Something needs to change in PvP

12 years Guild wars player, first time i consider quitting PvP because matchs seem totally random and non fun. Basically 3 reasons :

• toxic players : there's been an exponentially growing number lately, and it's impossible to plan a strategy or try to argue with people complaining at any death
• matchmaking : i'm facing the same opponents at 1400 or 1550. My last match was against several top players, not having any in my team
• balancing : it's mostly about teaming together mesmers necros and firebrand, and facing this setup with a crap one gets boring

Solo queue lately feels about putting these 3 points together, and i could like flip a coin to decide the result upon 50%( if not more) of my matchs probably.

I personnaly would go back to an old ladder without seasons, in order to have everyone belonging to his rank on the long run. Right now, you cannot expect to try and beat top players with one newcomer who is going to ragequit when he dies. This should prevent unfair matchs too.An alternative would be to make everyone start from scratch on each season ( let's say 1000), but have it run a bit longer ( 4 months ? ). Good people should climb anyway.

Also, i think there needs to be a change in non-ranked. When i'm experiencing some build, i first would like testing it against " less experienced " players. However :

• In unranked , people seems equally matched, and they usually run mesmers and scourges..
• In Hotjoin, most active rooms are about glory farming..The old Quickjoin seemed to be fine..

What do you think about it ?

You know the game is in a critical state, and probably the company too, when they ignored the fact that the mesmer is really really strong in PVP (probably because the overhaul in the last patch) and they buffed the mesmer axe instead doing some nerf. They made some unnesacary rework on deadeye when revenant/renegade needs it and they nerf druid to the ground... Just bad bad bad decisions.

@aaguilarce.1764 said:You know the game is in a critical state, and probably the company too, when they ignored the fact that the mesmer is really really strong in PVP (probably because the overhaul in the last patch) and they buffed the mesmer axe instead doing some nerf. They made some unnesacary rework on deadeye when revenant/renegade needs it and they nerf druid to the ground... Just bad bad bad decisions.

They are most certainly not in a critical state. What are you smoking? It seems like some good ish.

Nothing will changeAll is vainL2P

no team que = toxic community
so many threads about this nothing will change

I'd also like to add that gold division is almost unplayable and you don't learn anything from your games. Not saying that due to some loses, and i have lot of respect for my teammates, but this looks like mostly a deathmatch with people chasing everywhere and dying in a few seconds to anything related to condition, sometimes even flaming you for capping sides.

It would be nice to have some tutorial in addition in game.

@"Abazigal.3679" said:12 years Guild wars player, first time i consider quitting PvP because matchs seem totally random and non fun. Basically 3 reasons :

• toxic players : there's been an exponentially growing number lately, and it's impossible to plan a strategy or try to argue with people complaining at any death
• matchmaking : i'm facing the same opponents at 1400 or 1550. My last match was against several top players, not having any in my team
• balancing : it's mostly about teaming together mesmers necros and firebrand, and facing this setup with a crap one gets boring

Solo queue lately feels about putting these 3 points together, and i could like flip a coin to decide the result upon 50%( if not more) of my matchs probably.

I personnaly would go back to an old ladder without seasons, in order to have everyone belonging to his rank on the long run. Right now, you cannot expect to try and beat top players with one newcomer who is going to ragequit when he dies. This should prevent unfair matchs too.An alternative would be to make everyone start from scratch on each season ( let's say 1000), but have it run a bit longer ( 4 months ? ). Good people should climb anyway.

Also, i think there needs to be a change in non-ranked. When i'm experiencing some build, i first would like testing it against " less experienced " players. However :

• In unranked , people seems equally matched, and they usually run mesmers and scourges..
• In Hotjoin, most active rooms are about glory farming..The old Quickjoin seemed to be fine..

What do you think about it ?

I can tell you that in unranked it's much worse than in ranked.

• In ranked you can down your rank then have more breath.
• In unranked you can't down your pvp level and matches played. So you have nearly always hard time in every matches. And you're right, it's impossible to test new build there.

We need some open form of 15v15 ish with multiple objectives where players can just focus on buildcrafting & combat instead of being forced into conquest where the build that shits out most pressure in a circle while evading wins. People seem to forget that a lot of these so called pvp/balance issues are the result of the only pvp game mode this MMO has.

Here's my take on this, this is my opinion, based on 13 years of MMORPGs and 20+ years of gaming in general, and based on playing a lot of PvP oriented games from shooters to MOBAs:Arena net had a good thing going, but then, idk what happened but with hot came a lot of mismanagement, it was prevalent in the game, but it was also most critical for pvp modes:The new maps in WvW were not well received, and this came with a lot of systemic changes as well, which led to a big population dip, followed by massive bandwagoning, that created the imbalance we can see today. That plus lack of variation and the extinction of the WvW tournaments kinda took the sheen of WvW. Those issues date from at least 2015, and yet it's 2018 and we're still taking about planned changes. 3 Years is an eternity in a game...

sPvP, boy... Where to start... sPvP was definetly at it's prime during the content drought previous to HoT's release, and took a nosedive ever since, the issues are numerous.

• Their first mistake was establishing and maintaining a strict quarterly balance cadence. Sure the idea of having a major quarterly balance patch isn't bad on it's own, the problem arises when it's the only time they address balance. So what happens is that you have months, if not years of poor balance and unfun pvp, because balance is iterative, and if you only iterate 4 times a year, you're screwed, and so are the players.

• The second mistake was the duration of seasons... Arena Net has a weird philosophy, it permeates the gem store, their approach to beta testing, and even Season 1 of living world. That is to give us time-limited content to create a need to rush that content and clear it (or buy it) before the time runs out. What happens is that it ends up having a multitude of negative effects. People that can't make it once might quit entirely out of frustration because they've already missed out once, others will get burned out, some will not even attempt it due to the fast pace. So it leads to population decay. Also, it's not guaranteed that it's the competitive people that will stay, there's another "faction" of the community that tends to thrive in that kind of repetitive environment.

• It's a farm! Basically, PvP with ranked seasons became a furious extension of every PvE farm. The rewards are not linked to your outcomes, which means you can be as bad as you like, as toxic as you like, quit, AFK, sell wins, you can do the lot, and for those interested in the rewards, you'll still get that Byzanthine chest, regardless of all this.That's why, to me, personally GW2's pvp community is worse than League of Legends, which is notorious for its toxicity. But there most people are toxic because they want to win, because winning is how you get the best rewards. Sure there are some trolls, but those are the minority.In GW2, there's those like in league, but then there's all the others that are just there to farm, not because they want to play PvP, so they're the minute 1 AFKers, the "whatever man, i just need 2 more games for the next chest".This "gold star for showing up" attitude is a huge factor on how PvP worked out.

