Guild Wars 2

Hey all, I’m doing a series on class-based sPvP guides with the pros for esportsgaming.net and I got the first video uploaded last night, featuring Five Gauge and his 100 nades build for Engineer, what do you guys think? any suggestions/requests for future episodes? -(besides audio being a bit low, already working on this lol).

i queued into a dev team on patch day playing that new map, they were running 4 minion necros and a trap ranger lol. Needless to say, I brought up a few complaints about tab targeting with them.

I think ballancing should be an important part of this episode, as a lot of people were rely put off by the lack of balance changes in the last patch. This is a good (and quick) video to soak up some knowledge on balancing I think.
Bringing up how getting 1 shot by backstab burst is only fun for the person playing thief, limits the number of viable build options for thiefs in general, and just dumbs down the class in general (can spam it and wont come out of stealth if blocked; don’t have to watch for boons/don’t have to pay attention to interupts), for example.

Advice to Zoose: don’t be afraid to interrupt the devs if they start rambling off common sense rhetoric, be respectful to them, but also be respectful to the community and bring up questions/topics that you think THEY would want brought up.
Also (to Zoose and Xeph), take comfort in the fact that our community is behind you man, it can be a very intimidating situation and I think remembering this can be important. /end pep talk
looking forward to the show!

Hey folks, I got the chance to sit down with Five Gauge from team Jolly Fat Kids and create a video guide for his 100 nades build. Check it out! -and remember to like/subscribe for more GW2 content from esportsgaming.net!

Dino.4062:

why are there literally no viewers on twitch?

typically, titles only generate high ratings when:

• A) something big is happening in the game. (runescape 2007 rollback for example)
• B) a very popular person is playing that game. (like when you see warcraft 3 get 5k viewers because oddone is playing it)

Since none if these rely apply to our game, it will be mostly just members of the PvP community watching one another. But you can see, when Team Paradigm/Guildcast starts streaming, GW2 can still get around 600-1k viewers, just because these are popular channels with a large following.

People tend to get caught up in all the “league of legends streaming revolution” ect and forget that it’s popularity/marketing > skill to generate a viewerbase. If this weren’t true, TSM would not generate the largest following on twitch, as they get beaten by pretty much any pro team outside of NA scene in every global LAN tournament they enter. TSM has generated a massive following because Reginald is great at promoting the brand, and has been ever since Dreamhack 2009.

everything you listed with the exception of spectator mode. The game has improved quiet a bit, but there is still a lot of work ahead.

The game IS hurting in terms of watch-ability in its current state, let me explain why:

• No enemy cast bars: fights are nearly impossible for the viewer to follow accurately because many cast animations are the same.
• Worthless mini-map: green dots tell nothing, impossible to follow global awareness. Just switching out the green dots to class-based icons would be a simple fix.
• No custom games/spectator mode: Impossible to shoutcast matches.

Honestly though, I think GW2 will reach “t1” esports one day, it may just be like how Dota 2 is to LoL you know? less popular, but more/equally competitive. The dedication is there on anet’s part, and many organizations are ready to back up the scene with tournaments (will not give out specific names, but I can confirm this). It’s just a matter of when arenanet can patch these features into the game. But honestly, I’ve never seen a more dedicated developer team -they’ve probably even got 2 or 3 pvp devs reading this post right now (hi tyler).

Tyler Bearce.3427:

I just wanted to pop in once more and let you guys know that we are still watching this thread and evaluating our options. There is some good discussion here, and I do actually agree with the general consensus.

We love you Tyler! ;p

Lady Sara Goldheart.2764:

Zodian.6597:

Well what you could do instead is this; premade ranked queue, solo ranked queue, then just normals (1-5 player queue) with the current hidden mmr system (no leader board) to promote premade vs premade and solo vs solo play; but in a looser way.
Replace hotjoin with custom games to normalize the queue times and I think everyone wins no?

Was it not that they will monetize custom servers ?
It would not hurt to keep hotjoin but it has to be 5vs5 only.
Normals may also do their job, but I think hotjoins will be a better first experience.
Or we have a designated server or other things for newer players.

P.S.: I would also not mind a monthly fee.

