Guild Wars 2

Here is another of my teef

So, someone else started a thread to post your armor. I decided to go a bit deeper and see who can get a picture of the best pose/action shot.

I’ll post a few that I just did. Bring it on!

Drop a +1 up on your favorite.

Josh Davis.6015:

@Sudden – There’s a lot of great points in your response, and I appreciate you taking the time to put it on paper.

Like you mentioned, I come from the community – I’m a player. I don’t get to play quite as much as I’d like to anymore, but I do try to play as much as I can (much to my girlfriend’s chagrin). That said, the recent changes to glory and rank gain are the foundation on which we can begin to build a better version of PvP. Now that I’m privy to all of the ‘insider info’, I can say (as a player) I’m genuinely excited for our team’s vision for sPvP in the coming months.

The team’s top priority right now is to work on providing better incentives for playing in PvP. We want players to not only enjoy playing in matches, but also feel adequately rewarded afterwards for doing so. Meta obviously has a role in the ‘fun’ factor of PvP, and that’s something the Skills and Balance Team has been focused on as well. (Stay tuned.)

While we’ve been working on the above, we’ve also been working on prototypes of new maps and gametypes. Having these rank/glory changes in place is going to ensure that one game mode/map isn’t more rewarding than another, and you won’t feel compelled or required to participate in a certain gametype simply because it’s more profitable/rewarding than another.

On the topic of hotjoin, we hope that once the dust settles, players will drop the farm mentality and start playing to win. The existing system has been in for quite a while, so it may take some time for the entire player base to adapt. We’ll be rolling out additional changes in the future that should incentivize playing to win even more.

I just hope the revision removes ranks/glory from the equation or finds a way to take away every glory point or rank that was earned through the farms.

If you institute a system where rank has MORE weight, but there are many many individuals that earned theirs illegitimately, then you basterdize (thanks filter) the entire system.

It would completely demotivate players to earn ranks, that have already been tarnished via months of abuse.

That would be like having a bunch of people getting paid at work with money from the confederacy, sure you’re still getting paid, but it has no value.

Currently, if you have any interest in leaderboards (just leave the thread if you are going to bash people that enjoy finding their name on their) you tend to lean toward the most effective profession, instead of the one you most enjoy.

The current setup highly discourages you playing different professions that you would be interested in. For instance, I really really enjoy playing Mesmer, but I’m not very good at it. I can hotjoin, but I would rather have my nosehairs pulled out. So, I can choose to solo Q, but I then am hurting my MMR, which gives me an even higher chance of getting matched with new players or 4v5s, even when I play on my thief or warrior.

So, I guess there are 2 questions:

1- How hard would it be to implement a character specific leaderboard/mmr system
2 – Are there any plans, whatsoever to make this change.

I would ask for a time-frame too, but that is like asking someone from Hogwarts to say the name of main antagonist.

I understand the feeling. I pretty much stay hovering around the bottom of the leaderboards or just outside of it. I get there, sometimes going on a great streak only to be randomly matched up with people who are terrible. I don’t blame them, matchmaking thrust them into an awful situation.

The problem with the leaderboards is that that the more games you play, the more difficult it is to climb; yet, with losing, it feels like you fall at a constant rate.

I’m currently 160-148 and stuck at 85% (which on NA, seems to be the current cutoff, give or take a few ). When I lose a game, I tend to drop around 3 – 4 percent . When I win, I seem to go up around 2. That means that I need to currently have about a 75% win ratio to continue climbing, otherwise I feel like I’m running on a treadmill.

Well, 75% is very difficult to do in the current matchmaking. I seem like I get a few good match-ups here and there, but there are a lot of terrible match-ups sprinkled in.

Overall, don’t put too much weight in the leaderboards, because unfortunately, they mean nothing at this point. It’s frustrating, but it’s the truth and I don’t expect a fix this year, which is a shame.

That actually sounds fun.

I’m wondering if a multiplier system would have been the best option. This would still separate the best players and deter AFK. What I mean by that is this:

Each thing you do in game that benefits the team will give you 1 point. A kill is 1 point, decap 1 point, standing near a node every 30 seconds while it’s capped 1 point, etc.

Then at the end of the match, you get a 10x multiplier for winning, and a 3 or 5 times multiplier for losing.

This could still have carried over into other game modes, like deathmatch for instance, where each kill gives 1 point. Then the winning team still gets the 10x multiplier.

If you AFK in a game, you get no benefit because 0x 10 is still 0.

John Corpening.9847:

Today there were some changes to how glory and rank points are handed out at the end of a match. First off, instead of being based on personal score they are now based on win or loss. Secondly, rewards are now interpolated based on the duration of the match up to a time we have determined to be a little shorter than the typical match.

