Guild Wars 2

My bad, it was Sweetbread who said that.

Which game did you end up gettting pulled into, and what happened to the other one? Did you count as a desertion?

ronpierce.2760:

Enticing new players and old players to come play any mode for pvp will likely end up spilling into both. While it may slow conquest down for a time, increasing the overall pvp population could very likely keep arenas going (which would almost undoubtedly become the most played mode) but also bring in more people who feel like playing Conquest when they’re not doing arenas.

That’s a good point.

Just a quick question: does Piercing Arrows make longbow attacks go through obstacles? I was fighting a longbow ranger on foefire the other night and I hid behind the mine cart to force him to come onto the point, but for some reason he was still able to hit me!

I know it was most likely just a server desync issue (my client thought I was behind the cart, but the server thought I was a couple metres to the left or something), but just in case I thought I’d check: would Piercing Arrows allow a ranger to hit someone behind an obstacle?

Israel.7056:

truthishly.9513:

Posts like this just reek of such ridiculous entitlement it’s surprising that the devs even bother responding on the forum. You sound like you literally have your fingers in your ears and you’re screaming at the top of your lungs to prevent anything that isn’t about you getting your way from reaching your brain.

Ad hom.

Sorry, but when you’re presented with your match history and shown that you’ve had a statistically insignificant number of bad matchups, only to dismiss it with “nobody cares about the stats”, then you’re signalling that you’re not actually interested in constructive debate, and you’ve earned ad hominem attacks.

kdaddy.5431:

You dont know what im talking about? Seriously?

Justin is seriously feeding you info saying out of 67 matches only 5 were pre-made vs pugs and the guy won 2. Yet you still complain,

Hence my previous post: Justin should seriously stop wasting his time arguing with people like that. It’s like they’ve just been on a round the world luxury cruise at ANet’s expense and still insist the earth is flat!!!

Being someone who has always been ranked in both solo and team que i find it funny because the best players in solo que back then were the exact same players in the top of team ques.

Not only that, but having watched a lot of top-100 players stream solo queue, it’s obvious there were LOADS of shennanigans going on. People were sync-joning and got to be on the same team a lot of the time. And so many of them knew each other from team queue, and were all using the same community Teamspeak servers, so whenever 2 or more people who knew each other got on the same team they’d just jump in the same channel and play it like team queue.
The people complaining just didn’t know that any of this crap was going on. They had the illusion of fairness and were blissful in their ignorance. The fact is they’re probably getting much fairer matches now, but because they can tell they get a bad one the one time they do, suddenly they’re all indignant and furious.

The answer is no and my biggest problem has always been the solo que mentality. Groups and pre-made very rarely talk smack. Its the solo que people who talk trash to there own teammates if they lose and its cause they only solo que. They dont team up with friends or guild mates. They dont want to and thats fine but what gives you the right to complain because other people want to? Not to mention the fact that some of the best players in the game solo que and still win 65%+ of the time and you still complain about a solo que?

Yep, that’s why I rarely ventured into solo queue too, and I’m sure it’s the same people who are whining wanting solo queue back who were the biggest source of toxic waste back in those days. If they insist they’ll stop playing, good riddance. Nobody needs their negativity. It was a boon that they were segregated out into solo queue when it was created, it made team queue a lot friendlier, but being rid of them for good would be even better.

Justin ODell.9517:

aussieheals.6843:

This is bullkitten – you’re oversimplifying a complex situation to the point of no longer adding anything useful to the discussion. <3 from reddit :P

Eh? I was asking for more clarification because the most common complaint didn’t fit with the data.

The dude is obviously trolling. Remember you’re only collecting reports of bad matchups to improve your algorithm. You don’t actually need to debate or justify it to people who are just whining and are making spurious complaints without actually having had bad matchups.

Yeah agreeed, think they should start with giving the casters more healing skills. What if their main autoattack was Water Blast (ele staff water 1) for instance? Attacking the ganking player with it, the lord would get some heals from the splashback. Or if you gave them Orb of Light and scripted them to use it on cooldown, to heal the lord against ranged enemies too.

Reikou.7068:

Justin ODell.9517:

• One team has killer hairs and another has sickly dragons.

I think you’re looking for “hares” not “hairs”…

Nope. One of my matches yesterday was against a team who ALL had Permanent Hair Stylist Contracts, and they utterly roflstomped us. I made a bald character and it’s unfair that I’m matched against players who all have bigger and more stylish hair than mine. Matchups like those just shouldn’t happen in a game that claims to be esports!
#BringBackBaldArena

Israel.7056:

I don’t know how to measure everyone else’s enjoyment without some kind of comprehensive polling system. I can only really speak about mine and I enjoy this new setup much less than I enjoyed the old one. That being said I have a hard time believing that new players are having an easier time getting started but really I wouldn’t know.

Well, luckily we don’t need to poll them, MMO devs keep track of EVERYTHING we do because these games are the most sinister of Panopticons! :p When they were thinking about whether to cut solo queue, they would have been able to look at players who have only ever played 10 or less Arena matches in their account life (and then either went back to hotjoin or left pvp completely), and see which of the two queues most of the quitters had joined.
They can also look at things like number of players being reported: if (and I’m pulling these numbers of out my rectum) team queue generated 500 reports per 10,000 matches and solo generated 800, you can tell which is the more toxic environment. You can also tell which queue had more 4v5s, ragequits, largest points spread between wins and losses (meaning more unequal matches, an expected problem when there’s a smaller population so newbies will get matched against top players), and a billion other things. So you don’t need to go around asking players whether their fee-fees got hurt by their teammates and to describe how their emotions feel in interpretative dance. We as players are just data points on their servers, and can be measured and quantified and put on an excel spreadsheed. And yes, it’s a bit sad. But these people do this stuff for a living, they already have 10 years experience at making online games, so you gotta give them a bit of credit that they actually looked at the situation and made an evidence-based decision when they cut solo queue. Can they please everyone? Of course not. But I think they made the choice that will lead to the fewest number of people getting frustrated and quitting pvp completely.

