Satenia.9025

During my time playing various MMOs, I found that the more trivial a matter, the more elitist people act about it. In this particular case, the trivial matter is your personal contribution in the encounter. On an individual level, for any somewhat decent GW2 player, the mechanics are not difficult, the real difficulty comes with open world and 50+ others outside your control. Unable to differentiate between that - or not wanting to acknowledge that - results in the mentioned elitism. Some people have already suggested the "elitist" title, I think "delusional" would also fit just fine. OP, you are essentially suffering from the average WvW player syndrome: Mistaking a participation trophy for personal accomplishment.

The level of delusion here is simply astonishing. If you successfully made it through the encounter, you were lucky, it is as simple as that. There is no such thing as claiming personal credit for an open world encounter featuring 50+ players, which are outside your control. And no, getting into an "organized" map does not change that fact. And neither does grinding out the kills.

Intro While there will always be that one person insisting on keeping content unnecessarily difficulty, either because they “lucked” through it and think it happened due to their own efforts, or because they just do not personally care about that kind of progression, I think it is important to look at balance with the context of where and how the content is happening. As far as the Dragon’s End meta is concerned, we are talking about open world content tied to a map meta event. This is very different from instanced content such as fractals, strike missions and raids, and I believe that difficulty should be balanced in accordance with that. I will get into that by first pointing out what I consider the main problems, and then offer a few solutions. This post is spoiler-free, as far as I can tell. Having said that, what are the main problems? As mentioned in the intro, we are talking open world content tied to a map meta event. This kind of content will by design be tied to all sorts of players with various skill-levels. While some of this can be circumvented by “map hopping”, there is never the same level of coordination possible as it is with instanced content and designated squads. How is this a problem? I refer to the interview with Mike Zadorojny about balancing the “Icebrood Saga”, where he states that the difference in damage numbers between players go as high as ten times (Source: https://www.pcgamesn.com/guild-wars-2/difficulty). Ever wondered why there is that “easy mode” in the EoD campaign missions? Here is your answer. Open word content tied to a map meta event should be no different. Why do I keep referring to the term open world content tied to a map meta event? Because this is important for laying out the second problem, which is preparation time and event duration. Not factoring the mentioned “map hopping”, which is currently absolutely mandatory, there is roughly an hour of time spent in order to unlock the boss fight. This is vastly different from previous “difficult” open world content such as the Marionette encounter. If the EoD boss fight could be accessed within 10 minutes, the matter would be an entirely different one. The third problem is that it is tied to achievements and, most importantly, a new mount. A handful of days in, the number of players being made aware of the current difficulty is relatively low. But what do you think will happen once the large majority of players will find out that they are prevented from accessing the new mount? The chance of success will in fact even further decrease, as more players of lower skill level will flood in. For those around long enough to remember what happened to ranked PvP when they freshly introduced the legendary backpack and achievements, well, basically, a lot of frustration on all sides. Expect complaints to rise as the more casual player base catches up to this content. So, what could be possible solutions to this? I have thought of three, in order of personal preference, but these are more of a rough draft intended as brainstorming rather than being set in stone. Remove/change the “green/crystal” mechanics. While I do get why you put them in and understand that cutting content is perhaps not what the designers like to do, I think one has to look at this objectively and acknowledge that it is just not working out in this kind of content. You can keep this in instanced content, where people can be more organized, but I think it is pretty obvious that when people start trying to circumvent this mechanic entirely in order to have a chance at success, the mechanic has not been designed properly. Whether the boss health bar needs adjustment in combination with this removal, I cannot say at this point without having first seen a removal/rework. Speaking of health bar adjustments, leave everything as it is and cut the boss health bar down to roughly 60% of what it currently has. In that case, while I still think that the “green” mechanic is a poor one, at least a kill will still be possible with a bit of organization, bringing it more in line with the difficulty of existing map meta events. Remove the story achievement and mount unlock from this meta event. In that case, you have an open world map meta event that is difficult and that will see very little play, but at least you are not unnecessarily alienating the large majority of your player base. Thank you for your consideration!

Funny, at least on EU the situation seems to be the reverse: Certain "older" top players still have access to their accounts, while they should have gotten a perma-ban for their past "missteps" instead. Of course, that by itself speaks volumes about the current state of the game mode.

