Guild Wars 2

Proven.2854:

Lux.7169:

I haven’t heard of any top players complaining about the teams not being stacked.

Where are you getting this information?

What I -DO- hear top players complaining about is being in matches where half the players are single digit ranks… Like someone else said earlier, those matches basically come down to who gets the least terrible players on their team. Splitting solo Q pools into tiers would fix this. The common counter-argument to that is that wait times would be insane. However if pvp had more incentive to offer its players population wouldn’t be a problem at all. Funny how the puzzle is fitting together. I hope anet goes through and reaches our expectations.

Hey, let’s look at this the other way. If there were more people playing and getting decent then you wouldn’t have the current need-to-carry problems for the veterans either. So adding tiers would just be a quick fix that would make things worse for players overall and not solve the real problem.

Solving the real problem and not adding tiers is the best solution.

How is adding incentive and creating tiers a temp fix?
Not once did I mention vets have a “need-to-carry” problem.

I haven’t heard of any top players complaining about the teams not being stacked.

Where are you getting this information?

What I -DO- hear top players complaining about is being in matches where half the players are single digit ranks… Like someone else said earlier, those matches basically come down to who gets the least terrible players on their team. Splitting solo Q pools into tiers would fix this. The common counter-argument to that is that wait times would be insane. However if pvp had more incentive to offer its players population wouldn’t be a problem at all. Funny how the puzzle is fitting together. I hope anet goes through and reaches our expectations.

Mesmer’s portaling their way to r1 ]:<

jkjk

I agree with everyone in this thread.

Which is why this needs to come out WITH pvp rewards that benefit ALL players of the game. If pve players could come to win gold/rare skins lots of achievement points etc etc etc there would be a huge surge in the population. While this would most likely fill the lower brackets 0-75% the reward system should be crafted in a way to incentivize the top tier players into playing OFTEN. By this we could have some decay that STICKS (so if you’re too inactive after a few days you can’t recover from -some- of the decay you’re accumulating), but also have prestigious rewards. We will never have a perfect LB system, but that doesn’t mean anet can’t offer enticing rewards to promote active play.

I think by incorporating those ideas we would see a far more lively LB than we’re seeing now. The amazing thing is that it looks like this is the direction anet is going, it just seems to be a matter of time.

edit for clarification, by pve rewards I mean giving players the OPTION to choose between pvp exclusive reward or getting gold/item skins/other buffs they could take back to pve with them. I think this would bridge the gap between the two game modes where currently the gap is so vast it’s almost as if we’re playnig two completely different games.

NevirSayDie.6235:

Yup. A lot of the problems we’re seeing now are residual effects of things that have already been fixed. So after the reset, those things will be gone.

Although I believe a problem we will continue to see after the LB reset is that the top ranked players on the new LB will not have incentive to play. Sure you can get chests for legendary’s etc etc but most of us have 900+ chests. With such rapid decay there needs to be more incentives to actually play. Either make decay STICK, or give rewards for winning high-ranked matches. Otherwise I’m positive we’ll see the exact same thing happen with the first page. People vying for rank 1 will only play ever 3-5 days to erase their decay and jump up in ranks. There’s no incentive for them to risk their high-rank on the LB because honestly being high-ranked is more amusing than getting your 901st chest.

JinDaVikk.7291:

GankSinatra.2653:

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

“thing you’ll see before years end”
-Less particle
-legendary weapons

Already conflict there. legendary weapons produce the most particle effect

Thats a pretty unfair assumption to make, that those two are exclusive to one another.
Also some dude having a purple shine on a weapon isnt going to distract or clog up the screen like every skill having a purple explosion of legendary proportions.

Have you ever seen a norn with twilight/the other one use hundred blade? You cant see anything anywhere near that 300+ radius. Just massive massive particle spam.

Norns in pvp?

