maxwelgm.4315

Yes it's straight up unethical to propose to play in a competitive team activity and explicitly not compete and drag your team down. However, we have to use common sense here - GW2's PvP can not be considered competitive, and any mention of it being such is largely misusing the word. For one there's no intrinsic anti-cheating mechanism, also there is no moderation, also big balance patches happen in the middle of seasons, also there is a DuoQ even at reduced population, etc etc. At this point, even though people play without any sportsmanship, I'd go as far as saying people trying to play "ethically" or "competitively" are kidding themselves on the other hand. This group could find a much better use for their time in actual competitive games. GW2 may have words such as "rated", "competitive", "tournament", "ranked" thrown around but don't let yourself be fooled by it and embrace that you should be playing for fun instead - Anet are more or less the folks with actual slightly unethical behavior in this sense, by even trying to promote competition inside what is just a playground.

After the #74629834th thread about specific classes, it's clear by now every spec has too much of everything, and the only way to counter any given X class is to bring the Y class that can do more of a particular thing that X can do a lot but not enough. In this case it's clearly condi bombs vs Vindi's lack of excessive cleanse (even though it would have a healthy amount of cleanse if condis were kept on check).

The meta builds have too much of everything as others have mentioned, being good at attack/defense/mobility all at once. This leads to a higher % of matches with top players either dominating the builds and completely obliterating the other team or average players being stomped by meta builds either because they went against top players or didn't take meta builds themselves to begin with. Of course, there will always be a metagame, but if that metagame has too much disparity from basically any niche variation you can try, that's too strict to be healthy. There's also the low population issue, can't work much around that one. Newcomers either fall in love with the combat in spite of being farmed by top players or get farmed out of the game mode altogether. In actually competitive games like LoL you would practically never get matched by accident to an e-sport team on your very first matches, but here you can with relative ease find top #10 leaderboard players on your matches just by queueing randomly here and there in spite of personal rating. While the latter issue can't be fixed, the former only has bitter remedies. Because Anet has been consistently buffing and power creeping classes for so long, taking things away will necessarily feel bad now that we got used to all the mobility and offense that was added. Providing nerfs all across the board would probably improve the game but it's also improbable to be popular no matter how they do it, because it's only taking away without giving much in return. And only giving more means just increasing the CC creep to combat the mobility creep, and increasing the offense creep to combat the defense creep, and vice versa.

Didn't we eventually arrive to this state precisely coming from a meta full of bunker specs that could hold off 2 or 3 people indefinitely while sitting on red AoE circles? We already have no +toughness+healing power amulets for one, and no major stat healing power slot either. It doesn't seem like Anet is planning to bring back bunkers anytime soon if ever at all.

Any reason Anet gives for switching over to yearly mini expacs is PR speech - and they have to do it too, they're a company and it's only natural they would justify their decisions using the end product. We all know their real issues is NCSoft pressuring a non-lucrative branch of their business as well as having had to fire so much of their own staff back in over a year ago. They're simply unable to maintain a proper release cadence - what would make us think that they were serious about supporting the core game if they already had to reduce the amount and quality of new content, which makes no sense to do in a MMORPG? I'm not saying GW2 is on maintenance mode or anything, and I'm sure the remaining devs are working hard and passionately, the point is just that they simply can't pull off things as they have before, the game has reduced a lot in scope because the team is down to so little people in comparison to what would be a healthy number, and we just have to live with that, whatever they can give us with the mini expacs and what the game already offers to begin with, is it.

