Guild Wars 2

I know the devs are all reading and posting on the pvp forums 24/7, taking all of our feedback and applying it into the game, doing hot fixes and what not, so I’ll ask one more thing of you, can you fix the matchmaking system, so we can have good and fun matches at least half of the time? And by “good and fun” I mean games, that we dont have to wait for 10 mins and then get matched with r20 against top200 teams…
Thank you.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Just to clarify:

It’s actually significantly cheaper than a sub fee. The $20 you spend is the initial cost. It could also cost $10 + Gold, or no money at all if you have enough gold.

Once you have a server, it costs 480 gems for 20 days, 960 for 40 days, 1440 for 60 days. That’s less than $10/mo if only one person is supporting the server. Anyone can apply time to servers. Also, don’t forget you can convert gold to gems.

Don’t want to sound rude, but how exactly are you making gold from PvP?

So, as a top ~100 player I’ll give my feedback on the system(s) in question.
First a bit of a backstory – I’m mostly a “freelancer” spamming map chat with “lfg” massages. Made it to around 220 with map pug groups, then formed a team with 4 friends and (a week later) we peaked at rankings 75, 71, 95, 118(me) and 183.
Then, on the next day, the team gathered again and we started playing, first match we got matched and lost against 3 players from MiM and 2 from GANK (not sure if that was their tag), all of them around rankings 10 and 20 at the time. Immediately after that we won 3 (three) matches in a row (in the rankings range of 100-450 in both matches).
After one(!) lose (to much better ranked team) and then 3(!) wins, we… wait for it… dropped with 100+ positions!!! So, let me repeat, after a single lose and three wins I dropped from r118 to r175 ?!

Haven’t played tPvP since then… and not because I care for the ratings, just that I don’t like the idea of being “rewarded” in such a way….

Actually, they confirmed that solo Q is top priority for them atm, so I hope we will see improvements on this end too.

JonathanSharp.7094:

This has not yet happened, but will be coming in a patch next week.

Thank you for the clarification, Chap! I’m really excited for the patch next week. Right click targeting toggle, leaderboards and matchmaking improvements and I’m hoping for some good balance changes as well. Keep up the good work! (if possible a tiny bit faster )

Another quick question regarding this blog post: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/introducing-changes-to-the-pvp-leaderboards/
Are the changes live now, or do we have to wait for the next week’s update?

Thank you for the clarification, Evan!
Exactly what I wanted to hear! And of course, my reaction:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykpjFjsEdl4
:D

From the release page:

Fight to Keep Your Spot on the PvP Leaderboards

We’ve improved the way that the PvP leaderboards reflect excellence! Inactive players will automatically start to slip down the leaderboards over time, allowing new and active players an opportunity to fight their way up to a higher rank. This means that the leaderboards will more accurately represent the best PvP players.

That’s a very welcome change and ppl were asking for it for some time now. Big thanks to the team for that one!

My question is, is this the only improvement on the leaderboards? In the last SotG(http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2guru/b/410812694 around the 15min mark), PvP programer Evan Lesh talked about new (low ranked) players will not be matched so often with higher ranked players. Also the other big change mentioned in the SotG was the “less volatility” (or “jumping/skyrocketing” ladder positions after a single match). What about them, are they in this upcoming update?
My concern is the “volatility” issue, because now we have to “Fight to Keep Our Spot”, but in the same time, we will be jumping 50-100 or even a lot more positions (i’ve seen jumps of 1000+, from the 96% to top ~500 in exactly 2 matches), which seems kinda contradictory…

I hope someone from the PvP team can give us a bit more info.

Evan Lesh.3295:

We have been working on things However, we’re nearing the end of a development cycle, so there is literally nothing more I can do right now to help with the dueling “problem” for this patch. When custom arenas are out, you’ll have a much easier time finding the kind of server you like to play on.

You are saying it, like Custom Arenas wont make it in April’s patch either. If thats the case, it will be a big bummer… again.

Just noticed that there are a lot more pages to browse through. Up to page 40 which is 1000 players:
https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/pvp?page=40
Also if u log in, your name will be marked so its more easy to spot urself while going through the pages.
That was quick and Im happy with my resault. ^^
Sorry if this doesnt deserve its own thread, but its pretty big.
gl hf

Xeph.4513:

I will also take part in this game!

I hope you will keep your word, mate.

I want to start with a fun-fact: the first closed beta test, that the press was allowed to talk about was more then a year ago (the third weekend of Febuary, 2012). You can check lots of PvP footage from back then from various sources, be it IGN or GameSpot and TotalBiscuit or MikyB.

The first beta weekend was at the end of April and I’m sure most of you remember it well. Back then, there weren’t tiered skills and traits and no mystic forge (the armor/weapon skins were available directly from the corresponding rank vendors).
With the second beta weekend the skills and traits were tiered, the mystic forge was in place. In a stress tests between the weekends, they also added 2 new maps – Legacy of the Foefire and Raid on the Capricorn.
And then, we launched – 4 maps, free and paid 5v5 tournaments and 8v8 hotjoins.