Nah, I think the term “rent-able custom servers” was misunderstood by a lot of people: they simply meant custom game creation. And any monetization other than cosmetics VIA the cash shop would likely hurt the generated income of spvp rather than boost it.
We have to think of sPvP as a newborn child; it needs to be nurtured and developed very carefully in a way that’s healthy for it’s growth so that down the road, we can hit adulthood (esports) and have a powerful infrastructure to support the competitive and casual scenes alike.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Oni.5429:

You have two separate tourny ques at this moment. One for 3 round and one for 1 round. In a blog post you guys said that they had separate matchmaking. Paid tournaments previously demonstrated that you guys have the ’’feature’’ in place to force someone to be 5 premade players to que in to the match. You also now have a ‘’join solo’’ button.

If you piece these pieces together you get:

1.Make one tournament que ‘’join solo’’ only, 1 round
2. Make the other que ‘’submit roster’’ with 5 only , 1 round

LE VOILA!
It’s okay, we can scrap the idea of duoq for now. Put that in your ’’soon’’ basket. You can do the same for the random map generator, just keep rotating maps manually the way you guys do every 2 days or something.

There. That is the solution that will allow solo players to play the game without getting stomped by teams.

So in this suggestion, people would only play as a team of 5 or by themselves. That would mean effectively disabling tournaments for people who want to play tournaments with a friend. Or two friends, or three friends, but don’t have a full team. I can’t imagine that would go over very well either.

Well what you could do instead is this; premade ranked queue, solo ranked queue, then just normals (1-5 player queue) with the current hidden mmr system (no leader board) to promote premade vs premade and solo vs solo play; but in a looser way.
Replace hotjoin with custom games to normalize the queue times and I think everyone wins no?

Evan Lesh.3295:

Sprawl.3891:

Evan Lesh.3295:

We’re definitely listening. I like these ideas a lot. Custom Arenas will still be used to fill the role of hot-join. They won’t all be password protected, and people who just want to jump into a game are still going to do that. We’re curious to see how the population shifts now that the tournament formats are changing.

when are you going to fix matches starting 5v4 or 5v3? Nobody on your team seems to want to respond to this major issue.

Please keep the threads on track:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Sick-of-3v5-4v5-and-other-unfair-odds/first#post1541949

Hey Evan, I just wanted to say that it’s great to see some dev activity on a lot of these threads man. I think it’s awesome and that I speak for the whole community when I thank you for the time you’ve taken to read and respond to our posts.

Lordrosicky.5813:

If someone logs out whilst solo queuing for a tournament before the count down is up then someone else should take their roster spot.

This will solve 99% of the 4 vs 5 problems.

But I dont believe this is the sole problem. The number of 4 vs 5 matches on very very short queues is remarkable. I think you need to look into you system. There could be some coding errors which are causing 4 man teams to be produced. There was never this many 4 vs 5 games even with the old 8 man queues with epically long queues.

Either way, I dont like the idea of punishing deserters. But I do like the idea kicking people from the roster whenever they log out and are in a queue. This seems like it should logically happen. But please only do this when that person solo queued because otherwise you will ruins so many premade vs premade matches.

Well if you look at the bigger picture, custom arenas are going to solve ALOT of problems, such as the whole “i don’t want to play the map that’s being used for todays tournaments”, we also could scrap hotjoin once customs are in place; pushing more people into the tournament game queue, and it also helps people trying to create media content for the game by giving them at least one of the tools that they may need to create guide videos, host scrims or what have you, the 2nd being spectator mode (to later host tournaments/shoutcast scrims -something a few organizations I’ve spoken recently with plan on doing).
While I agree that solo queue is a HUGE HUGE HUGE HUGE part of why spvp fell off the deep end; we must approach the situation from a marketing perspective as well; right now there is virtually no media content being produced that promotes the competitive or even casual PvP scene in this game, we’ll need that media to grab peoples attention and get the to logg back into the game.

tldr; custom arenas = essential tool for pvp youtubers, gw2 media content creation = more people seeing game play = more people coming back to the game (which is the real “highest” priority for everyone right now).

gwawer.9805:

You guys traumatized them with the knee-jerk negative feedback yesterday. They read the forum response, went to a bar got drunk and now have hangovers.

lmao YEP. but anyways I think there will be an interview here conducted by Enshadowed from TP EU.

Shar.3402:

WoW is that way —-—->

no cast bars, thank you.

Like I said, there would obviously be a way for the casual players to turn them off. Just for the competitive scene, it’s rely impossible to follow what’s going on in a fight without them.

ReversaI.6275:

Zodian.6597:

how to get this staff? :o

A guildmate of mine got it from the gold tourney chests, don’t think it can be made with mystic toilet..but could be wrong.

free tournament chests? or paid?