Laying the Groundwork for New Game Types
There are several reasons for these changes. The biggest reason is to lay the groundwork for new game types and map mechanics. By normalizing rewards we can be much more flexible with map layouts, game types and mechanics. Game modes will need to reward players equally without directing players to one mode or another based on perceived differences in rewards or encouraging players to play a specific way in order to maximize rewards. As an added benefit, we can also begin to be more flexible with Custom Arena settings.

Time interpolation falls into this category as well. If we introduce a mechanic that leaves the potential for the match to be over very quickly, such as regicide, we need to ensure that doesn’t lead to collaboration to farm rewards or encourage players to play this mode simply to maximize their rewards.

Team Based Rewards
The second big reason for this change is that we have seen that certain builds are much more effective at scoring points than other builds. For example, we see that typical bunker builds score lower than all other types of builds because they serve a vital role of point defense. All members of a team should share in the rewards equally. Again, this lays the foundation for new game modes. We don’t want to limit ideas for new modes because it creates one role that is potentially more or less lucrative than another role.

The numbers chosen for the rewards are based on the data we have collected. On average players who earn the most glory earn about 120 glory per match. We therefore set the minimum numbers to be on par with this number and scaled up from there. Along with this change you will see that Solo Arena and Team Arena both reward significantly more glory and rank points for winning. This is both to compensate for the queue times as well as to reward the higher risk that is taken in these areas.

As an added anti-AFK and botting measure players will need to score at least some points to get rewards. The standard AFK detection continues to be in place and players detected as AFK will receive no rewards.

Also, as before, players will continue to earn a small bonus for having the highest score personal score in each of the game stats.

I think this change is a great start. I wish this would have been in since launch to teach new players that winning is more important than anything else. Nevertheless, thank you for this change.

I hope that to go along with this now, there will be a much deeper breakdown at the end of matches. Showing a wealth of statistical summaries to help players find out why they lost and to get better from it.

Either way, thank you.

Just curious:

For 2 weeks, has there been enough time to now see what needs fixing? For instance, warriors are almost indistinguishable from what they were prior to the patch. They are just as strong and in the case of my new build, stronger because of other changes.

My original question still stands. How long do we wait for new changes? The perception of this “collaborative development” will wear off pretty quick once people start to see that changes are still made at the same maddening pace.

Shukran.4851:

Kultas Sunstrider.9218:

Shukran.4851:

if you look for pve, yes, GW2 is imho the best mmorpg atm.

u never played wow, huh?

“imho”
“atm”

anyway, i think that wow is kitten just because of cartoon graphic. still i think that gw2 pve is wonderful.
i could add “b2p” >>>> “p2p”

b2p is NOT > P2P.

At this point, I wish GW2 would have been P2P from the start. They would have to devote more resources to the game and then the resources added wouldn’t have to be spent making fluff that will drive gem sales.

I hate that this game is B2P and I am excited that ESO and Wildstar are P2P, because if they are any good and people like it, they will have to STAY good and keep changing for the better, or that game will turn into this game.

Commercial hit, to dead.

I’ve been playing pretty faithfully since head start. I check the forums regularly and often post. Most of my posts are providing feedback on things that are wrong, and calling out blatant errors, misguided additions, etc. I do that because I really do love this game, but lately, I have had 0 desire to log in.

1- All of my friends left. No, not some, not most: all.

• In large part due to how cumbersome it was to even group with friends to PvP (such a elementary piece of this puzzle has been missing since launch)

2 – That leaves me with my own desire to get better as a solo player.

• How can anyone accurately gauge progress when you are constantly fighting with and against new players or in 4v5 situations and no apparent rhyme or reason to who you are partied with?
• Leaderboards should offer some measuring stick, but because of the MMR debacle along with the the fact that the leaderboards itself has so many flaws, nobody cares about them (even the players at the top of it)

3 – Lastly, and certainly the most important to me. With our eyes and our 14 months of experience, we know where PvP stands in this game. There is no longer any question, so if it’s clearly the bottom on the priority list, why stick around to watch it develop?

So, I have to echo the statements of the OP: what now?

“We’re aware of this issue. We are having some internal discussions currently on how to fix it. We can’t really talk about it right now, but I would expect to see the fix sometime in November…of 2014”

There have been other threads on this in previous months, so it’s definitely a real thing that sometimes happens. The issue is clearly that it took the collective MMR of your opponents, (which was 0) and then tried to calculate the points you should get for that win based on that. Which, I think when you multiply something by 0…remind me what happens again?

Neon.8651:

This feels like internet terrorism. I’m over here expecting a happy day, and then bam.

Piece of candy corn.

If you don’t open the bags, the terrorists win.

I’ve changed this thread and now I’m bumping it. Sue me.

Kaon.7192:

Common legitimate use cases that this change negatively affects include:

-Playing in Hot Join while waiting for solo/team queue now rewards essentially no glory because it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to finish a match before queue ends. Even if you do finish your first match, the early half of your next match would likely reward nothing.

-Players with flaky connections dc’ing before end of match will not be rewarded glory for anything they accomplished before that point, even if they connect back before match ends.