• Of course all this might be less obvious if it weren't for another huge factor: the removal ranked team queue. Oh yeah "people voted", but we already established a lot of people aren't there for the competitive aspect, just for the loot. You can't put a minority issue to a majority vote, look at the statistics in GW2 Efficiency and you'll notice just how small the percentage of rank 80+ pvpers is, and that's something that people were comfortably obtaining at year one. The first 4 seasons were going pretty well, even though the first 2 were pretty much unplayable with immortal Tempests and Chronomancers. But we had teams, we could coordinate around those factors. Also, having teams, a team leader board, and a chance at Pro champs to the best guild teams made people care about their match outcomes.Win trading wasn't a big issue back then, hackers didn't show up nearly as frequently, balance was mitigated with organization, all that swept away in one fell swoop. All that because players felt like they were losing due to premades (all data we have point to that being false).

• Arena Net gave up on Stronghold, in months, instead of attempting to improve it with feedback.

Basically, the unctuous attitude from Arena Net, trying to appease the reward-driven majority, instead of appealing to the fans of PvP, was the driving engine for a series of misguided decisions that slowly but inexorably drove true PvPers away from GW2, and contributed to the current environment almost exclusively. I can point the flaws, but honestly, i don't think that the game mode can be saved, it bled away too many PvPers to be recoverable. The matchmaker is already struggling to create same rank teams, i doubt that it will ever be fixable.

A few things that could improve it would be a serious, integral campaign to revive PvP:

• weekly or bi-weekly balance would be ideal, at the very least monthly;
• longer seasons, at least 6 months long without scaling minimal games for being ranked. Allow players their breaks.
• Invest in more modes outside the Conquest mode.
• Bring back ranked teams, if anything ranked games should be team only, not the only way around. And no AT's don't make up for that, not everyone can just be there at specific times, it's a nice additional incentive to PvP, but it's a poor substitute for a ranked ladder.
• Remove the farm. Make rewards season-exclusive (or as close to that as you can get), and depend on your final standing, not on number of games played. Keep the gold and maybe the Shards of Glory as a end-match reward, but remove the pip farm, give 1 additional ascended shard to winners, per game. Create a repeatable competitive achievement that gives League Tickets after X wins.
• Unlock, or allow Free to Play players to unlock with gems, gold or reward tracks, each individual Elite Specialization for PvP only (maybe go with the MOBA free elite of the week). This evens out the playing field, encourages F2P players (or people who don't buy specific expansions) to play more PvP without feeling like they'll lose all the time, and also works as a preview to encourage people to eventually buy the expansions.
• Try to revive the pro scene, or at least encourage the amateur one. For starters try to make the game better to spectate, clear the visual noise, make classes more identifiable with Standard models, enforce standard models and team colours on spectate (but try to have a few different models if there's two of the same class on a team), improve the camera and information present with spectate mode (better scoring, show specializations and weapons, along with skills and cooldowns).

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

• Try to revive the pro scene, or at least encourage the amateur one. For starters try to make the game better to spectate, clear the visual noise, make classes more identifiable with Standard models, enforce standard models and team colours on spectate (but try to have a few different models if there's two of the same class on a team), improve the camera and information present with spectate mode (better scoring, show specializations and weapons, along with skills and cooldowns).

This should be coming thanks to swiss round tournaments, although i still do not get why it took so long to implement a feature that existed and worked very well in GW1.

@Abazigal.3679 said:

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

• Try to revive the pro scene, or at least encourage the amateur one. For starters try to make the game better to spectate, clear the visual noise, make classes more identifiable with Standard models, enforce standard models and team colours on spectate (but try to have a few different models if there's two of the same class on a team), improve the camera and information present with spectate mode (better scoring, show specializations and weapons, along with skills and cooldowns).

It still doesn't replace a proper ranked ladder with teams (it's supposed to be a team competitive mode, not a farm facilitator), but yeah, it's a step. When it comes, been, what? 3 months+ since that was announced?Also it still doesn't make it easier to spectate. Competitive games live and die by how entertaining it is to watch. GW2 has a good balance of action and tactics, not too different from MOBA games, but it's hard to read.

@"ReaverKane.7598" said:Here's my take on this, this is my opinion, based on 13 years of MMORPGs and 20+ years of gaming in general, and based on playing a lot of PvP oriented games from shooters to MOBAs:Arena net had a good thing going, but then, idk what happened but with hot came a lot of mismanagement, it was prevalent in the game, but it was also most critical for pvp modes:The new maps in WvW were not well received, and this came with a lot of systemic changes as well, which led to a big population dip, followed by massive bandwagoning, that created the imbalance we can see today. That plus lack of variation and the extinction of the WvW tournaments kinda took the sheen of WvW. Those issues date from at least 2015, and yet it's 2018 and we're still taking about planned changes. 3 Years is an eternity in a game...

sPvP, boy... Where to start... sPvP was definetly at it's prime during the content drought previous to HoT's release, and took a nosedive ever since, the issues are numerous.

• Their first mistake was establishing and maintaining a strict quarterly balance cadence. Sure the idea of having a major quarterly balance patch isn't bad on it's own, the problem arises when it's the only time they address balance. So what happens is that you have months, if not years of poor balance and unfun pvp, because balance is iterative, and if you only iterate 4 times a year, you're screwed, and so are the players.

• The second mistake was the duration of seasons... Arena Net has a weird philosophy, it permeates the gem store, their approach to beta testing, and even Season 1 of living world. That is to give us time-limited content to create a need to rush that content and clear it (or buy it) before the time runs out. What happens is that it ends up having a multitude of negative effects. People that can't make it once might quit entirely out of frustration because they've already missed out once, others will get burned out, some will not even attempt it due to the fast pace. So it leads to population decay. Also, it's not guaranteed that it's the competitive people that will stay, there's another "faction" of the community that tends to thrive in that kind of repetitive environment.

• It's a farm! Basically, PvP with ranked seasons became a furious extension of every PvE farm. The rewards are not linked to your outcomes, which means you can be as bad as you like, as toxic as you like, quit, AFK, sell wins, you can do the lot, and for those interested in the rewards, you'll still get that Byzanthine chest, regardless of all this.That's why, to me, personally GW2's pvp community is worse than League of Legends, which is notorious for its toxicity. But there most people are toxic because they want to win, because winning is how you get the best rewards. Sure there are some trolls, but those are the minority.In GW2, there's those like in league, but then there's all the others that are just there to farm, not because they want to play PvP, so they're the minute 1 AFKers, the "whatever man, i just need 2 more games for the next chest".This "gold star for showing up" attitude is a huge factor on how PvP worked out.

• Of course all this might be less obvious if it weren't for another huge factor: the removal ranked team queue. Oh yeah "people voted", but we already established a lot of people aren't there for the competitive aspect, just for the loot. You can't put a minority issue to a majority vote, look at the statistics in GW2 Efficiency and you'll notice just how small the percentage of rank 80+ pvpers is, and that's something that people were comfortably obtaining at year one. The first 4 seasons were going pretty well, even though the first 2 were pretty much unplayable with immortal Tempests and Chronomancers. But we had teams, we could coordinate around those factors. Also, having teams, a team leader board, and a chance at Pro champs to the best guild teams made people care about their match outcomes.Win trading wasn't a big issue back then, hackers didn't show up nearly as frequently, balance was mitigated with organization, all that swept away in one fell swoop. All that because players felt like they were losing due to premades (all data we have point to that being false).

