Re-work to PVP - Bring in more Players

[Multicolorhipster.9751]

These are all pretty good, solid ideas past idea 2

Speaking on the good first; technically speaking you already do gain more rating from facing higher-rated players, there just aren't any higher-rated players and the ones that do play are usually farming rating with a duoq at some ungodly hour of the night and avoiding anything close to real competition, so you never see them or reap any sort of benefit from that.

And when it comes to character/class-swap; absolutely with you there, but I still feel like you should be able to edit your build before a match at least. Locked into the character you queued as, but free to make adjustments to that character's build until the pre-match is over. That should really replace class-swap because class-swap is a broken mess that nobody would even know about had they not been told by someone else that they are able to do that.

 

On the other hand, not a big fan of ideas 1 & 2

A casual, competitive queue is a bit of an oxymoron that leads to a lot of frustration and toxicity. If you're going to have fun playing either way, then its probably going to be queuing how you want to, but in this case you'd have two different groups of people playing the same thing in opposite ways with varying motivations, which isn't competitive in the slightest.

Any comp players would just be totally 🦴'd in that setting, there's nothing for them there.

[Luvo.6350]

11 hours ago, Multicolorhipster.9751 said:

These are all pretty good, solid ideas past idea 2

Speaking on the good first; technically speaking you already do gain more rating from facing higher-rated players, there just aren't any higher-rated players and the ones that do play are usually farming rating with a duoq at some ungodly hour of the night and avoiding anything close to real competition, so you never see them or reap any sort of benefit from that.

And when it comes to character/class-swap; absolutely with you there, but I still feel like you should be able to edit your build before a match at least. Locked into the character you queued as, but free to make adjustments to that character's build until the pre-match is over. That should really replace class-swap because class-swap is a broken mess that nobody would even know about had they not been told by someone else that they are able to do that.

 

On the other hand, not a big fan of ideas 1 & 2

A casual, competitive queue is a bit of an oxymoron that leads to a lot of frustration and toxicity. If you're going to have fun playing either way, then its probably going to be queuing how you want to, but in this case you'd have two different groups of people playing the same thing in opposite ways with varying motivations, which isn't competitive in the slightest.

Any comp players would just be totally 🦴'd in that setting, there's nothing for them there.

I dunno about that class swap though... I feel like its somewhat essential for two reasons:

 

1. You only get 3 build and 2 gear templates per character unless you spent a lot of gold or real money, which especially newer players may not have access to or just dont wanna spent.

So what many players do is to make an alt character for certain builds or even play completely different classes for different roles (for example i like to play my good old strength Spellbreaker for duelist but sometimes my team needs a dps for mid, and i dont like the warr dps specs so i switch to mesmer for that). And making a whole new build, can be a bit scuffed in those 1.5 min you have at game start but may be essential at least in ranked.

 

2. sometimes you get queued with the same class, which is not the end of the world ofc but ideally you wanna have the benefits of different classes right? 

 

Anyway i guess calling class swap essential may be a bit strong of a word but it certainly introduces some quality of live, which im not ready to give up and im sure many will agree.

Instead i promote my Idea from a previous post where you get a secondary prep phase before a game after the class swap/build edit phase, where class swap and build edit is locked but you get to see Runes and sigils  (and maybe even utility and weapons?) of all players. So you can prepare for who to focus, to protect and what tactic to play.

[Trevor Boyer.6524]

They need to stop character swap once a player has loaded into a match. Even during the pre-game organize phase, you should only be able to change gear/build, not the character.

This is mainly to stop certain forms of match manipulation, such as "My duo loads into match as double thief cause we don't want thief on our team, then we swap to Spellbreaker/Catalyst. I queue my windowed alt account also as a thief during synch queue to ensure it always lands on opposing team."

[Multicolorhipster.9751]

11 hours ago, Luvo.6350 said:

I dunno about that class swap though... I feel like its somewhat essential for two reasons:

I feel you, I mean; I disagree, but I can easily see why someone would think that way because class-swap does help some people, but personally i'm of the mind that the cons greatly outweigh the pros

The biggest con being class-swapping's effect on matchmaking since the profession you queue as affects that like @Trevor Boyer.6524mentioned above. This allows people to duoq as a profession they find weak, and that they can hard counter, then when they get into a match they just class-swap to hard counter that class with 2 different people. 