But more importantly, this change doesn’t put nearly enough of a dent in those disgusting glory farm servers that can still gain glory at many times the rate of regular play.

Ban the server owners and anyone who has spent more than a dozen hours in those servers since their introductions (I’m being generous with the definition of willful exploitation here).

This is an exploit that completely destroyed whatever pitiful value Glory, the only currency sPvP players had access to, had remaining. Please deal with it with at least a fraction of the gravitas that you have demonstrated for exploits that devalue gold and undermine the PvE economy.

Frankly this double standard you have shown so far on this issue speaks volumes on how seriously you guys really take sPvP as a game mode.

This x1000. Also, bolded for truth!

In my opinion, this is how it should function:

• You enter heart of the mist.
• Heart of the mist is a merged lobby that all regional servers go to. You then have lobbies to select (in the mist browser you can choose which “instance” to join. That way if 1 is full or overcrowded there will be a backup or 2)

You are offered the following options:

Dueling Zone in the back part of the Mist

• Nuff said

Hotjoin

• You can join solo or with friends by hitting “join solo” or “join as party”.
• It then puts you in a random server with people that also joined the same way as you. If you joined as 3, it will try to match you with another group of 3 with 2 randoms or a party of 2. If it can’t accomplish this in the allotted time, it will try to find you 2 groups of 2 with a random, or some close equivalent.
• When you play hotjoin, anyone in a reasonable proximity to the action gets glory (if you are even near a node that gets neuted/capped, you get glory; this will keep you from having to stand on the point for the last tick to get credit) If you are anywhere within proximity of the node during a kill, you get defender glory. For every 5 seconds you remain within proximity of a capped node, you get glory. There should be other glory earning means as well, but they should all be around the idea of conquest. This amount should be small.
  *When you win the game, it gets multiplied by 2. Glory is only a currency for certain items. You get no RANK for winning in hotjoin.

Custom Arenas

• Should still exist. They would function exactly how they do now except they offer no rewards of any kind. They should be for practice, tournaments, etc.

Solo/Duo Q

• The structure for this is much like that of hotjoin, except you can join alone or with 1 friend. You gain a small amount of glory and that then gets multiplied if you win, the same as hotjoin. This time it gets multiplied by 3. Once you have achieved 50 wins, you get placed into an MMR pool. At this point, it attempts to put you in the best possible MMR fight. Depending on the overall MMR of your team vs overall MMR of other team determines how much your MMR goes up or down. You will move through bronze, silver, and gold ranking. Each having its own finishers, skins, titles, ect.

Team Q

• Team Q Is 5 man only. In this mode your glory multiplier is x5. You also get Rank, but at a rate of 1.5x that of solo queue. You Q as a team, not a roster. You will need to make a team and the actual TEAM gets MMR; not you. Your roster can contain up to 10 players. Each player can be a part of up to 3 rosters. Your team moves through its own bronze, silver, and gold bracket and gets unique rewards for this.

There should be a Glory Rework

• the rewards are slim and offer no incentive to play. If you are still playing this game since launch, it has 0 to do with rewards
• from the slim rewards, you received good enough rewards way too fast (for instance, My favorite gear is the seer gear and I got that in the first week or 2 of this game, so I literally have nothing to reach for)

Glory Suggestion

• Glory should be able to buy you things like level scrolls. For X amount of glory. The glory amount should be: If it takes you 3 hours to level in PvE (just guessing since I don’t PvE) then the glory needed for this type of reward should be about 4 or 5 hours. It should take more time than PvE, but still be a means to achieve it.
• You should be able to purchase a scroll that will let you take a PvP skin earned into PvE. This should be very expensive for each item. The option will be there, but due to the cost, you will really only feasibly be able to take 1 or 2 sets of gear into PvE. (It should then be unlocked similar to how the achievement skins work)
• Similar to gem to gold conversion, there should be a glory to gold conversion. It should also be a conversion that would make it to where you COULD earn gold, but not necessarily be the best method to do so.
• There should also be PvP items (like back slots) that can ONLY be earned in PvP, but be used anywhere. These should be extremely cool looking and when someone sees you, they should know “That guy is a PvP beast”. Currently, when you enter Lion’s Arch they see you and think, “hmm..that guy is a noob or only PvPs”

It’s late, I just threw my thoughts together and I’m sure there are many things I’ve conceived before that I forgot to add, but overall, you get the idea.

John Corpening.9847:

Trick or Treat bags are a temporary reward during the Mad King festivities. We agree that it would have been better to give both Trick or Treat bags and reward chests but the system involved can, at this time, only reward one type of item at a time. We therefore made the decision to allow PvP players to participate in the game wide festivities because it is only a couple of weeks. There is an achievement that you can earn by opening Trick or Treat bags and if you take a look at this page:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a-guide-to-blood-and-madness/

You will see that the contents of trick or treat bags can be used to work towards bigger rewards. Rather than give PvP players no option to work towards these rewards we decided to temporarily give out trick or treat bags.