Win trade is known to happen in this game and a few of the known wintraders have been namedropped already. It's certainly not ideal to not win anything when the other team surrenders but it's otherwise easily exploitable to win points by people who already exploit massively to begin with. Also quick surrenders due to DC/afk with no rewards or losses exist in many competitive games such as LoL. I do realize not winning points when they surrender a close game would also be exploitable - this is though a matter of only allowing surrenders in between certain time windows or in special conditions like a DC before 5 mins. Anet are the ones who'd have to balance that if they ever decided to implement it. As for pips from losing, yeah it also sucks because pips are a progression system rather than a competitive system - which begs the question of why they are only in ranked to begin with. We could very well just live with it and let people farm from surrenders in unranked if pips were there instead. Again, if removing or at least reduced rewards for surrendering is not a thing, it's 100% going to be exploited and we just change one issue for another. You should indeed be motivated to push your team into not giving up as well as they should be motivated not to give up as well lest they lose rewards - except if all 5 of you would have no choice in a match so bad you can only wait at base and then why not give up your 3 pips for 10 extra minutes of your life? Maybe Anet has the right idea not allowing surrenders after all if people would insist on collecting their gains every match no matter how miserable the match itself might be.

I can see a problem with this in the case surrendering would give out full rewards to the winning team and the usual losing rewards for the losing team, this could be exploited in both unranked and ranked for reward track and pips farming. Maybe allow it but have the winning team win less pips/reward track points and no rank points, with the surrendering team getting nothing at all? Otherwise, this is a legit great idea, the most tiresome matches of all to me are the ones where it's just waiting until either my own or the enemy team clocks in 500 points in a lopsided match.

Very few people are actually and legit against the view that aspirational content should exist. FFXIV is probably one of the most popular MMORPG nowadays with a huge crowd which plays both this and that game in fact, and it has several difficulty tiers and several raid and trial encounters ranging from extreme trials to ultimate raids in difficulty. Large number of encounters, large gradient in difficulty, everyone can fit somewhere. What people really complain about in GW2 is precisely that content absolutely cannot be aspirational if there's no path leading to it, then it's just a wall. Also, the life cycle of content in GW2 is extremely enhanced by accessibility and rewards, see HoT metas and HoT/PoF NM raids being done by a reasonable number of players until this day vs "actual challenges" such as Gazed into the Void, or even sPvP tournaments in general that are exclusive and excluding by nature. If SotO released with 4 strikes and 3 of them had doable CMs that ranged in between Dagda and KOCM/Ankka (with title) difficulty, few people would actually be vocal about having a 4th strike at the legendary Cerus level - heck, the same happened with HTCM early on, nowadays people recognize it as quality content even if they can't pull it off, or at least are not bothered by the space it takes because they have 3 other strikes to do. Lastly but not least, if strikes are not all meant to be done weekly there should be more of them for sure, because that would mean a weekly static group would be locked into the single Dagda CM run and the other 4 "easily weekly" CMs in EoD+vanilla (how many Trials are there in FFXIV even if you only played A Realm Reborn?). Once again, aspirational content is something you aspire to while playing other things on the way, not one of the only two encounters available across a whole year. Anet did mention in one of the last interviews that instanced content players should expect good news from the next expac, but it's been a long 10 years of "next release hype" so I have only a small dose of hopium left that they can release content like Cerus legendary CM intentionally and not by accident and with a better release cadence.

Thanks for clarifying! Thanks also to SoftFootpaws, this is what I meant actually, that IBS could also be fueled into obtaining EoD rewards. As Cyninja pointed out, I however did not realize that green shards are still the ones required to actually purchase the weekly coins and clovers. This is indeed way worse than even during EoD now that we only have 2 strikes. In fact I've been doing the weekly Dagda CM for a while and am nowhere close to buying all of the rewards from the tab, even if I ignore ever getting clovers. The change really makes little sense to me now.

This post is from when Green shards were available from EoD strikes right? Now that both EoD and IBS awards blue shards this is a non-issue isn't it?

The way they handled this and had everyone jumping into the legendary title while they released (even at reduced HP) a nearly impossible to complete CM title was a huge letdown when my static realized we likely wouldn't be able to pull off either title anytime soon. There is no in between here going from Dagda to this and even with HTCM we would weekly clear the other 3 strikes when we felt like it - hence HTCM was aspirational to us because there was other content leading to it. Meanwhile Dagda doesn't lead to Cerus at all, it's more like jumping off a cliff. If they only release 2 strikes the individual strikes should have more degrees of difficulty from default, and properly, purposely tailored difficulty instead of accidentally releasing a "legendary" encounter that's still actually easier than your original intention for the CM title.