Random Weird Guy.3528:

That way you can still sit around in Lion’s Arch crafting or using the toilet.

Using the toilet is the #1 reason for missing the match ready prompt for me…

Seriously though, I loved being able to jump into WvW and flip a camp while I was queued, but tbh the queues are short enough that I wouldn’t be able to do that now, so I think the new system is better, for now. If queue times get longer people are going to get antsy.
The real reason they did it was to stop 4v5s due to people going afk while queued. Now if you don’t click the ready button within 10" you get kicked off the queue. I get why that means they can’t risk having people get a ready prompt while on a loading screen or something, but an ideal long term solution can only be a ready prompt that appears even while you’re on a load screen. After all, error messages appear on load screens, so the UI has the ability to draw pop-ups over the loadscreen.

I would love a 2v2/3v3 arena, but I’m not sure we have enough population to support it, especially with another game mode (which, tbh, sounds even better) confirmed and on the way.
If it was a choice of 2 out of Conquest, Stronghold, and team arena, I’d say delete Conquest, but I don’t see them doing it… :p

Maybe some day they’ll release the pvp-side of the game as a standalone free-to-play thing (monetised by skill/trait unlocks with gold), and enough people will join for us to have all the game modes.

Israel.7056:

And I’m sorry you had a bad Solo Arena experience, my experience was mostly positive.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really sweat the whiners and flamers very much, and the 4v5s became less frequent when I got into the top-500. I still hated Skyhammer of course, which was reason enough to quit on its own. But if you’re low ranked and/or a beginner, and you join solo queue your experience is VERY different than what you’ve probably had. 4v5s are a pandemic at the lower reaches (queue times were long so a lot of people went afk, and there were lots of people ragequitting mid-match), and I’ve been in matches were there was a newbie and his teammates would stop playing and start abusing him in map chat for having the temerity to be below rank 40 or running a non-meta build. And because the population of solo queue was so small, ANY beginner would always get matched against experienced players, which was frustrating for both sides.
I’m glad you had a good time in solo queue, I don’t begrudge you that, but you have to understand that it really drove A LOT of people away from pvp!

Sweetbread.4701:

I don’t think anyone really cares about Justin’s stats.

The stats are the truth. You can keep choosing to ignore them and thinking you’re special, that ALL your losses are because The System had it in for you, but the truth is less than 10% of your matchups were bad, and the rest of your losses were just losses and there was no special meaning or reason to them. You can believe the stats or not, but the stats don’t care if you believe in them.

Sweetbread.4701:

Opc.4718:

Sweetbread.4701:

I don’t think anyone really cares about Justin’s stats. I know I’ve had quite a few ridiculously lopsided matches vs. premades since the pvp changes.

By “quite a few”, you mean a statistically insignificant amount compared to the rest of your total matches? No match making system is perfect, and these stats show the current match maker is pretty kitten good. Justin’s stats show exactly how many lopsided matches someone is actually experiencing, and you’re going to just brush it off because “cognitive bias”.

Sorry if you want to be an Anet apologist, but the problem is getting more and more blatant the higher my matchmaking gets or maybe that’s just the current trend for people to gravitate towards premades to deal with other premades. You can quote stats or link entire wikipedia articles out of sheer laziness/trying to avoid the actual discussion if you want, but the fact of the matter is that this is an issue that shouldn’t even be happening AT ALL in any game that’s remotely trying to take it’s pvp seriously. It was a severely flawed and poorly thought out design decision and it’s only going to get worse imo.

He’s not being an apologist, he just realises that he’s not special, and neither am I, and neither are you. Your losses are not all due to the system having hosed you and put you against premades, and your wins aren’t because you’re awesome. Sure, you’ve had a few losses due to bad matchups, but you’ve had a few wins due to bad matchups for the other side too. The vast majority of your games were even fights, and what happens in an even fight is you win some and you lose some. It’s life. He’s quoting wikipedia articles because you’re exhibiting the exact symptoms of cognitive bias: you’ve had a couple of losses to premades, and you extrapolate from that to believe that ALL your losses were because of premades! But it’s just not true: the stats prove it! It’s in your game history, you might not like getting hearing that your losses are not due to an external injustice but just random losses with no special meaning, but that’s the truth.

And as to the “shouldn’t be happening at all” argument: the vast majority of team-based online competitive games only let you queue solo in unranked environments. Would you prefer that? I personally would take a small number of bad matchups to be able to avoid having to stand around shouting “LFG!” for half an hour, like I had to back when I was pugging Heroes Ascent in GW1! Just the fact that we have THE OPTION to queue solo in a team game is above and beyond what you’d get in most other games, but you have to understand that it’s a TEAM GAME and you are actually handicapping yourself. If you choose to walk around with only one shoe on, don’t force everyone else to take off theirs so you can keep up. Play solo, but BE AN ADULT and accept that sometimes the odds will be stacked against you.

truthishly.9513:

Justin ODell.9517:

Gabriell.4856:

Anyway to allow us to know our chance of winning before the match starts?

