most notably about queue times and population. It was a little concerning that other members on the show didn’t seem to see this as a massive problem, since it will have a major impact on esports potential, which I assume you all care about.
Finally, you started this thread to discuss the show. If a little criticism is ‘disgusting’ to you, ‘shows whats wrong with the community’ and ‘discredits me as a person’ all I can say is I am sorry for being honest and not just simply accepting your and Anet’s words as the gospel.
I may not spend 40 hours a week in paids farming a fancy collection of QP badges. Nevertheless, I actually do think the combat mechanics in this game are very good and worth keeping around which is why I make posts like these in an attempt to pressure Anet to put spvp development up the agenda since it has been at to bottom since release.
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Yes GW2 is slightly easier to return to than other MMOs. The point is that if there is no competitive community with a big player base, you can’t expect an esport to just magically appear once changes are added 2-4 or whatever months from now.
As has been pointed out in this thread and others, rating and MMR won’t work if there is a tiny population. Its still long queues and miss-matches which will not give people who come back a good experience.
I just don’t think paids/frees are going to be accomplishing what Anet intends. As much as it might theoretically be a small increase in income, I see it going the other way where it just discourages players from returning to the game and purchasing expansions. The population won’t be there for 6/8 teams to lose the majority of their tickets each tournament…Its a self-cannibalizing system that doesn’t truly represent skill.
Very well said.
Punishing casual players by charging them to be farmed by a few hardcore teams has got to be one of the worst ideas ever implemented in competitive gaming.
Its how a game sells 2 million copies with promises of e-sport potential, yet only has like a hundred or so active competitive players 3 months in.
but…it hasn’t been a year yet…..and can you see into the future within 3-6 months?
MMOs do not have a good track record of retaining players 6+ months after release even when major changes are made. SWTOR is an example of a game that added rated MMR 3 months in, yet it didn’t bring people back and that is much faster than the timeline Anet has indicated.
There isn’t much point in investing time into a game when there is a strong possibility that nobody will be playing once the necessary changes are implemented. The population is already bad now, its probably just going to continue getting lower while we wait for these changes.
Jumper is 100% correct.
MMR Doesn’t work when you have no population. You just end up with even longer queues, or have the present situation which puts noobs against vets and has resulted in a mass exodus of players.
Also, the fact that it takes 40 players and 45 minutes which include long downtimes between matches just to play a basic competitve match just makes the problem even worse.
Please just add single competitive matches like in GW1 and every other pvp game out there and give people the game they want.
Stop trying to force the poker tournament style monetization scheme on us. It has failed and killed the population. Just use it for special events and the rest of the time let people have a system that is actually playable.
7 People was too many when an actual dev was on who had big announcements.
The problem with having the host be from a fan site, and wannabe e-sport heroes as guests, is that they threw a lot of softballs to Anet and glossed over or didn’t address the most important issues for players who might be considering coming back.
As people here have pointed out, MMR won’t work with the present population since with so few teams newer people will still get matched against vets which defeats the purpose. The population issue MUST be addressed before anything else.
It also makes no sense in the present tournament system since a noob bracket tournament would be getting the same qualifier points reward that a vet bracket receives.
One of the things that might bring people back is a legitimate solo queue, but we got the answer that this isn’t going to happen.
Also people want single ranked matches, not tournaments that require 40 people and 45 mins with a lot of downtime just to take part in a basic competitive game. He said this was being considered, but was very vague when this is probably one of the most important changes that need to be made.
They didn’t even talk about the ticket entry fee barrier monetization scheme, probably because the monopoly teams that were represented don’t care, but it is hurting the population.
From an Esport’s perspective, until Anet puts up some money rather than making vague promises, there is no reason to take this game seriously and be a free-labor beta tester for some far off hope that the game will take off.
The overall message was pretty much that there is really no reason to play the game presently. We are better off letting the guys on the show test these proposed features then maybe return once a legitimate competitive system is actually implemented.
The problem is that 3-6 months down the line the game will be so far from release that it will be a major challenge to get people to come back even with the perfect system. And like it or not, its the masses that make a game successful, not the ‘pros’.
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Agree with OP
Players should be able to get karma or pvp tokens in spvp which they can use to get stuff in the pve side of the game.
If people could gear up the pve side of their characters by playing spvp that would probably bring a lot more people in who don’t like farming karma events or dungeons.
I also agree that armor skins should be unlocked on both sides of the game.
