Lack of players suddenly?

Rank1 eu is 1813 now, none of the people who were top10 are playing anymore. Rank1 was 1936 a week ago. Every game I get is people doing placements and is always one sided stomp(win or lose).

What happened?

for na at least i think there was an exodus since anet didn't follow up on what they said they were gonna do. they're still taking too long to fix problems and people are finally fed up. also the bots, hackers, and match throwers aren't helping. the game is on its last legs. wvw the lag/ population discrepancies is making it unplayable for a lot and i hear pve isn't doing so hot either.

i can't speak for everyone, but my interest drastically declined when they introduced 2v2s, then took it away. it was so much fun, it just killed my vibe entirely. Then they brought 3v3 but only for 2 weeks. After I read it was only 2 weeks I didn't even bother with it. Lastly, i'm finding it difficult to enjoy my main class anymore. I started playing again last week and at least in NA Gold 3 and Plat 1, there was enough people for me to get competitive games going. Most of my matches seemed very fair.

Too many problems from anet for me to do pvp in this game. i'm sure it's also felt by others

Or.. ppl are simply taking their summer vacation outside and with their families.

I can only speak for myself, but several reasons prevent me from playing ranked:

• Meta is quite boring, bunker builds are legion, meta dps builds are oppressive while having strong survival options at the same time
• Random toxicity is overly present and nothing is done to help that
• Patches are disappointing, changes feel random and actual problems are too rarely addressed.
• (+) I can't be bothered to play a gamemode that isn't fun anymore for the sole reward of a title I already have.

None of you realizes that when a week passes the amount of matches required to be on the leaderboards increases and ppl who don't have those matches disappear from the boards.

@Domino.1359 said:Too many problems from anet for me to do pvp in this game. i'm sure it's also felt by others

y u p

It's for a lot of reasons, most of which have already been said here so i'll just elaborate somewhat.

•The Meta Is Boring - The Feb 25th patch was very controversial, and whether you like it or hate it you can probably agree that it was too experimental to dump on us, only for it to hardly be tweaked since. As it came into the game; we were even assured that things would be broken for a while, by the one largely responsible for the patch. There's like no urgency to fix anything though, and promises for a quicker balance patch cadence weren't met.Just nerfing and removing as many options as possible isn't very fun or exciting either.

•Ranked is a mess - Just, every part of it is a mess. Not talking about the meta or OP builds, but it's fundamentally broken and outdated on so many levels that it'd take up this entire thread and many more to talk about.

•Hackers and Bots - Apparently a big problem right now. I hardly ever see bots, and I've never seen a hacker in my time playing, but there's pretty solid evidence that they do exist in Ranked right now.So people are either right that it is an issue, or its the new scapegoat for people actively contributing to PvP's decline... or both.

•Dwindling population - It's a self perpetuating problem. A lot of PvP's problems are owed to its small population and inability to function with small numbers.As people leave, a lot of these problems and more rise to the surface; such as bad matchmaking and bots, which in turn causes more people to leave.

•Toxic community - Constantly at eachother's throats and rewarded for doing so. You can afk in Ranked, doing absolutely nothing or the bare minimum, and get paid for doing it(It's even one of the best moneymakers in the entire game!)The 'pros' don't really do much to help it either. Wintrading, Metagaming, and matchfixing and they get light penalties for doing them, so they just go and do it all over again. A lot of the people who are supposed to represent the 'pro'-scene for this game also do hardly anything but complain about it, and even then it's never constructive. They'll just pop in to say "X-Profession killed me, pls nerf" or stream themselves playing Ranked or ATs and constantly whine the entire time that "X-Profession is so busted dude, like why" which naturally sparks like 10-15 different threads all parroting the same thing.Nasty to gatekeep the leaderboard with a bunch of alts too. That just shouldn't be allowed.

People are just starting to get tired of and wise to what's going on. Less people are ignoring these problems, and are instead moving on to PvP in other games that aren't as busted and toxic.