Now, almost 8 months after release, we have 2 additional maps, no paids (changed to 2team tournament), slow and broken matchmaking, team colors, constant respawn timer, 5v5 hotjoins and a lot less players. Really nice progress for the last year, don’t you agree?

1. Are the devs happy with the current lack of viable builds variety, the really stalled meta and what are they gonna do about it?
Like almost all of the wars are glass hundred blades, the thieves use backstab, the eles are bunkers, the guardians are shouts, the necros are mark/vails, 100nade engies, glassy mesmers and crossfire autoattacking rangers.

2. Any plans to revive 8team tournaments?
Even in prime time, in EU servers the waiting is more then half an hour…

3. Will we see changes to the rewards like gems or more pvp specific items?
Anything really…

hey lets let the pvp’ers guest on the EU side and pvp with them

np

Anyway, jk aside, I was really looking forward to guesting, but now its really pointless…

In one of the threads about culling, Colin Johanson said that the culling fixes and optimizations for WvW will be available in PvE and PvP too. Is there any information if we will see them at the same time, or they will go live for WvW first, and later for the rest of the game?

Questions about PvP paid tournaments:
What are the plans of getting more players willing to play paids? Right now its hard to go from free to paid tournaments, because of the huge gap between the player skills.

For 1-on-1 tournaments it was said in the stream that the wining team will stay in the pool. Does that mean that they will stay until they lose (like Random and Team arenas in Guild Wars 1) or there is still limited number of rounds?

PvE Qs:1. Can You, please, give a bit more information on the upcomming changes to dungeons/fractals, especially the one about rezing in combat. How it will work? What will be the drawbacks and will this transfer outside of dungeon/fractal modes (like in pvp/wvw)?

2. With the 2013 blog post it was said that battles with open world bosses will be modified. Any plans to make dragon battles more dynamic and specifically with more stages (like Claw of Jormag) and less/none “blind spots”, where the players can deal dmg to the boss, but they are just outside of its range.

3. What will be the "party/group size) for the guild missions? Will they be varying or repeatable?

ColinJohanson.2394:

We’ll be evaluating the culling system fixes we do for WvW, and applying as many of them as make sense as possible to all parts of the game absolutely.

This rises the question, if the culling fixes will be introduced firstly in WvW only and then some time after, we will see the change in the rest of the game OR, the fixes will be introduced in all aspecsts of the game at the same time?

Evan Lesh.3295:

I want to hop in and say that while this bug is proving near impossible to reproduce on our machines, we hope our fixes going out today will finally take care of it.

Are you, by any chance, using only (mostly) nVidia graphic cards? This idea came to me few days back, when 3 of my guild mates got the loading stuck bug one by one 3-4 times in a single round(while they were topically getting it once-twice in a tournament run) and I havnt experienced it at all (since it got reintroduced last month). The difference between my mates’ PCs and mine, are that Im using a nVidia card (gtx460 with the latest beta 310.64 driver), while they all have AMD Radeons (HD6970, HD6870 and HD7850, everyone with the latest 12.11 driver).

A bit more info on the Party Search from GW1, cuz I have some free time, but cant play GW2 atm.

The tool in GW1 wasn’t automated and all it did was “echo” your lfg line.
I will explain what I mean by that with one really common example: You are looking for a group to run Ascalonian Catacombs (ac for short). So you go to the zone (Plains of Ashford in this case) and type “lfg ac explorable” in map chat. In that moment the system kicks in, captures the “lfg ac explorable” line and makes it visible in the tool UI to everyone in the zone (hopefully across servers/worlds/overflows), no mater even if they entered the zone AFTER you started looking for group.
From there I see that you are looking for group and the tool showing your name, profession, level, party size, server/world/overflow and also gives me option to whisper or join you.

Basically you will do what you do now – “spam” in map chat, but instead of “spamming” only in your server/world/overflow, you are “spamming” everyone that is in the same zone, no matter of the server/world/overflow they are in. This will reduce the time spent for gathering a group by much… very, very much.
And “spamming” isn’t really the right word, because it will not get lost in the chat, bu you have to type it once and it will be listed in the tool for as long as you decide to disband the group.

Of course this will (have to) work for everything, not just dungeons – Tournament PvP, WvW and even as someone above mentioned – world events, bosses, puzzles, etc etc.

I really, really hope you don’t implement a system similar to any of the generic mmorpgs out there (Im talking about the “click what dungeon you want to queue for, then wait till get matched with complete team of pugs and get in the dungeon instance immediately after” type of system). These sort of things will hurt the community and will empty the zones even more, cuz everyone will be just sitting in Lion’s Arch.

Why don’t you just make the current tool work like the one in GW1? Its simple and gets the job done right. Just move it to a separate UI panel so its easier to find, then make it work across different servers/worlds/overflows. And of course – the most important thing is to automatically add you in the tool whenever you type something starting with lfg/glf etc.
For those, who have no idea what Im talking about – more info: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Party_search

As Chap said it for the pvp rankings the other day – the systems are there, they have been tested and worked in GW1, you just have to adjust it for GW2.
And he is right. The first Guild Wars (after some time) did a lot of things right, why would you just ignore and trow them away?