• Step 1: remove hotjoins (HOTJOINS = BAD, TOXIC, GET THEM OUT NOW).
• Step 2: remove “8 team frees” (TOURNAMENTS = BAD, TOXIC, GET THEM OUT NOW).
• Step 3: make a duplicate of the current “Quick Frees” (keeping original of course).
• Step 4: segregate the solo queue players from the duo-premade players.
• Step 5: apply rated status to it.
• Step 6: public ratings ladder for solo queue, public ratings ladder for duo+.
• Step 7: apply random map generator consisting of legacy and forest to rated games, random map generator of every map to original “quick frees”.
• Step 8: release custom games so ppl can still play w/e map they want.
• Step 9: do a barrel roll!
  done

So what do you guys think about the patch?

you can carry orb with invulns (cantrips), s/d bunker ele is pretty game breaking. Not to mention you can rtl while carrying orb.

how to get this staff? :o

Although you guys rely let the spvp community down with the balancing portion of this patch, it’s good to see that we’re heading in a better direction for the overall design of the game (tournament reform/mmr). Hopefully we can take out hotjoins and Xeph’s rant on balancing will get the consideration it deserves from the Jons.

nerva.7940:

yeah, spvp is back. thanks.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/big-changes-to-pvp-paid-tournaments-replaced-by-free-tournaments/

will 8v8 hotjoin be removed? please say it will.

yeah, hotjoin needs to go go go! Very toxic to the overall design of the game, I was in disbelief during the beta when someone told me that it was going to ship with release.

LOL that’s awesome!

Well done! Keep up the great work!

felivear.1536:

As usual, you are correct. The game is doing fine, there are lots of people playing, it’s just too bad none of them are playing PvP. Anet is going on gaming shows and touting GW2 as the “fastest selling MMO in history” and yet we have a PvP population on the verge of extinction. When you add those 2 sentences together, how can you not see that your implementation of PvP is abysmal? Let me reiterate.

• You have the fastest selling MMO of all time
• You have a PvP population that is almost non existent

So, you have the players to play PvP if it was fun and rewarding to do so. How about you start listening to the players that are telling you to add a solo Q and stop being so silent on even the most benign changes? Start treating us as loyal fans and let’s have a back-and-forth about changes. You kick an idea our way, we’ll kick it back and so on. This “we know what’s best for the game” attitude, only to release a feature that doesn’t work or is a bad design is just frustrating.

It’s funny because if you actually look at their numbers on google analytics, population has in fact dropped around 85% from September – now. Since PVE has maintained around the same numbers since launch, this would suggest that 85% of the original player base was here for the pvp. Food for thought.

loulakion.9741:

well i hope the developers wont listen you that the solution to the problem of low population in the sPvP is the loss of soloQ (what? i dont get it what supposed to be qualified points i thought they were for players and not teams… anyway… )

to add my pity opinion, if you want to see the sPvP to gather people >> become competitive
1) make it f2p or sell 10$ accounts locked in Mists > sPvP (with a smaller client also to be downloaded )…
2) add real tournaments with real money prizes
3) bring spectate mode+custom maps (even for this smaller “sPvP client”)

in my opinion even of they need 1 year to create something like that, even then it will work, compared to SMITE you mentioned is far above GW2 …

While these features would be great, I think you’ve missed the gaping flaw in anet’s design philosophy; the first issue is that there is no casual game type where people can queue and play on same teams with friends. In an MMO, it’s the social bonds which rely keep people playing; not the gameplay (contrary to popular belief). The second issue is that there is no viable option to solo queue competitively; this means no individual player progression occurs, instead people just form teams, label them as competitive and call it good.
So without individual skill progression and a weak casual player base, spvp is destined to fail. There’s also a lot of skill/mechanic balancing revolving around counter-play that needs to be addressed, but the real problem is this lack of transparency between the dedicated community members and the developer team as to what the hell is actually going on behind their iron curtain. Just look at the new ratings system; they spent weeks getting it ready before announcing how it ACTUALLY worked to the community, and SO many design flaws were pointed out. The time and resources that went into designing something as big as that are now wasted because they failed to notify the players on how they wanted ratings to work. If they would have said “hey guys this is our plan for ratings ____”, and opened like a post on the forums for feedback, I gaurentee you solo queue, public numerical ratings, and single map match making would have gone into the design.

TL;DR = Patches are not “Christmas presents”, the community should not be surprised by what is in them on the day that they launch. The lack of transparency allows toxic elements to enter our game that would otherwise not be there if community feedback was given beforehand.