Let’s be serious now

Michael.7382:

BTW
“Shard collectors have been added to the Heart of the Mist near the glory vendors. These vendors accept Shards of Legend for legendary PvP weapons and other rare items.”
It may mean armor sets like nightmare or other rare skins like Vision of the Mists, Cobalt, Lyss, Aether etc?

Those were my thoughts exactly. Volcanus, vision of the mists, etc etc etc

Rezz.8019:

Justin ODell.9517:

Does anyone want a leaderboard based only on the amount of time played?

No.

kirito.4138:

For ~90% of the PVP population (non leaderboard players) this new match making was good and made games more fun. Hopefully because they are enjoying it more the playerbase as a whole will expand…

However, in the meantime, for remaining veterans… games are cringe worthy. It’s like a basketball game with a mix of highschool and kindergarden players.

This exactly.

To improve the system there needs to be tiers and you can only be pooled into players of the same tier. Even if there were just THREE tiers it would be TONS better than it currently is
tier1: 0-50%
tier2: 50% – top 1,000
tier 3: top 1,000

I’m sure other people have other suggestions, and I’d love for even more tiers than that since there a VAST differences in skill levels among the top 1,000.

Justin ODell.9517:

I agree, these are very good suggestions.

Phantom Master.9582:

Make Solo Q rewards significantly better depending on your position.

Can you clarify what you mean by position?

My interpretation of what he was suggesting in that quote was that at higher ranks the matches should theoretically be more difficult in that the skill involved should also reflect in the rewards.

In an ideal system I would support that suggestion. As it stands right now there would need to be different tiers and the LB should be reset before anything like that is implemented.

dreztina.4820:

You guys need to stop trying to force people into tpvp. There are reasons it has a miniscule population. Those reasons don’t magically go away just because you force people to play it. If you want more people to play tpvp, encourage anet to make it suck less kitten, and then people will actually want to play it. The legendaries should be attainable from every form of spvp.

How are they forcing people into it? You can use glory to buy rank reward chests…

sound logic…

finally all my stacks of chests will be useful

Yeah, there are definitely players who did NOT sync Queue to get to the top, and even from those who did sync Queue, it backfired for them probably half the time. The only time you reliably get the same team is ~top 20.

I’ll go over my personal experiences for a brief moment. I was normally in the 100-200 range for about 80% of the time LB came out. I fell pretty hard when I started only playing oceanic times because that’s when MM is at its worst (vast differences between the two teams due to low population). I did go from about 700 back to top 100 and from there rubber-banded in the 50-180 range for a couple weeks. The teams were still extremely unreliable since, believe it or not, more than 5 people in the top 100 were Q’ing up at any given time.

It wasn’t until I hit rank 27 when I would consistently get the exact same players. I can literally name off each player I’d do ~10 matches w/ a night for a couple weeks. I wasn’t sync Q’ing but I did want to play. When you’re getting 20 min waits you tend not to have any control over who it puts you with, since basically even if I Q up when others are in, the wait is so long it’s just going to pair me w/ them when they’re out. On that note, though, the other team would STILL have 2-3 players in the top 75 against us though.

So from my experiences getting any semi-reliable team is extraordinarily difficult, especially during the day. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had TONS of games where I would get the same awful player ~10+ times in a row.

Josh Davis.6015:

I hear your frustrations, Morf. In early December the PvP team will be able to preview what we’ve been working on and what we’ll continue to be working on in the new year. I think you guys will be happy with what we’ve come up with – I know I am.

Have a good weekend, all!

This sounds very hopeful. Your words come with an extra weight of credibility for me since you literally came from the high-end pvp demographic and have been straight-forward and honest with us throughout the whole process you’ve been through.

Thanks and keep up the hard work, Grouch!

YinsenDK.1840:

Nice to hear im not the only one with this opinion.
I remember the Z-keys from GW1. Those baby’s kept me playing for tons of hours when you could sell them for 5k each.