1) Dwindling population in Spvp and its effect on queue times and a ladder system
2) The negative effects that the tournament ticket micro-transaction scheme have had on the player base by creating monopoly teams and a giant skill gap
4) Unimpressive viewership levelsAre not actual problems, but symptoms of the issues in tPvP that Anet has outlined their direction for. The problems with paid tournaments are almost all directly attributable to insufficient progression through free tournaments. Fixing “matchmaking” in free tournaments should fix the advancement path for teams going from hotjoin to tPvP to paids. The viewership numbers are a result of poor tools (namely, no spectator mode) for viewing and indirectly because of the current sPvP population. Again, resolving the issues with tPvP should naturally resolve this.
I do agree here. The choice for new or average teams is to play against pugs, or get stomped in paids. There is no middle ground or place to build up and learn so nobody cares about streams and the like.
I still do think that design decisions like:
- ticket entry fee
- 3 game tournament system that requires 40 people to even play
- ~45 minute time commitment with a big chunk of that being downtime waiting for the next match to start
Are just way to many barriers for most people to bother with and has very much hurt the population. Its actually a challenge to just play a basic competitive match which could be easily remedied with a single match style system that EVERY OTHER competitive pvp game uses.
Good video and I agree with the vast majority of its content. Another thing to point out about how meaningless it is for the current hardcore players, if the game has any hope of e-sport status there will need to be significant additions of viable builds meaning the game played for that first big tournament will be much different than what they had spent hundreds of hours practicing.
I feel like anything below $250,000 would be a bit of a joke considering their seed money is going to be a necessity to kick off the e-sport aspect. I think 1mill would attract a lot of interest but like you said that could be a large risk for how small the population currently is.
Also something that I think can not be said enough, the entire tournament system needs to be scrapped and tournaments reserved for the larger daily and monthly tournaments.
Agree entirely. The only reason to take the game seriously right now is for some far off hope that the game will take off. If Anet actually put some money down rather than keep making vague promises about how good things will be down the line then players will have some assurance that they are not completely wasting their time by simply providing free beta testing.
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Anet Game Designer Jonathan Sharp recently appeared Guru State of the Game and outlined the future plans for GW2 sPvP.
From the perspective of a player who is considering returning, I think it is important to take a critical look at what the realistic future of spvp will look like.
The improvements that players should look forward to are:
1) Anet understands that rating and MMR is the number one thing that is needed and is shifting their focus
2) Private servers are still on the way, but are not the number 1 priority
2) The current tournament system as opposed to single ranked matches are here to stay
3) Solo queue is on the agenda, but it will still have pugs vs premades except with rating taken into account
4) Esports support like a better score card that shows actually useful information and observer mode are in the works
5) Glory changes that better connect spvp to the rest of the world are in development
The major issues that were not addressed in any significant detail include:
1) Dwindling population in Spvp and its effect on queue times and a ladder system
2) The negative effects that the tournament ticket micro-transaction scheme have had on the player base by creating monopoly teams and a giant skill gap
3) The lack of connection between sPvP and the rest of the game population
4) Unimpressive viewership levels
5) The massive challenge of fostering an esport many, many months after an MMO release date
6) Anets design philosophy of incremental change and releasing things ‘when they are ready’ has resulted in vague and unclear promises about how great things will be in the future provides little incentive for competitive players to play the present game as they are pretty much beta testers at this point.
I elaborate and offer my opinions on these subjects in the following video with the hope of giving players honest and realistic expectations for the future of spvp.
“Pro” players at this point are basically unpaid, full-time beta testers
Clearly many players are not satisfied with sPvP.
Many people like myself couldn’t give Anet our money fast enough with the hope that they would design a pvp rpg that was similar to GW1, but with new and innovative combat mechanics.
In a sense we were duped as we got a barely functional system that is still pretty much in an early beta stage and is going to require months and months of development time to even get to the starting point GW1 was at 7 years ago.
By that time the new car feeling will be long gone for most people, so the potential for an esport level spvp community seems pretty low.
For the people who actually want spvp to be a higher priority for Anet, our only option is to keep these kinds of posts coming.
I guess turning paids into a slot machine can’t even get people to queue.
‘LoL took a year to be competitive’
This is not a good argument because LoL started off small then grew and grew, because it had a format that supported casual and hardcore players.
GW2 is the complete opposite. It promised the moon and started off huge, but has now lost a huge amount of the spvp population and general interest.
Anet duped people to a certain extent, and getting people to come back in massive numbers after the game has improved 6 months down the line has not worked for pretty much any MMO.
