Guild Wars 2

That’s cool, but I would play harder even on matches I knew were losses, if I could mitigate the rank loss.

Helbjorne.9368:

vorpal.1497:

Have the amount of rank points for a loss depend on the score: close match = minimal loss, blowout = large loss of points to discourage players giving up after the first fight.

Invalidate 4v5 and return us to the lobby with a major penalty to the d/c

Do not “expand” the matchmaking tolerance until like 5+ minutes of queue time

There I fixed matchmaking for you

Except when we’re being punished for facing people far outside our skill range and having a blowout. I’m in low Plat, I played a game against a duo legend group yesterday, lost 500 – 84, and lost 18 points. What kittening sense does that make?

The whole system is kittened from matchmaking to the rating system, and ArenaNet isn’t going to do kitten about it. They abandoned sPvP long ago.

The duo legend issue is tied to the way the matchmaker expands its low rank tolerance after like 30 seconds.

Have the amount of rank points for a loss depend on the score: close match = minimal loss, blowout = large loss of points to discourage players giving up after the first fight.

Invalidate 4v5 and return us to the lobby with a major penalty to the d/c

Do not “expand” the matchmaking tolerance until like 5+ minutes of queue time

There I fixed matchmaking for you

Also note that he was responding to a scenario in which one team had a d/c, so he’s essentially saying a team with a d/c who lost a 4v5 mid, deserves to lose when the guy does reconnect.

On the subject of intentional disconnects, punish the player who disconnected from a ranked match. Take the team’s aggregate rank decrease and apply it to the disconnectee, plus a 12+ hour dishonored. For people with wacky rural isdn or satellite connections, this is unfortunate but they are wasting 9 other people’s time when they dont secure a solid connection in a competitive format. For them, there’s always unranked and hotjoin.

Got to platinum in several seasons with axe mainhand, and to platinum in the current season with axe main and offhand (no Heart of Thrones so yeah there’s that…)

After shield #4 cast time was nerfed (its distance was already nerfed long ago to be nearly useless), and the way unblockables have taken over the meta, I went back to my old pipedream of offhand axe shenanigans.

The change to axe #4 was nice (quickness instead of fury), but as already said the movement speed from axe #5 isn’t a thing (it’s slower than swiftness, and if you have Warrior’s Sprint like 100% of warrior builds, then it doesn’t apply).

Therefore I would say it’s the best offhand now, and very good for mainhand as well. While it sacrifices all mobility and defensive options, it does serve a role in pvp. It’s a sort of counter to blind-spam due to its very fast attack speed, and the damage it puts out is like a permanent and mobile 100-blades.

Don’t use axe #5 for damage but as a feint as GrackFields mentioned. The dmg per hit is very low, so classes with heavy retaliation you will quickly end up killing yourself. Instead use it to scare an opponent into popping a stunbreak or CC, many people see its animation and think it must be dangerous.

Personally I go the Arms route for the passive signet of might + passive quickness, does very well against thieves, mesmers, and guardians. Does quite poorly against necros and revs and berserker warriors.

Well you asked, and my response is still that disconnect has no place in a ranked format. Invalidate the match and punish the person who disconnected severely.

edit: invalidate it for the winners too and return to lobby. I DONT WANT TO PROLONG A 4v5 EVEN IF I AM ON THE TEAM WITH 5!

Ben Phongluangtham.1065:

If you have a teammate DC for 2 minutes or more and you lose, you should not lose rating. Every case we’ve investigated of people still losing rating under these circumstances has turned out to be false. I attribute it to people having an altered sense of time during a match.

All that being said, we’ve been talking about possibly reducing the time. There are some considerations, like making match manipulation easier.

We’re currently thinking of trying 1 minute as a trial and keeping an eye on player behavior.

What do you guys think?

If 2 teams are approximately equally matched against eachother, I would argue that even 10 seconds is enough to throw the match – because once the initial team fight is lost, there is a snowball effect where the losers continue to lose as they trickle on to nodes 1 by 1.

Ever since the balance patch prior to S7, we’ve had 500ms+ of latency. Was this a hardware downgrade, or a bug introduced by the patch?

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

Unblockables are necessary in current meta. In the past you only have few well timed aegis or single block skills. Now a lot of classes have duration blocks which render perfect timing obsolete.

Right that’s what I meant by the DH meta 1-2 seasons back, where the block spam became insane and we all got unblockable buffs to compensate.