• Arena Net gave up on Stronghold, in months, instead of attempting to improve it with feedback.

Basically, the unctuous attitude from Arena Net, trying to appease the reward-driven majority, instead of appealing to the fans of PvP, was the driving engine for a series of misguided decisions that slowly but inexorably drove true PvPers away from GW2, and contributed to the current environment almost exclusively. I can point the flaws, but honestly, i don't think that the game mode can be saved, it bled away too many PvPers to be recoverable. The matchmaker is already struggling to create same rank teams, i doubt that it will ever be fixable.

A few things that could improve it would be a serious, integral campaign to revive PvP:

• weekly or bi-weekly balance would be ideal, at the very least monthly;
• longer seasons, at least 6 months long without scaling minimal games for being ranked. Allow players their breaks.
• Invest in more modes outside the Conquest mode.
• Bring back ranked teams, if anything ranked games should be team only, not the only way around. And no AT's don't make up for that, not everyone can just be there at specific times, it's a nice additional incentive to PvP, but it's a poor substitute for a ranked ladder.
• Remove the farm. Make rewards season-exclusive (or as close to that as you can get), and depend on your final standing, not on number of games played. Keep the gold and maybe the Shards of Glory as a end-match reward, but remove the pip farm, give 1 additional ascended shard to winners, per game. Create a repeatable competitive achievement that gives League Tickets after X wins.
• Unlock, or allow Free to Play players to unlock with gems, gold or reward tracks, each individual Elite Specialization for PvP only (maybe go with the MOBA free elite of the week). This evens out the playing field, encourages F2P players (or people who don't buy specific expansions) to play more PvP without feeling like they'll lose all the time, and also works as a preview to encourage people to eventually buy the expansions.
• Try to revive the pro scene, or at least encourage the amateur one. For starters try to make the game better to spectate, clear the visual noise, make classes more identifiable with Standard models, enforce standard models and team colours on spectate (but try to have a few different models if there's two of the same class on a team), improve the camera and information present with spectate mode (better scoring, show specializations and weapons, along with skills and cooldowns).

In other words,pvp got neglected and sacrificed for pve. There can be no other explanation. ANet brought in more pve players at pvp and pvp players' expense. They "balance" in the interest of pve, not pvp. This new underwater patch clearly showed me that this patch was done strictly for pve since pvp underwater combat does not exist. Is it any wonder why so many pvpers have left? Is it any wonder why matchmaking is messed up? pvpers have left the building!All you really have left are a trickle of veteran tryhards and pvers. pvp players have left for other games. Now, this is not to blame pvers, it is what it is. ANet simply doesn't care about pvp. This is seen in their day-to-day actions.

Now, I've pvp'ed since release, since the days of 8v8. I've slowly watched pvp decline over the years. Honestly, I think it started with taking away 8v8. Also taking out 8v8 in favor of 5v5 in a way ruined the dynamic of conquest. With 8v8 games, they were generally more even since there were always people on points and they were almost always contested. Second, taking away pvp-only items and skins. People actually had something to play for.

Then came the merging of team and solo queues. That messed up the matches, so you got both solo queuers and teams queuers angry. You started seeing games with win gaps of over 200 points. Then came the specialization change. Looking back, that showed me that ANet didn't really want to dedicate to balancing pvp in depth. The spec system is actually more limiting than the old trait point system. pvp then just fell off a cliff with HoT. All these new elite specs, which were clearly broken at release were clearly designed and brought out with pve in mind. Raids were the new thing so pvp again got sacrificed. Seasons were brought out and, as you said, pvp became a farm. Rewards were massively buffed to bring in pve players. The damage of elite specs is through the roof, so now we only have faceroll builds. Now it's PoF specs, which are elite specs on STEROIDS. Scourge, mirage, firebrand, holosmith etc. Scourge completely invalidates the game of conquest because of its mechanics. pvp is COMPLETELY braindead.

Now, why am I still here? Farming gold, that's why. Ranked just gives that out like candy!

@JTGuevara.9018 said:

@"ReaverKane.7598" said:Here's my take on this, this is my opinion, based on 13 years of MMORPGs and 20+ years of gaming in general, and based on playing a lot of PvP oriented games from shooters to MOBAs:Arena net had a good thing going, but then, idk what happened but with hot came a lot of mismanagement, it was prevalent in the game, but it was also most critical for pvp modes:The new maps in WvW were not well received, and this came with a lot of systemic changes as well, which led to a big population dip, followed by massive bandwagoning, that created the imbalance we can see today. That plus lack of variation and the extinction of the WvW tournaments kinda took the sheen of WvW. Those issues date from at least 2015, and yet it's 2018 and we're still taking about planned changes. 3 Years is an eternity in a game...

sPvP, boy... Where to start... sPvP was definetly at it's prime during the content drought previous to HoT's release, and took a nosedive ever since, the issues are numerous.

• Their first mistake was establishing and maintaining a
  strict quarterly balance
  cadence. Sure the idea of having a major quarterly balance patch isn't bad on it's own, the problem arises when it's the
  only
  time they address balance. So what happens is that you have months, if not years of poor balance and unfun pvp, because balance is iterative, and if you only iterate 4 times a year, you're screwed, and so are the players.

• The second mistake was the
  duration of seasons
  ... Arena Net has a weird philosophy, it permeates the gem store, their approach to beta testing, and even Season 1 of living world. That is to give us time-limited content to create a need to rush that content and clear it (or buy it) before the time runs out. What happens is that it ends up having a multitude of negative effects. People that can't make it once might quit entirely out of frustration because they've already missed out once, others will get burned out, some will not even attempt it due to the fast pace. So it leads to population decay. Also, it's not guaranteed that it's the competitive people that will stay, there's another "faction" of the community that tends to thrive in that kind of repetitive environment.

• It's a farm
  ! Basically, PvP with ranked seasons became a furious extension of every PvE farm. The rewards are not linked to your outcomes, which means you can be as bad as you like, as toxic as you like, quit, AFK, sell wins, you can do the lot, and for those interested in the rewards, you'll still get that Byzanthine chest, regardless of all this.That's why, to me, personally GW2's pvp community is worse than League of Legends, which is notorious for its toxicity. But there most people are toxic because they want to win, because winning is how you get the best rewards. Sure there are some trolls, but those are the minority.In GW2, there's those like in league, but then there's all the others that are just there to farm, not because they want to play PvP, so they're the minute 1 AFKers, the "whatever man, i just need 2 more games for the next chest".This "gold star for showing up" attitude is a huge factor on how PvP worked out.