Esports isn’t about giving a few hardcore players a chance to win money.
No viewership, no esport.Money brings viewership. Nobody would watch nor professionally play football, baseball, etc. if enormous amounts of money wasn’t involved.
Viewership makes a game spectate worthy, but that doesn’t necessarily make it an E-Sport. Minecraft has a lot of viewers on Twitch, it’s not an E-Sport. E-Sports have cash-prize championships, like real-life sports. Notice all the games here are widely viewed on Twitch: http://www.esportsearnings.com/
I don’t really understand this post. You say esports requires money tournaments to get viewership, then bring up Minecraft which is an example of the compete opposite — a game that has had next to no money put into it, yet has a lot of viewership because people actually find it interesting.
I will grant that yes money is necessary to get things rolling, but where is it going to come from?
My view is that 3rd party organizers are not going to invest in a game that gets 200 viewers, and Anet is probably not going to invest in spvp when they can’t monetize on the casual players.
This is the spvp sub-forum and spvp is not meeting player expectations.
Maybe the forum is full of critical posts because they actually have legitimate complaints.
Esports isn’t about giving a few hardcore players a chance to win money.
No viewership, no esport.
Since sPvP was released in such barebones state, a lot of the interest and playerbase has left.
Even if the game had a ladder, private servers and spectator mode within a year, it won’t be an esport if it has a tiny viewership and player base.
A lot hinges on what kind of money Anet is prepared to throw at spvp to attract attention from viewers and players. However, since most people who were interested in GW2 already bought the game, and spvp doesn’t have an effective way to monetize casual players I highly doubt they will spend much money on events.
If you’re going to play a PvP game, you need to accept losing and analyze the situation in order to get better. In fact, when you get stomped, if you’re paying attention, you can learn more quickly what works best and start moving towards playing with/against it.
I get that it’s discouraging, but why do PvPers have such thin skins these days?
I am sorry but blaming the players is incredibly stupid at this stage.
The reason is that with no elo or MMR there is no way for newer teams to build up their skill by playing similarly skilled competition. They can stomp pugs in frees or wait for 20 mins in queue to likely get farmed by the very small number of hardcore teams. Add to this the fact they they are spending currency in paids to get farmed.
You can’t expect people to stick it out through a broken system. Players and teams don’t quit because they can’t handle losing. They quit because its impossible for them to get a meaningful match consistently, and there are 1000000 other games where they can.
If you honestly believe it makes sense that people should farm or pay money for tickets just to get stomped by a team with way more experience over and over until they get better instead of playing against similarly skilled competition and moving up a ladder as they improve, all I can say is have fun in the near empty and shrinking sPvP you currently have.
If people stop talking about your valid concerns then that can mean one of two things:
they are no longer relevant and the thread you started would have died off anyway, or we’re all gone. :P So long as the topic of discussion is worth pursuing it will be pursued irregardless of whether or not it has its own little fancy forum post all to itself.
Look it wasn’t just my thread that was affected. Pray’s got hijacked as well, and both title’s were changed.
And since when have I been saying anything was obliterated? All I have said is that mods messing with popular threads that happen to be critical of the game that a lot of players agree with doesn’t look good.
Also the reason I and other talk about GW1 is that its a game that Anet had 7 years to develop a competitive system for that did eventually work well. I get your point about how the features were not perfect at day 1, so I probably should be more clear about my point that day 1 GW1 features are missing in GW2. But stuff like arranged matches, ladder and random arena was there even if they were not perfect.
Anet already proved it knew how to design a functional pvp game over the life of GW1, so it upsetting that this experience does not seem to have made the transition to GW2.
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You guys really need to chill with the “concern” about moderation. They merged two topics which covered and said the same thing: sPvP is messed up, here let outline the reasons. I read and posted in both of those threads and I felt like I was wasting my breath half repeating myself because there’s only so much you can say in a topic that has been covered, is being covered, and will continue to be covered when everyone decides its their turn to post their opinion (usually exactly the same one, since the problems are glaringly obvious).
Before I get my panties in a bunch (since, as I’ve stated, I know full well the growing pains the first GW went through to get to the “glory” everyone keeps quoting), I’m going to see what they do with this next update and I’m also going to give ptPvP (paid tournies) a little more than a single week on the heels of a massive event to show me whether or not it can foster some amount of competitive game play. In its current state… I doubt it can but if certain issues are ironed out (and from what I’ve seen of Jon’s recent in game forays, this seems to be the case with at least half of the glaringly obvious issues on the chopping block) and some form of matchmaking makes its way into this game, I might have reason to hope.