Forgot NA teams bro! Such as [Cute], [RMA], TP shift, TP NA, Alpha Colective, [PZ] (kindof), [LOVE], the list goes on an on. Pretty much all of the big teams on NA have quit or are on ‘hiatus".
Good rant thread though, hope it opens up some eyes over here in Seattle. The patch is in 3 days and we still have no real idea on any of the specifics of whats going to be in it, yet I could not only look up, but PLAY the coming “Quinn and Valor” league of legends patch in the PBE that won’t launch for another month or so.
Look at it this way; if they told us the specifics of EVERYTHING they intended to spend time on (except maybe minor class balancing), at least then the community could act as a sort of filter to make sure junk that’s toxic to the game’s overall design like hotjoin doesn’t even reach the drawing board.

Someone posted a video on this sub forum a few days ago belonging to a youtube channel that I found quiet interesting and informative. I don’t usually follow the links that are posted within these sub forums, but i’m glad that I gave this one a shot. http://www.youtube.com/user/ExtraCreditz/featured
I rely liked the episodes on counterplay, balancing for skill, and depth vs complexity. Cheers! -Neglekt

Duncanmix.5238:

I think you are should rename your tiers a bit.

Tier S: best class or too much op
Tier A: slightly op
Tier B: good balance
Tier C: underpowered

With that said from Warrior pov:

Tier S: Elementalist (no surprise here i guess)
Tier A: Guardian, Thief, Mesmer. I’m little bit surprised that people putting thieves so low. As a warrior, you can be in middle of battle and suddenly you die to thief. In like second, you can go scratch, yawn, check your phone for sec or whatever and thats enough time for thief to down you.
Tier B: Necro, Ranger, Enge. I guess lots of people noticed potential in ranger, but I rarely meet some top tier rangers and they are ok with me.
Tier C: Warrior. Nothing makes me happy then to see bunch of warrior in enemy team. You know they gonna bulls rush you, and you know once you dodge it you won.

Seems pretty accurate to whats being played right now on NA, I’d say maybe Mesmer switch with Thief though; very few teams run mesmer in higher level play anymore (despite the huge benifits a great mesmer can bring to a team), and thief is still /dance 1 shotting everyone in da face (caed, im lookin at you buddy) -but now with d/p wep combo. ;p

Hey guys, just wanted to post a vid with updated trick shots for Inf arrow. Have fun with it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vt_avvejHYw&list=UUntcKrdj_s08UAx2WVm-cTQ&index=2

One of many reasons why hotjoin will most likely be scrapped from the game in the near future. PvP is just a real mess right now, anet is starting to work on it though.

Hammerheart.1426:

It is mostly a population issue, and chances are you are getting paired with the only teams playing at the time.

My team played against Phantaram once, among some other big names, and we were like, wat? There’s no way we are the same rating as some of the people we’ve been paired against.

As the population grows, the MMR will start to pair us up more reliably.

This.

Very informative, and well written thread. It’s nice to find gems like this hidden through all the garbage that accumulates in this sub-forum. -Neglekt

nerva.7940:

thing they dont seem to understand is how to make pvp accessible. on top of that theyre splitting up the pop way too much and for some irrational reason clutching onto the 8v8 hotjoin.

this game badly needs what everyone is asking for:

improved rewards
5v5 1v1 team soloqueue
5v5 paids 1v1 team queue
monthly 8 team, 5v5, 3 round tournaments

anything less than this will continue to kill spvp. anything less is simply unacceptable at this point. if 8v8 hotjoin remains and 3 round free tourneys remain, i honestly dont think anybody will give a kitten to play spvp again.

eagerly awaiting to see the spvp reveal, but deep down i know i will be disappointed.

Completely agree with you, they could even just do ranked/unranked team queues and a solo queue with hidden mmr. The problem is that Peters (more so than Sharp I think), is clutching onto this idea that somehow great solo queue players will be on par with average premades; which will never happen in the games current state, terrible minimap design allows VOIP to carry games.
I’ll be writing an article on esportsgaming.net addressing some of these issues sometime this week. But it’s also worth noting that in terms of acceptability; they are making some good improvements such as changing the default builds that people start with on character creation to actual viable setups, and listening to the community and our feedback; I’m almost certain 1 or 2 pvp devs will be reading this post -HI DEVS! lol

According to Google trends, the games population (popularity is a decent indicator to concurrent population) dropped about 70% from August-October, peeking in September i believe. Since then, it’s started to level out a bit, but still decreasing (less and less of a decrease over time), which is expected for a MMORPG; even WoW’s popularity has been receding ever since it peeked in December 2006.
We’re hoping the February and March updates will get the ball rolling for sPvP, if you’re on a server other than Anvil Rock (NA) or Desolation (EU), I’d recommend trying out the new guesting feature to gain access to the mist lobbies of these servers as they are still pretty much booming with active players and make the game feel a lot more populated if you play sPvP.