This is by no means the final reward update to PvP. There are many things in the works regarding PvP rewards that will be rolled out over the course of several months.

I do however understand your complaints and concerns. So I’d like to offer this to you guys, if you accept Trick or Treat bags until the Mad King festivities are over, would you be happy to have double PvP reward chests for the two weeks after the festivities are over? This way those players who would like to spend their time in PvP to earn their holiday rewards can continue to spend their time in PvP and those of you who don’t want the holiday rewards can sell them on the trading post and then collect double PvP reward chests for a couple of weeks to make up for it.

Does this sound like a reasonable solution?

So, I just want to state how thrilled I am with this post. I do not think the solution is necessarily ground-breaking, I think it does solve the issue that the holiday bags introduced. I am, however, extremely excited about this one line:

“So I’d like to offer this to you guys, if you accept Trick or Treat bags until the Mad King festivities are over, would you be happy to have double PvP reward chests for the two weeks after the festivities are over? "

That one single line is adding to this game what has been the biggest omission: collaboration. I can’t imagine why these things have been missing for so long, but how much headache could the devs and the players have alluded if these types of questions have been asked since the game released?

Hopefully this isn’t a one-off incident and these questions will become commonplace, because although i think you guys are good developers, it’s obvious the vision for this game thus far has not lined up with the player’s vision.

Thank you for your post.

Focussing on the game fixes that we request will not fix this game. This is what needs to be the priority:

1: Open up the communication (communication goes TWO ways).
– This is where the developers openly talk about plans, thought process, likes, dislikes, data findings, etc. No more, “we can’t talk about that”. That single line is destroying this game. (take a look at your sister company Carbine and how they’ve been thus far)
2: Provide a PTR. This is not bashing, this is fact: your internal QA team is unable to handle what’s been asked of them and it’s unfair to them to put so much pressure on them. Also, how many ideas have been put in, immediately rejected by the community and then later pulled out. How much time and MONEY could you have saved to openly discuss those items and have them rejected while they are concepts, instead of rejected once on live servers. Think about that. Seriously. Think about it.
3: Give this game type the love it deserves – incoming tangent First, let me say that one of the most exciting things about this game prior to the launch was it’s lack of a sub fee. I now see how much that has negatively affected this game (PvP). With no sub fee, there are finite resources. With finite resources, there is limited focus on where development can take place. Where do you think that development will take place? In the mode where peopel spend $10 to buy a Quagan backpack. I will never, and I mean never, play PvP in another MMO that doesn’t have a sub fee. It works for games like LoL, Dota, etc, because there isn’t this other game mode that is vying for resources. If LoL had created a PvE experience as well, with the same business model, I doubt it would have came as far as it has.

I don’t want to be doom-and-gloom because I think that does nobody any good, but with the mass exodus of players, is this game really beyond help? You have an uphill battle. At launch, you had all the players in the world (3 million plus box sales you screamed from the rooftops), why didn’t you hire a ridiculous amount of people to help get the features in that would sustain this game at the start (we won’t even get into why these features weren’t here at launch). You could have front loaded your investment and then coasted to victory while people enjoyed many game types, good leaderboards, effective matchmaking, and a way that 2 friends can easily compete together. Nope. You neglected all of that and shifted all of your resources to pumping out a living story that would be consumed faster than a pork chop at a homeless shelter.

So, I end with this. Is balance, game modes, leaderboards, MMR, trait fixes, etc. important? Absolutely, but at this point, those are symtpoms of a greater disease. This game mode could have been everything we were promised, but due to a complete disregard for the game type, it has been left to die a painful, starving death. To fix it, you have to restore (or create) faith that you care about this game mode, and you’ll be willing to fix it and development at all cost.

Good day.

Last night I played in a game where we won 500-0. The opposite team had 2 level 1s. One of them had a commander tag and, I kid you not, was keyboard turning spamming his dagger 1 (thief). I stood there on my warrior and ate his damage and typing, “tickle tickle”. I got to 20% health and then started fighting, I ended at 100% and him dead.

That’s not a testament to my skill, it’s a testament to …wtf is this guy doing matched with level 40+? Also, what is he doing with a commander tag?

Edit: this was played at 7PM central time.

Kolly.9872:

Conditions should have always been just for support in this game:
- control (immobilize, chill)
- anti-healing (poison)
-anti direct damage (weakness)
and so on

in the first place condition like burning and bleeding should never exist at all or at least the condition damage stat should have been removed from equipments age ago so that the only condition damage stat comes from traits.
Sadly it will never be like this

I feel the exact same way. I think conditions should be cool debilitating affects that are applied strategically and removed strategically. There should not be AOE condition spam and then the counter for that is AOE condition removal spam. It just doesn’t feel rewarding. Not to mention, for casting, how much easier would it be.