It ties in with OP’s point about a tendency towards un-counterable spam lately

A point not mentioned is unblockables.

While I enjoy and use unblockables heavily (an evolution I had to make during the DH season), it feels cheesey and punishes counterplay. When someone reads his opponent well, and pops a block at the perfect moment, his opponent (me) just makes sure the dolorous blow arrives with unblockable status. So the guy attempting to make a good counterplay is punished, and the guy (me) just spamming an unblockable ability doesn’t even bother reading his opponent and just makes sure important skills hit through defenses.

If only there was a condition that reduced healing

It’s hard to get excited after begging for a feature for 3-4 years

ok now think about the volume of reports, you’re almost about to understand

How about bans for all the people filing frivolous reports?

I dropped from mid plat to mid gold today, something like 20 losses and 4 wins

War here, my feeling is that the class is top tier at dueling, but EASILY neutered in any team engagement. Thieves/necros/guards all bring the blind spam, I’ve been seeing a lot of weakness spam (from eles, I think?) lately too, those two conditions alone can shut down a warrior. Also war doesn’t have “invuln”, Endure Pain does nothing to stop condition damage and Resistance is corruptible/strippable.

In other words, in the current power-weighted meta warrior seems arbitrarily good. Bring the condi and the warriors are going to feel it… even as a dedicated longbow user (i.e. reliable cleansing ire usage) I find necros incredibly difficult. Then consider that the majority of warriors use mace/greatsword atm means they are that much more susceptible to condi when they inevtiably miss that F1 skill.

Bandicam is terrible, just be a man and set up OBS https://obsproject.com/download

I got placed in lowest tier gold, but I have climbed into low tier platinum and I don’t have HoT for elite spec builds. The system could definitely be better though if it took into account whether a win was a blowout or if your team barely got by.

Yes it’s true that your team often has people playing badly, but so does the other team.

I’m glad that the stealth + push/pull mechanics have been nuked from this map, and from a design standpoint the map in general uses space and height differences beautifully. However the low level channels/canals which cover much of the map see almost no gameplay happen in them.

IMO this could be one of the best maps if that space was utilized more, perhaps if the skyhammer portal was a roaming orb in the canals maybe requiring a 1-2 second channelling to access, which would force people to go look for it a bit and fight down there. It also means point B isn’t so ridiculously close to the skyhammer, which is the map’s biggest problem as a team that is “playing sides” is at a huge disadvantage in terms of skyhammer access.

I know there’s almost no chance a dev will read this and care, just my 2 cents on a map I see a lot of potential in.

Mesmers shouldn’t be the boon strip class AND the stunlock class, pick one and voila, the game is fixed. Oh wait what about grena— sound of explosion, followed by silence

Shinki.8045:

Combustive Shot always seemed to fizzle when it hit a block or reflect. I suppose that’s better than it reflecting back on us.

Go to the mists golem testing area with some +adrenaline build so you can spam 50 combustive shots, and count how many completely fail to trigger, in the absence of all blocks or reflects…

I don’t want to give away what I use precisely, because maybe there is a more creative and better version of the build that you can create.

But the idea behind it is to Skull Crack with the new Berserker’s Power trait, then switch to GS and apply as much 100b as you can before they stunbreak. Sometimes you spend a long time baiting a million stunbreaks out of people with Mace #3, Shield #4, and even “wasted” Skull Cracks. Shield #5 is also a welcome 2 seconds of breathing space in an insane burst meta

Honestly I think this is a pretty boring and incredibly predictable playstyle for warrior, but even with glassy amulets I can stay in a fight a lot longer than with other builds – since you get more “breathing space” by shield’s block, GS whirlwind, and the fact that you are temporarily stopping one enemy’s output with all those dazes/stuns.

Longbow burst used to fail to fire (yet still go on cooldown) about 10% of the time prepatch. Now it happens nearly 50% of the time for me so I’ve had to stop using the weapon completely.

You found the only thief in GW2 that doesn’t spam blinds and still took 3 min to down him, and only because he let you (he would have withdrawn and regenerated in a real fight).

Also you say you are running berserker, but it seems most of your opponents don’t even scratch you for long periods of time even when your utilities are down. I’m a bit confused ;-o

For warrior at least, you need to active 2 utilities simultaneously to become “invulnerable”, which last 8 seconds and then you are vulnerable for 52 seconds…

For now I’ve had limited success by adjusting my playstyle, to keep myself on the extreme periphery of battles with a full glass build (since defensive builds seem to have been made irrelevant, quickly overwhelmed by even a single glass cannon). And then load up on dodges and escape utilities, and peel towards spawn/home if I feel the stunlock spam coming, to at least force my opponents to risk wasting time in finishing me off, and get them on the respawn.