EdenEnix.6341:

Hello guys. I recently started pvping with my ele and what a nightmare. No I dont suck, I been the top player a few times. Problem is when I have to 1v1 some one. Crappy interface problems aside, I’ve been watching videos of people pvping with an ele and some how they are able to use skills with hot keys, move the character, AND move the camera all at the same time without changing any hotkeys. How the hell do they do this? Do they have 3 hands or what? Any advice appreciated, thanks.

You can change keybinds in the settings interface. You can use shift, ctrl, and alt + any letter/number key. So no, you shouldn’t need a mouse to bind all of your keys, I was able to play WoW arenas pretty competitively before I ever got a good mouse. But in pretty much any game, most players are willing to shell out around $100 for a decent gaming mouse (Razer mouses mostly); the utility and comparability you gain outweighs the price, even most casuals have a razer mouse these days lol.

kodesh.2851:

I’m fine without cast bars. I like that people have to learn the animations through experience. Cast bars would make interrupts even more ez-mode. It’s not tough to tell when someone is casting, but it does take some experience to learn what to interrupt and what to dodge/ignore.

I do think the mini-map could be more informative of your own team’s movements. Enemy movements should remain hidden.

While I agree with you on the mini-map, I think what’s happening mostly right now with interrupts is a lot of RNG; you just get someone low then spam cc (pistol offhand skill: “headshot” on thief for example).
Its also worth noting that a lot (most) of the cast animations in the game are the same/similar (thief “basilisk venom”/thief “hide in shadows” heal for example) to one another, so having an icon/text to let you AND the viewer know which skill is being used/interrupted would be a huge improvement to the watch-ability of the game as well as to the general fluidity of combat.

Something that I think should be addressed at some point (more so than it has been) is the “watchability” of this game. We all know that esports is where GW2 is headed, anyone who disagrees with that at this point is only kidding themselves. However, I’m concerned about how difficult it is for the viewer to follow what is actually happening during an sPvP match, so many little details just get missed. Here’s my 2 (literally and figuratively) cents on how we could improve the issue.

• Cast Bars (bars that would hover under the target’s HP bar displaying the name of a skill and the duration of it’s cast) would be huge for not only watch ability, but play ability as well, to be able to see what skill the other player is actually using, how fluid their rotation between skills in general is, and what abilities are actually getting interrupted by the person playing, would greatly improve the experience of watching a team fight.
• I also think class based icons for the mini-map, rather than simple green dots, would be an amazing improvement for global awareness of people that don’t have access to a team’s VOIP, this would also be a huge benefit to solo queue (yolo queue) players in terms of global map awareness -right now VOIP is just OP as hell because without it you can’t truly know WHO is WHERE on the map; you just have to kind of guess based on subtracting which classes are near you from your overall team comp.

Skyro.3108:

Not to undermine your effort because it’s always nice to see people trying to teach the community, but if you don’t play the class your trying to give advice to then I’d steer away from doing so. Good advice must be practical to be of any use.

For example condi mesmers are actually pretty terrible in tPvP to begin with, as is confusion (on the Mesmer) in general. In almost any scenario you would deal more damage with just mind wrack rather than using cof and praying your opponent spams a bazillion skills during the 3s confusion is up. And while it’s true confusion is strong vs the ranger’s auto-attack if the ranger blindly spams it, you’re simply not going to face many condition-based mesmers in high level tPvP because they are terrible overall, and you certainly shouldn’t be advising Mesmers to do so.

Arcane Thievery is really only useful in 1v1, and even then it is debatable to take over null field due to being able to combo null field into another 5s of chaos armor. Similarly I would never take Feedback simply to help combat a trap ranger. It is not really needed.

Personally I don’t think the standard glass cannon shatter mesmers have much of a chance to kill a good trap ranger, but I don’t think trap rangers or OP or anything like that. It has more to do with glass cannon mesmers (and glass cannon builds in general) becoming less and less effective in high level tPvP. It’s amusing to me how the majority of the forum posters here still believe glass cannon shatter mesmers are OP when most high level tPvP’ers think they are pretty UP now.