• Of course all this might be less obvious if it weren't for another huge factor: the removal
  ranked team queue
  . Oh yeah "people voted", but we already established a lot of people aren't there for the competitive aspect, just for the loot. You can't put a minority issue to a majority vote, look at the statistics in GW2 Efficiency and you'll notice just how small the percentage of rank 80+ pvpers is, and that's something that people were comfortably obtaining at year one. The first 4 seasons were going pretty well, even though the first 2 were pretty much unplayable with immortal Tempests and Chronomancers. But we had teams, we could coordinate around those factors. Also, having teams, a team leader board, and a chance at Pro champs to the best guild teams made people care about their match outcomes.Win trading wasn't a big issue back then, hackers didn't show up nearly as frequently, balance was mitigated with organization, all that swept away in one fell swoop. All that because players
  felt
  like they were losing due to premades (all data we have point to that being false).

• Arena Net gave up on Stronghold, in months, instead of attempting to improve it with feedback.

Basically, the unctuous attitude from Arena Net, trying to appease the reward-driven majority, instead of appealing to the fans of PvP, was the driving engine for a series of misguided decisions that slowly but inexorably drove true PvPers away from GW2, and contributed to the current environment almost exclusively. I can point the flaws, but honestly, i don't think that the game mode can be saved, it bled away too many PvPers to be recoverable. The matchmaker is already struggling to create same rank teams, i doubt that it will ever be fixable.

A few things that could improve it would be a serious, integral campaign to revive PvP:

• weekly or bi-weekly balance would be ideal, at the very least monthly;
• longer seasons, at least 6 months long without scaling minimal games for being ranked. Allow players their breaks.
• Invest in more modes outside the Conquest mode.
• Bring back ranked teams, if anything ranked games should be team only, not the only way around. And no AT's don't make up for that, not everyone can just be there at specific times, it's a nice additional incentive to PvP, but it's a poor substitute for a ranked ladder.
• Remove the farm. Make rewards season-exclusive (or as close to that as you can get), and depend on your final standing, not on number of games played. Keep the gold and maybe the Shards of Glory as a end-match reward, but remove the pip farm, give 1 additional ascended shard to winners, per game. Create a repeatable competitive achievement that gives League Tickets after X wins.
• Unlock, or allow Free to Play players to unlock with gems, gold or reward tracks, each individual Elite Specialization
  for PvP only
  (maybe go with the MOBA free elite of the week). This evens out the playing field, encourages F2P players (or people who don't buy specific expansions) to play more PvP without feeling like they'll lose all the time, and also works as a preview to encourage people to eventually buy the expansions.
• Try to revive the pro scene, or at least encourage the amateur one. For starters try to make the game better to spectate, clear the visual noise, make classes more identifiable with Standard models, enforce standard models and team colours on spectate (but try to have a few different models if there's two of the same class on a team), improve the camera and information present with spectate mode (better scoring, show specializations and weapons, along with skills and cooldowns).

In a way yes. Their intention was more or less noble. They wanted more people in PvP, which is always good, the problem was they way they went about doing so. Making it a farm, and, at times, a easier way to obtain PvE rewards, attracted people for the wrong reasons, and that was one of the problems.

They "balance" in the interest of pve, not pvp.False. They actually tend to ruin pve in order to adress issues raised by PvP and WvW communities. Most recent was their gutting of Scourge in PvE, while basically not even addressing the actual issues it had in PvP.

This new underwater patch clearly showed me that this patch was done strictly for pve since pvp underwater combat does not exist.

1) It doesn't exist now because underwater combat was crap, and very imbalanced, so they removed the mostly underwater pvp map, and changed the central area of WvW borderlands to remove 90% of the water there (there used to be a huge lake where the ruins are now).This was done because they appeased the complaints about underwater combat "sucking" by simply removing it, instead of making it better.

2) Whether you like it or not, it's pve that pays the bills, and PvE needed the underwater combat balance since 2012. It's far overdue, and if it had been done earlier and better we might have had underwater pvp.

Is it any wonder why so many pvpers have left? Is it any wonder why matchmaking is messed up? pvpers have left the building!All you really have left are a trickle of veteran tryhards and pvers. pvp players have left for other games. Now, this is not to blame pvers, it is what it is. ANet simply doesn't care about pvp. This is seen in their day-to-day actions.

It's not that they don't care, its that they managed it very poorly. Which led to the current situation. Also, in a way you're right, they thoroughly neglected pvp during most of the HoT era. Now they're starting to pick it up a bit, but i doubt they'll be on time.

Now, I've pvp'ed since release, since the days of 8v8. I've slowly watched pvp decline over the years. Honestly, I think it started with taking away 8v8. Also taking out 8v8 in favor of 5v5 in a way ruined the dynamic of conquest. With 8v8 games, they were generally more even since there were always people on points and they were almost always contested. Second, taking away pvp-only items and skins. People actually had something to play for.

Well, to be fair, 10v10 (then reduced to 8v8) was in hot-join, and afaik you can still do that in hot-join. Ranked (tournaments) was always 5v5...

Then came the merging of team and solo queues. That messed up the matches, so you got both solo queuers and teams queuers angry. You started seeing games with win gaps of over 200 points.That wasn't really nothing new. Games with 200 point gaps happened.

Then came the specialization change. Looking back, that showed me that ANet didn't really want to dedicate to balancing pvp in depth. The spec system is actually more limiting than the old trait point system.

I disagree, specializations allow much better costumization, since you'd always have to pick the power line for damage, that removed flexibility.

pvp then just fell off a cliff with HoT. All these new elite specs, which were clearly broken at release were clearly designed and brought out with pve in mind.The problem wasn't elites, really... I mean Spellbreaker and Scourge were clearly built with PvP in mind, and look what the community reaction was.

Raids were the new thing so pvp again got sacrificed. Seasons were brought out and, as you said, pvp became a farm. Rewards were massively buffed to bring in pve players.

Well, Raids came a long time after the first pvp seasons rolled in. And yeah, they did buff the rewards. But the main issue that started the decay of PvP at the early seasons was the stubborn insistence on only balancing every quarter. That kept the worse, most toxic meta ever, alive during 2-3 seasons, where Chronomancers and Tempests were all but unkillable, where you'd end games with barely any points because no one would be able to kill each other.All that time they were trying everything to get people into PvP, and was that overly unctuous attitude, and their drive to please everyone that led to them removing teams from ranked. Which just exacerbated all issues.