Absolutely! Z-Keys were AMAZING! I was so disappointed when I began to pvp and saw that we didn’t get anything comparable… it’s just a gear grind where we spend XXX hours trying to get armor a pve’er can literally farm in a few days.

I really hope this revamped reward system has things like zkeys/chests.

I share your exact sentiments on this issue. Hopefully the complete revamp to the rewards system in pvp will address this issue and make it easier to convert our rewards in pvp to pve incentives.

I saw a post on reddit where they did some data mining and they specifically mentioned something about 120k glory would translate to leveling up a character to 80. I would love to see something like that in the upcoming reward overhaul as well as armor/gold/weapon upgrades.

There are a few of us thieves still being competitive, but yes we are the vast minority in a bunker/condi meta.

I never thought I’d see the day when people were sad to see thieves get nerfed.

Iksargo.2640:

Lux.7169:

snip

I suppose I should clarify my statements as well. I am not against rewarding players in general, but I am against rewards based off of rank on the current leaderboard. Let’s give a reward to everyone that played their qualifying matches in the current system. Great idea; I love it. But rewarding some players more than others for being “higher ranked” in a broken system makes no sense to me.

Great so it looks like some common ground could emerge. I’d be perfectly fine without some sort of reward for LB. I honestly don’t care that much but I just saw it as a good opportunity to issue rewards based on similar circumstances in the past (made a bunch of hype about how QPs would be useful but then ended up nixing the program and gave them titles).

The common ground I was talking about was rewards in general. I’d be fine if this old LB was completely ignored if there was something else they could issue rewards on. While this is venturing into a different topic altogether I won’t push this issue too much. Although I am curious (if you have some ideas) on what you think would be an appropriate mode for issuing rewards would be, and what those rewards would entail. Like I said though, it’s a different topic and you may not have anything in mind.

That’s pretty awesome and very hopeful!

Iksargo.2640:

I definitely see where you’re coming from and respect your position on the matter. I also appreciate how you are actually making attempts to address the issues specifically.

My biggest issue is the lack of rewards period. While I realize a system is in the works, really, who cares if people got a title for participating in this system anet created? I absolutely agree that it was broken and manipulated and isn’t a representation of skill, but really when you think about it, what system WILL be flawless to the point where you can finally say “ok, they really do deserve a title.”

Bottom line is all that players are asking for seems to be a title currently unavailable. Who cares if they got it? If you don’t respect the system you won’t take the title seriously anyway. It’s basically just a form of recognition that wouldn’t hurt anyone at all, unless for some reason people were jealous over a title gained in a broken system.

Instead of creating this elitism through comments like “absolutely no rewards should be given to people who participated in this 5-month ladder even though anet was already mentioning the possibility of rewarding ladder-ranks” we could perhaps support the idea of anet rewarding players for their dedication to the game, particularly pvp.

From watching your stream a ton I realize you don’t care much for rewards or incentives anyway. So if you genuinely don’t care then why be the antagonist? For some players we would LOVE to see pvp rewards and incentives to play, and if anything this would benefit you as well since if you’ve been monitoring the forums the top two things that have been asked for are balance in matches and rewards. Let’s bring some life back into the mists, because realistically, these rewards aren’t hurting anyone.

tl;dr

The benefits of rewarding players seem to far outweigh the cons. Many people would love to see recognition/rewards and it would get the ball rolling on a definitive reward system for PvP giving players goals to aim towards, and honestly I can’t see why others would legitimately be opposed to the addition of something as minor as a title.

I thought I would clarify my stance on this since you’ve taken the time to flesh out your oppositions.

Writetyper.1985:

Splitting 8v8’s and 5v5’s so I can quickly tell if a player count is above or below quota.

Writetyper.1985:

Lux.7169:

-snip-

I never dissed the strategy at all, I was merely commenting that you rush lord successfully every game I see you on foefire.

