New player experience needs to be looked at.

Look, i like this game, i'd like to see it grow and i'd like to have people to play it with. So i try to teach some of my friends to play it. Result? Face stacks after stacks of people with 10k+ hours of playtime because obviously we're also a stack, but the difference is that 2 or 3 of us are brand new while the entire enemy team have titles like Relentless Legend and so on. Its not fun for them, its not fun for us and makes it REALLY hard to sell the game to my friends as getting stomped over and over makes the game look pretty freaking unbalanced and cheesy.

For example, I don't think matching stacks of players who have on average less than 250 games played lifetime agains't Solo players would be that dangerous for the game's health.

I mean, i remember my own experience as a late-comer being pretty harsh too...but i'm stubborn as a bull so i toughed it out but sadly not everyone's like that.

Definitely needs some "newer player protection". At least for the first 5 minutes of the newer players queue time. In case there isnt enough players queuing.

I remember when i first started playing spvp and having a really rough time against players who were leaps and bounds better than me, it wasnt a learning experience. It was just frustrating being spawn killed and not understanding whats going on.

Tell them to play Chronomancer, that should make them on par with a top25 player.

For now, I think the best way is to duel in guild hall. It's not perfect, yes. But you can create some controllable environment and not spend 80% of the time dead. When me and my brother just started, we dueled a lot with as close the the meta builds as possible in guild hall. Also, re-reading some guides after practicing them helps to improve a ton since you already have some experience playing the build.

Without a massive overhaul and new investment, I think it's just about impossible for this game to "grow" at this point in its lifecycle. I don't think that's ever happened with any game ever, not even really good ones with full support. (talking about PvP when it comes to dev support, but even PvE won't see much growth besides return players at expansion launches)

Player base too small because the pvp balance is poor at best. No one wants to deal with imbalanced classes, well most don't resulting is old players becoming increasingly frustrated and new players scared away for just trying new things and getting roflstomped over and over again.

All is vain, l2p

That's what i said in the other post. The issue is that there is no alternative than unranked for teams to play, and this is really hard to practice there.What's missing is that there is no quickplay, these arenas are all about glory farming. I wish we could play in these arenas like we used to 2 years ago..

@Abazigal.3679 said:That's what i said in the other post. The issue is that there is no alternative than unranked for teams to play, and this is really hard to practice there.What's missing is that there is no quickplay, these arenas are all about glory farming. I wish we could play in these arenas like we used to 2 years ago..

Join a 1v1/duel/team practice Arena. Theres a handful of them. duel there until you have a grasp of how your class works in pvp, then you can unranked to learn rotations.

I'm trying to learn Revenant and it's been tough. I have no other choice other than to screw 4 other people's experience in unranked while I selfishly try different stuff just for experiments....

I would recommend that you have your friends watch streams and obviously read the metabattle guide for their build. The streams are by far the best learning tool that there is.

My first ranked pvp season i ended in plat 1 and maybe that's not great but its not terrible. I learned everything from watching helseths streams.

Browsing the forums helps too. Although 99% of everything posted here is someone complaining you can learn a lot about the current meta from the salt. The salt has hidden wisdom the salt will show us the way the salt.

I tried f2p myself month or so ago and from my experience, about a dozen first matches have been pure newcomers with homebrew builds PvPing as it was 2012. In fact, only last few unranked games before hitting 20 and transitioning over to ranked matchmaker started to match my smurf account with people having some very vague idea of basics of conquest and playing somewhat meta builds.

If you point towards ranked with your friends already having unlocked it, the system works relatively fine, it's only limited by number of players in non-prime hours which leads to bigger skill gaps. If you want to avoid it, re-queue after queue drags on for too long.

What has to change about new player experience however is better build presets. Preset for core warrior was some GS/Hammer build as an example and I hear that other classes have similar not-so-good builds.Another thing is a complete lack of tutorial that was removed with new HotM map I believe(?). Some basic tutorial, especially on how node mechanics of capping and contesting work would help majority of the players I met on f2p.

@Griever.8150 said:Look, i like this game, i'd like to see it grow and i'd like to have people to play it with. So i try to teach some of my friends to play it. Result? Face stacks after stacks of people with 10k+ hours of playtime because obviously we're also a stack, but the difference is that 2 or 3 of us are brand new while the entire enemy team have titles like Relentless Legend and so on. Its not fun for them, its not fun for us and makes it REALLY hard to sell the game to my friends as getting stomped over and over makes the game look pretty freaking unbalanced and cheesy.

For example, I don't think matching stacks of players who have on average less than 250 games played lifetime agains't Solo players would be that dangerous for the game's health.

I mean, i remember my own experience as a late-comer being pretty harsh too...but i'm stubborn as a bull so i toughed it out but sadly not everyone's like that.

I believe the best way to fix this is to increase the level requirement in order for those players to play ranked PvP. The current level is 20, which I think it too low of a level in order to have them qualified in order to play ranked PvP against skilled players.

I also think that the profession NPCs need to be improved. They need to add NPCs that will allow players to fight against elite specializations. Elite NPCs such as Reaper, Dragonhunter, Daredevil, Tempest, Scrapper etc. as well as being able to choose the weapons that those NPCs can use. Instead, what we currently have are core professions with a very limited number of weapons: warrior only uses hammer, thief only uses p/p, ranger only uses longbow and so on.

The damage in this game is also too high. New players are dead before they know it. When this happens a couple of times, they give up. They can't tell whats happening, and therefore can't really make out what they did wrong.

Would agree, HeadCrowned, biggest PvP failure is the combat log which is near useless for learning. PvP is a zero feedback mini-game hence why peeps just go for max-burst DPS builds and ofc why such builds are so effective - there is nothing to think with!

@HeadCrowned.6834 said:The damage in this game is also too high. New players are dead before they know it. When this happens a couple of times, they give up. They can't tell whats happening, and therefore can't really make out what they did wrong.

If you consider DPS thief, old 100B spike warrior or even DPS staff ele, builds are rather easy to understand. You have 2 skills to anticipate, animations are obvious, and these builds have/had vey few sustain. A beginner might have issues facing that, but should learn.

If you now consider holosmiths, scourges or mesmers, well the damages are really unpredictibles, builds have too much sustain, no obvious counter, and it's still fairly easy to die to these. I won't add the case where you have 2 or 3 of these builds together.. People end up rerolling mesmers/scourges, beat other inexperienced players rather easily and end up at xx rating, although they don't know how to play conquest. That's the issue for 3 seasons..