Unranked PVP has me rather concerned

[Michalis.6105]

Just as a preface to this topic I have organized and rebuilt TCG communities in my area for the better part of a decade and I have seen a trend that always causes problems if not outright death, called a negative growth curve which I am seeing happen in unranked PVP and it has me rather concerned cause it can effectively cause the death of PVP entirely if left unchecked.

So what is a negative growth curve?

Well in simple terms in any game you always want more players coming in than are leaving and part of achieving this is having an environment where they can learn against players of a similar skill level and to be blunt you aren't getting any of that in unranked pvp. Which is the introduction to pvp it's the thing that should get people hooked on the mode and want to learn more, but instead they get squashed so fast that you have no idea how it even happened or what went wrong you put people off pvp entirely because they feel like they can't learn or even have fun, cause the second they come out of spawn they die again and again, or if they are lucky they get to do it to the other side all this leads to most players not really sticking to it and slowly but surely the entrenched pvp players will also drop off for a myriad of reasons and eventually you will hit a point where you are losing more players than you are taking in.

How do you fix this?

Well frankly I don't have a good solution to most of it but I think one thing that could probably help a lot is separate solos and groups into their own ques yes it might make match making slower but fast match making doesn't mean much when you run out of people to play with.

[Lysico.4906]

It is unranked.  Who really cares.  You go there to test stuff out or chill

[solemn.9670]

41 minutes ago, Lysico.4906 said:

It is unranked.  Who really cares.  You go there to test stuff out or chill

ah, ye olde "nothing matters shut up" approach to a subject

nothing to worry about here guys may as well close the thread, it's just unranked. Delete it from the game entirely.

For real though, pretty sure everything but PvE is dying in this game and has been for years. Simply put, Anet won't care because it doesn't make them as much money.

[aelska.4609]

The problem I see with unranked is that it doesnt have any specific purpose: why would you play unranked when you can have the exact same thing with better rewards in ranked ? 

I keep wondering why unranked is not simply the old hotjoin. Yet another odd Anet decision.

[trunks.5249]

4 hours ago, Michalis.6105 said:

Just as a preface to this topic I have organized and rebuilt TCG communities in my area for the better part of a decade and I have seen a trend that always causes problems if not outright death, called a negative growth curve which I am seeing happen in unranked PVP and it has me rather concerned cause it can effectively cause the death of PVP entirely if left unchecked.

So what is a negative growth curve?

Well in simple terms in any game you always want more players coming in than are leaving and part of achieving this is having an environment where they can learn against players of a similar skill level and to be blunt you aren't getting any of that in unranked pvp. Which is the introduction to pvp it's the thing that should get people hooked on the mode and want to learn more, but instead they get squashed so fast that you have no idea how it even happened or what went wrong you put people off pvp entirely because they feel like they can't learn or even have fun, cause the second they come out of spawn they die again and again, or if they are lucky they get to do it to the other side all this leads to most players not really sticking to it and slowly but surely the entrenched pvp players will also drop off for a myriad of reasons and eventually you will hit a point where you are losing more players than you are taking in.

How do you fix this?

Well frankly I don't have a good solution to most of it but I think one thing that could probably help a lot is separate solos and groups into their own ques yes it might make match making slower but fast match making doesn't mean much when you run out of people to play with.

us ranked players use it to test new specs and builds we have to test somewhere.  i would think you guys would see what we are doing and just ask us for are builds thats what  i  did when i first started out

Edited May 29, 2022 by trunks.5249

[trunks.5249]

3 minutes ago, aelska.4609 said:

The problem I see with unranked is that it doesnt have any specific purpose: why would you play unranked when you can have the exact same thing with better rewards in ranked ? 

I keep wondering why unranked is not simply the old hotjoin. Yet another odd Anet decision.

yes it does its where a lot of ranked players go to test new builds. you want them testing in rank and you lose because some person is testing a build they know nothing about yet?

[Reikou.7068]

5 hours ago, Michalis.6105 said:

Well in simple terms in any game you always want more players coming in than are leaving and part of achieving this is having an environment where they can learn against players of a similar skill level and to be blunt you aren't getting any of that in unranked pvp. 

 

To be fair, you aren't getting any of this in ranked PvP either.  

