[When do gem store items, like Mount Skins, recycle again?]

It looked, at one point, like they were further developing this website or something based on the user profile section. I wondered if they had some intention of adding an option to purchase items online through a website or something and receive them in game. That way maybe they wouldn't have to rotate them since there isn't really any point (but I'm probably mistaken) since this isn't a subscription based game. 

Probably heaps of technical difficulties involved with something like that. Could also just be that it's not a high priority or their current model works better. I don't know. If you decide to pursue it I'll likely fail miserably but I volunteer!

Also wondered if maybe they didn't have something in the works with the last Trading post upgrade. Idk. Happy to see the game doing well still though!

[Thank you]

I don’t know if anyone will see this because I’m unsure about most of where I am in life and what life is these days but wanted to say a few things just in case.

 

I can’t begin to express how grateful I am for the many years of enjoyment I’ve had in this game, the guild mates I’ve had, the adventures I’ve been on. I’d love to play again someday but I’m not sure if I’ll ever get the chance. The community here truly is, aside from a few bad occurrences and iffy game modes, the best I’ve seen though others have seemed to improve a bit.

 

I will always cherish the time I had with you all, on Guild missions, in raids, etc.

 

I want to give my biggest thanks to the devs and the studio. I’ve always been opinionated and I’ve definitely been more unfair than I should have at times. I can’t imagine what it takes to be able to put something like this together, to keep it going, and especially given the difficult times the studio has had over the past few years. To keep morale in an already difficult industry, the amount of talent you all have. I know I’ve said it before but my dream, long ago, was to make it out there in hopes of one day getting to the level of being able to work for the studio. I have nowhere near the skill level or knowledge of anyone there but it did inspire me to pursue an associates - wasted where I am - and a career in web dev though I’ve not exactly excelled in it. I just want to say thank you once again to the many people involved. 
 

To the fellow players, especially in pvp, I want to make a special note to apologize to the people I’ve argued with, ridiculed, and been outright nasty and unsportsmanlike to. I’ve always been a poor sport, a bit of a brat, and I’ve always had low self-esteem but it doesn’t excuse the way I’ve acted or the things I’ve said at times. I hope you can trust me when I say I’m not that person outside of the game, that I’m far more patient, that I tried to be better toward the end because I know I stepped over the line on multiple occasions and I wish you all the best in life. Truly, truly want to express how sorry I am for how loathsome I was to some of you. I hid behind anonymity and I let my anger get the best of me far too many times. We don’t know who is on the other side of the screen or what they’re going through and I’m so sorry. I hope you’re all enjoying life, the game, and everything in between.
 

Lastly, I wish the studio a prosperous long future still. Special apology to certain studio members I mentioned in the past looking high on stream. That was not intended to be an insult and I fear it was taken that way. I can’t imagine what it must take to be  up there or the amount of nerves it takes to be on camera like that and honestly I always looked forward to the livestreams after releases. Rambling, I’m sorry. 
 

I wish you all the best, players, devs, studio. 
 

With love, 

CT

[Confused emote reminds me of this:]

I love the idea of this being a potential metric for whoever handles analytics and forum interaction. 

Oh - google analytics is showing 15 confused emojis events on this post, let's check it out!

Welp, that was pointless. 

I don't really know what the emoticons were supposed to do. Metrics or just some cute way of interacting and a fun little pet project of one of the website devs. Idk. I definitely don't think it's serving any legit purpose at this point. Still mad props to the ui/ux team. The notification system, the ui, the responsiveness, are all so good. 

But anyway - 😕😕 😕 😕 😕 

5 confused face rating for this thread.

[Ele needs an adjustment]

20 hours ago, Eddie.9143 said:

I've only seen that flappy guy beating ppl lol 

You talking about the magnificent EZ Clap?

[When is balance patch?]

Don't really need any buffs when your main objective is running troll builds in the ffa.

[don't confuse ur class advantages with skill]

As a recent bladesworn enjoyer that wins a fair share of fights it is entirely skill. 

These buttons don't just spam themselves and aegis isn't passive like it is on op guard.