I would like to quit while I’m behind and get it over with as quickly as possible.

For ranked arena during a ladder, we plan to make the information available. I wouldn’t recommend leaving in one of those matches though.

I think it would be best to show it after the match to prevent an epidemic of quitters/afkers/loudmouths. Keep morale up, some people already do a pretty good job of destroying it as soon as something goes wrong.

Absolutely agree!
I’d say make match history available on your account website, but don’t show any win predictions before a match.

Israel.7056:

As someone who used to love doing Solo Arena my advice to the OP is simply to stop doing PvP until they reintroduce a proper Solo Arena game mode again.

Yeah, cause if EVERYONE who used to do solo queue quit we would really miss all 200 of you! I don’t think the pvp population would EVER recover from such a huge hit! :p

they didn’t consult the players before they removed Solo Arena what makes you think they’re going to care what we think now?

Well… they didn’t consult the players who played solo arena, because, like I said above there were too few people playing it! It was a toxic place full of abusive people and afkers. Newbies would come out of hotjoin and join solo arena and then quit pvp completely because their own teammates would start flaming them before the match even started! That there were a few people who enjoyed it like pigs rolling in muck is irrelevant: the number of players who had terrible experiences there was a lot bigger, and consideration for them is therefore weighed more heavily in the developers’ minds.
I personally didn’t mind solo queue. I never played there (except when I once decided to see how high I could get using a nooby minionmancer build, so I played it 2 weeks in a row, got to 265 and immediately went back to team queue), but I was ok with the fact that it existed. It was nice to have a place where all the ragequitters, AFKers, and abusive flamers went. It purged team queue and made it a nicer place. But the fact is when a new player wandered into it by accident, they would have a terrible experience, and probably assume that, oh if solo is like that, then team arena, which is probably an even more competitive environment cause you get all the pro premades there, must be even worse, so there’s NO WAY I’m going in there! As you can imagine, from a developer’s point of view it’s suicide to have an environment like that be their players’ introduction to pvp, so it had to go. It was an unpleasant, elitist, dysfunctional place, full of horrible, abusive people. Reintroducing all those people back into the general population makes the game a tiny little bit worse, but thankfully they’re so spread out we hardly notice them, and now that the option to join solo arena doesn’t exist, there’s no risk of a newbie accidentally queueing for it and thereby unknowingly dive into a pool of toxic sludge and human manure.

truthishly.9513:

Or there are people like me, whose losses Justin admitted he had no explanation for. All I could tell from the matchups was that my teams were being overmatched by far better players, so I chalked it up to an aberrant spike in my MMR.

He didn’t actually say that though, if he had noticed a spike in your MMR that would’ve been a possible explanation. He said he was at a loss to explain your losses, and specifically noted that premades weren’t consistently stacked against you. But since you’re back at roughly 50% now could it not have been just a fluke losing streak? That’s how randomness works, sometimes you’ll win 1, lose 1, win 2, lose 4, win 3, lose 1, win 8, lose 2 etc, while other teams you’ll just lose 77 games in a row and only get back up to 50% over a long period of time. He looked at the data, saw there were no abnormal matchups, so it was just a fluke.

But even winning roughly 50% of my games since the losing streak that prompted this thread, I have seen that a great number of my wins AND losses resulted from one team or the other having a ton of really inexperienced players on them, which is at the base of many complaints on the forum.

Yeah, that’s a separate problem and it’s a genuine one: it’s due to the big influx of new people from the sale weekend, and it’s not just a problem for us, it’s an even bigger problem for the beginners themselves who get matched up with and againt experienced players and get roflstomped. They’re all gonna quit pvp and never touch it again. I’ve made suggestions in another thread about why this problem is caused and how it could be fixed. The tl;dr is that it’s a basic weakness of the Glicko-2 algorithm, which calculates your MMR by bouncing you up and down the ladder in gradually decreasing jumps until you “settle”. The problem with it is that your first several dozen matchups are very likely to be bad ones.

Nah, cause remember you have to defendd your own lord too. So (assuming 8v8) it might be 2 simultaneous 4v4s in each base – or maybe an 7v5 in one base and a 1v3 in the other, depending on the splits, my point is you’ll rarely have everyone fighting at the same place unless one team somehow completely rolled through the other’s gates and NPCs and is at their lord before the other team even got inside their base, which means one team completely sucked tbh.
Plus they said there’ll be other objectives such as trebs to defend your base with (there go another 2 players manning that), or NPCs you can recruit to bash down enemy gates for you (who’ll presumably be able to do it a lot faster than players, so if everyone on the enemy team is autoattacking your gate you can leave 5 people to defend the lord while a 3-strong gank team goes with that NPC to take out the enemy lord). It depends on a million factors, but I’m sure we’ll be able to avoid the “spamfest of 30+” you’re worried about.

GeneralJimmy.2186:

So the problem is your looking at the whole teams. I playing solo from my perspective its only the other teams party size that really matters. If theres premade on my team I may or may not even know this let alone benift from it. This becomes really clear in teamfights and rotaitons.
Some arbitary exampls as there is endless variables I down some one he gets ressed asap then they turn around focus me. I get a 1v1 with a build advantge boom his teammate is there to help him. This doesnt happen with full solo Q or to a much lesser extent as there a lack of information about both your opponents and your teammates.