Yeah I was just projecting my supressed emotions on the recent hate I got during a stream recently. It seems that I’m notorious for this XD I do apologize for going on an unnecessarily long spiel about it in here :b

Writetyper.1985:

Lux.7169:

Make it so you can’t pull any single guard the lord has. Also make it so that the lord revives any fallen guards when he is out of combat or the enemy is stealthed.

This is coming from you who lord rushes every game

But yeah, definitely make it so that if you pull one guard they all pull. The guards are quite strong and it’s hard to beat them down but if you just take an extra 30 seconds killing them slowly then the lord is cake.

I don’t know why people hassle me about this constantly. My win percent on foefire is outrageous, literally my best map. For me it’s a numbers game. Pressure far so they don’t get a free home cap, if I can’t kill whoever goes far I disengage and pressure base. Far can either choose to pursue me into their base or go mid. If they go mid I decap far. If they go into base I stealth and let them commit to either home or defending lord. Idiots defend lord and I get a decap.

If I’m uncontested I just cap far, clear the room and save lord for later. Who doesn’t want a free 150 points for ~30s of work?

But yeah, I honestly wouldn’t care if they buffed the lord’s sustain. At least make him immune to blind, or have blind be only ~10% effective.

While I understand that not many people support my strategy on that map, I ask that you reserve judgment until you’re the player who is against me at that far point. When that player faces the decisions and realizes the counterplay to every decision he makes, then I feel that you can tell me it’s a bad strategy.

Mister Fluffkin.7358:

What exactly is broken about matchmaking? In 90% of my matches i get opponents/teammates equal to my ladderrank. Ok, sometimes there is some obscure matchup(guess due to the numbers of actual players), but in a matchup of “topplayers vs. noobs” no one gets anything for his ranking. Theres a kind of hidden ELO system behind the scene, like we know it from other games ladders. So what…?

Loosing to a superstrong team does exactly nothing to your rank. I for example have beaten some top20 players in soloq several times, now im top20 myself with a bad ratio of 60%. Honestly, you can only win if youre matched vs. the elite.

For me it feels pretty legit.

You know what’s even more surprising? The best players in the game who actively play Solo Q remarkably seem to be consistently in the top ranks…. If it’s so broken then why aren’t we hearing about “pro” players unable to hit high ranks due to the broken system.

I haven’t heard of a single “pro” player struggling to reach what appears to be the top 2% of all pvp players on the ladder. If it’s such a broken system not only would we have bad players in the top ranks, but we’d have good players unable to enter the top ranks.

Make it so you can’t pull any single guard the lord has. Also make it so that the lord revives any fallen guards when he is out of combat or the enemy is stealthed.

Mladi Bojevnik.2517:

This thread just reflects how bad human nature is. People are asking for a reward which if it will happen will probably be some title (that most wont even use) or 5 turney win reward chests with no affect on other players what so ever.

And yet people are crying how unfair that would be. It almost fells like Anet would be giving out 1000$ to everyone on leaderboards.

And whinning because some players got reward for QP months ago ? Really ? I did not even know they did and from my experience until now I doubt it was anything gamebreaking. Probably 1g worth of stuff for 1st place.

Noone will lose anything if they give out rewards and some will get some minor reward.

My thoughts exactly.

PvP is already suffering from a severe drought of rewards in every manner, yet at the SLIGHTEST suggestion of it people go ballistic ranting and venting about how it would be horrible to release rewards for something like LB.

Do they have any suggestions for offering titles or rewards? None have been posted by a single person who has voiced their opinion against it, they’re just antagonizing to grief everyone is what it seems like. Who cares if some people get titles or some miniscule form of recognition for participating in a LB that Anet created? If anet wants to give players some minor title who cares? How does it affect everyone else? If they don’t take the title seriously then it should have no impact what-so-ever but to simply rant and vent and scream about it in the forums seems a kittenildish.

As has been said before, they gave unique titles to people who literally ‘farmed’ QP’s… which was based just on winning/grinding games during the QP era. If anything that was severely more flawed than this current system.