The damage of elite specs is through the roof, so now we only have faceroll builds. Now it's PoF specs, which are elite specs on STEROIDS. Scourge, mirage, firebrand, holosmith etc. Scourge completely invalidates the game of conquest because of its mechanics. pvp is COMPLETELY braindead.Well, you can't have it both ways... Scourge was clearly built with PvP in mind... You can't complain they made HoT elites for pve, and then complain when a elite made for pvp is good in pvp.Also, people said the same about DragonHunter... OOOh traps... And Ranger traps, and necro wells, and bunker engineers... There was always a relatively strong build that was static and made it hard to claim a point. But no one was as bad as immortal chronomancers, and yet everyone learned to counter those.The problem with current day PvP is that the people that used to come up with the strategies for that, don't... And all that's left is people that only care about the farm, and for those it's easier to complain, then, i don't know, get a burst power ranged build that can easily clear a Scourge from a point and then capture that point.

I've stopped playing PvP a while ago, got tired of poor balance, especially how they broke pve scourge (which i was just finishing building) to not fix it in PvP. But i've played in season 8 (and maybe a bit of 9?), and i never really had issues with scourges. Because i either played as a scourge or as a ranger, and with both, 8/10 times i'd have scourges dead and points captured in no time flat. (why? because as a scourge, i'd take an extra condi cleanse to fight other scourges, i'd lose a bit of damage, but i'd kill the "big baddy", with Ranger the scourge never even saw me).

Now, why am I still here? Farming gold, that's why. Ranked just gives that out like candy!

Well, then you're just like all the other pvers, right? Joking... Don't be mad.You adopted a "us vs them" posture, in a very ill informed way as well, i know it's fashionable to hate scourges and say that they balance for pve, but neither are correct. Instead of hating scourges, you should be coming up with ways to counter them (and they are, and easily), mesmers, on the other hand not as much. And i'm still waiting for people to point out when they broke pvp metas with pve balance changes, while i can cite several ocurrences of them breaking pve metas and making entire classes useless for the sake of pvp and more frequently WvW (the granddaddy of dead content).It's not like they don't care about PvP and WvW, they obviously do, the problem is that they blunder about a lot, don't learn from past mistakes, and are slow to admit fault. And in no way this is exclusive to how they run PvP, the thing is, PvE has a more robust platform to stand on, PvP is more susceptible to these problems, so it suffers more.

Thing is, the game is 6 years old, and still Arena Net seem to be trying to figure out stuff that should have been set in stone at launch. They certainly took 4 years pretty much just to figure out a good method of delivering living world.

Why is everyone waiting on them to fix or change anything? It’s pretty clear they don’t want to or care ....

Do your own thing with in-house leagues , 3vs3, and 1vs1. Ban certain spec and amulets to make a small balance .... the community is what keeps this pvp game alive not Anet. They don’t care to help reply to the email/msgs about in-house tournaments or leagues that get over 1k views.

I have fully given up on even making post on the forums unless it’s to bring people to my events or help with my event. We have control on how things should be do , so we should stir things to the right direction till we can.

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

@JTGuevara.9018 said:

@ReaverKane.7598 said:Here's my take on this, this is my opinion, based on 13 years of MMORPGs and 20+ years of gaming in general, and based on playing a lot of PvP oriented games from shooters to MOBAs:Arena net had a good thing going, but then, idk what happened but with hot came a lot of mismanagement, it was prevalent in the game, but it was also most critical for pvp modes:The new maps in WvW were not well received, and this came with a lot of systemic changes as well, which led to a big population dip, followed by massive bandwagoning, that created the imbalance we can see today. That plus lack of variation and the extinction of the WvW tournaments kinda took the sheen of WvW. Those issues date from at least 2015, and yet it's 2018 and we're still taking about planned changes. 3 Years is an eternity in a game...

sPvP, boy... Where to start... sPvP was definetly at it's prime during the content drought previous to HoT's release, and took a nosedive ever since, the issues are numerous.

• Their first mistake was establishing and maintaining a
  strict quarterly balance
  cadence. Sure the idea of having a major quarterly balance patch isn't bad on it's own, the problem arises when it's the
  only
  time they address balance. So what happens is that you have months, if not years of poor balance and unfun pvp, because balance is iterative, and if you only iterate 4 times a year, you're screwed, and so are the players.

• The second mistake was the
  duration of seasons
  ... Arena Net has a weird philosophy, it permeates the gem store, their approach to beta testing, and even Season 1 of living world. That is to give us time-limited content to create a need to rush that content and clear it (or buy it) before the time runs out. What happens is that it ends up having a multitude of negative effects. People that can't make it once might quit entirely out of frustration because they've already missed out once, others will get burned out, some will not even attempt it due to the fast pace. So it leads to population decay. Also, it's not guaranteed that it's the competitive people that will stay, there's another "faction" of the community that tends to thrive in that kind of repetitive environment.

• It's a farm
  ! Basically, PvP with ranked seasons became a furious extension of every PvE farm. The rewards are not linked to your outcomes, which means you can be as bad as you like, as toxic as you like, quit, AFK, sell wins, you can do the lot, and for those interested in the rewards, you'll still get that Byzanthine chest, regardless of all this.That's why, to me, personally GW2's pvp community is worse than League of Legends, which is notorious for its toxicity. But there most people are toxic because they want to win, because winning is how you get the best rewards. Sure there are some trolls, but those are the minority.In GW2, there's those like in league, but then there's all the others that are just there to farm, not because they want to play PvP, so they're the minute 1 AFKers, the "whatever man, i just need 2 more games for the next chest".This "gold star for showing up" attitude is a huge factor on how PvP worked out.

• Of course all this might be less obvious if it weren't for another huge factor: the removal
  ranked team queue
  . Oh yeah "people voted", but we already established a lot of people aren't there for the competitive aspect, just for the loot. You can't put a minority issue to a majority vote, look at the statistics in GW2 Efficiency and you'll notice just how small the percentage of rank 80+ pvpers is, and that's something that people were comfortably obtaining at year one. The first 4 seasons were going pretty well, even though the first 2 were pretty much unplayable with immortal Tempests and Chronomancers. But we had teams, we could coordinate around those factors. Also, having teams, a team leader board, and a chance at Pro champs to the best guild teams made people care about their match outcomes.Win trading wasn't a big issue back then, hackers didn't show up nearly as frequently, balance was mitigated with organization, all that swept away in one fell swoop. All that because players
  felt
  like they were losing due to premades (all data we have point to that being false).

• Arena Net gave up on Stronghold, in months, instead of attempting to improve it with feedback.

Basically, the unctuous attitude from Arena Net, trying to appease the reward-driven majority, instead of appealing to the fans of PvP, was the driving engine for a series of misguided decisions that slowly but inexorably drove true PvPers away from GW2, and contributed to the current environment almost exclusively. I can point the flaws, but honestly, i don't think that the game mode can be saved, it bled away too many PvPers to be recoverable. The matchmaker is already struggling to create same rank teams, i doubt that it will ever be fixable.