[Just dropping in to say bladesworn is still extremely lame]

#shotsfired

Nope, sorry - all shots were reflected by skill 4. You've now been redirected to the login screen.

[Is there a difference in play per rank?]

On 10/6/2023 at 5:09 AM, Remus Darkblight.1673 said:

Out of curiosity, do we know what the actual population of PvP is right now and in each region and timezone?

I only started getting into PvP recently when they revamped dailies and added the wizard vault. I used to hate the game mode and avoided it like the plague.

Currently at low gold with probably about a 50% win rate. Matches for me are usually either heavily skewed to one team or the other, 500 to 150 about 80% of the time. Only once every 5 or 6 games is a close fight. Sometimes matchmaking feels a bit non-existent, but that would make sense with a very limited pool of players.

The last entry in the leaderboard is like 1420 or something isn't it? 

For reference to be on the leaderboard it used to be like plat 2'ish or somewhere around there. 

Of the ones on the leaderboard you have probably 2-3 alt accounts -

So if I had to guess I'd say probably 300ish NA including non-leaderboard silver/bronze folks. And that's being generous.

[What Can ArenaNet Actually do To Make PvP Better? (A Thread for Thoughts)]

I think the point is they don't WANT to attract more players because that's just justification for more work/resources. (Likely mandated by the NCSoft overlords.)

Ideally, at this point, they want to milk the living story crowd with micro-expansions while they meet carefully planned checkboxes to fund their other ip's.

So - what COULD they do and what WILL they do are entirely different. 

What you can expect is MAYBE one or two more micro-expansions, some more weapon unlocks, and your usual bi-annual draw a skill out of a hat coefficient nerf followed by six months of something being blatantly busted. 

Expecting any major reworks to anything at this point is just hopium and you can insist I'm a doomer but I think the writing is on the wall. Best of luck to them on their new ip's though. 

To be honest, at the rate gen AI is advancing by the time they finish these other ip's, or any other studio for that matter, the mmo/game market as we know it may be heading for sunset. Between advances like Apple Vision, ai video/image gen, things like LLM's that can be used to simulate real player behavior, eventually if not already present gen ai 3d models - 

I mean, we may be creating our own completely customized video games before too long. 
 

[Will we ever see a downstate rebalancing?]

3 hours ago, dead.7638 said:

Ele mist form should be up top.   Can’t tell you how many times they down and just mist form into a tower and self res.   Belongs on the top.    Only down state that it op in ranger.   They have too many options to get back up with pet skills still being able to used.   I think before hot it didn’t matter but with the new pets that can interrupt and dmg you during a stomp and the ranger themself can interrupt a stomp.   It’s just a lot.  I doubt engi mech was even a consideration when making the spec.

Lol. 
 

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve tried to do that and came up an inch short or had a guard staff barrier block the entrance.

 

Most of the time you’re just delaying a future death in the tower anyway. Idk. Way bigger concerns like necro, occasionally guard, and mostly ranger.

 

Nothing like getting a ranger into down state and getting pelted with cc spam while they rapidly revive.

 

Only other significant downstate is a power chrono/mes if they’re able to get you to downstate from skill 3 or finish you off but I’m assuming it’s been nerfed as I haven’t had this happen in years.

[Is there a difference in play per rank?]

Yeah, tonight is one of those nights apparently.

No duo's on my side against two duo's on the other.

I thought this wasn't supposed to be possible?

[Help with thief build]

Case in point -

Just attacked a reaper and got them to 10% health. 

They ENTER SHROUD and crit me for 6800 damage.

That's a decent backstab for thief.

Please explain this balance.

[Is there a difference in play per rank?]

On 10/3/2023 at 5:50 PM, Khalisto.5780 said:

hum, match quality swings hard depending on the time of the day you playing

you could also have lost a few and kept playing tilted while you should have stopped, or played drunk or something like that

or it could be just be bad luck as you mentioned

idk - edibles/drunk are usually the times I play best. 

If you find yourself losing two matches in a row though it's probably best to just quit ranked for the night. This is a good indication - at least in my experience - that you're going to go up against the duo's and people intentionally queuing during that playtime because it's easier for them to move up in rank and matchmaking will do everything it can to pit you against people far above your rating because the population is too small and matchmaking is trying to make sure you have a guaranteed loss to keep the ratio in place.