Cross-tier matchmaking and infinitely expanding search range NEEDS to go. Match quality needs to be prioritized over short queue times.  Matches need to be worth playing, or population will keep going down the gutter.

 

Edited May 29, 2022 by Reikou.7068

[Stand The Wall.6987]

people have been asking for a pvp tutorial for ages. the game doesn't do much to teach you anything, not even in open world. you have to figure out mechanics yourself and often ppl never do cuz there is not a requirement to do so and its not obvious. i think a new players intro to pvp should be 3v3 and not conquest, its much more simple and the player can focus on learning to fight other players and not be yelled at by some tryhard for not fighting on points.

[Tulkas.2576]

I love unranked. I hadn’t played it in ages but I had some achievements I wanted to get done so I did a dozen matches or so last night. 
In one of the first matches I played, I look at the comps, things look decent, we’ve got a support guard, a side noder and some decent team fights specs, the other team has no WB or Harbs, so I’m feeling good and I go with team fight vindicator.

The gates open and I head mid. I use a couple movement skills so I’m ahead of the group and I round the corner to get an eye on mid, I don’t see any enemies so I assume stealth. I look back and don’t see any of my team mates either. I check the map and all FOUR of them have gone home. 
I look back at mid, still no enemies. I go in to investigate.

Mid is empty. The ENTIRE enemy team went home. 
 

These are the kinds of matches where I can spend the entire match at far 2v1ing a support FB and core Mesmer, holding the node and getting kills on them (and they keep coming back for more) then look up at the score after a few minutes and some how we are down 375-400 (probably because someone on the other team is doing the same thing to my teammates, but slightly faster) and then decide ‘kitten I guess we better win this thing’. I can see everyone is at home, so I stop by mid on my way there (mid is 50% capped by my own team and no one is there) get to home, everyone is at 50% health (except the 2 downs that no one is stomping or rezzing) finish off the downs, down the remainder, head back to mid to intercept that FB/Mes duo, land kills on them asap cause my team is with me now, head to far after defending mid and end up winning the game 500-415.

 

You feel like a god damned super hero. And then sometimes you run into a superhero on the other team (and hopefully it’s not your spec’s counter) and you spend the whole match demolishing buildings and killing civilians by accident as you hunt each other down and seek to destroy the other. 
 

Then you queue ranked again and snap back to reality and everything is hard and you struggle kill people 1v1 let alone 1v2 and no one leaves nodes half capped and the trebuchet never gets used…

 

I wish unranked gave pips. I’d never leave. 

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

7 hours ago, Michalis.6105 said:

Well in simple terms in any game you always want more players coming in than are leaving and part of achieving this is having an environment where they can learn against players of a similar skill level and to be blunt you aren't getting any of that in unranked pvp.

Yup, it really is a problem in GW2. This is not just in unranked but also ranked and ATs.

Arenanet needs to do something different 10 years in. Everything you described in your post is 100% accurate and it is causing what you refer to as a negative growth curve. Players join this game and just want slow paced time to learn, but then they are immediately thrown against 10 year veterans. This is no fun for the guy trying to learn and believe it or not, it isn't fun for the veteran either. The veterans also want to play with and against players of their similar skill level for more balanced matches.

 

4 hours ago, Lysico.4906 said:

It is unranked.  Who really cares.  You go there to test stuff out or chill

Reread his post.

What he is pointing out is that you can't chill in unranked when you're a level 10 glory rank and you're against level 900 10 year veterans. You can't test anything out as a new player when you immediately die as soon as you touch combat. As he described, it happens so fast that new players can't even realistically learn what they are doing or what is even happening in general.

You ask who cares? The beginners care. They want to chill and learn the game, not be hyper pressured at all times.

 

2 hours ago, aelska.4609 said:

The problem I see with unranked is that it doesnt have any specific purpose: why would you play unranked when you can have the exact same thing with better rewards in ranked ? 

Because there is too much cheating in ranked. The matches aren't even GGs anymore. It's just a bunch of lopsided wins & losses due to win trading. The game feels bad in ranked man. Unranked honestly has more GGs nowadays.

 

2 hours ago, Reikou.7068 said:

Matches need to be worth playing, or population will keep going down the gutter.