Well Nero does play this spec in higher level play so…. yeah, but he is RELY far ahead of other Mesmers in the game right now, so maybe most would have issues playing that spec. He’s playing chess while we’re all playing checkers! ;p

s/d bunker ele counters trap ranger.

settings > graphics > post processing > set to high. This setting can make the game feel a lot more colorful if you have it disabled.

Why don’t we just give a buff that generates +x amount of points per second that stacks based on the number of people leave the team? Only in frees of course, since its a rely only a problem there.

Paids are good now, good queues, the mmr lets ppl play against equal skill level teams ect. BUT, frees are are in rely bad shape right now, 45 minute queues for solo queue, lots of afkers, ect..
How about we just combine frees and hotjoins? just make frees a single team v single team (like paids) with ninja mmr and no ladder so that new players get matched up to each other and good solo queue players can have fun too. I’m sure this has been pitched before a million times, but I think reiteration is key to getting things done around here.
Normal match making + ranked match making is the direction in which i feel like this game is going (or at least will end up at), we could still just do monthlies with the top rated players in the ranked bracket, which would just be the current paids system + a ladder, monthlies based on MMR over QP would hold higher credibility anywase.
I know everyone has been pushing for ranked solo queue, but lets try to reform our current systems first so that we can make spvp actually playable for every player demographic (not just hardcores and ppl with teams) and then build upon it later.

dimyzuka.7051:

Zodian.6597:

I don’t think you understand, there would literally be < 100 people who would queue into ratings based solo queue right now. You’d get 2k mmr players playing against 1k mmr players after the queue fails to find games in their bracket. Just because it’s the reason people quit doesn’t mean it will just instantly bring all of them back and it certainly doesn’t mean that upon returning they will instantly queue into ranked games.

if you can’t see how solo que would be by far the most popular queing bracket and would bring hundreds of players like myself back who quit the game you need to play some other competitive pvp games and get a feel as to what pvp players want.

You’d get 2k mmr players playing against 1k mmr players after the queue fails to find games in their bracket.

With this proposed system the SAME thing will happen, ASWELL as the possibility of facing a premade team as a solo que’d team and then lose rating for it.

With Aanets system i can already see the fail, just like we saw the fail with their 8team tournament system on release, just like their fail no incentive no meaningfull reason to pvp system;
John Doe has 2 hours free before work, he logs on to que some rated solo que pvp and get his ranking up, first game he gets in against a premade as a pug, his team mate goes afk because he doesn’t care about rating and doesn’t like to get bent over and kitten He just wasted 30mins in a 4vs5 which he couldn’t leave AND loses rating. It just so happens that 5min after Johns que popped another 5 solo players were registered into the system, but as they just missed out on johns team they get matched up against a premade aswell after a short wait and many tears are had.

It doesn’t matter how long the wait times are with a proper solo que because with their proposed system its basically wasting 30minutes AND losing rating if u meet a premade. I would rather wait a little extra longer (messing around in hotjoins or browsing net/streams)in que to get a proper solo vs solo match than get an instant que into a mismatch against a premade where im almost guaranteed to lose rating and have 0 enjoyment, and then que again and run the same risk again, if i am unlucky whos knows how long it will take and how many tears before i get my solo vs solo match i want.

This is all assuming that ques will be instant with their system which won’t be the case, how long will ques be? how long will it wait before giving up on a solo match and matching you against a premade? Imagine waiting 20minutes ONLY to get a premade.

And like jumper said whats the point of even having a ranking system if its so unbalanced, if they do ignore everyone and put in this system they will at least HAVE to have 2 separate ladders (solo/group) otherwise the whole system is flawed and noone will want to que as solo because it will ruin their rating. It’s obvious this sytem will fail for solo quers, and will force everyone into social networking wars2, then they will probably use those numbers to make an argument that solo que isnt a priority.

yeah idk, it’s rely going to depend on how this systems actually going to be implemented. I think the reason that they are giving us rank over a numerical ratings is because there are literally <200 people actively queueing in paids right now (and i have 1/2 of them on my friends list lol). So it will make people feel better about being rank 200 in NA rather than having like 2 players at ridiculously inflated ratings and the rest at meh/deflated rating numbers.
Also, with the current spvp population being as low as it is, solo queue could be abused hardcore, examples being: you could queue on weekday mornings, effectively dodging like the entire competitive player base and just farm rating, or you could watch friends list and wait for a match to finish then queue at the same time as a friend and get put into the same game, you’re also very likely to queue into people who are on your friends list anyways, so you could easily just get into VOIP with that person and win via dominant communication. It’s just too easy to manipulate who you queue into at this point.