Just because you may not know that there’s premades on your team doesn’t mean they’re not there. And the other team’s premades exhibiting good teamwork and coming to reinforce each other when they’re in trouble doesn’t make the game “unfair”: it means they’re playing well, watching the minimap and the health bars of their teammates, and going where they’re needed. Being on voice comms helps with that but it’s not needed: I’ve played with random puggies who always seemed to be exactly where they needed to be, swooping in at the last second to save me from a stomp and turning a fight around. You not being able to do that doesn’t mean that everyone else needs to be handicapped by being banned from teaming up. It just means that you need to get better.
As Justin’s stats show, 92.5% of the time you’re in an equal matchup: either everyone in the game is queuing solo, or if there’s premades on the other team there’s a premade on your team as well. If you’re losing more of those games than you’re winning, it might be due to the opposition premades carrying – but it might also be because you’re dragging your own team’s premades down!
7.5% of the time you had premades stacked against you. Those aren’t bad odds imho. And Justin’s stats didn’t cover the number of times where your own team had premades stacked in its favour, which is probably also around 7.5%. It’s only human to think that every game you win was a fair fight, and every game you lost was unfair and the fault of the system (we all do it subconsciously), but that’s just not true: the numbers prove it. You’re only average, as all of us are: you have an unfair disadvantage in as many games as you have an unfair advantage. The number of those games is tiny, so the vast majority of the time it’s a fair fight. Stop blaming the system and learn how to minimise your self-inflicted disadvantage of playing solo by having greater map awareness – it’s not easy, but if you insist on queueing solo it’s something you have to learn.

8v8 will be ok ASSUMING the secondary objectives are meaningful and actually help the team to go after them! If they make them as pointless as the side-buffs in Temple of the Silent Storm (where going for them is an actual waste of time), or as marginal as the bosses on Niflhel (where they only matter if there’s a narrow score gap between you and going for them carries the risk of having them stolen), then blob tactics will prevail. I read somewhere that there’ll be an open beta for it, so hopefully they’ll balance it right.

witcher.3197:

Vamp Rook.7835:

I don’t understand this discussion:

Stronghold == GW1 GvG

So, GvG/Stronghold is not Zerg vs Zerg.

Teams of the discussion:

• WvW players who call their 20v20 zergfests ‘GvG’ and demand a gamemode for it and are disappointed that they won’t be able to zerg in the official GvG gamemode of gw2.
• GW1 players who remember what GvG actually means and welcome the gamemode.
• GW2 PvP players who understand that 5v5 is a good size for PvP.

Pretty good summary

(Although I think Stronghold could easily go up to 6. If they do 8 as in GW1, it might be a bit too spammy in team fights unless it’s a huge map with lots of meaningful objectives to force teams to split.)

I completely agree with you, OP. Back when Izzy was in charge of skill balance in GW1 he openly admitted that some of their balance changes were to shake things up and encourage build variation, not simply to nerf builds that were genuinely overpowered. That’s why whenever something became the best, most efficient build for something they would either hit it, or buff something that countered it. Not because it was OP, or because people complained about it, but JUST BECAUSE!
This isn’t Quake or Unreal Tournament: you’ll never achieve the perfectly level playing field of 2 identical players with identical sets of weapons. This is an RPG! Imbalance is inherently built into the game! Build X will always have an advantage over build Y, which in turn will completely counter build Z etc. Once the most powerful and efficient versions of each of these are discovered and get onto metabattle, that’s all anyone will ever be running. Not only does this get boring, but it also exacerbates the inherent imbalances by allowing people the time to find the most perfect build of X to most efficiently counter Y! So the imbalances get harder and harder, making it even more necessary for people to run the most efficient build of their profession.

Frequent minor rebalancing keeps the meta from stabilising, because people haven’t found the most efficient version of everything. (I’m not just talking about “which is better, d/d ele or staff ele?”, but even down to minor details like “which Earth adept trait is best for d/d ele?”) And when people are still experimenting, you get a lot more build variations running around, which in turn keeps people honest and prevents a build up of the kind of class-stacking cheese we see in the meta these days. Because many of the variant builds we see running around will be sub-par and inefficient, but each of them will pack some marginal utility that has the potential to destroy a team that just picked 5 of the most powerful build in the meta and ran with it.

This is established wisdom which game balancers are well aware of (including people who used to do game balancing and still work at ANet!), but for some reason the people running GW2 think their game is exempt from all the rules. And yet they’re breaking some of the rules they themselves wrote. In the GW2 manifesto Mike O’Brien wrote

So much of traditional MMO combat is rote and repetitive. You execute the same strategy over and over again, just augmented over time with better and better gear. After a while it starts to feel like you’re playing a spreadsheet. Combat needs to be about making creative choices, and it needs to feel immediate, active, and visceral.

(emphasis mine)
How are we expected to feel like we’re making creative choices when, not only have the most efficient classes for pvp been the same since last April, but even the most efficient builds for each of those classes are known and well-established?

Justin ODell.9517:

Arietta The Broken.1875:

day no. 28 of horrible match ups vs full teams. \o/

In the last 7 days you’ve had 175 games played in unranked arena. That’s made up of 82 victories, 13 buys, 73 defeats, 6 forfeits, and 1 desertion… that’s 95 wins to 80 losses. Of the 175 games only 4 times were you stacked against pre-mades and did not have an equivalent pre-made on your team.