[Help with thief build]

Thief in general, in pvp, is not easy to play. 

There's so much cleave and passive aoe damage packed into traits in this game that you have to be very selective about where you stand and when you attack. It's also not easy to land high amounts of damage on a thief as it is with most other professions because of boons/projectile reflect/passive defensives and thief damage being generally lower than something like a holo that can just press two buttons and do more damage than you can with a few attacks and your largest hitting stealth attacks. 

Personally, deadeye is still very tricky to play. Sure, it's annoying to fight against and uses a lot of stealth - but you still have to be careful about when and who you attack. 

Dagger/pistol daredevil is the most common because it's more of a duelist but it's also less damage and takes more skill consideration. 

I've been playing the good ole core d/d thief build but it's pretty much a - you have one shot to land high damaging attacks and if you're not careful you could be stealing/teleporting into a mass amount of aoe ground clutter or cleave - or just have your damage negated because you're attacking something loading up with blocks. 

There really isn't a lot of build diversity for thief - Specter still has a condi variant that's decent and relies less on stealth. There's probably still a few people running the pistol/blind spam build. 

Really depends on your playstyle. I'd love staff daredevil to be viable again but it hasn't been since it's release in HoT and then it was apparently so appauling to the majority that they decided to permanently shelve it. - And power creep/specs released since then have just made the playstyle far too high risk - (combined with the janky animation frame of staff 5's evade that's too unreliable to really count as an evade imo.)

Azure would probably have far better advice as I believe they play thief far more than me but if you're outnumbered - RUN. Just leave. Survive and move on. Most of the thieves I see playing well in matches never stop moving. 

For match-ups - this entirely depends on what spec/playstyle you are. If you're melee and playing core/daredevil, mesmer is generally a decent-ish 1v1 because it gives you a stolen skill that grants all boons - including aegis and resolution. (block and condition damage reduction)

If I were you I'd watch some of Vallun's videos. He has build videos and talks about trade-offs and what to do in certain situations and presents it in a pretty beginner friendly fashion.

[If you want to seem really good at this game]

Aimlessly evade+jump spam on a warrior.

It doesn't actually help you in anyway - that's spamming full counter or ammo skills on bladesworn.

But you'll feel super epic and look like a really elite player while doing it. 

<3
 

[Is there a difference in play per rank?]

There isn’t really a difference in rank anymore.

 

I’ve had multiple matches the past few days against 1 or more people that are or have been in the top 5. Two that are consistently fighting for #1.

 

Grim, Naru, whoever Pimap is, AGamer - I think they’ve been in top 5 haven’t they? Whoever JADEN is and was pretty high up there but I haven’t seen them that high up in previous seasons.

 

The population is so small there isn’t really a different rank anymore. I had someone friend me from my matches that had a rating of 980.

 

So uh… 

Idk. Depends on playtimes too. You’ll see the same 10 people often during certain times for a few hours, usually later in the evening.

 

Difference in play also depends entirely on who they’re against and the victor is often decided beforehand by a few people queue syncing or the matchmaking deciding you’ve won enough for the day and puts you up against top 10. 
 

Oddly enough I had much better matches yesterday than I’ve had in a LONG time. Even fought a dev on a bladesworn the other night. My team lost of course as we did not have a bladesworn. 🤣
 

 

[Solemn reminder that no new spvp content has been released since Nov 2018.]

Don't worry. Next expansion we'll get a reward track. 

It will come at the expense of a living world map and new weapons though.

 

[What Can ArenaNet Actually do To Make PvP Better? (A Thread for Thoughts)]

Replace the people in charge of the gamemode.

Stop encouraging degenerate no-counterplay builds. 

To clarify - I don't mean this as a "can this person" but an increase to the team and have more opinions than what we have currently + player discords and golem benchmarks. 

This won't happen because they have other priorities now, no matter who's decision that is, it is what it is. 