A few things that could improve it would be a serious, integral campaign to revive PvP:

• weekly or bi-weekly balance would be ideal, at the very least monthly;
• longer seasons, at least 6 months long without scaling minimal games for being ranked. Allow players their breaks.
• Invest in more modes outside the Conquest mode.
• Bring back ranked teams, if anything ranked games should be team only, not the only way around. And no AT's don't make up for that, not everyone can just be there at specific times, it's a nice additional incentive to PvP, but it's a poor substitute for a ranked ladder.
• Remove the farm. Make rewards season-exclusive (or as close to that as you can get), and depend on your final standing, not on number of games played. Keep the gold and maybe the Shards of Glory as a end-match reward, but remove the pip farm, give 1 additional ascended shard to winners, per game. Create a repeatable competitive achievement that gives League Tickets after X wins.
• Unlock, or allow Free to Play players to unlock with gems, gold or reward tracks, each individual Elite Specialization
  for PvP only
  (maybe go with the MOBA free elite of the week). This evens out the playing field, encourages F2P players (or people who don't buy specific expansions) to play more PvP without feeling like they'll lose all the time, and also works as a preview to encourage people to eventually buy the expansions.
• Try to revive the pro scene, or at least encourage the amateur one. For starters try to make the game better to spectate, clear the visual noise, make classes more identifiable with Standard models, enforce standard models and team colours on spectate (but try to have a few different models if there's two of the same class on a team), improve the camera and information present with spectate mode (better scoring, show specializations and weapons, along with skills and cooldowns).

They "balance" in the interest of pve, not pvp.False. They actually tend to ruin pve in order to adress issues raised by PvP and WvW communities. Most recent was their gutting of Scourge in PvE, while basically not even addressing the actual issues it had in PvP.

This new underwater patch clearly showed me that this patch was done strictly for pve since

pvp underwater combat does not exist.

1) It doesn't exist

now

because underwater combat was crap, and very imbalanced, so they removed the mostly underwater pvp map, and changed the central area of WvW borderlands to remove 90% of the water there (there used to be a huge lake where the ruins are now).This was done because they appeased the complaints about underwater combat "sucking" by simply removing it, instead of making it better.

Is it any wonder why so many pvpers have left? Is it any wonder why matchmaking is messed up?

pvpers have left the building!

All you really have left are a trickle of veteran tryhards and pvers. pvp players have left for other games. Now, this is

not

to blame pvers, it is what it is. ANet simply doesn't care about pvp. This is seen in their day-to-day actions.

Now, I've pvp'ed since release, since the days of 8v8. I've slowly watched pvp decline over the years. Honestly, I think it started with taking away 8v8. Also taking out 8v8 in favor of 5v5 in a way ruined the dynamic of conquest. With 8v8 games, they were generally more even since there were always people on points and they were almost always contested. Second, taking away pvp-only items and skins. People actually had something to play for.

Well, to be fair, 10v10 (then reduced to 8v8) was in hot-join, and afaik you can still do that in hot-join. Ranked (tournaments) was always 5v5...

Then came the merging of team and solo queues. That messed up the matches, so you got both solo queuers and teams queuers angry. You started seeing games with win gaps of over 200 points.That wasn't really nothing new. Games with 200 point gaps happened.

Then came the specialization change. Looking back, that showed me that ANet didn't really want to dedicate to balancing pvp in depth. The spec system is actually more limiting than the old trait point system.

I disagree, specializations allow much better costumization, since you'd always have to pick the power line for damage, that removed flexibility.

pvp then just fell off a cliff with HoT. All these new elite specs, which were clearly broken at release were clearly designed and brought out with pve in mind.The problem wasn't elites, really... I mean Spellbreaker and Scourge were clearly built with PvP in mind, and look what the community reaction was.

Raids were the new thing so pvp

again

got sacrificed. Seasons were brought out and, as you said, pvp became a farm. Rewards were massively buffed to bring in pve players.

Well, Raids came a long time after the first pvp seasons rolled in. And yeah, they did buff the rewards. But the main issue that started the decay of PvP at the early seasons was the stubborn insistence on only balancing every quarter. That kept the worse, most toxic meta ever, alive during 2-3 seasons, where Chronomancers and Tempests were all but unkillable, where you'd end games with barely any points because no one would be able to kill each other.All that time they were trying everything to get people into PvP, and was that overly unctuous attitude, and their drive to please everyone that led to them removing teams from ranked. Which just exacerbated all issues.

The damage of elite specs is through the roof, so now we only have faceroll builds. Now it's PoF specs, which are elite specs on STEROIDS. Scourge, mirage, firebrand, holosmith etc. Scourge completely invalidates the game of conquest because of its mechanics. pvp is COMPLETELY braindead.Well, you can't have it both ways... Scourge was clearly built with PvP in mind... You can't complain they made HoT elites for pve, and then complain when a elite made for pvp is good in pvp.Also, people said the same about DragonHunter... OOOh traps... And Ranger traps, and necro wells, and bunker engineers... There was always a relatively strong build that was static and made it hard to claim a point. But no one was as bad as immortal chronomancers, and yet everyone learned to counter those.The problem with current day PvP is that the people that used to come up with the strategies for that, don't... And all that's left is people that only care about the farm, and for those it's easier to complain, then, i don't know, get a burst power ranged build that can easily clear a Scourge from a point and then capture that point.

Now, why am I still here? Farming gold, that's why. Ranked just gives that out like candy!

Well, then you're just like all the other pvers, right? Joking... Don't be mad.You adopted a "us vs them" posture, in a very ill informed way as well, i know it's fashionable to hate scourges and say that they balance for pve, but neither are correct. Instead of hating scourges, you should be coming up with ways to counter them (and they are, and easily), mesmers, on the other hand not as much. And i'm still waiting for people to point out when they broke pvp metas with pve balance changes, while i can cite several ocurrences of them breaking pve metas and making entire classes useless for the sake of pvp and more frequently WvW (the granddaddy of dead content).It's not like they don't care about PvP and WvW, they obviously do, the problem is that they blunder about a lot, don't learn from past mistakes, and are slow to admit fault. And in no way this is exclusive to how they run PvP, the thing is, PvE has a more robust platform to stand on, PvP is more susceptible to these problems, so it suffers more.

You say things are broken, but at the same time you want players to "adapt" to them. That makes no sense. So let's see, scourge. Look, the only counter to scourge is....play another scourge! It is as simple as that. Yeah, they can be countered 1 on 1 but not overall.

Also, are you seriously telling me that ANet cares about pvp and wvw? Ehh...no. Most certainly not on the balance end. You even say it yourself, "don't learn from past mistakes", "slow to admit fault". That is called being careless. And it should be pointed out. I mean, it's been SIX years!

As far as fashionable goes, the only thing that's really fashionable is complaining about the "fashionable"!

@"Abazigal.3679" said:12 years Guild wars player, first time i consider quitting PvP because matchs seem totally random and non fun. Basically 3 reasons :

• toxic players : there's been an exponentially growing number lately, and it's impossible to plan a strategy or try to argue with people complaining at any death
• matchmaking : i'm facing the same opponents at 1400 or 1550. My last match was against several top players, not having any in my team
• balancing : it's mostly about teaming together mesmers necros and firebrand, and facing this setup with a crap one gets boring

Solo queue lately feels about putting these 3 points together, and i could like flip a coin to decide the result upon 50%( if not more) of my matchs probably.