I love it when he does that! People are coming on the forums complaining that all their matchups are terrible and they’re getting wrecked and Justin goes “nope, you’re winning about 50% of the time, here’s proof”. I don’t know what’s causing so many people to think they’re getting screwed over by the system when they’re clearly not. Could be:
a. their losses stand out more in their memory than their wins, so they think they’re losing more than they are, or
b. they have an accurate estimate of their wins/loss ratio, but they overestimate their own ability so think it should be higher, or
c. they attribute every win to their own awesomeness and every loss to bad matchmaking.
Either way, we’re all just being human, but people should really read about cognitive bias before coming on here to moan. Remember, however good you are at this game, you’re not special, you’re just a number! :p
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

The hiding thief would kill the lord and take the tower.

They can pretty much do that already, so what’s the problem with necros being able to too? Only on towers though, keeps there’s no way anyone can solo a champion keep lord and their bodyguards.

Isslair.4908:

manveruppd.7601:

The only solution to this is if MMR IS NOT USED AS A MATCHMAKING VARIABLE until a player has accrued a certain number of matches (say 30), so MMR actually means something.

What about second accounts then? You’ll still get really skilled people who are forced to play against total newbies for 30 matches and stomp the hell out of them.

They are not a problem: an experienced player will quickly rise to the right MMR before too long. Besides, the second accounts of experienced pvpers are way fewer than the first accounts of complete beginners.

THe OP’s experience is what every newcomer to this game faces, and it’s an inherent weakness of the Glicko-2 system. Because the system assigns unrated players a high Ratings Deviation, it essentially assumes that a brand new player could be terrible but could also be awesome. They’re therefore just as likely to be assigned a good or a bad opponent. Glicko-2 essentially assumes that, if you have 0 matches, you’re somewhere in the middle of the skill spectrum, and it moves you up or down as you play.

In principle that’s fine if your aim is an accurate MMR, but not if you want people to have fun: at this point in the game’s lifespan, even the people in the middle of the skill spectrum will be pretty decent and chew up and spit out beginners! So everyone just starting out is guaranteed to lose their first 10-20 games in a row!

It’s a really horrible flaw which drives a lot of new players away from spvp, because of the impression that it’s wildly unfair and extremely hardcore. Even skilled players from WvW have an absolutely terrible time when they move to spvp because they’re just as likely to be matched against teams so high-rated they create a space-time anomaly on the leaderboards when they log in as against a team of one-flippered manatees randomly mashing the keyboards with their snouts. You can’t expect people to endure through 20-30 absolutely terrible matchups while their Glicko-2 rating stabilises!

Things worked OK in the starting few months of the game, when we were all more or less on the same level, but now, where there’s people who’ve been playing for 2 years and can kill you before you even spot them, it’s really unfair to drop beginners right in the middle of this!

The only solution to this is if MMR IS NOT USED AS A MATCHMAKING VARIABLE until a player has accrued a certain number of matches (say 30), so MMR actually means something. They should arbitrarily be assigned a made-up lowest-possible MMR, so they’re guaranteed to be matched up with other beginners. Keep calculating MMR in the background, just don’t use it for matchmaking: let players accrue enough matches so their MMR is meaningful before it’s used.

If you’re not willing to implement this, the only other way to make sure people don’t quit pvp after 10 games is to force them to only do hotjoins until rank 10 or 20 or so, and only then be allowed into unranked. Then gate ranked behind an even higher rank requirement.

I’ve talked to a lot of beginners who get dropped into a match full of top-1000 people for their very first game, it happens every single time there’s a free trial. Those people just NEVER come back! Justin, there’s a big influx of new players here now because of the sale, so if you can knock up something along the lines I suggested before a big wave of them start getting bored of pve and start queueing up for matches, you can actually singlehandedly grow the active pvp population significantly!

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

And people in WvW would now have to hunt all over for Flesh Wurms when they take a keep/tower. Even without ground targeting, they can be placed in some very…interesting spots. They would become the low-risk hiding mesmer.

Considering the mesmer can portal a whole zerg back in, it’s also the no-point equivalent of the hiding mesmer It’s more like the hiding thief: sure, they could hide till the defenders are gone and then autoattack the door down for his friends, but what would be the point? :p
Besides, that could be easily fixed by keeping a range limitation, just have it be unlimited by pathing. It would mean the necro could only put it near the wall to get teleported there.

As to actually putting it ON the walls to use as grappling hooks, I don’t think the casting range of the wurm is long enough to let you put it on top of ramparts from the ground. At best you’d be able to port yourself onto the side of the wall and then fall down again :p

So what’s the new class mechanic he was talking about? Bah, he was probably just stringing random words togehter and we’re reading way too much into it! :p

kwstyle.9148:

I have tested both Flesh Wurm and Spectral Walk and you will be ported back to the wurm. The only thing is that you still get an interrupt after porting out but that is all. So II think your wurm was too far away.

Thanks for testing. I was definitely not too far away though, well within 1,200. Probably just too many obstacles. It’s annoying that you still get interrupted though. I really think all teleports should work the same way, and not pretend to be teleports but actually work like charge-type skills.

MethaneGas.8357:

Wurm should port you out of Ring of Warding for sure…. unless you glitched somehow and the wurm-port itself failed because of some barrier in the environment… so it would have glitched regardless if Ring of Warding was there or not.

That’s probably what happened, was just outside Henge and there’s lots of rocks and stuff strewn around there. There was definitely a traceable path between me and the wurm that was less than 1,200 length though! I was only fighting at the entrance of the path leading into Henge, and my Wurm was on the ledge overlooking it – I could literally have hit it with a scepter.

It glitches for me every….100 times I use it or so in sPvP… maybe less. And by glitch I mean your character doesn’t move at all.. or moves only slightly in the wurm’s direction.