Having two balance patches a year however is still pretty poor though. Especially considering the fact that the balance patches are generally coefficient and duration tweaks and not desperately needed skill/utility/trait reworks. Didn't they mention in one of their previous blog posts when switching to this model that it would allow them to touch up on other aspects of the game? Maybe I'm misremembering and I know it's just glitter and PR talk but it would be nice to see more core utilities adjusted and more added for missing skill types.
 

[What Can ArenaNet Actually do To Make PvP Better? (A Thread for Thoughts)]

1 hour ago, Downstate.4697 said:

The best thing anet can do without investing in any resources is remove duo queue and prevent games from snowballing. They can prevent snowballing by reducing the time it takes for a downed person to return to playing. Between bleeding out and the death timer, it’s a good 30-45s of 4v5. 

Bleeding out and downed state is toxic in itself. Sure it's "strategic", but it's strategic in a really cheesy way. 

I very rarely let people "bleed out" because, 1.) Someone is going to come along and res them and it will come back to bite me. 2.) It's just cheesing a cap based mode. 

I would personally love to see a no down state bonus event for pvp to let people see how they feel about it. If you need to compensate with longer respawn times, fine. People don't want to spend 3 minutes sitting on the ground and downstates are drastically different and imbalanced. Always have been. This would negate the res utility builds but it's not fun facing an organized comp that uses those heavily anyway. Especially if you're in an imbalanced match-up and you're lucky enough to get downs for your team but - oh look - reset the fight because some necro/guard/ele comes along and now your team is out of cooldowns and you're back to being outnumbered. 

[Dragon Trigger needs to be blockable]

41 minutes ago, KryTiKaL.3125 said:

While I am not the biggest fan of Bladesworn for a variety of reasons, that is more or less the one thing that is "overloaded" on Warrior just overall (save for the bloated sustain that can be possible with Bladesworn) meanwhile other classes are just in general overloaded just across the board with their skills, traits, effects.

I understand the frustration with it, I really do, however I do find it just ever so slightly amusing that people take such issue with it whenever Warrior's entire profession mechanic can no longer be entirely negated with one single effect among the 5 total that do so; i.e blocks, dodges, evade effects, invulns, blinds. Granted Unyielding Dragon also negates Blinds.

When every class seems to have access to all of those effects, often times within the same build, Warrior genuinely has a rough time even getting any benefit from the entirety of their profession mechanic, on any of the Specializations. Other classes have unblockable attacks that they trigger and do a lot more with for a lot less effort and are a lot less telegraphed.

Full counter has always been a little overloaded. "Just don't attack" doesn't mean anything when a slight breeze in their direction triggers it. 

As do condition ticks from what it seems. I just know I try to go out of my way to avoid it and seemingly every time it triggers but with this game having so much passive trait damage, cleave, and conditions I'm just not sure what the ideal scenario is for this.

[sPvP tri-state meetup]

14 minutes ago, magickthief.6492 said:

We do this nightly in map chat. Probably got a few accounts terminated for going too far.

Uh oh. Are you the one that was giving an hour long sermon the other day?

[Top stats do the direct opposite of what they should be doing.]

This also doesn't account for profession imbalance. Just because someone has top stats like "top healing" or whatever, doesn't mean they contributed to the match. 

It could just be elite warrior player #412 trolling sidenodes and sprinting across the map. 

Does anybody put any weight into these? I see people saying "look at top stats" and I just lol. 

[REMOVE DUO Q]

Duo queue aside - 

 

Can’t two people just make sure their rating is equal, queue at the same time on the same class individually and likely wind up in the same match against each other?

 

 

[the FFA arena (once again) and its bugs]

Fun note - 

You can duel if someone else gets on theirs. 

Aerial combat and pvp content in this expansion. You just have to look hard enough.

[Uptick in double duo?]

59 minutes ago, Trevor Boyer.6524 said:

Yeah something is wrong with it. Was it you or Bethekey that we were discussing this before?

I'm not just saying this off a few bad days of gaming. I've been watching this for quite a few seasons, and now that population is so low it is plainly obvious to see. There is definitely something going on where some accounts are much much more frequently being granted strong stacks vs. much easier stacks. It isn't dumb luck. Some people are just nearly always benefitting that match where it's a plat+ duo with a couple stray plats vs. a solo plat who is being made to carry 4x low golds or worse.