I personnaly would go back to an old ladder without seasons, in order to have everyone belonging to his rank on the long run. Right now, you cannot expect to try and beat top players with one newcomer who is going to ragequit when he dies. This should prevent unfair matchs too.An alternative would be to make everyone start from scratch on each season ( let's say 1000), but have it run a bit longer ( 4 months ? ). Good people should climb anyway.

Also, i think there needs to be a change in non-ranked. When i'm experiencing some build, i first would like testing it against " less experienced " players. However :

• In unranked , people seems equally matched, and they usually run mesmers and scourges..
• In Hotjoin, most active rooms are about glory farming..The old Quickjoin seemed to be fine..

What do you think about it ?

i really feel you. and also i quit pvp arenas.but i have to say your reason like most of the community are bit false.why false? it has nothing to do with the anet almost. toxic has always been out there even from gw1 days. afk and ragequit also...regarding match making i think even if anet will change the system some new toxic and afk will come which dislike the new system

regarding facing the same ppl over and over and builds balance i totally agree . also agree that anet responsibility to decide whether she want to invest in the pvp or let it die. if they want to invest they have to bring back more ppl, to allow them to play together and make it easier to group up and communicate (voice chat in game)

anet want to make pvp competitive versus grindable . this is the results.

Players who want what I am about to suggest will say no. The developers will say no. Even players who never played GW2 will say no. But, I am telling you GW2 needs a healer class. Remove such abilities from druid and ele, replace with damage. Then, introduce monk out of the mists. Ive seen monks beat all GW1, GOD Amongst Mere Mortals, R15 HA,.....everything...they are capable. Monk will solve everything.

P.S.Did you know Anet that your input trys to auto correct one of your own titles and a real word? see Amongst

@JTGuevara.9018 said:

@ReaverKane.7598 said:

@JTGuevara.9018 said:

@ReaverKane.7598 said:Here's my take on this, this is my opinion, based on 13 years of MMORPGs and 20+ years of gaming in general, and based on playing a lot of PvP oriented games from shooters to MOBAs:Arena net had a good thing going, but then, idk what happened but with hot came a lot of mismanagement, it was prevalent in the game, but it was also most critical for pvp modes:The new maps in WvW were not well received, and this came with a lot of systemic changes as well, which led to a big population dip, followed by massive bandwagoning, that created the imbalance we can see today. That plus lack of variation and the extinction of the WvW tournaments kinda took the sheen of WvW. Those issues date from at least 2015, and yet it's 2018 and we're still taking about planned changes. 3 Years is an eternity in a game...

sPvP, boy... Where to start... sPvP was definetly at it's prime during the content drought previous to HoT's release, and took a nosedive ever since, the issues are numerous.

• Their first mistake was establishing and maintaining a
  strict quarterly balance
  cadence. Sure the idea of having a major quarterly balance patch isn't bad on it's own, the problem arises when it's the
  only
  time they address balance. So what happens is that you have months, if not years of poor balance and unfun pvp, because balance is iterative, and if you only iterate 4 times a year, you're screwed, and so are the players.

• The second mistake was the
  duration of seasons
  ... Arena Net has a weird philosophy, it permeates the gem store, their approach to beta testing, and even Season 1 of living world. That is to give us time-limited content to create a need to rush that content and clear it (or buy it) before the time runs out. What happens is that it ends up having a multitude of negative effects. People that can't make it once might quit entirely out of frustration because they've already missed out once, others will get burned out, some will not even attempt it due to the fast pace. So it leads to population decay. Also, it's not guaranteed that it's the competitive people that will stay, there's another "faction" of the community that tends to thrive in that kind of repetitive environment.

• It's a farm
  ! Basically, PvP with ranked seasons became a furious extension of every PvE farm. The rewards are not linked to your outcomes, which means you can be as bad as you like, as toxic as you like, quit, AFK, sell wins, you can do the lot, and for those interested in the rewards, you'll still get that Byzanthine chest, regardless of all this.That's why, to me, personally GW2's pvp community is worse than League of Legends, which is notorious for its toxicity. But there most people are toxic because they want to win, because winning is how you get the best rewards. Sure there are some trolls, but those are the minority.In GW2, there's those like in league, but then there's all the others that are just there to farm, not because they want to play PvP, so they're the minute 1 AFKers, the "whatever man, i just need 2 more games for the next chest".This "gold star for showing up" attitude is a huge factor on how PvP worked out.

• Of course all this might be less obvious if it weren't for another huge factor: the removal
  ranked team queue
  . Oh yeah "people voted", but we already established a lot of people aren't there for the competitive aspect, just for the loot. You can't put a minority issue to a majority vote, look at the statistics in GW2 Efficiency and you'll notice just how small the percentage of rank 80+ pvpers is, and that's something that people were comfortably obtaining at year one. The first 4 seasons were going pretty well, even though the first 2 were pretty much unplayable with immortal Tempests and Chronomancers. But we had teams, we could coordinate around those factors. Also, having teams, a team leader board, and a chance at Pro champs to the best guild teams made people care about their match outcomes.Win trading wasn't a big issue back then, hackers didn't show up nearly as frequently, balance was mitigated with organization, all that swept away in one fell swoop. All that because players
  felt
  like they were losing due to premades (all data we have point to that being false).

• Arena Net gave up on Stronghold, in months, instead of attempting to improve it with feedback.

Basically, the unctuous attitude from Arena Net, trying to appease the reward-driven majority, instead of appealing to the fans of PvP, was the driving engine for a series of misguided decisions that slowly but inexorably drove true PvPers away from GW2, and contributed to the current environment almost exclusively. I can point the flaws, but honestly, i don't think that the game mode can be saved, it bled away too many PvPers to be recoverable. The matchmaker is already struggling to create same rank teams, i doubt that it will ever be fixable.

A few things that could improve it would be a serious, integral campaign to revive PvP:

• weekly or bi-weekly balance would be ideal, at the very least monthly;
• longer seasons, at least 6 months long without scaling minimal games for being ranked. Allow players their breaks.
• Invest in more modes outside the Conquest mode.
• Bring back ranked teams, if anything ranked games should be team only, not the only way around. And no AT's don't make up for that, not everyone can just be there at specific times, it's a nice additional incentive to PvP, but it's a poor substitute for a ranked ladder.
• Remove the farm. Make rewards season-exclusive (or as close to that as you can get), and depend on your final standing, not on number of games played. Keep the gold and maybe the Shards of Glory as a end-match reward, but remove the pip farm, give 1 additional ascended shard to winners, per game. Create a repeatable competitive achievement that gives League Tickets after X wins.
• Unlock, or allow Free to Play players to unlock with gems, gold or reward tracks, each individual Elite Specialization
  for PvP only
  (maybe go with the MOBA free elite of the week). This evens out the playing field, encourages F2P players (or people who don't buy specific expansions) to play more PvP without feeling like they'll lose all the time, and also works as a preview to encourage people to eventually buy the expansions.
• Try to revive the pro scene, or at least encourage the amateur one. For starters try to make the game better to spectate, clear the visual noise, make classes more identifiable with Standard models, enforce standard models and team colours on spectate (but try to have a few different models if there's two of the same class on a team), improve the camera and information present with spectate mode (better scoring, show specializations and weapons, along with skills and cooldowns).