Mladi Bojevnik.2517:

And can someone explain why everyone is praising team arena lederboards and bashing solo arena ones.

To clarify with information you’re probably already aware of, Solo Q is considered in a more broken state than team Q because of the way matches are created. In Solo Q there’s a huge propensity to pair the top 5 players in the Q on the same team and the bottom 5 players in that Q on the opposing team. This isn’t the case in team Q since in team Q you theoretically create your own team.

In my opinion that’s the main reason there’s so much antagonism towards Solo Q. Although some would also say that the lack of coordination compared to team Q make solo Q a joke, but I personally disagree. The only qualm I have is with the lopsided matches.

He strongly suggests we take advantage of this..? This sounds promising!

Nary Why Irk.8150:

I don´t see where is the problem for rewarding players yet

This exactly.

Forsaker.9213:

this is pvp forum and i dont care about pve those are 2 diffrent things so plz dont compare it

How about the title rewards for QP where the players with the most wins total got special prizes?

Should those be revoked? Those were even more flawed than the current system because it just rewarded # of wins and had nothing to do with any rating or match-making. I knew of teams who were sync q’ing to trade wins/losses.

What does it matter to you if someone gets a title for this? Why are you so offended by it? I’m genuinely curious.

Forsaker.9213:

no rewards for this , system is broken , ppl are abusing it so i dont think its good to rward ppl for that , 1st make good working system then rewards

pve is too easy too and has a flawed system that rewards RNG luck, zerging habits, and doesn’t reward skill over time played; I think we should stop giving pve’ers items for using the flawed mystic forge and dungeon paths.

Just wanted to link the pvp community to a 2v2 tournament hosted by Kierin.

twitch.tv/gw2friends

brackets: bit.ly/gw2tourney2

rules: bit.ly/gw2tourney2rules

Kavia.8249:

Lux.7169:

From my understanding tPvP isn’t getting reset, nor is it getting much attention from anet =\

Team queue leaderboard is also being reset – reread Justin’s first post in the matchmaking changes thread

Really? I wonder if this is to wipe some of the decay out of them or what. I can’t see them revamping the way they match teams in team Q since that didn’t seem to be a problem. I am really curious as to what is instigating the tQ LB reset.

Or different titles for tPvP and SoloQ.

From my understanding tPvP isn’t getting reset, nor is it getting much attention from anet =\

Romek.4201:

they are not “more” justified and this is no reason to do it again

alot people are in top 100 which would never be there and when YOU think you are legit than YOU will be there again and YOU will be there when we get the rewardsystem + Seasons

and a legit TOP player would be happy for this change to have more competive Matchups in the future + leaderboards which are not a joke and ignored from most players

you sound more like you fear you will never be there again

Fear I won’t be on there again? While I respect your opinion on the topic at hand, the personal insults are uncalled for.

Not only have I been off and on top 100 many times throughout the LB lifetime, I’m one of the few players with more than 100 games. I just checked and I’m at 743 for Solo Q alone. I’m not concerned at all. But I guess I understand where you’re coming from since you’ve never even been close to top 100. Blame the system.

So please, forgive me for simply asking what the community thought about it. I didn’t know my rank would infuriate you to the point of personally insulting me.

Also, did you read past the first couple sentences? You know, where I said: “First of all I fully support the MMR and LB reset, I think it’s much-needed fresh air for the spvp community.”

candlecan.9827:

This entire thread just makes me LOL. How in the world with this leaderboard do you differentiate those who sync que’d, or those who legitimately earned their record. The current system is broken, admittedly so by all parties; how on earth do you want to reward people for this??? The best thing is to fix the leaderboards and totally forget about this shameful period in PvP, not rewarding players with a title for achieving a rank in a pool ripe with exploits and inaccuracy. 100 games IS NOT a sufficient filter to stop those who dont deserve it from being rewarded.