Think of how much easier the game would have been to balance if all main sources of damage would be direct damage and then only have to worry about conditions being a form of CC or effect that reduces chances for things to occur.

I’m sure it’s pure coincidence, but last night every one of my games were 4v5 or 5v4. Not sure if it was due to the lagging (foefire specifically) but it was definitely odd.

Raijinn.9065:

At least do something about the passive 400+ healing a second healing signet

That’s one of the things I thought for sure would be toned down. I ran on my warrior most of the night last night and had no problem stunning people to death still (although it was noticeable more difficult), but the healing is still insane.

So many passive things in this game, with this probably being the most blatant. At least with the thief sigil, you have to attack to get it’s benefit, this, however, is 100% passive.

ronpierce.2760:

From what I can tell these do show them… In the top right corner just like push-abilities with the little circle-arrow icon. o.O

I stand corrected. Thanks

Are these intentionally left off the trait facts?

For example, 30 points in Arms for warrior – Last Chance.

“Gain quickness when you strike a foe below the health threshold”

What is the ICD on this, and other traits like it.

Don’t you think the full mailbox maybe is a bit of a hint at the likelihood that your PM would be read/responded to?

JonathanSharp.7094:

Hey Felivear, thanks for the post!

We knew for a while that Warriors were stronger than the meta seemed to indicate at one point, and we knew a fix for the sigil was coming.

Sometimes it just takes a while ( IN ANY GAME ) for people to try all builds, all combinations of strategies, all options, etc.

That’s why we want to see what today’s improvements do to the game, especially to support meta. I ran into a VERY strong staff Elementalist earlier on live, and was excited to see it when I did.

It normally takes a few days/weeks for builds to assimilate new changes into their kitten nals.

Due to that, we’ll be watching the meta to see where it goes and then make more changes in future updates.

The Sigil of Paralyzation was making Warriors (who used it to great effect) very strong, so went ahead and fixed it with this update. We have plans to rework all sigils/runes, but that Sigil, we felt, was so important that we had to fix it now, before we did a large balance pass on the sigils/runes.

We have to make sure we aren’t making you guys download new clients all the time for fixes. We knew the sigil of paralyzation was strong, but we also knew our fix was coming in today’s update.

Hope this makes sense and thanks for the post!

I know internally, the idea of many patches may be a topic that is taboo, but I, for one, could care less. I would assume that many players would feel the same. I know there are some issues with bandwidth and download caps, etc, but I would thing that the best option for the players is to update as needed.

The Svanir bug, the paralyzation bug, etc are all examples of things that should have been hotfixed.

I know this next point is beating a dead-horse, but if the bug had a huge negative impact on PvE, I have a hard time believing that a quick fix wouldn’t be imminent.

And I hope you take my posts as constructive and coming from a place of pure love for the potential of this game (faithfully playing for 14 months should show that alone). Sometimes my passion can overshadow the meat of my posts, but I think the intention is pure.

Thanks for your response. I just hope you all take certain items that have such a huge impact on gameplay into consideration and place much more urgency on them. For the good of the game.

So, there will be apologists out there that rip this thread apart saying that I’m attacking the devs, and I am not doing that at all. There is a certain theme that is being thrown around on the forums and I want to have some clarification, because I think it’s misleading.

The statement that, “we knew where warriors were headed this whole time and it took you guys a while to catch up” is being echoed in many threads currently; however, the current fix to bring them back in line is to fix sigil of paralyzation, which was a bug.

So, if you made changes to warrior, and they turned out to be the way that you thought, then either:

a- you knew paralyzation was a bug and just waited for us to “catch” it
or
b- the bug was never known and you never knew that warriors would turn out the way they did.

Another topic of discussion:

If you are waiting to balance the game, because a bug that has been in the game, since probably the beginning, was finally fixed and you are waiting to see how it all panned out….then, why wasn’t that bug fixed IMMEDIATELY since it wasn’t intended and then the meta would naturally shift. If you had done the latter, then this patch could have been used to address some of the actual BALANCE concerns, and not bug fixes. Instead were addressing a bug to then evaluate what balance updates are required.

I am not currently someone that is blasting this patch on the forums, because I think it was a step in the right direction, but this whole ,“we knew warriors were headed where they were, we just sat back and waited for you to catch up” i believe is a bit misleading. Once again, because that would mean you knew the bug was in play and did nothing about it.

I guess, to keep this constructive: why can’t we fix bugs immediately? Why do you we have to wait for large updates for major bugs THAT ARE ADMITTEDLY SHIFTING THE META, to be fixed?

I know the approach is slow and steady, and maybe this patch will bring the change we need, but I doubt it. Even during the live stream Roy stated a few times, “we know it’s probably not enough but we want to wait and see”. Which is understandable if the game was updated at even a remotely reasonable pace. But it’s not and so I leave you with this:

If the patch doesn’t fix the meta, doesn’t make the game more enjoyable, how long do we wait for the next patch to address it’s shortcomings?