I know exactly what you mean by “glitching”, happens to me far more than once in a hundred times though. Maybe I don’t know the best spots to put it, but I’ve been using it on and off since release and have found loads of them, as well as noted the ones used by necro streamers. I’m convinced that enemy CC and/or barriers increase the chance of it glitching.

The other kind of “glitch” is when you use it to port up to ledges. But that works the same as other ports and glitches as often as those so that’s not a wurm-specific problem.

I’ve tested that a lot: if there’s a path to walk to from where you’re standing and the ledge you left it on, and it’s less than 1200, it’ll port you. Best example is you can get to the top of the steps overlooking Graveyard on Foefire by triggering it anywhere up to about the middle of the node. You can also get to the ledges overlooking the side points from anywhere on the side points, although it glitched for me twice in the same match on quarry the other night and got killed by an obnoxious power ranger.

Confusingly, however, I’ve also had it port me across gaps it shouldn’t have been able to. Like, from the roof of the house outside Clocktower on Kyhlo, onto the walkway around Clocktower. Not a huge gap (you can jump it), but no direct walkable path leading there at all. The trick is you have to be jumping, and on the same y-axis level as the wurm when you activate it. Useful if, say, you’re crippled so you can’t make the jump from the house onto clocktower. (I didn’t find this out by myself, saw a video of people doing jumping puzzles who used it as a trick-jump.) But it really makes no sense according to the rules I THOUGHT it worked with!

unlucky.9285:

you know whats even more fun? when a guard drops it directly ontop of you and you dont have a teleport and no matter what you do it keeps knocking you down over and over and over even if you do nothing………. but when you drop your spectral wall directly ontop of someone they can leisurely walk out of it no harm done

Yeah I know, it’s extremely annoying if you get caught on the edge of a barrier like that,. The reason you get knocked down is because even pivoting on the spot counts as movement, so you get knocked down. Ifyou use a skill like Doomor Tainted Shackles that won’t make your character pivot to face your target you won’t get knocked down. (Unless you’re actually caught between the edge of a barrier and another obstacle, in a space too small for your character to actually stand, that one’s the worst possible situation, but it can only happen through blind luck.)

Dirame.8521:

One thing I’ve noticed since the beginning of the game is that Teleports are like running really fast. If you can’t run there, you can’t go there. And this theory usually applies but on the rare occasion you can bypass it.

Only the case with some teleports. Portal, for instance, isn’t limited by pathing.

Hmm that interview Bhawb quoted does imply they might actually change the profession mechanics. And he cited Druid as an example, which, knowing that people in the ranger forums have been asking for the option to leave their pets at home for years now, is pretty leading…
Might be reading too much into it though, and tbh I’m probably overhyping myself by thinking of all sorts of too-good-to-be-true possibilities which will lead to an inevitable letdown on release, so I’d better stop :p

Actually Justin, I don’t know if you still have data from before solo queue was abolished, but you would be able to clearly see how much of the Foefire spread is due to the lord mechanic and how much due to organised teams having an advantage by comparing the team and solo queue spreads. I know there were a lot of soloers and partial groups in team queue as well, so it’s not completely reliable, but still.

Justin ODell.9517:

I enjoy advice like this. I wrote a ladder sim a week or so ago that basically replays the season with different rules. I’ve also found it a very handy, and faster, way to get stats out of the data. Been adding all sorts of reports to it as I get time.

That’s great! So can you use your sim to pick any player and see how far above or below the rank he actually ended up at he would’ve been if X reward rule was different?

Random Weird Guy.3528:

And I like to think that the importance of the mid-point in this map is great since it forces a different playstyle to other maps.

That’s part of what I love about that map: big central point, you have room to kite, can’t just spam aoe and autowin. Some of the tensest, most drawn-out fights I’ve had in gw2 were on that point!

I do realise that the side points being quite far from the bases (in fact base→far is only slightly longer than base→close), so teams built to contest 3 points have an advantage there, but I like to think this keeps teams honest and prevents a single comp from becoming dominant. If every single map was like Forest every single team would be running a mid bunker and an off-bunker and matches would be very repetitive and boring. In fact we went through this, it was the 2013 meta.

redux.1502:

I’d summon Gaile Gray’s former frog avatar.

Hehe, beat me to it! With the power to hide in a bush in LA and instantly summon every player from every other instance of the map to stand around her and spam her with questions!

Lordrosicky.5813:

NOBODY EVER asked for solo queue to be removed.

Thing is, that statement is factually correct, but also completely wrong: no, none of the roughly 200 people that were left still playing solo queue ever asked for it to be removed! :p However, the fact that it was a. toxic b. extremely unwelcoming to newcomers and c. a deserted, barren wasteland, led them to the conclusion that it needed to either be fixed or scrapped. They chose scrapped, and I think that, while things are admittedly choppy right now, it will prove to be the right choice in the months to come, PROVIDED that the pvp population grows.

If we have enough people playing for matchmaking to be reasonably stable, then a reasonably-skilled solo player will get matched with and against other reasonably skilled solo players, with or against slightly less-skilled partial teams, and against somewhat-more-than-slightly less-skilled full teams (whose lower individual skill is made up for by the fact that they’re a full coordinated team, so they should still give a full team of higher-skilled soloers a good fight), so that you’ll be able to get good, close fights most of the time.