Why isn't embodiment of sin the colored title 🙂 GW2Efficiency does show no one completed it yet, and I can't see any PoVs in the discords I'm part of, not even many attempt logs. And the angry poster above was right: the fight is the same with only health differences, so the title condition should actually be harder due to forcing players into empowering nasty debuffs like Gluttony. EDIT: I have just found a few hours before I posted this one NA group has completed the Embodiment of Sin title. They had to use trailblazer scourges with parasitic contagion and a deadeye spamming immobilize, they also used several epidemics to handle adds. In other words a whole lot of utility which IMO is good but now we face the fact it's actually more punishing than the legendary encounter anyway.

Do you have some idea of how many new players you get per match? I typically only see known faces when I queue and I had like 400 matches the last conquest season. We have a lot of veterans who make rotation mistakes and how to rotate can be non-trivial if you're not in an organized group. For instance in this very post you have said you were fighting outnumbered out of the node while two people camped a capped point so it was pretty much a choice to try pushing the enemy team instead of snowballing from the capped point itself (especially in a tied 300/300 state). Yes the support should be following the teamfights around wherever the teamfight is, but if the cause of strategy mismatch is due to someone being "new" the burden would be mostly on the veteran to adapt and overcome - or lose the match which is the other team's merit for exploiting the situation. Oh...yeah, that's what the 3rd topic venting some grievance from a single match coming from the same person? The other two had Youtube videos to call out hacks which is OK I suppose but then it's done twice for some reason. As OP already responded to this post, the topic is pretty much done because it was just some personal grievance, I guess just pay attention to the ratio of sarcasm to actual argumentation in the first post before I even read the rest next time.

PvP was designed around Conquest and any other mode has extreme shortcomings (I suspect why they didn't even bother ever releasing anything else too). Of course sidenoders will rule 2v2 seasons since there's no way to outrotate them. Just bring your own duelist or wait for the 5v5 to be back

Oh yeah I agree, we need things like Scourge Desert Empowerment applying reveal on shade hit, Mirage dagger ambush applying reveal and so on and so on, then finally thief gets deleted

GW2Efficiency (yes we're all aware it's only a slice of the population) has 83 people listed as completing "Legendary Conqueror of Cerus" and, indeed, there are no statistics shown whatsoever for "Apathetic" which is the Embodiment of Sin title achievement - I guess it's not far from saying the normal CM may get a nerf eventually then, since at least the legendary groups would have easily cleared the alternative title if HP was really the only previous source of the Embodiment of Sin title challenge.

I don't know why this has so many confused reacts (which I guess is a mere "dislike" button in the forums). It would have made more sense for them to further differentiate legendary and "regular" CM rather than just changing HP - including changing the greens mechanic as just one example. The fact mechanics remain so similar just shows how much they had to salvage a mistake/bug rather than have something release that was carefully planned and tailored as an experience. I don't know why people can't be happy about the hard content while simultaneously acknowledging Anet didn't even plan for it at all and the hardcore crowd got not much more than a modest nod (a single, *accidentally* hard encounter throughout an entire expansion).

Looking at the leaderboard it's probably just even more unpopular than the conquest season so the "support" if you could even call it that might be discontinued

If unranked was the mode with pips I would 100% be an unranked simp and would forever leave all the notorious samurai extrovert jay ultimate xckjytrybvxz accounts to cannibalize themselves on the leaderboard - and I'm sure a lot of others as well - but this would probably not demotivate cheaters, especially the ones with spare alt accounts to snipe/fool around other top players. Alt accounts are probably the most prominent form of cheating atm due to the DuoQ rather than bots, even more so since it's not quite forbidden to do, even if it's in very bad faith.