And this is classic Arenanet mistake making. For some reason they only do band-aid fixes. They never think about long term effects, and that is exactly why we are here now. People called this stuff out in this very forum 5+ years ago, pointing out exactly what was going to happen if long term solutions weren't implemented, and it all came true.

 

 

Edited May 29, 2022 by Trevor Boyer.6524

[Michalis.6105]

9 hours ago, Lysico.4906 said:

It is unranked.  Who really cares.  You go there to test stuff out or chill

Given how many players joined with the expansion you really should cause all those new players and any that come down the line are gonna hey let's try pvp join unranked get smashed and go that was awful I'm never doing that again and never touch the mode again

[Ovark.2514]

9 hours ago, aelska.4609 said:

The problem I see with unranked is that it doesnt have any specific purpose: why would you play unranked when you can have the exact same thing with better rewards in ranked ? 

I keep wondering why unranked is not simply the old hotjoin. Yet another odd Anet decision.

It's like hotjoin but with all the best things about hotjoin removed in favor of having teams with equal numbers of players. unranked is no more balanced than hotjoin was. And, actually might be even less balanced because players can't reshuffle themselves to match against more worthy foes.

[greedywholesome.9081]

yup, what @Ovark.2514 said!

[greedywholesome.9081]

Hey OP, I go there to test stuff out and just expect the worst outcome.

If I can assemble a 5 man team for fun and laughs, we do unranked as well. 

 

But yeah, there should be a safe place to practice builds on. Maybe form a pvp guild and practice on private servers. I have tons of timer coins I can donate to anyone, really, just to help out. 

Edited May 30, 2022 by greedywholesome.9081

[VyPR.3412]

.

Edited May 30, 2022 by VyPR.3412
Wrong topic

[greedywholesome.9081]

Just now, VyPR.3412 said:

"Hold on to your points. Seize theirs."

 

Anet devs in 2012 - "Our work is done here"

 

Im shallow, I laughed at that and gas came out of my orifice. 

[Michalis.6105]

23 minutes ago, greedywholesome.9081 said:

Hey OP, I go there to test stuff out and just expect the worst outcome.

If I can assemble a 5 man team for fun and laughs, we do unranked as well. 

 

But yeah, there should be a safe place to practice builds on. Maybe form a pvp guild and practice on private servers. I have tons of timer coins I can donate to anyone, really, just to help out. 

it's not really about practicing builds it's about being able when you are new able to play and learn the basics of pvp without just getting smashed in 2 seconds flat by a premade 5 man team again and again you kill their desire to even try pvp and no amount of testing builds is going to give them the desire to play pvp again 

[Sahne.6950]

PvP needs "Rookie-servers/Queues".

Be it League of legends, Crossfire, ESO, Counterstrike, Battlefield, Call of Duty.... yada yada. ALL of them have it and its pretty important to give newcomers a good experience in their first games.

"Rookie-Servers/Queues" means, that people that have just started out in a certain gamemode, will be linked with other people that are just starting out. For example, if you are under level... idk 15 in PvP, you will only be matched with people that are also under Level 15. As soon as you hit level 15, you will be matched with everyone. But that first week or so... you are going to play againt newcomers and have time to develope a build and some basic knowledge. Queue times will be long, but i would rather wait 4 minutes for my first game, than get roflstomped.

[greedywholesome.9081]

7 hours ago, Michalis.6105 said:

it's not really about practicing builds it's about being able when you are new able to play and learn the basics of pvp without just getting smashed in 2 seconds flat by a premade 5 man team again and again you kill their desire to even try pvp and no amount of testing builds is going to give them the desire to play pvp again 

 

I feel and agree with you wholeheartedly. As of late, there isn't a safe place to learn and practice builds. In the past we had hotjoin and no one gave a darn what build you were playing. Unranked is 50/50 - either you get experienced pvpers practicing new stuff or a full tryhard premade that won't even give you a chance to practice. 

 

Believe me, when I form a 5 man and feel the opponents are new and trying to learn (so easy to spot with how dodges are wasted, how combos are anticipated and how rotations are played out) - I used to tell teammates to let opponents win and practice. I'd often encourage them. 

 

The message is valid and I support the need to create a place where new comers can learn and play without feeling inferior. 

 

Yes, I'm nice to new players and often give advice about being stingy with dodging and knowing kiting spots etc etc.