So how do you justify the top QP title reward? There were amazing teams like Java’s and Nero’s that were playing prime time, and other teams that were farming Oceanic Dead-time pug hours. I won’t list names for that because pretty sure that would break ToS.

So what I want to know is why you think the old titles given out to the people with the most QP’s is more justified than me just asking anet to consider something like a title. They already mentioned the possibility of rewarding LB rank in the past while we were playing on this LB, so what’s so wrong about inquiring about it.

kirito.4138:

Lux.7169:

I invested about ~700 games on this ladder and I think it would be nifty to get a title for it. Yes, I’m easy to please ^^

Something besides… a glory booster…

I would like a free glory boosters for my ~2700 tpvp wins too.

Oh, don’t worry, we have a special reward coming for that… at 10,000 tournament wins we get 5 more achievement points.

I wish I were kidding.

lilz shorty.1879:

Lol the only way this should work is you have over 100 games played. Some of the people who played 10-15 games and got one loss then stopped queing on their accounts rofl, is a joke

Read that in another thread. I definitely agree, that would be a great barrier to filter out people who just played the LB game and not really the Solo Q experience.

Then again, I’m biased.

I like your stipulation of “more than 100 games”, but then again I am biased. I do think there should be some minor reward (such as a title). We played on this leaderboard while reading devs talk about giving recognition/rewards based on LB rank in the future (I can look for the sources), and now it’s being erased/reset. What harm would it do to give us a title?

I would love to see some sort of small recognition for LB performance before/after it gets reset. Specifically something similar to the past titles that were distributed (veteran of the arena, challenger of the arena, legend of the arena, etc etc), based on the highest you were ever ranked on the old/new LB system

Ok before we get into “LB MEANS NOTHING!!1! pve noob” hear me out and feel free to openly disagree if you want.

First of all I fully support the MMR and LB reset, I think it’s much-needed fresh air for the spvp community.

The logic behind the request is this: it’s a minor recognition for a personal accomplishment (even if the system itself was flawed). The players from before were able to get special titles when I was on hiatus, and they simply had to accumulate win totals, win % had nothing to do with it, so really there wasn’t anything more challenging to achieve those titles back then. Essentially they rewarded the most active players in the tpvp paid tourney community.

While I won’t think twice if nothing happens, I figured I’d voice this in case others felt passionately one way or another and perhaps a dev would consider some sort of recognition for being on the old LB before they erased our MMR’s and created a new LB. I invested about ~700 games on this ladder and I think it would be nifty to get a title for it. Yes, I’m easy to please ^^

Something besides… a glory booster…

Honestly I don’t see how “time” should even be a factor in determining a match-up.

Allow me to elaborate. Time should be inconsequential in that the issue is not with putting bad players up against good players. The way the system is currently set up is that it is drastically biased towards splitting teams up based on their MMR, meaning it has a huge propensity to putting the top 5 rated players in any given match on the same team.

By either COMPLETELY shuffling the 10 players picked for Queue or scattering them based on a formula that evens out the chances of winning it shouldn’t take more “time” to get a better match-making system.

The only reason I could see time being a factor would be if you were trying to force matches to have all players within a certain range of each other, which is a pretty ridiculous goal given the current setup (if you wanted to accomplish this then a better addition would be tiers that only places players of similar tiers within the same matches). The main concern I have heard is that people are tired of the illusion of sync Queueing. No one wants to see the same top 20 players in the exact same team for 5 hours in a row (I’ve been there, both on the top and bottom team—it’s especially bad during oceanic time zone).

IMO I expect both good and bad players in any given match. All that I ask is that it’s randomized WITHIN the match to prevent both organized syncing and to promote a more balanced game (thus resulting in less people leaving mid-match).

ronpierce.2760:

The rules of todays’ went really well, I think. It was very fluid, quick, clean and tons of fun. The commentators did AMAZING.