Take note, there’s a difference between being hopeful and being rational.
Meanwhile, Blackgate has some WvW ground to make up tonight.
Paid tournaments have been out for around 14 days and already have very long wait times. For newer teams that do not want to face pugs over and over this means they can have to wait for 20-40 minutes only to get stomped in less than 8 minutes by a hardcore team. Then they have to wait even longer for the next tournament.
Usually when a new game mode is released there is a ton of interest. Its very concerning that the newest addition to sPvP is already in such a lackluster state so soon which is why so many people are concerned.
A lot of people clearly don’t feel like sitting around while all their friends leave, so we make forum posts. Is it really necessary for all related ‘PvP Feedback’ to be in a single thread?
rather than engage the community and outline steps of improvement, devs/mods are moving to cover-up mode. They’ve begun to merge all the angry and well-thought out posts regarding bad tPvP into one main post with an innocuous “GW2 PvP Feedback” subject line…
sigh.
Yes it is concerning, but at least we got someone’s attention.
This issue is already practically at the top of Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/12vuqr/guild_wars_2_spvp_the_death_spiral_of_competitive/
Yeah I agree with a lot of what you said. There is an untapped market here.
What concerns me is that very few MMOs have been able to come back after the initial interest dies off.
Sure. First, the $350,000 may be optimistic. It may only be $100,000.
Second, the cash would be used as a marketing device to lure players to the game, once it is properly balanced and has all of the features to make it eSports ready. The amount has nothing to do with the players who are currently still playing the game seriously for free.
Third, I’m not sure I agree with your cause-and-effect assumption regarding League of Legends. My recollection — and I could be off base here — is that Riot was fairly bullish about promoting their cash tournaments, even before the game was huge, which in and of itself drove much of the interest in the game.
In other words, the cash brings the gamers, not necessarily the other way around.
Ok granted they might spend cash as a marketing tactic, but still you are not addressing that most of the people interested in GW2 do not play or care about the competitive side. Anet or NCSoft would probably be more inclined to spend that 350k on new PVE content since they already have a huge base of people in that area of the game.
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Can you explain to me why they would spend $350 000 + development costs when right now there are like ~30 players who are ‘competitive’ and you predict that number to shrink, and nobody watches streams.
The reason Riot can inject so much money is because they have a huge pvp player base paying them money. 90%+ of GW2 population is in PVE and WvW and couldn’t care less about competitive play.
Until then I’d rather let the whole thing suffer to the point no one does it so they’re ultimately forced to look at the real issues.
I would say we have already reached that point. The danger is that they see nobody playing sPvP and therefore put development on the back burner in favor of PvE. This is unfortunate because the good combat mechanics will be lost to a competitive community.
I’ve been a competitive DotA player for a very long time and there are some things that I would like to point out. DotA’s competitive scene started off very obscure and the game itself had a huge skill barrier to entry. It wasn’t easy to pick up, and had no real support. In some ways it’s a miracle the game took off, but I can see a lot of people looking to it as inspiration that any other game with “properly” built PvP can eventually do the same.
The reality is that GW2 is a VERY different scenario. When DotA started out as a competitive game in 2005 or so, it was a unique game. The people that played it were already very devoted because the game had no rivals. If it didn’t succeed, the entire genre that all those players loved would die — they had a lot of motivation to make it work. GW2 does not have that luxury of devotion. If you don’t like PvP in GW2, you can simply hop to any number of other MMOs on the market.
ArenaNet needs to act fast because this isn’t the sort of thing that the community is going to faithfully wait around for. Delaying to make PvP more fun and inviting for the average gamer will kill PvP for the serious gamers. You need the foundation of the low and midskill players for it to work.
Good post. I would say a major difference between MOBAs and GW2 is that LoL and the like were not initially sold to people as an esport. They started small and grew.
GW2 is the opposite. We had lots of developer content stating GW2 would have esports potential and a lot of people bought into that and purchased the game for that reason.
They pretty much duped people by then they releasing a game that has a barely functioning competitive system and thus most people have left and interest has plummeted.
yup, thread merge = less visibility. gj…
why not merge all threads in this section into one even?