It’s just frustrating to play this way though because I contribute less, and it’s just more fun to be in the middle of the chaos trading blows ;-(

I think it’s kinda fun how the rebalance shook everything up and we have to learn how to play a new game pretty much, however:

I see a very heavy usage of daze and stun now, and I’m trying to think of how to mitigate it (coming from a warrior perspective). Even when I fill up on stunbreakers and stability, the amount of incoming stuns and boon strips often grants me less than a second where I have keyboard input.

Also, the cooldown on some skills getting interrupted is brutal, like getting a 6 second skill interrupted makes it go on a 16 second cooldown (in warrior’s case, this means 16 seconds with no condi cleanse because it was your telegraphed burst skill)

I’m not talking about a duel where you can learn to read when a stun is coming and skillfully dodge/block, but teamfights where 3-4 people decide to unload on you. Before you bask in delicious shoutbow tears, know that I didn’t and don’t play shoutbow (although those builds are just as susceptible to stunlocks as any other).

Any suggestions on counterplay for teamfight anti-stun gameplay?

I read about this weeks (months?) ago, but it never happened to me. Then 2 weeks ago it started happening during a play session; that is, my OCD scoreboard checking was totally normal for several matches, then suddenly I was hit by the 2-3 second delay on each check. Hasn’t gone away since

Instead of climbing the ranks and going against higher and higher MMR opponents, the matchmaking algorithm manages to instead put you on teams with lower and lower MMR players.

I have nothing to contribute other than salt and anger, but I had to rant about this.

The good
———
1. Temple of the Silent Storm – great use of vertical space, good connectivity, fun strategic secondary mechanic, good ways to LoS opponents
2. Forest of Niflhel – a good “baseline” for what makes a good layout for the 3 cap game mode, and the longer-to-travel-to ledges on mid are a nice touch, although I don’t like the secondary mechanic of NPCs
3. Battle of Khylo – good layout, very good secondary mechanic, adding the LoS options to the middle ground is a good mixup (usually the side nodes have the LoS options in other maps).
4. Spiritwatch – this map could compete with my #1 if the orb simply disabled abilities/traits, the layout and strategy options are excellent

The bad
——
5. Legacy of the Foefire – The worst secondary mechanic of all maps, the openness makes it a turkey shoot for rangers (although this is the very reason why many people love it), the side nodes are imbalanced in that waterfall you can LoS opponent and still contest/cleave/aoe but at quarry if you LoS your opponent you are behind the big rock and not able to contest or pressure in any way
6. Skyhammer – It’s better now that the cannon can be dodged, but the instant death mechanic of the platforms keeps me from considering this map in any serious way. If the platforms did something else, like a 4 sec immobilize or knockdown, this would be an extremely good map

Not listing courtyard since it’s not a serious map even for a deathmatch game mode

Sure, I’ll concede that there are off-times when the queuing population is low, but it’s a solvable situation. The algorithm could be made to wait longer, or to compress the MMR range it allows, and do so dynamically based on the queuing population (I know this won’t happen though due to dev perceptions and majority player perceptions on “how long is too long to wait”, but still…)

And then there’s quality of life issues that have the potential to increase the population, like being able to queue while outside the Mists, or unique pvp rewards, or elimination of hotjoin (but leave custom arenas the way they are), re-integration of solo queue, skill-based leaderboard ranking instead of time-based, and so on.

It’s a bit of a myth that there aren’t many players. When I finally broke into this season’s leaderboard a week or two back, it was saying I was in the top 95%. Therefore the leaderboards represent about 5% of the pvp population, meaning there have been on the order of 20,000 unique accounts that have participated in pvp this season.

Ok, it’s not breaking any records for player activity, but a significant portion of that 20,000 are VERY active. Most people on the leaderboards have 200-300 matches, which is on the order of 50-75 hours to achieve!

How about the turret regen becoming a boon (thus removable and subject to other forms of boon hate)? Or maybe it’s an active heal, in which case ignore me, I obviously don’t play engi ;-P

Oh and to the argument that the population would decrease if the avg queue time goes up even 1 minute:

While yes, that would be true of a piece of the population, what about the piece of the population who have stopped playing because of match quality / teammate toxicity?