@Hot Boy.7138 said:i can't speak for everyone, but my interest drastically declined when they introduced 2v2s, then took it away. it was so much fun, it just killed my vibe entirely. Then they brought 3v3 but only for 2 weeks. After I read it was only 2 weeks I didn't even bother with it. Lastly, i'm finding it difficult to enjoy my main class anymore. I started playing again last week and at least in NA Gold 3 and Plat 1, there was enough people for me to get competitive games going. Most of my matches seemed very fair.

Also good news, 2v2 and 3v3 aren't gone. They're going to be rotating mini-season gamemodes afaik. =)

@"Multicolorhipster.9751" said:It's for a lot of reasons, most of which have already been said here so i'll just elaborate somewhat.

•The Meta Is Boring - The Feb 25th patch was very controversial, and whether you like it or hate it you can probably agree that it was too experimental to dump on us, only for it to hardly be tweaked since. As it came into the game; we were even assured that things would be broken for a while, by the one largely responsible for the patch. There's like no urgency to fix anything though, and promises for a quicker balance patch cadence weren't met.Just nerfing and removing as many options as possible isn't very fun or exciting either.

•Ranked is a mess - Just, every part of it is a mess. Not talking about the meta or OP builds, but it's fundamentally broken and outdated on so many levels that it'd take up this entire thread and many more to talk about.

•Hackers and Bots - Apparently a big problem right now. I hardly ever see bots, and I've never seen a hacker in my time playing, but there's pretty solid evidence that they do exist in Ranked right now.So people are either right that it is an issue, or its the new scapegoat for people actively contributing to PvP's decline... or both.

•Dwindling population - It's a self perpetuating problem. A lot of PvP's problems are owed to its small population and inability to function with small numbers.As people leave, a lot of these problems and more rise to the surface; such as bad matchmaking and bots, which in turn causes more people to leave.

•Toxic community - Constantly at eachother's throats and rewarded for doing so. You can afk in Ranked, doing absolutely nothing or the bare minimum, and get paid for doing it(It's even one of the best moneymakers in the entire game!)The 'pros' don't really do much to help it either. Wintrading, Metagaming, and matchfixing and they get light penalties for doing them, so they just go and do it all over again. A lot of the people who are supposed to represent the 'pro'-scene for this game also do hardly anything but complain about it, and even then it's never constructive. They'll just pop in to say "X-Profession killed me, pls nerf" or stream themselves playing Ranked or ATs and constantly whine the entire time that "X-Profession is so busted dude, like why" which naturally sparks like 10-15 different threads all parroting the same thing.Nasty to gatekeep the leaderboard with a bunch of alts too. That just shouldn't be allowed.

People are just starting to get tired of and wise to what's going on. Less people are ignoring these problems, and are instead moving on to PvP in other games that aren't as busted and toxic.

@Hot Boy.7138 said:i can't speak for everyone, but my interest drastically declined when they introduced 2v2s, then took it away. it was so much fun, it just killed my vibe entirely. Then they brought 3v3 but only for 2 weeks. After I read it was only 2 weeks I didn't even bother with it. Lastly, i'm finding it difficult to enjoy my main class anymore. I started playing again last week and at least in NA Gold 3 and Plat 1, there was enough people for me to get competitive games going. Most of my matches seemed very fair.

@The Ace.9105 said:None of you realizes that when a week passes the amount of matches required to be on the leaderboards increases and ppl who don't have those matches disappear from the boards.

^This

@Shiyo.3578 said:Rank1 eu is 1813 now, none of the people who were top10 are playing anymore. Rank1 was 1936 a week ago. Every game I get is people doing placements and is always one sided stomp(win or lose).

What happened?

im g3 guy now, and a few days ago played with boyce who has 1720, seems like it is not enough players to make teams on the average same mmr.

the patch for sure was disappointing, and pretty much had set the tone for the futureoffpeak q gave me 3 mes bots in 1 game while in plat, that doesnt really motivate me either

The february 25 patch was a catastrophic disaster, and were just living through the consequences.