Good day.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the QoL stuff. I think the only 2 balance things that I wish would have been addressed is the healing signet for warriors (passive healing that outheals non-berzerker builds is no fun). I also wish conditions, in general, would be addressed. I am not a huge fan of the counters to conditions being more condition removal. I wish there were less conditions, with more impact and cool effects (weakness, cripple, etc) that had to be situationally removed. I just don’t like spamming conditions and counter that by spamming condition removal.

I also wish they would drastically lower condition damage and give it the ability to crit. This way, condition builds would have to spec into precision to make it effective, like power does now. Currently, conditions are the only damage stat required, the rest can be to survive.

Anyway, overall I’m not super bummed about the patch.

NevirSayDie.6235:

Dorii.2394:

Hey everyone, I played GW2 for couple of months last year and was amazed at this game, was hooked on pvp, loved the combat.. but eventually grew tired of pvping for no rank and status (other than item looks)

I’ve been browsing the forum a bit and saw a couple of new features added (custom arenas, and a mention of a ranking system?) and i just wanted a current players opinion on how things work now

-Dorii

Things are working pretty well right now. Matchmaking is not perfect and leaderboards need tweaking, but they are both huge improvements over last year, when they didn’t exist.

Please don’t take this the wrong way, but your posts are interesting to me. I’m sure you read negative feedback toward the game a lot and wonder how people could type it, but I often ask myself the same thing about your posts.

Matchmaking is not perfect and leaderboards need tweaking, but they are both huge improvements over last year, when they didn’t exist.
That’s like saying, “the economy could use a little stimulation and politicians sometimes tell little white lies, but overall, the US is in a good place”

Rubik.7192:

Pvp server decides to shut down right after I get a solo queue pop. For the next 15min, the solo queue pop up notice appears every 5secs reminding me I have a math in 60seconds. Posting this here hoping Anet does something about this (after delaying it for another half year) and hopefully this does not count as a loss, which it shouldn’t since nobody should be in the match.

May have something to do with the patch about to be implemented. They usually shut down matches and don’t allow queuing or re-entry until after patch. I’m just guessing though since I’m at work.

I am pretty sure what you posted is a screenshot of a hotjoin match. You will rarely, if ever, find this issue in TPvP, which I think is a testament to how different these game types are.

Hotjoin is jumping from point to point, bursting down enemies and tagging as many enemies as possible on your way to dragon rank. TPvP is nothing like that. This goes back to a reoccurring theme that I’ve been preaching on the forums for a while: the need for a scoring adjustment in hotjoin.

If hotjoin is meant to be a stepping stone for people to get acclimated to conquest and then have them join me, and others, in solo q or team queue, no wonder solo q is a mess. When you get in matches with players that fight on roads, stand with you on points when it’s uncontested and at the end of the match you see they are rank 30…you have to wonder, “how effective is this game in teaching new players to play the game correctly?”

By my own estimation, I say it fails miserably.

Urejt.5648:

In January there will be ladder implementation in form of divisions. Currently we have rank system and long list of players with thier arena results. All of above does not make player distinguish himself from another becouse rank can be earned during glory farm, and list of best players of arena is not visible from game level.

With implemantation of ladder divisions, players will fight for better place in ranking while earning glory and rank points.

What is most important, player’s place in division will be visable next to players’s name in form of an icon.

We feel that it is very important to divide players in two groups. Glory farmers with high rank and bronze ladder icon and real pvp gladiatiors with grandmaster icons.

With that being said, we will work harder on pvp system. There is long term plan for gvg system.

Whoa. If this is real, I will be a happy camper. Also, why does this post appear to be written in a way that a dev would type it, “we will work hard..”, etc.

Anyway, here’s to hoping this is legit.

Nothing that happens on Skyhammer counts.

Decrypter.1785:

What is being done about this ? Overheard a guy bragging about getting 10 rank levels in a day , please roll them back , its not hard to see who is abusing the system with the amount of daily levels/rank points gained ..

As i genuine Spvper who earned his ranks from tournies its hard to take and unprofessional of you to allow this behaviour

Thanx , hoping action is taken

If done in PvE: Immediate fix and PERMABANS!
If done in SPvP: “We’re looking into fixes for this” for 6 months

The problem with this is that the criticism you state here basically points to the fact that they don’t know what to do with the game. I think that’s not the case at all. They clearly know what to do and we’ve been giving them perfect examples of what to do for months, it just doesn’t get done.

Outsourcing DEVs will never happen for the same reason that changes haven’t already been made, because they don’t want to dump resources into a mode that delivers them no resources in return.

I mean look at the leaderboard fix and the 4v5 fix. How much easier can 2 fixes be? Leaderboard – fix decay, raise games required to 50 or 100
4v5 – Put in a “i am ready button” before the start of the match to ensure nobody has died of old-age since queueing.