So my anecdotal experience is that a lot (maybe not the majority, but a huge percentage nonetheless) of matches are blowouts, which I consider to mean one team can’t even muster 350 points. I think this is a fixable problem.

I also think the “population is low” argument that a lot of people spout is incorrect. In the christmas test season, I played a few matches almost every day, desperately trying to break into the top 1000. I think I got in the 980’s on the last day and then promptly pushed off again. This means that, on NA at least, there is a population of over 1000 very active people grinding for competitive matches. And keep in mind that this has probably been the bleakest period in PvP’s history, with the test leaderboard only representing the grind, and the broken solo vs. team matchmaking. And yet 1000+ were devoted enough to keep me off the leaderboard (and I consider myself “quite active”). So we don’t know the size of the pvp population, but it’s there, certainly.

Anyway, let’s talk about queue times. Currently, as a mostly solo player, I wait usually 1-2 minutes for a match. Rarely do I wait 5 minutes. For a game where the pvp population is supposedly “low”, these queue times are amazingly short. While the solos vs. team situations do seem to be uncommon now (yay!!!), match quality with solos vs. solos is still not what it used to be (boo!!!); many of my matches are blowouts.

Presumably, the “net” that the matchmaking puts out on the queuing players is initially small. As time increases, and if good matches are not found, then the “net” increases by relaxing its restrictions.

If my average queue time seems to be 2 minutes, then can we assume the “net” is relaxing its restrictions after only 1 minute? And by 5 minutes we’re at “screw it, let anyone play against anyone”? Personally, I am willing to wait 5-15 minutes for a good match in competitive mode.

So I would suggest a few small changes, to increase the quality of matches:

Ingame and easily viewable leaderboard, to get players to care about their play

Commensurate with the above, make it clear to players that you can avoid losing LB points, despite losing a match. (I’m an active player and don’t know the conditions for this, so it’s definitely not clear to players right now)

Lock professions, or get rid of the profession metric in matchmaking algorithm, or make enemy team names/classes hidden until match begins. Since people can and do switch during the warmup period, the profession metric in matchmaking is currently useless IMO.

Matching low MMR players with high MMR is OK, as long as they’re evenly distributed on both teams (this may already be how the game makes teams, but if not I figure it is worth noting)

And last but not least, increase the time before the matchmaking net starts widening.

tl;dr How long would you wait for a better quality competitive matchup?

Very well thought out, the most important bit is
“If all ten players have not joined by the time the match begins, do not begin the match”

If any of this is too much difficulty to implement, please at least get this one done, it isn’t too much to ask!

KratosAngel.7289:

Actually, its definitely more a way to prevent us from proving through screenshots that MMR is not working in some situations.

Basically this. Like others have said, rank is an indication of time which is in turn an indicator of skill. If someone is, say, rank 40 then it is very likely they have played the maps many times and know how the secondary mechanics work for example. If someone is rank 12, then it is very likely they dont know anything about map flow, priorities, nor even what skills/traits are useful. There is the fringe case of a veteran buying a 2nd copy of the game, and thus having high skill with very low rank, but that is not worth talking about.

Rank is probably a poor indicator of skill, when comparing two “high” ranked players (like >30). But I can guarantee you that a person with “low” rank (e.g. <20) are going to be unskilled simply by virtue of them having only spent like 6 hours total.

However! Unskilled players are not a problem. It is only when one team gets populated by one or more unskilled players, meanwhile the other team gets all average/good players, which is the problem. So by hiding rank now, they hide this broken situation of a team hamstrung by an unskilled player while paired with average/good players.

Take home point: ArenaNet is aware of these issues with mismatched games, and have made the conscious decision to not fix it, due to lack of time or simply the architecture of the code doesn’t allow them to. Thus they hide rank so we will stop “proving” via screenshots that there is a problem with mismatched teams.

Sezz.3029:

Obsidia.5127:

I just thought you should all know that WE ALL GET 4V5 MATCHES! Stop using that as an excuse. There is a reason why Henry (Lordrosicky) had 3 accounts in the Top 10 of EU SoloQ and that’s because he was the best Necro I have seen so far. He clearly understood where he should be and how long he should stay there for etc.