Evan Lesh.3295:

The issue does effect the whole game, but because players see the load screen so much more often in PvP, this player base is affected more.

The question is, why do we have to see the loading screen every time we respawn in such small maps? Remove the loading screen for every respawn and the problem with stucking at the loading screen during pvp tournaments will be gone. Two rabbits with one stone – we(the players) don’t waste time to watch the loading screen over and over again, and you(the devs) don’t waste time to fix problems that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

I know its a lot easier said then done and most likely it will not happen in the foreseeable future, but that’s not the most efficient way to deal with this issues, and efficiency was the primary topic in ArenaNet’s conference at GDC Online last month.

At least add an option to toggle this on and off. I myself will turn it off immediately, because its really costly to lose targets in tpvp.

Thanks for the headsup! Now I can quietly wait for this to get fixed.

Now that EnemyCrusher mentioned it, I think I did purchased one character slot during one of the BWEs… that’s some wierd issue here.

I know the team have their hands full with support tickets and updates, but from what I’m reading now it shouldnt be too long until I hear from a support agent. So I’m posting here with a hope someone more active in the forums team member can update me on my issue.

The issue itself is this – on the early evening on 15th of october I purchased an additional character slot for my account. After the purchase I continued to play with my current character until few hours later when I exited to the character select screen only to see that I have two additional slots instead of just one. I tought that I may have miss-clicked, thus buying 2 slots. So I logged back with my other character to check if I’ve been charged twice, but that was not the case. The rest of the gems where there, available to me. Also at the recently bought tab there is only one character slot listed.

Then I contacted the customer support via the website, explaining the issue as I did here and wen to bed. The next morning I got a reply stating that I will be transferred to a different department for my concern regarding getting an additional slot.

Back then I also checked the forums and found, that there was an issue with the Black Lion Trading Co (with the makeover kits available for short time) about the same time when I bought the character slot. I have no idea if these two issues are connected (I havent tried to purchase anything esle), but thought I should mention it.

Now, three days later, I still have 2 slots(I still havent created another character, because it may be deleted with one of the slots) and no info what so ever… I dont want to get accused for theft and/or getting my account suspending for glitching/exploing the system, so I hope to get this resolved as soon as possible.

Thanks.

P.S. Sorry for the wall of text, but wanted to be as much informative as possible. Also my support ticket is 121016-000871.

This is a known issue since the 10/8 build went live and its being of a top priority since then. That’s a whole work week and still we have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. I don’t wanna know what’s the status on their low priority stuff… Same thing with the “invisible army” in WvW, which was an issue from the very first beta. Again top priority, and its just getting worse. Basically at the moment half of the game is just unplayble (or at least for me it’s not really fun to stare at the loading screen or fight vs invisible enemies). The other half still have bugged events and skill points, that even bugs at the very same point every f time.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m long time follower of GW (3000+ hours in GW1 and almost 500 in GW2 already, can give you screens, cuz I’m still playing GW1 from time to time) and for a very, very fist time I’m actually complaining about something in the franchise. And that will be the support as a whole. I just can’t get it why we have to wait a full week for every update, while in GW1 we could get few new builds a day (aka hot fixes) when such issues occur. Till now all we are getting are “thank you for you patience and undarstaing”.

Well, we were patient for the PvP servers to get online on headstart. We were (really) patient till the tournament rewards get fixed. We were (really, really) patient for the PvP blog post to get posted(or translated or w/). Now we are patient for this to get fixed, whenever that is. I do not wanna know what we will have to be patient and understating about next, but what I DO wanna know is till when we will have to be patient?!

I really, really wanna know the answer to this, because it’s getting ridiculous. It’s just not something that I had used to with Anet and GW1 for the past 7 years and it’s (at the very least) disappointing.

Let me end this qq/whine/vent post whit a quote from the blogpost itself:
“The way we see it, Guild Wars 2 sPvP may be shipped, but it’s far from finished.”

Thank you for the update, Colin! Even without the the blog posts, its better to keep us up to date once in a while (if its possible – let it be more often), instead of complete silence for weeks. So, if you still have some more bits of info, pass it along. It will be more then welcome.
Again, thanks for posting and see you ingame!

Yeap, you are totaly missing the fact, that the pvp in the game is not only 8v8 spamfest. When you are queuing with less then 5 man party in tournaments, its really hard to win 4v5, or very annoying to wait 5 minutes before each match…

Its not common, but the cases of afking/leeching/waiting for the 5 min timers are getting more and more often. Sadly, there is no system in place to take care of this annoying minority of players. I know anet are constantly following the forums, so I think its the right place for me to suggest a similar system to the dishonorable function in the first Guild Wars. For those unfamiliar with it – its a automated system that prevents players from joining pvp for 10 mins when reported by at least 3 players (out of 8 man party). For every report after the initial 3, the suspension gets +5 mins. To prevent abusing, the player can get reported only by his teammates.
Its a great way to deal with afk and leechers…