The shoutcasting was definitely top notch.
Really fun games to watch! Love it when the community steps up to help bring the spotlight to pvp every now and then.

Stx.4857:

How could it even be used to break a stun if it has a cast time?

The problem is that even if they’re stunned they could use return… so stunning them just to watch them return out with unlimited uses left them extremely powerful in disengaging and distancing themselves from the immediate danger.

The funny thing is, when someone’s scoring 300+ points in a competitive match, more often than not whatever they’re doing is dominating the match.

If you literally gave them max points per kill for them to be randomly going around killing people for 15 points per kill (and they never cap a single objective), that’s 20 kills they were involved in during the match. It equates to 15×20 = 300 seconds = 5 minutes of downtime where enemies are literally waiting to respawn. Not only that but they have to take 10-20 seconds to run back into battle.

but I digress…. since I was talking about competitive 5v5… not hotjoin. On the topic of hotjoin, who actually cares if they win or lose? Isn’t it just a place to go screw around with builds and bad players?

Matches are in the semi-finals with 150+ viewers. Still time to catch the semis and the finals!

Cloak and Swagger’s Tournament is going live in 1 hour. It’s an all-thieve 1v1 tournament.

Beefy Boy will be streaming it here: http://www.twitch.tv/beefytruck

Brackets: http://challonge.com/sof ( BRACKETS are also viewable on the stream right now )

For this tournament the Shadow Arts traitline has been banned.

Thanks to donations the prize pool hit 35gold!

Happy viewing!

…continued wall of text

For me a thief’s only saving grace is a number game. For example, if you consider the average effect any given player has on a game as a 1.0 meaning the total average should be about a 5.0 if all players are playing equally valuable specs, then a thief’s value is: XX+Y where more often than not XX is less than 1.

Let’s say a thief has a value of .85 meaning he’s running sub-optimal. The Y value has yet to be calculated though. Y represents is an artificial value that becomes true should he succeed. Y is based off of his ability to increase the numbers in fights.

For example, let’s say the game just started and the Thief RED runs to far pt solo and sees a bunker war going there from the blue team, so instead of pushing far he goes mid. Thief BLUE (the other thief) also rushed to the enemy far (this is reds home now) sees a bunker warrior and decides to engage. He temp stalls the cap (10second stall until bunk war caps through thief stealthing). 2 mins later thief gives up, disengages to go help team elsewhere.

Thief RED (the one who disengaged immediately) went to mid to the teamfight where his team was originally 3v3 and he made it a 4v3.

At first glance it appears that thief RED made the better choice. But that’s ONLY dependent on his true value, Y.

For equality purposes let’s assume everyone in the game is a bunker warrior except the thieves.

Thief RED only made a better choice if he can kill someone at mid in the 4v3 where he is a number up. However if Thief RED + his 3 bunker warriors at mid can’t kill ANYTHING, then the 10seconds (10 points) that thief BLUE stalled is worth more and technically the better decision, because he realized (or didn’t but still benefited from it) how little he was worth in the value of the game.

However, thief RED only has to have a Y value of 15.1 to be useful in this game. So let’s say he goes mid, wins the 4v3 and they cap it. His Y value is much higher than .15, meaning he has surpassed the 1.0 mark, the average of the game.

It’s my way of thinking of a thief’s value. It’s not just based on team fights or 1v1’s or res potential. The Y value is affected by mobility and the ability to rapidly influence the numbers in skirmishes.

Builds aren’t the problem with thieves. There are a variety of solid builds out there even though 2 have solidified its place as the alpha predator builds.

The main problem is two-fold, the condition meta coupled with the shift towards a tank-meta.

The lack of condition removal is crushing to a thief. Not that we can’t access it, but rather by doing so we sacrifice the necessary pressure to 1v1 the meta condi classes.