I mean, if they can’t fix those simple things, I assure you, it has nothing to do with their “eyes” it has everything to do with their wallets and care for SPVP.

Justin ODell.9517:

Hey guys, Josh (of SAB fame) offered some really good tips in another sub-forum. Since they were buried on page 20 I figured it would be a good idea to post a link to them here.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Collaborative-Development/page/20#post3007420

Does anyone else have any similar advice for us developers? What ways we can make collaborating easier for you? What things are we already doing that you enjoy? What would you like to see more of?

First, let me say I appreciate the level of discussion from reds on the forums right now, I really do. Having said that, it is really difficult for us, or at least me, to take any of this seriously. The game has been out for 14 months, we’ve given tens of thousands of words of feedback and suggestions only to hear, “we can’t talk about that” or “keep the ideas coming”. That’s not dialogue. That’s one party pouring their heart and soul into the void.

Secondly, and I know you don’t intend it this way, but it sounds as if the reds are now saying, “We need to teach you all how to give feedback because you haven’t been doing it right. We would have implemented some of you ideas if only it had been typed better”.

I don’t know if some higher-up in the office finally stepped into the PvP DEVS dungeon and said, “ok, we’re ready to do some things in your little area, go get us some feedback” but that’s what it feels like.

More than anything, I hope my cynicism is unjustified and you all aren’t just doing lip-service like the past year. I hope this is really the start of actual development in the only game mode that I care about, and the reason I bought this game.

Krayiss.4926:

@felivear
This isnt at the devs this is for the players

lol ok. then i don’t have the energy to battle with the players anymore. :P

So, I was going to go back and re-read all of the promises to try to point out all the empty promises, but I don’t have the patience anymore. I log in, I play the same game mode I’ve been playing for 14 months. I soloq in a broken matchmaking system and a disgusting leaderboard. I do all of this with empty hopes that it will get better before the other games that have my attention come out. I suggest you do the same. I don’t have the energy to carry on these battles with the devs anymore.

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’re just starting work on a number of bigger systems/features for PvP, and as is our policy until they are far enough along that we won’t throw them out or change them massively we won’t talk about them quite yet. We’re working down a list of big stuff though, and there are more folks working on PvP related projects right now than ever.

And as a reminder, things we’ve already said we’re working on currently that are far enough along for us to discuss are:

- Fixing rewards and progression in PvP to make the game type much more rewarding.
- Investigating new game types for PvP.
- Improving the game and experience for the core base in general to make it more fun for more casual or casual-competitive gamers to play PvP.
- Improving and continuing to support and grow the competitive scene.

In January, things should hopefully be nailed down enough we should be able to go into much greater detail on the other systems and features we’re working on right now on top of the stuff listed above.

So, I guess this is a moot point, but the words “We’re just starting work on a number of bigger systems/features for PvP” are the ones that drive me crazy. I, as well as most of the other forum posters in SPVP, have been faithfully waiting for this game to develop into the game we were promised at launch. We’ve been strung along for over 14 months now with promises of, “well talk about that more later” and it’s never talked about. Then a year later we get, “we’re finally working on soandso”, well, I guess we know why you weren’t ready to talk about it before…because it was only being talked about internally. Great.

And I know this will immediately get discounted, but the fact is PvE has been getting these features added at a steady clip since launch, and yet we are 14 months into this game and we are just now getting stuff worked on.

You can say that you’ve been adding things all along to SPvP, and in some cases to magazines the great progress is bragged about, but the truth is, most of the features added were either ripped out because they were ill-conceived or they were done incorrectly because apparently live servers are beta servers for concepts.

Anyway, as I’m sure you’re aware, I’ll keep playing this game because clearly the mechanics are fun, but it’s a shame that after 14 months I have nothing to show for it and I’ve been toiling away in the same game mode watching it die around me.

Have a good day.

Justin ODell.9517:

Guys, thanks for posting in here and being constructive. We really like the ideas in here. Keep them coming and I’ll pass them along to the team!

Err… I mean.

As Jonathan Sharp mentioned in another thread we are working on additional game types among other things.

Personally, I’m busy doing some major work on our server infrastructure to clean it up and improve scalability, which opens the doors for a lot of things coming down the pipe.

Do you do programming on all aspects of the game or is your primary focus with the PvP team? And +1.. love the response.

Justin ODell.9517:

evilapprentice.6379:

Why was this a possibility at all?

I understand where you are coming from, it’s frustrating, it bothers me as a player and bothers me even more as a developer. The upcoming changes should significantly improve things, but either way we will continue working to improve the experience.

Brutal Arts.6307:

Does that refer to the following balance patch on the 15th of October or does this refer to some in house as of yet to be determined date?

Sorry for the confusion, I was not referring to the skills and balance patch, but a drop some time after that. I do not know if we have a strong date for that or not.

Krayiss.4926:

Could you explain the process of how hard it would be to server program a PTR and test MMR?