EDIT: forum quoted myself for some reason

Anet seems to have put themselves into a corner or at least they must perceive it that way, as also in NA we have players who were previously banned years ago and supposedly in permanent dishonor hoarding top leaderboard positions with both their main and alt accounts. The usual suspect random letters named accounts also frequently found in duos with top players. Maybe they think it's not worth policing so few people and banning what few we have left would empty the mode altogether, or maybe they simply don't find it worth the time to investigate match logs for a game mode with so little traction that at this point is basically as discontinued as dungeons in PvE except it's an entire mode. Whatever the reason, after so many years of repeatedly calling out the same players over and over and even after said players were actually banned just to come back and proceed as usual (let alone potential players that Anet has never found out are cheating), we're forced to assume Anet simply won't commit to improving sPvP match quality. Whoever is still playing surely must be playing only for fun and surely must also be aware they will have to get over a few (or a lot, depending on the time of day) very sus matches.

I'd love if spectral grasp knocked down but also if it targeted from behind walls and ported the enemy to you, a reverse Judge's intervention if you will - that would just about make me a main necro yeah lol

I mean, it is pretty fast but it sounds strange to complain about any 1/4 casting time skills when guardian Hammer 4/5 into Judge's Intervention and revenant phase traversal exists. EDIT: I stand corrected, thanks to the below posters. It's 1/2s so even slower than 1/4, infinitely slower than the instant casts WITH STUNBREAK as reminded by other folks 🙂

This is getting a lot of confusion reacts by I guess players who do CMs, but it's kinda true if a tad hyperbolic. I've taken months to get Voidwalker more because of how difficult it is to gather 10 people at a particular time for said several months than it is to actually do pulls on the encounter. Likewise, Cerus CM feels even less aspirational even though it is actually harder, with even less of my previous buddies feeling like tackling it anytime soon. This is not a complaint that I can't form a group, I already have and will complete it - but it's certainly jarring to go straight from whatever they thought Dagda CM was going to be to Febe CM with no warning of how hard it would be, meaning we will probably just disband again once we are done with no other hard encounter realistically in sight. As usual the C in Anet stands for consistency and the lack of regular updates will probably make a lot of people just finish it once and never touch it again just like the Ankka CM title (aggravating also is that you have to play the encounter "wrong" to get the now middle tier "Embodiment of Sin" title) or even the Voidwalker title, where a small subset now complete it weekly but let's not pretend it's not a small subset compared to everyone who does have the title, or also to regular W1-W7 raiders. Aspirational content is the most aspirational when it doesn't seem completely out of reach compared to the rest of the content. Let me repeat I mean compared to the rest of the content and not compared to your personal skill level as a player. It doesn't only matter how good 100s of people are at the game who were anxiously waiting for this to come out for years, what also matters is how there's 1000s of other people who could have used a better content cadence and would gladly have jumped into this more difficult one if they were regularly fed with a gradient of difficult encounters that progress into the aspirational one (like they did with EoD strikes even but not here wink wink). It's not even that their resources are directed entirely to open world PvE or any other mode - we have recycled wyvern fights and reused repainted models of bosses as SotO metas too - wherever we look we find that things appear to be lacking in steps or gradient from point A to point B, from the story to strike difficulties there's large jumps everywhere with nothing filling gaps that players feel exist. In sum, I'd say players are really complaining about lack of content when they voice complaints about difficulty of particular encounters. Because there's already so little new things to play to begin with, it becomes frustrating when there's a shiny piece of it you perceive as inaccessible (and kinda correctly, because there's a huge gap in between it and the rest of the game, regardless of your personal skill level). Everyone knows FFXIV has super hard encounters but there are so many encounters to begin with as well as so many gradients in how difficult they can be from normal to ultimate, that it doesn't matter and ultimate content becomes truly aspirational then. Now, I appreciate the counterarguments to all of this, "just stop playing then", "go play some other game then", and yes this is all true and I play other games myself, but let's not defend Anet content cadence putting it on the players' end to enjoy crumbs (no matter how tasty the crumbs are such as Cerus CM).

Anet is correct to start slowly with the colored titles, keep it to the most relevant game modes and achievements imo. Plus soon enough they'll run out of sensible colors and it will become a new form of visual noise where we'll have people demanding a "hide titles" tick box lol