I think priority targeting would be a rely nice convenience, but it would rely screw Mesmers over lol. Maybe a way to personalize the scripting like target x class before x (thief>necro>warrior>ranger>ele>engineer>guard>mesmer), and just group Mesmer clones with the Mesmer class and prioritize them last.

Rambodacious.7495:

As you can see from the title, many people believe me to be the greatest SPvPer whom will ever live. As much as I try to gracefully deny such statements, they never seem to stop. So, I’m opening the floor to this fine community, is there anyone in the world that can compete not only with my skill and prowess in this video game, but also my natural style and mojo?

- Muke Muscleshell
- Potluck Massacre
- Sanctum of Rall

Lmao! I hate that 90% of our community won’t understand your satirical post, thanks for the laugh

Khyras.8021:

Zodian.6597:

Khyras.8021:

JonPeters.5630:

I don’t really think it is a matter of right vs wrong. Separating the queues is technology we haven’t developed. Bracketing them so that when you queue you play as 5s,4s,3s,2s,solo you tend to queue vs those is something we are working towards because its part of a robust single system. It also is the version that solves everything except the edge cases without fragmenting the player base and creating long wait times in certain brackets. This is why this is the right system for the game RIGHT NOW.

It isn’t that the points Teldo, et al. make are invalid they are just more valid for a more mature game like LoL, a game which has been out 3 longer than we have.

What do you mean separating queues is the technology you havent developed? You already have 3 separate queues spvp, free and paid tourneys.Playerbase is already fragmented into 3 segments, removing entry fee for pvp and adding separate ladders and queues for people who want to queue solo or in group is the way you go if you want more people in pvp. 2 queues doesnt fragment playerbase, it gives players options to play how they want and when they want, nothing stops team players to queue up for solo queue matches to advance their solo queue ladder standing when their team is not up.

I think what he means is that they have no way to “combine” these features, which is what it would take to create a solo queue ladder; you’d have to take team segregation from hotjoin, queue system from the new paids, and re-develop the rating system algorithm twice to account for solo queue and team based ladders. Not to mention they’d have to create all new UI and ect…

It’s clear that we all know how essential solo queue is to driving a competitive scene, I talked to Sharp about it weeks ago. The sad truth is that A) we don’t have the player base to harbor it without rating inflation and horrendously long queue times, and the time it would take to develop, test, and implement this would be a nightmare.

If you even look at LoL; a game with 5mil+ concurrent players, only had ~300k players participate in ranked last season, we barely have 300 people playing spvp concurrently as it is. You have to remember that the majority of the casual player base will not play ranked for fear of obtaining low rating, would you rely want to play a solo queue against the same 30 people all day?

Although this system isn’t going to get the game anywhere near esports ready, it’s better than the god awful QP ladder we have currently; and perhaps if it attracts people back into the game we can get a dedicated solo queue ladder and progress the competitive scene towards esports level.

It’s also worth noting that this system has a very broad and strong infrastructure for change based on population growth, example: once they get 10k players on the ladder with steady ratings, they could begin to adopt a league system (like sc2 and LoL now use), or even simply segregate the demographics and just reset ratings. I don’t LOVE the new ladder system in its current state, but I like how it gives us choices down the road.

Population is low largely because there is no solo queue so they dont want solo queue because population is low? That doesnt make any sense. If population is low you can launch solo queue without matchmaking, its 5 random pug vs 5 random pug there is no way you will get 5 random random ppl rank 10 vs 5 random ppl rank 40 every time or ever imo. Later when population raises you can introduce matchmaking if you want and tweak it based on queue times ( say, 1000 ppl divided into 10 rank based tiers plays solo queue and queue time is too long? you divide them into 8 tiers queue time goes down problem solved).

I don’t think you understand, there would literally be < 100 people who would queue into ratings based solo queue right now. You’d get 2k mmr players playing against 1k mmr players after the queue fails to find games in their bracket. Just because it’s the reason people quit doesn’t mean it will just instantly bring all of them back and it certainly doesn’t mean that upon returning they will instantly queue into ranked games.