Stop using that as an excuse? lol I one time got 4 matches in a row 4v5……. It’s not an excuse, it’s the reality. You need to get off that “denial train”, and jump on my “YOLO Q TRAIN” I guaranteed you’ll be a happier person

What he meant is, statistically we all get Xv5, so you climbed some percentage of the leaderboard “on the shoulders” of unfair/thrown matches in your favor. Then you also fall down again when on the other end of the thrown match. In other words, that guy above you on the leaderboard is also getting hit by a Xv5 every 5-10 matches. It sucks and it is ridiculous but we all experience it, so REGULARLY being high in the leaderboards does still mean something.

Solution: invalidate 1/2/3/4 vs. 5 in regards to counting towards leaderboards/MMR. Or simply just dont allow a match like that to even start. When ArenaNet does this, it will be like christmas

Thanks for the reassurance that it was possible. The rubble is extremely awkward to jump up, after like 45 minutes of trying I figured there must be some other trick to it. Your reassurance that the rubble was the key gave me the willpower to keep trying!

The one above the letter “U” in the map for “Trader’s Forum”

I think I’m referring to the one south of the one you guys are talking about

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:Trader's_Forum_map.jpg

Is this obtainable in Lion’s Arch (Enemy Controlled)? In the normal Lion’s Arch, it is accessed by climbing a scaffold up to a bridge which it is on. In the current version of the map, a tower collapsed over the bridge and there seems to be no way up, nor under via water routes etc.

Rifle does need a little help, but none of these suggestions are what it needs IMO. Especially #5… if anything you’d want it to be a leap backward.

Well, getting rid of the cast time on #4 would be nice, but I dont think it needs the boon strip (there’s a sigil for that). I think just the Crack Shot trait needs something more interesting.

Drek Thalon.5490:

“Its not min/max fancy burst nuke feck em all up build, but rather a build along the lines I like to see my warrior…… Durable front-line grunt that gets things done.”

That’s just the problem.. you aren’t min/maxed to do anything, really. There are better ways to create ‘durable’ builds out there with shouts/battle standards, and there are better ways to create condition builds so your confusion actually does something rather than nothing. Unfortunately, you’re just kind of all over the place here.

I haven’t been playing because of FFXIV, but I was in top 200 with a very similar build. I use mace/sword and longbow, 20/0/20/0/30 – the most important traits being Ire, Sundered Mace, Burst Mastery, and Vigorous Focus.

Then utilities it’s important to have at least Berserker’s Stance, and a stun breaker so it’s a no-brainer to go for the Balanced Stance. Both will be granting vigor which is your main defense. Signet of Precision also, so that you can enter fights with full adrenaline and it’s on a low cooldown. Finally Warbanner instead of Rage, because Rage is easily stripped or absorbed or corrupted, and this isn’t a burst build.

Main reason I use sword offhand instead of mace is because of the awesome block on #5. It’s on half the cooldown of shield, and as long as you’re not in melee range, it will block everything for the duration (unlike mace #2 which just blocks one ability).

Abusing endurance is a very fun way to play warrior IMO and this guy is on the right track. It can be extremely strong 1v1, even survive 2 minutes+ in 1v2, but then becomes less useful in team fights where a bursty warrior would be preferred. So it’s a viable bunker / bunker assault role. It actually destroys spirit rangers, they don’t like constant stuns and AoE (remember longbow F1 is doing ticks of power/crit-modified damage!), but some of the old style rangers (beastmaster? I dunno the vocab of that class) will beat you unless you’re better than me, but almost no one plays those anymore.

Yet despite this, they’re still primary target along with mesmer/necro in a team fight due to ease of killing them. I do this and I’m a war main ;-P

it was a typo in the patch notes, confirmed by a dev somewhere in the war forum

I agree with basically all of this. But as you pointed out, the fix would require a monumental reworking which is sad. Still, the game is great fun in its current state if teams are evenly matched (which is a rarity because of the way teams pair up with randoms, but that’s an easy fix).

I think their best bet is to just tone down a bit some of the major things like AoE and condition spam, and let things settle.

So you want moderators to increase their work load, because you care a lot about a match score, but not enough to watch the match?

Chase.8415:

Wouldn’t it make sense that an immobilize interrupts you?

Immobilize means immobilize, interrupt means interrupt.

Yeah this is one of those bugs that has been in the game since the beginning of time. Whatever action you’re doing when immobilize hits will get interrupted; autoattack chain, targetted spells etc. Safe to assume they just can’t fix it at this point.