There aren’t enough people playing right now for that to happen. Last night, you and your team beat my pug (me and another guy were duo-ing, the other 3 were on their own, it must’ve been a big outlier that we were matched against your lot). But you can see that, once we’ve hit a certain population, things are gonna be a lot smoother than artificially segregating solo players into their own playground. Conquest is by definition a team game, you need to co-ordinate across several points on the map. Having a separate ladder that forces people to queue solo will only attract people who care solely about their own personal ranking, and therefore will create a (pointlessly) competitive, toxic environment.

Justin ODell.9517:

Mrbig.8019:

This is actually proving my point.

I wouldn’t necessarly jump to that conclusion. The data could also be explained by the unique lord mechanic which can add 150 to your team’s score. Unfortunately I have no data on how often that happens.

That was my first thought too. Lord ganks can turn a narrow loss into a 100+ point win, so it’s reasonable to attribute it to that.

You can certainly argue that premades have an advantage there because they can coordinate the lord gank better, converging on the enemy base from all over the map. It’s tenable. Maybe PART of the larger point-delta is attributable to that, but certainly not all of it. And even if it is, surely that’s good design? This is a team game, and good teamwork and communications should be rewarded. If they’re being rewarded more highly on this map, doesn’t it make it a better-designed map than all the others?

Comparing it to a secondary profession raises my expectations a lot personally. Unless it was Exaggerated Marketing Speak™, it makes me hope that the new weapon skills/utilities/traits/whatever that specialisations will unlock will let you play your profession in a style that wasn’t previously viable. Such as a bunkery thief, or a necro with lots of mobility. Stuff like that. I’m not saying I’m specifically expecting necro GS skills to give us lots of mobility, I just mean I’m hoping specialisations will really make each class feel different. I doubt that’ll mean fundamentally changing the profession mechanics, so we’ll still have DS, but there might be traits that change profession mechanics in subtle ways (like PoC does).

I’ll get a guardian buddy and test it again under controlled conditions before submitting a bug report – you know how Flesh Wurm sometimes only moves you 2 feet to the left when there’s too many obstacles between you and the point of origin, so I can’t be totally sure it was Ring of Warding that caused it. (Happened to me twice on Foefire last night: was fighting on a side point, wurm was on the ledge next to the point, I activated necrotic traversal, but only got moved about an inch away from where I was standing…. :/ )

kitten it, this thread had 666 views and then I clicked on it! Sorry guys! :p

As to the OP’s question, since Flesh Wurm isn’t very useful in WvW, I would also echo shrouded removal. Putrid Mark, unfortunately, won’t work while immobilised. Although marks don’t require facing when you’re moving (you can run and throw one behind you no problem), they do when you’re standing still. Try it yourself: if you’re immobilised and you try to drop a mark behind you it’ll go into 5" cooldown. I’ve complained about this before and also posted about it in the bug forums.
If you’re fighting a melee opponent, you can drop it at your feet andd wait for them to close in, hoping they won’t use one of the endless evade-spam attack skills every melee weapon except ours seems to have to do it. If not and they stay behind you for the duration of the immobilise, jump into DS and eat the burst.

Last night I got trapped in a guardian’s Hammer 5 bubble. I activated Necrotic Traversal to get out (he was trying to stall me so his teammate could deccap our point), but instead of teleporting to my Flesh Wurm, I only went as far as the edge of the bubble and then got knocked down!

I knew that Flesh Wurm was a very limited teleport compared to some of the thief and mesmer ones, and I’m OK with the fact that necros are deliberately designed to have less mobility than such classes, but a teleport skill that doesn’t even let you escape situations like that… Surely, SURELY that has to be unintentional? It’s the entire point of the skill, it CANNOT be working as intended!

Nightshade.5924:

While I acknowledge that you have a point, that is WHY I want a STATISTICAL SAMPLE. There are millions of players in GW2. Most of those millions hopefully play PvP, if for no other reason than they want to get the daily points.

The thief was just an example, as another class that has good escapes. The point of my post was that the statistics you requested (killed:kills ratio) is meaningless. As was also pointed out by DaveGan.8065 and Aereniel.7356 and half a dozen other people. It doesn’t matter that they can stealth and run away. The point is they haven’t killed you, they haven’t budged you off your point, they’ve wasted their time and didn’t help their team.

As an aside, it sounds like the kind of mesmers you’re having trouble with are PU, as the standard shatter build these days rarely carries more than 1 stealth skill and often none at all. Against PU mesmers there’s 2 things you need to remember: they can’t cap while they’re stealthed, and you can still hit them with aoe attacks (eg grenades, bombs, cone attacks from offhand pistol or flamethrower, blowing up turrets etc).

Nightshade.5924:

I refuse to waste a character slot on a class that I consider cheat heavy and in need of revision. I have a eng, a necro, a warrior, a ele, and a ranger. I only PvP right now w/ the first three, still getting my ranger tactics down.

Well the problem is your argument is based on your personal experience, which you assume to be the general case. You’ve had several people respond to tell you that their own experience, as well as the de facto situation in pvp tournaments (which are viewable by anyone, so you can see for yourself), is completely different, and that mesmers and thieves aren’t considered all that powerful. Instead of calling you rude names, they advised you to make a mesmer and test your assertion (that mesmers are very hard to kill) empirically. It’s a very reasonable suggestion: testing your theories empirically is the scientific method, after all, which all modern knowledge and technology (including the computer you typed your post on) owes its existence to. So dismissing it out of hand just because you consider playing stealth-based classes (fully A QUARTER of the classes in this game) “cheating”, might seem to an impartial observer like deep down you know you’re wrong, and you’re afraid to discover that you just need to get better. It’s therefore unlikely to lead to people taking you more seriously, and certainly isn’t going to lead to ANet setting a bunch of gameplay programmers, network engineers, game designers, and UI designers into spending an aggreggate of several dozen hours (which the rest of us are paying for with our gem purchases, mind) implementing a half-baked suggestion you blurted out in an angry forum post.