They are all sPvP feedback threads after all. GoshWhy should we have several topics discussing the same PvP issues , when one constructive topic with good arguments has better chance to stay on the 1st page longer (we already have tons of thief topics flying around and I personally wish that this discussion would stay more compact and purposeful)? It’s also easier for people conserned about PvP issues to post in one topic instead of several. Jacobins video was already posted on this topic and only thing missing was his written shorter version of the matters he talks there. I only wish there were stickies in this forum.
edit: Also, I think that ‘PvP Feedback’ is a better title for serious discussion than likes of “This game is dying”, although it’s too vague.
I dunno merging topics and changing the titles to something less provocative could be seen as an attempt to bury legitimate criticism. Also, merging ‘PvP Feedback’ into one thread is going to make it harder for the discussion to stay compact since that title is about as general and non-specific as it gets.
Ideally, the free tournament is the place for new team to build up and train there skills, hot join is the causal players play for fun. Paid tournament is where the hardcore time will play for price.
By the nature of GW, sPVP it is team base game, remember before really think joining tPVP. You have to have a team, the game won’t give you team, but you have to build it up. That’s something beyond the game itself. Read a little about the most successful team e-sport game (CS so far, dota also coming up), we will learn from there. How many teams in the world you can name it? How many “new players” or new team come up each year? Did they death?
You are missing the point, nobody is going to form a team and stick around for the long term because they have to spend money or farm tickets to just end up getting farmed by the teams that have already spent hundreds of hours in the game.
The community basically cannibalizes the new or less experienced teams until they leave and we are in the situation now where there are only ~30 players who are “competitive”.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Leaderboards-for-Qualifying-Points/first#post665723
In order to be in the top 32 players (not teams or guilds) as of Nov 8, you only need 2 tourney wins. That’s not a healthy competitive scene.Think about it for a moment. You need 2 measly tourney wins to be in the top 32 players for your entire REGION. That is not active competitive pvp. Period.
I’ll be totally honest. From where I’m standing it looks like there are fewer then 5 or so dedicated teams. Gw1 had hundreds. And dota, sc2, and other esports? Yeah….the audience for custom arenas, especially PAID custom arenas just isn’t there.
Yes, exactly correct. If you win 9 games, even against pug or inexperienced teams you are in the top 30. The competitive scene is in a death spiral.
I cannot believe they merged your topic Jacobin, that’s some real incompetence right there. Good to see that the moderators are about as capable as the PVP team.
@ Jacobin you covered all the bases and analysed the core issues. Everything you said was spot on.
The game is not sustainable in its current state. Even atm, if you ranked in the top 5, you really haven’t achieved much as there are probably only 15 teams across both NA and EU that compete several days a week.
Yes thank you, the competitive scene is on life support.
As for merging my thread, at least somebody somewhere took notice. However, I can’t help but think its burying criticism to a certain extent, and trying to make the forum look prettier.
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I really like the pvp potential for this game but it really does feel unfinished at times. Also, everything listed here is quite true however I feel they are all symptoms where the true cause is a small pvp population to begin with. And its catch 22 because if they devoted resources, they could cultivate the interest in PVP… However they probably won’t do so because the we need a larger pvp community to substantiate big and consistent patches, so resources won’t be relegated to do so because we’re too small.
Sure, they’ll fix things in time perhaps but we’re talking long after the interests of potential core players have waned. IMO the best shot they had for esport potential is if they hit the ground running at launch and delivered weekly updates and hotfixes quickly when needed. Keep the momentum going. At this point its going to be a big uphill battle to capture new interest.
Just think, if after release they devoted the same resources to PVP as they did the Halloween events and likely upcoming other holiday events, imagine how much further along PVP features would be.
It makes sense that they work on pve stuff when 90% of the game population is in pve, but letting spvp dwindle away means fewer players and less incentive for them to develop the competitive side of things.
That’s exactly what happend to me and my friends. At first we enjoyed the structure PvP and soon we strated to play free tournaments but we got owned by a lot of pro-teams. We could only make the top 3 in like 2 out of 20 tournaments and always felt like we had to play against way better team. We didn’t even start to play payed tournaments because we only got like 6 tickets after playing quite some time and we knew we had a great change to lose in the first round. So we didn’t see the point of spending more time in pvp and now we rather play a tournament which is sad because we had a lot of fun when we started.
Its stories like this that fill me with so much disappointment and has no doubt been experienced by potentially hundreds of players.
You like the game and have a 5 man team ready to play, but you have no ability to develop your skill and team synergy because you can’t consistently play against similarly skilled competition.
You end up getting farmed, eventually run out of tickets and then leave because nobody is going to spend money or farm, to then just get farmed by the small number of hardcore teams that have already put in hundreds of hours and already have a never ending supply of tickets.
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