Being in the top of the ladder is matching many things : being good, play in duoQ, play at certain hours, not playing too much matches in a row... Let's stream us, Bluri, a full soloQ of 20-30 matches in a row, a sunday of holiday at 16h and starting from gold 1. You will climb rank, but we all know how stupid/trololo-yo-yo it will be. And you know it too. So please, stop being ironic a bit. People here don't say that top ladder players are not good. They say that the conquest game mode with its duoQ system is not soloQ friendly, for everyone, good players too. The current ranked mode is an aberration, in the way of competition (ranked mode). This is very true. I doubt that anyone seriously suggests that the players in the upper tiers cannot play, however, as you rightly pointed out it's just as much about with whom and when they play (and especially how they handle the queue). Regular solo-queuing during prime-time/weekends/etc. puts anyone at a potential disadvantage, including "top-players". Those I see during those times once in a while are just as affected by bad team-mates, afk-ing, "dcs" and so on. Contrary to popular belief, they do not carry the whole team while being at such a disadvantage. So perhaps it's simply that around gold/low-plat these situations are more common, while in higher plat you have potentially more tryhards and as such "better" matches (as in all 10 players actually play the game - in such a case, a "top player" is more likely to have an actual impact). That being said, the complete denial of match manipulation by the top ranks is absolutely hilarious. It's all conspiracy theories and jealously, right? I would think that past bans and adjustments to the sPvP season system say otherwise. Say hi to your Paypal accounts from me while you guys are at it patting each others backs over whatever you think is left of leaderboard "prestige" in this game.

No for primarily two reasons: First and most importantly, this game is built around cooperation and it's what pretty much sets it apart from many other MMOs. In the open-world, you pretty much share everything with other players regardless of being grouped or not - nodes, loot, xp, etc., everyone gets their share and there is essentially no kill-stealing and similar (it can happen in rare instances). This has been a big positive for the game and attracting and maintaining players. That being said, ow-pvp tends to attract the worst scum of online-gaming. Having played one such game for a while (BDO), all I can say is that once you've seen that level of toxicity, any negative comments received during GW2's sPvP will feel like light banter at best. There are plenty of dedicated pvp-options in this game, let's leave it at that (... and that's coming from someone actively playing sPvP in this game).

Totally not biased, of course. Another clueless person who spouts out random stuff without 0 facts. Name 1 player that managed to buy the gizmo and has it today that did not play it himself and won it fair and square?Yeah Z E R O. Just to make you understand - the people that tried to buy it got all suspended and rewards removed so not one person has managed to get the gizmos unless they actually get carried by a team by playing themselvesJust to make you understand - prestige ceases to be relevant when there is doubt about the legitimacy of obtaining such. One case caught enough public attention, how many others did not. The fact that you still play/post is more than enough to support my point.

Initially, I would never have supported this kind of suggestion. But gizmo rewards have lost their prestige the moment "top" players started selling them for 200 euro and got away with a 3 months temporary ban. So by all means, make them available through grind. Totally not biased, of course.

Based on my personal experience, they don't. I somewhat keep track of people that go out of their way to verbally abuse others (seen cases as bad as death-threats, wishing illnesses and the like). They still play, so these reports have either not been looked into, or Anet does not consider the offense severe enough. About the "keeping track" part, when you block and rename someone, you will among other things see the "renamed" account-name show up on the top 250 leaderboard once they qualify for it. It's sort of hilarious when you consider that next to all the match manipulators you got the ragers and verbal abusers up there too. Captures the current state of PvP better than anything else ever could.

Likely canceled after the initial complaints that the Swiss are getting their own tournament (with a lot of cheese on top). Selfish buggers!

PvP is dead, Paypal killed it. For this season finale, the servers helped. Just like the OP, I ended up just short on meeting the minimum games for this season. As someone who always struggles to meet the weekly quota and plays in plat, this has been a huge letdown. Weeks of trying not to fall behind on games to then being locked out of the last few due to server problems or whatever. But as someone else pointed out, it's fully automated and of course Anet will simply look the other way and pretend nothing happened. Just like they do when it comes to reported players. Just like they do when it comes to bots. Just like they do when it comes to former "pro" players cheating and turning this game mode into a sad joke. Anyway, disappointed, but hardly a new feeling when it comes to the current state of the PvP seasons. Because of life. As of Sunday-evening, I was 2 games short. Not really because of any other reason than struggling with the weekly quota once in a while. Life happens. Sure enough I could have pushed those last few games on Sunday-evening, but why stress myself out when I can just play them on Monday. Or not.