However, because I’m nice, I’m gonna humour you and argue the inverse, ie. I’m going to assume that you’re right, just to show you that your argument isn’t just empirically wrong, but theoretically wrong too. Suppose then that if a “killed” counter is introduced, thieves and mesmers will be shown to have a much lower killed:kills ration than other classes. As in, maybe the average for other classes is 1:1 ratio of kills to killed, but thieves and mesmers get killed 0.5 times for each 1 kill they get.

What would that prove? Would it prove what you’re saying, that thieves and mesmers are just better? That they’re OP? That stealth needs to be toned down? Maybe. But read the following example and tell me if it’s also a feasible explanation:

Picture this: you’re guarding a point. Thief comes and tries to kill you. You nearly kill him, he stealths away. He comes to kill you again 30" later, you nearly kill him, he stealths away. Eventually , 10 minutes in, he actually manages to kill you, decaps your point. 30" later you come back, start fighting him, you nearly kill him, he stealths away. You recap your point. Game ends, your team wins.

What happened there from a “killed counter” perspective? The thief killed you once, and got killed 0 times himself. So if the thief has lots of matches like this, your proposed counter will show the thief to be OP. But what actually happened from a game perspective? You held the point against the thief the whole game, and won your team the match. So does that make thieves OP?

What I’m trying to say is that their being hard to kill doesn’t necesarilly mean they’re OP, it means they have great escapes! But every class has tradeoffs, and trust me, their abilities to disengage from fights well means they have a lot of other downsides, such as that they’re made of paper and will die if you sneeze on them in any sustained fight.

If you want to beat thieves easily, just go make a DPS guardian and watch them kill themselves on your retaliation. If you actually want to LEARN AND GET BETTER though, go play a thief/mesmer yourself.

Backpack.8517:

ghaleon.2861 a Solo Q player had this record
assuming equal matchmaking and close games, he would have around 5000 points……

Wins 5849
Loses 5449

Should he be rank 1, and I be 95%?? Like really??

Surely that wouldn’t happen, because as he got more wins his MMR would rise, and he’d gain fewer points per win (and lose more points per loss to lower-rated teams)?

Flyphish.6398:

Thank you. The changes made thus far are great and I dread reverting back to the old system. Don’t let the vocal minority sway you.

Completely agree. However loud and whiny the forum gets, please don’t forget JUST HOW FEW PEOPLE used to regularly play solo queue. The new system is an improvement even if it’s not better.

However, you really should consider only having one arena during off-season. If the leaderboards aren’t active between seasons there’s no point in ranked arena is there? You’re just splitting the player pool in 2 for no reason, and making both matchmaking and queue times worse for both queues.

I recommend that, after the test season is over, you temporarily disable ranked arena until the first “proper” season starts.

That’s a good point, they’ll have prizes and stuff for top-20 or whatever it was. ATM though it seems there’s no reason to go ranked over unranked at all.

I’m really puzzled by so many of you going 6 in Fire. You’re building around Lightning Rod, and you’re investing in the one tree that has no CCs on any weapon set! If you were getting stuff like Burning Precision or Burning fire, that work in any attunement, I’d get it, but you’re all choosing traits that need you to be in fire attunement as well. And Persisting Flames, well, if you’re using zerker ammy surely you don’t really need the fury that much? I could see it being useful if you were running celestial where your precision is lower, but with the high crit chance zerker already gives you it seems overkill for a GM trait.
Having said that, I haven’t actually tried it, so I’ll do a few hotjoins and come back to this thread! :p

Thanks. So as a followup, is this a good idea? :p Since in ranked you jeopardise your rank, shouldn’t you be better rewarded?

Do ranked and unranked arenas award the same progression in reward tracks?

Justin ODell.9517:

Sins.4782:

Can you guys write a script to change matchmaking variables at set intervals based on number of players queuing or something?

It isn’t just a matter of how many players are queuing, it’s how many are queuing within your skill range.

Is there a way you can make it dynamic, narrowing the acceptable range of matchups during peak times and expanding it during off-peak times?

Current leaderboards still show solo and team arena, so I’m guessing they haven’t been updated to work with the current system… Are new leaderboards coming? Are they waiting till the test season starts to implement them? What’s happening?

I have played with people who, due to their experience with other competitive games, were absolute beasts in pvp only 2 weeks after buying the game. I’ve also played with people who’ve been pvping since launch and they’re still dead weight. You never know. That rank 1 noob could be a future champion, but if you rage at them in chat, throw your toys out of the pram, and go afk, you’ll just drive them away from the game (or they’ll put you on their blocklist and never want to team up with you).

Congrats to Abjured! Both teams were awesome though and I really enjoyed all the matches, they were hard fought and not one-sided at all!

I also wanna join in thanking ChroNick and Jebro for stepping in and saving the day. I know we could’ve all watched the Chinese stream or waited for Blu to upload the replay, but live with two enthusiastic commentators and the chat exploding in OMGWTFBBQs with every clutch play is infinitely better! Just goes to show, we don’t need glitz, dancers, and boy bands for esports, we just need to watch it live in the company of other people who are passionate about the game. That’s what makes it a sport: your fellow fans!