A public test realm is something on our radar, and many of us would like to see it, but it’s far beyond the scope of the SPvP team.

So far, I really like you. I don’t know that I’ve seen you post on here before today, but your responses are a welcomed addition.

Guys, thanks for posting in here and being constructive. We really like the ideas in here. Keep them coming and I’ll pass them along to the team!

Krayiss.4926:

Agreed 4v5 is hurting the game right now

Thread Necros…now with 20% more deathshroud! I see what you are doing on the front page btw….and I LIKE IT!

Lindelle.3718:

I would love the wolf rank finisher, but I have NEVER done spvp in gw2. I’ve been in this game since the beginning and done pvp in other MMOs, just never really tried the spvp here. If I enjoy it I would love to really get into it. I know it is a tough question because it can depend on skill/wins and time spent playing I’m sure… but can anyone give me some kind of idea as to how long it might roughly take?

It depends on how you play. If you play hotjoin (which is the highest glory per hour) you can be there much faster than I got there. I played only TPVP/SoloQ with very little hotjoin sprinkled in. That is not the optimal way to play if you are looking for ranks.

Really, outside of exploiting, the fastest way is to roll a thief or other high mobility class with a lot of burst. Burst players down in between jumping from point-to-point to decap/cap.

I hate typing that last paragraph because I hate that hotjoin promotes that type of game, but if you are purely looking for rank, that’s the way to go.

Brutal Arts.6307:

Justin ODell.9517:

We’re working on this right now. Hopefully it will be available in the next PvP drop.

Does that refer to the following balance patch on the 15th of October or does this refer to some in house as of yet to be determined date?

I was wondering the exact same thing.

Justin ODell.9517:

evilapprentice.6379:

… can we have an explanation as to why this is just happening now?

It can happen for a lot of reasons, and I honestly don’t know exactly what happened here.

Speculating, it’s possible the 5th user that dropped was a very highly rated player. This can confuse the match maker because the average skill rating of the red team (adjusted for the time each team has been waiting in the queue) could be very near the average rating for the blue team.

Improving match making to include parameters beyond just skill rating is on our radar.

I could be wrong here, but I think he’s asking why is this fix or possible fixes only JUST NOW being looked into? This has been a huge issue since the matchmaking’s introduction. How are we to believe that SPVP is really on anyone’s radar when fundamental issues are overlooked for so long.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Just to confirm, we are working on new maps. I can’t give too many details, but a few things:

1) We’re trying maps with no cap points.
2) We’re trying mechanics that focus on high risk/reward mechanics that can win to sudden wins/sudden losses.
3) We’re trying maps that focus on “big play” moments that permanently impact the map flow/map status.
4) I can’t give an ETA on when you’d see one live, because we’re trying different maps, and each of them takes time to prototype, etc.

I think that conquest is easy for new players to get into, and it’s allowed for some amazing high-level games so far! But we’d like to try some new things that get away from conquest.

Also, as many of us have said, we want to give players enough variety such that they can change what they play from time to time, while also being sure that we don’t fracture the player-base by spreading players out to too many different game types.

I know this isn’t a super exhaustive answer, but just wanted to give you guys a quick update.

On the topic of “new players easily getting into conquest”: you don’t teach new players conquest. You funnel them to hotjoin which is a conquest map that actually rewards them to NOT play conquest. They then struggle to get into matches with friends, etc and many of them quit.

I am blown away by this. This is such a foundation element that has been missing FOR OVER A YEAR. Such a simple fix with high impact. (impact is diminishing day by day because new players are fewer and fewer).

I’m not sure if you guys discuss “low hanging fruit” in your office, but this would be a great example of this.

Edit: I went hunting (wow that was depressing btw) by searching through my past posts and found https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Big-Changes-before-Christmas/first#post912162 which was in December of 2012. I was begging for changes to hotjoin so that the players that get the game for Christmas would be encouraged to stay….

Justin ODell.9517:

ahuba.6430:

So why isnt the decay permanent? Why, if I play just one game i get right back to the place i was.

For a few reasons, some of which are technical.

From a design perspective, and I’m not a designer so take this with a grain of salt, we want to encourage players to keep playing. If a player has to leave for a while, for whatever reason, we don’t want them to feel punished when they come back.

Making the rating decay permanent would also distort match making because the rating decay would be impossible to keep in sync with the player’s skill.

We’re trying hard to not give this issue a half measure, so we’re opting to do something more than patching this one issue. This is going to take time, but hopefully we’ll be able to give you more details soon.

Look, I appreciate you coming in here and communicating some things with us, but I’m going to ask a simple question: why do so many things, like this leaderboard, not work correctly in this game, but work fine in so many other games?

There are features in this game that work correctly in indie games, but have “technical limitations” in a game that sold 3+million copies.

I know you guys try really hard and do care about this game, but the amount of times we hear, “technical limitations” or “we can’t just do X because it would do Y” is really hard to take at this point.

Space bar.