Khyras.8021:

JonPeters.5630:

I don’t really think it is a matter of right vs wrong. Separating the queues is technology we haven’t developed. Bracketing them so that when you queue you play as 5s,4s,3s,2s,solo you tend to queue vs those is something we are working towards because its part of a robust single system. It also is the version that solves everything except the edge cases without fragmenting the player base and creating long wait times in certain brackets. This is why this is the right system for the game RIGHT NOW.

It isn’t that the points Teldo, et al. make are invalid they are just more valid for a more mature game like LoL, a game which has been out 3 longer than we have.

What do you mean separating queues is the technology you havent developed? You already have 3 separate queues spvp, free and paid tourneys.Playerbase is already fragmented into 3 segments, removing entry fee for pvp and adding separate ladders and queues for people who want to queue solo or in group is the way you go if you want more people in pvp. 2 queues doesnt fragment playerbase, it gives players options to play how they want and when they want, nothing stops team players to queue up for solo queue matches to advance their solo queue ladder standing when their team is not up.

I think what he means is that they have no way to “combine” these features, which is what it would take to create a solo queue ladder; you’d have to take team segregation from hotjoin, queue system from the new paids, and re-develop the rating system algorithm twice to account for solo queue and team based ladders. Not to mention they’d have to create all new UI and ect…

It’s clear that we all know how essential solo queue is to driving a competitive scene, I talked to Sharp about it weeks ago. The sad truth is that A) we don’t have the player base to harbor it without rating inflation and horrendously long queue times, and B) the time it would take to develop, test, and implement this would be a nightmare.

If you even look at LoL; a game with 5mil+ concurrent players, only had ~300k players participate in ranked last season, we barely have 300 people playing spvp concurrently as it is. You have to remember that the majority of the casual player base will not play ranked for fear of obtaining low rating, would you rely want to play a solo queue against the same 30 people all day?

Although this system isn’t going to get the game anywhere near esports ready, it’s better than the god awful QP ladder we have currently; and perhaps if it attracts people back into the game we can get a dedicated solo queue ladder and progress the competitive scene towards esports level.

It’s also worth noting that this system has a very broad and strong infrastructure for change based on population growth, example: once they get 10k players on the ladder with steady ratings, they could begin to adopt a league system (like sc2 and LoL now use), or even simply segregate the demographics and just reset ratings. I don’t LOVE the new ladder system in its current state, but I like how it gives us choices down the road.

Lets not turn this into a Java bash thread pls, he brought up some good points about rally bugs and l2p issues. Java is a great player, arguably one of the most skilled players in the game. Hes a good guy for going on and representing our NA community in front of so many people and the devs. I guarantee most of us would be extremely intimidated to be in that position.

I don’t think gem reward is appropriate for lower skill level players. The whole point of gem reward in first place was a marketing strategy; if top tier players are using things in the gem store, the casuals will likely follow and purchase what the good players have.
Perhaps they could segregate rewards based on rating; i.e. highest rated players (like top .5% in ratings ladder) get gem rewards for wins, lower rated players get lesser rewards.
The problem with giving everyone gem rewards would be the potential profit losses for when they actually release some good gear skins with the target demographic of spvp players in mind.
We have to keep in mind that anet still has to generate a steady income from the game at some point.

grats on 1000 games bro, d/d Ele is the funnest class imo. Thief can be fun too, but backstab is probably in for a nerf so if you’re gana play thief probably get used to d/p or s/p cas d/d won’t be viable once bs is nerfed. Engineer and necro are RELY steep learning curves in comparison to all the other classes, mesmer and guard are most borring imo because you’re forced to run boring utilities that only benefit your team. Ranger is fun, pretty easy learning curve with a decently high skill cap, trap ranger gets boring after ~50 games though.

daydream.2938:

E-sports develops organically from pvp being popular enough.

Im concerned that spvp isnt popular enough, and that indirectly effects the esports crowd as well

That’s the truth rely, esports business model works like this:
1) game becomes mad popular
2) streaming the game generates a huge following
3) big tech-based businesses see potential to appeal to a demographic of people who are technology driven.
4) Businesses sponsor tournaments to appeal to the game’s viewer demographic, organizations host them for add revenue.
5) Domino effect occurs: game receives promotion and gets more players, as casual player base goes up, stream viewer base becomes stronger, as stream viewer base becomes stronger, pro players can have the means to go to more tournaments and ect…

I mean if arenanet could host like a $50,000 tourney, it could theoretically kickstart the process, but it’s rely circumstantial; remember everyone laughed at the idea of League of Legends becoming an esport back before the s1 $100k tournament prize at dreamhack in 2009.