Bots, hackers, afk-ers, toxic chat warriors, already played alot of matches for now AND some good single player games to stream lastly build diversity

but yeah balance isnt the first issue

rank 6k wvw, plat pvp person.

the 'big balance patch' turned the group of 20-30 or so roamers i used to play with into literally noone in the space of whatever many months.the game seems to be headed in the direction of 111 gameplay in general and i think perhaps it just took myself and the others i used to play with time to realise that fact.

gws is a casual af game now imo, to think pvp/wvw can be competitive at this stage is busted logic for a whole bunch of reasons.that said, it was a lot of fun for a long time so what can you do. gw3 might be fun if they aren't all fired for cutting the playerbase in half with a patch.

This one is 100% not about balance or matchmaking or hacking or toxicity etc it's just LB minimum match requirements increase. I've seen stuff like g3 top 100.

I don’t know who is behind the balance team, but please anet put some other ppl there!This is the worst state this game has been in,I played gw2 throughout all the expansions, i was always still playing while most of my friends quit because they already saw back then the balance in this game is shit, but everything comes to end.After many years, seeing so many bad patches, anet just not listening to the community for ages.. It is finally time to say goodbye to gw2.You made this game into a aoe spamfest game, look at holo, how strong it is and still no nerfs.Look at stealth, how fucking broken it is, and yet anet still encourages thieves to go SA, because D/P is the only viable build, and now they all pick SA with it.. Fun times anet!Go on like this for a while, and the only community u will have is the one from pve.

well anet said there would be a lot of balance patches after the big feb 25th patch to pull everything all together, but it didn't happen. anet lies a lot to the the community.

'suddenly'

Well... Covid19 happened too, all companies had to make some adjustments to their priorities. Obviously PvP isn't one of them right now. It wasn't before either, so I guess it's on standby. A few words here and there would help though.

Had a 13 min q during weekend prime time on NA duoing as 2 top 20 players

@Hot Boy.7138 said:well anet said there would be a lot of balance patches after the big feb 25th patch to pull everything all together, but it didn't happen. anet lies a lot to the the community.

Fair enough. Just saying that so far they've kept their promise there.

As much as I want to get back into PvP I struggle to... due to the spammable nature of condition damage, spammable AOE that is cast from an entire team doing more damage than a small army, cutting off a teams chance of stopping a cap or even fighting.

Some classes are able to dish out insane amounts of damage from abusing both of the above, while evading all incoming attacks.

Stop making PvP aimed at apes with big AOE condi sticks! It's not fun and needs to be hit really hard with a hammer made of nerf.

If nothing changes the game will just become a daily simulator (which is currently what im doing with the PvP mode, due to the really unfun condition damage meta.)

@UNOwen.7132 said:The february 25 patch was a catastrophic disaster, and were just living through the consequences.

It could have been something good. If they actually finished it... toning down the damage was supposed to be the first step. Now we're stuck in an experimental half-done rework, but this time its not only an elite specialisation or a temporary gamemode, this time it's THE ENTIRE PVP EXPERIENCE.No clear deadlines or release schedule, no communication, only uncertainty. You need the customers trust to make them stuck around like this, but with how they handled this game for the last few years, that thing is just not there anymore. This rework was their last shot at fixing PvP and they pretty much blew it by taking their sweet time. By the time it's done(if they even bother to finish it properly, with all the steps CMC initally mentioned), hardly anyone will play the gamemode anyway.Nothing short of a new expansion pack can save PvP now.

@Bazsi.2734 said:Nothing short of a new expansion pack can save PvP now.

You expect elite specialization, which naturally are over-powered to drive expansion sales, to somehow save PvP?Most likely, all they'll do is blow even more unbalanced winds into the game mode.