I have no idea how it's being done but a few things come to mind:

1. Possibly someone has access to custom arena like options to swap players before a match starts. A lot of these matches do look like a skew of players that could have and should have been evenly split, but for whatever reason the algorithm tossed all the lows on one team? OK. It just seems to be happening too often lately, and the people who are stacked on the high side are always the same names. It's never those people being put on the low side being forced to carry 4x low golds or worse. Am I the only one who pays attention to notice this stuff?
2. Aside from classic win trading, there is something else strange going on to support the above ^ I notice and increased rate of weird requeues where I only get like 25 seconds to hit accept and if I don't hit accept it immediately requeues a game. But apparently other people in those queues are getting like 2 or 3 minutes to hit accept? Anyone else ever see this? Where there is one box left unchecked and for some reason the queue timer seriously allows that one person like 2 to 3 minutes to choose to hit accept or decline before it requeues. I've seen it sit for upwards of 2 minutes and then finally someone hits accept, which should be impossible to happen for normal players like myself who only get 25 seconds to push accept. That box is supposed to immediately reenter queue if people don't hit accept within 25 seconds, not sit and linger for 2+ minutes before something happens. I also notice when this fishy stuff happens with the queue box, is when you'll get these strangely ridiculously lopsided matches where a super stack against some shuffled low tier comp.
3. Super frequent emptying of maps that forces everyone to constantly load into new map instance. YES, seems like maybe I'm the only one noticing this, but whenever there is a really bad day of repeat ridiculously rigged matches and I can see every organic plat player dropping into gold all the same time to a bunch of alts no one has ever seen before, the maps are constantly emptying and forcing people to load new map. You'll load a map, stand there for 10 minutes near the FFA and then it'll empty again, and tell you to load the new map again, and it'll keep doing this for like the entire time ultra bad games are going around. I have no idea what this has to do with matchmaking other than maybe it can dictate seeding somehow, but this definitely seems to be correlated with strings of severely bad match making.
4. There is also the possibility that someone is able to go into the algorithm directly and mess with numbers & settings.

Whatever is going on, it's no longer classic win trading. These matches lately are being directly fudged with and as much is obvious.

And you're right, some people are being directly targeted to prevent rating gains. Again, as much is obvious when there are guys up around 1600 all season who good AT teams won't touch because their performance is low, but then you have guys who take 3rd in MATs right under Team USA who are in the leaderboards perma stuck in high G3 bottom Plat.

It would just be nice if for one season they'd leave it alone. Let some of these trodden harassed players actually play to the ratings they deserve for once. They owe the community so much more than that. The least they could do is leave it alone for just one season.

I'm always going off about it so probably. Maybe both though. 

At this point I just assume it's a multi-tiered system. Lock alts or people in on the system at certain rating brackets - say the switch between gold 1 - gold 2 or gold 2 - gold 3, and throw matches if you want an easy farmable person to move up so the upper echelon can farm them. If you don't want someone to move up, be sure to get on their team and throw. Record what time they queue, what they usually play, and with the low population you can pretty much guarantee you'll be in a match with them or against them. Since getting back into this crap again I've noticed the same 10-15 names over and over again every night, same time of night. I also noticed that when I reach certain thresholds like - just getting slightly above gold 1/2/3 again - I'm facing the SAME PEOPLE I ALWAYS FACE AT THIS RATING. This could be a symptom of when I play as well as I usually, due to having a life outside of gw2 pvp, wind up queuing anywhere from 8-12. 

That could entirely just be coincidence and low rating but think of how easy it would be to sell a gizmo if you control more variables - like deciding who moves up the ladder. What do the others get in return? A spot on the leaderboard, a title, "clout". Who knows. I see people I used to play against rating far lower than I would expect them to and a few others constantly running around with plat badges that go from stomping everyone on the team to suddenly being beat by Joe Newb whose name I don't recognize. A lot of people during these crossover thresholds that go up against each other consistently too. Again, low population only or low population + "hey let's sync queues as professions likely to get matched up against each other so we control the match."