They "balance" in the interest of pve, not pvp.False. They actually tend to ruin pve in order to adress issues raised by PvP and WvW communities. Most recent was their gutting of Scourge in PvE, while basically not even addressing the actual issues it had in PvP.

This new underwater patch clearly showed me that this patch was done strictly for pve since

pvp underwater combat does not exist.

1) It doesn't exist

now

because underwater combat was crap, and very imbalanced, so they removed the mostly underwater pvp map, and changed the central area of WvW borderlands to remove 90% of the water there (there used to be a huge lake where the ruins are now).This was done because they appeased the complaints about underwater combat "sucking" by simply removing it, instead of making it better.

Is it any wonder why so many pvpers have left? Is it any wonder why matchmaking is messed up?

pvpers have left the building!

All you really have left are a trickle of veteran tryhards and pvers. pvp players have left for other games. Now, this is

not

to blame pvers, it is what it is. ANet simply doesn't care about pvp. This is seen in their day-to-day actions.

Now, I've pvp'ed since release, since the days of 8v8. I've slowly watched pvp decline over the years. Honestly, I think it started with taking away 8v8. Also taking out 8v8 in favor of 5v5 in a way ruined the dynamic of conquest. With 8v8 games, they were generally more even since there were always people on points and they were almost always contested. Second, taking away pvp-only items and skins. People actually had something to play for.

Well, to be fair, 10v10 (then reduced to 8v8) was in hot-join, and afaik you can still do that in hot-join. Ranked (tournaments) was always 5v5...

Then came the merging of team and solo queues. That messed up the matches, so you got both solo queuers and teams queuers angry. You started seeing games with win gaps of over 200 points.That wasn't really nothing new. Games with 200 point gaps happened.

Then came the specialization change. Looking back, that showed me that ANet didn't really want to dedicate to balancing pvp in depth. The spec system is actually more limiting than the old trait point system.

I disagree, specializations allow much better costumization, since you'd always have to pick the power line for damage, that removed flexibility.

pvp then just fell off a cliff with HoT. All these new elite specs, which were clearly broken at release were clearly designed and brought out with pve in mind.The problem wasn't elites, really... I mean Spellbreaker and Scourge were clearly built with PvP in mind, and look what the community reaction was.

Raids were the new thing so pvp

again

got sacrificed. Seasons were brought out and, as you said, pvp became a farm. Rewards were massively buffed to bring in pve players.

Well, Raids came a long time after the first pvp seasons rolled in. And yeah, they did buff the rewards. But the main issue that started the decay of PvP at the early seasons was the stubborn insistence on only balancing every quarter. That kept the worse, most toxic meta ever, alive during 2-3 seasons, where Chronomancers and Tempests were all but unkillable, where you'd end games with barely any points because no one would be able to kill each other.All that time they were trying everything to get people into PvP, and was that overly unctuous attitude, and their drive to please everyone that led to them removing teams from ranked. Which just exacerbated all issues.

The damage of elite specs is through the roof, so now we only have faceroll builds. Now it's PoF specs, which are elite specs on STEROIDS. Scourge, mirage, firebrand, holosmith etc. Scourge completely invalidates the game of conquest because of its mechanics. pvp is COMPLETELY braindead.Well, you can't have it both ways... Scourge was clearly built with PvP in mind... You can't complain they made HoT elites for pve, and then complain when a elite made for pvp is good in pvp.Also, people said the same about DragonHunter... OOOh traps... And Ranger traps, and necro wells, and bunker engineers... There was always a relatively strong build that was static and made it hard to claim a point. But no one was as bad as immortal chronomancers, and yet everyone learned to counter those.The problem with current day PvP is that the people that used to come up with the strategies for that, don't... And all that's left is people that only care about the farm, and for those it's easier to complain, then, i don't know, get a burst power ranged build that can easily clear a Scourge from a point and then capture that point.

Now, why am I still here? Farming gold, that's why. Ranked just gives that out like candy!

Well, then you're just like all the other pvers, right? Joking... Don't be mad.You adopted a "us vs them" posture, in a very ill informed way as well, i know it's fashionable to hate scourges and say that they balance for pve, but neither are correct. Instead of hating scourges, you should be coming up with ways to counter them (and they are, and easily), mesmers, on the other hand not as much. And i'm still waiting for people to point out when they broke pvp metas with pve balance changes, while i can cite several ocurrences of them breaking pve metas and making entire classes useless for the sake of pvp and more frequently WvW (the granddaddy of dead content).It's not like they don't care about PvP and WvW, they obviously do, the problem is that they blunder about a lot, don't learn from past mistakes, and are slow to admit fault. And in no way this is exclusive to how they run PvP, the thing is, PvE has a more robust platform to stand on, PvP is more susceptible to these problems, so it suffers more.

What's broken isn't scourge, it's Arena Net's approach. They don't really look for causes, they react to player's distaste, and just work on numbers, rarely attempting to figure out the problem.Scourge was never about numbers (as proven by the nerf's ineffectiveness for pvp and wvw, but still allowing scourge to die out in pve), Scourge's problem was mechanical. They basically made Renegade summons killable, when they shouldn't be, and made Scourge's shades invulnerable, when they should allow interaction. That's the solution to scourge, in a nutshell. But, no, they decided to just mess with numbers, because that's the easy way.

But even then, scourge was no where near as problematic as the community paints it. It had clear counters and interactions that could easily be exploited. If there were pro teams, you can bet your ass that scourge would probably not be so heavily relied upon in those teams, but instead probably spellbreaker would be more prominent as the anti-boon class, because it has a better engage and range. Scourge is a very static class, and easy to shutdown in range.And that's my problem with the pvp community, they don't try to use their heads, which is the main part of pvp, if a build can't be outright beat by a previous meta build, then it's broken and the fight must be won in the forums.

Also, are you seriously telling me that ANet cares about pvp and wvw? Ehh...no. Most certainly not on the balance end. You even say it yourself, "don't learn from past mistakes", "slow to admit fault". That is called being careless. And it should be pointed out. I mean, it's been SIX years!

Caring and being competent aren't mutually exclusive. Just because they're not good at it, doesn't mean they don't care, just that they aren't good at it.

As far as fashionable goes, the only thing that's really fashionable is complaining about the "fashionable"!

Quite the paradox you got there.