Why do I say 1v1? In team-fights thieves are a liability. If you get focused you have to blow CD’s to JUST survive. Meaning there goes your burst or your safety net (depending if you ‘survive’ with disable shot or shadowstep or stealth). While you can be useful in team-fights, it’s unusual to see a thief consistently in them; hence the roaming title we’re notorious for.

Back to 1v1. In this meta far (enemy close) will typically be defended by warrior, engi, spirit ranger, guardian or in rare situations some form of necro.

Put all of the machismo stuff aside. I don’t care how many rangers you can 1v3 etc etc etc. Can you beat Elita One in a 1v1 at far? Can you beat Eurantien at a 1v1 at far. Eura is a bad example since he’s running a plethora of off-beat builds. Just because you 1v1’d some ranger means nothing. It has no bearing on whether or not rangers are where they should be with regard to the meta. To do justice I find it useful seeing how the top players are performing against each other AND considering how the builds fade throughout LB. I’m using LB as a reference only because it’s where I actually have experience. They are definitely flawed and need to be re-worked. But it’s no surprise that caed, cruuk, magic tokerr are CONSTANTLY in the top 100.

Back on topic, here are my thoughts, and I have a TON of experience:
Spirit Ranger 1v1 far: I honestly have no idea how other thieves do it or if they even try. I have personally found my niche to beating them and it was conveniently what I’ve been running even before that point. By this I mean I haven’t lost to a spirit ranger 1v1 far in as many top tier matches I can remember. Elita, Deku are the two most recent that come to mind. However I don’t run meta since I bring smoke screen.

Since I don’t know how other thieves have been performing I consider it an extremely difficult match-up for most since they can’t afford to make mistakes and the enemy can afford to make tons.

1v1 Bunker Warrior. From my knowledge it’s literally impossible and a complete waste of time to 1v1 them. I don’t care if you SAY you’ve 1v1’d a pure bunker warrior. Have you 1v1’d Juaraz? If no, then unless you name a credible top tier bunker warrior it means nothing to me. If they’re more of a hybrid then it’s less of a problem. Even if someone like Caed CAN take down Juaraz, I’m estimating a 2minute fight while Juaraz owns the point and doesn’t get decapped those entire 2 minutes.

1v1 guardian. The problem is high-level home pt guardians have become increasingly rare since warriors are doing it better (passive proc to stability and an active proc). A top tier guardian shouldn’t die -quickly- to a thief. Meaning expect a 1 fight even in top tier matches.

1v1 Necro. Now we get into necro a shadey area where there’s a ton of really bad ones, and some amazing ones. The biggest name coming to mind immediately is Jery E, someone who has been play necro before they were buffed and has had that experience advantage. No recent 1v1 with him comes to mind but I am pretty sure he could obliterate me. Scrub necros will blow their evades when you’re not even bursting so it doesn’t even matter. What matters is the necros who KNOW when to blow their fears, their dodges, hit you with chill, torment, etc. It literally becomes a hard-counter at that point since they can react to you, and your only reaction besides blowing your dodges on as many wells as you can is to disengage…

My thoughts on thief. I think thief is in a good place. I do not think the meta is in a good place. Risk vs Reward: thieves typically put everything on the line to go as high in damage as possible while still maintaining some nifty tricks. I think thieves should be rewarded more for taking this risk, and they should be rewarded more for interrupting key spells.

It’s just not fun for most people to play thief when your friend can hop on a warrior, attach the meta build and just eat your attacks with no punishment for speccing to be so tanky. He would even kill you if you didn’t disengage.

Right now thieves are great for destroying bads, and fun in casual play, but when you start playing in the higher echelons you realize how easy it is to exploit the evades, condi spam, and tankiness in the game.

AtoBoss.2906:

…………..wut.

-Gold
-Exclusive skins only obtainable in PvP but transferable to PvE
-Exclusive finishers for X amount of glory and for achieving X rank on Leaderboards
-Gems (moot point if we can convert glory to gold since we could just use gold to by gems)