If you want, you can read more about it here where some dev-replies have been posted: 

Ultimately Anet sided with class-swap, but tbh, your reasons are even better than theirs. Arenanet kept class-swapping basically for convenience given to people playing PvE with a different character.

They took one look at an exploit, acknowledged it as an exploit with potential to affect sPvP matchmaking, and then just did it anyway, but just between you and me, I'm pretty sure they did it for the top players, since the top players are the only ones sweaty enough to abuse a basic game function and weaponize it. 🙄

 

11 hours ago, Luvo.6350 said:

1. You only get 3 build and 2 gear templates per character unless you spent a lot of gold or real money, which especially newer players may not have access to or just dont wanna spent.

So what many players do is to make an alt character for certain builds or even play completely different classes for different roles (for example i like to play my good old strength Spellbreaker for duelist but sometimes my team needs a dps for mid, and i dont like the warr dps specs so i switch to mesmer for that). And making a whole new build, can be a bit scuffed in those 1.5 min you have at game start but may be essential at least in ranked.

I promise you will eventually get faster with it. It takes me like maybe 20s sober for me to put together a build with the editor, all muscle memory and remembering the names of the sigils/runes I use.

I've never even used build/gear templates for anything other than sharing builds with people.

To be totally real with you, the only people I see messing up and having the wrong build equipped when a match starts are the class-swappers, because some of them play a cringe metagame called 'Class-Swap Hot Potato', and are so sweaty to land a counter pick that they class-swap well beyond the pre-match timer and their team is forced to start 4v5. That or they class-swap to a PvE character who's PvP build isn't even finished.

11 hours ago, Luvo.6350 said:

2. sometimes you get queued with the same class, which is not the end of the world ofc but ideally you wanna have the benefits of different classes right? 

Not really, no. In the past, yes, but we're at the point where we have 3 subclasses for every profession in a game where we already had total build freedom.

I think people just way overthink that.

11 hours ago, Luvo.6350 said:

Anyway i guess calling class swap essential may be a bit strong of a word but it certainly introduces some quality of live, which im not ready to give up and im sure many will agree.

Instead i promote my Idea from a previous post where you get a secondary prep phase before a game after the class swap/build edit phase, where class swap and build edit is locked but you get to see Runes and sigils  (and maybe even utility and weapons?) of all players. So you can prepare for who to focus, to protect and what tactic to play.

That I can agree with. It is convenient to a lot of people, and depending on what games you come from you might be used to knowing exactly what you're up against before a match starts, so I guess its kind of catch 22.

For as many games there are that show you all this pre-match information there are many more where all of it is purposefully hidden from players to encourage them to adapt in a match as it progresses, rather than leaving all strategy to the pre-round. In the end the pre-round is only going to last like 1 or 2 mins, the 10-15 minutes of game that follow can either be fun, or pre-decided snowballing.

[Luvo.6350]

Yea i wasnt aware that ppl actually abuse the algorithm like that. And the limeted buildtemplates still would be a problem for newer players though, who this is kinda about... Though ya i guess that could maybe be bypassed by just giving couple more buildtemplates or smthing... Dunno how much cash anet makes off of those. But ya with that i actually would be on side with locking classswap.

 

Ya dunno about the ``figure it out as you go´´ philosophy. I think the pre-match info would make the game more fair and actually enhance tactical gameplay since it reduces the reliance on Luck on who finds the squishy players first and pushes ppl to play a tactic according to the teamcomps. That goes especially for newer players who dont know which builds are typically played. Hell even if anet wants to go with that  play blind and hope for luck at lest they could add a in depth analyses of the performance and build of all players after the game, so ppl can at least learn on what killed them etc.

[Multicolorhipster.9751]

3 hours ago, Luvo.6350 said:

Yea i wasnt aware that ppl actually abuse the algorithm like that. And the limeted buildtemplates still would be a problem for newer players though, who this is kinda about... Though ya i guess that could maybe be bypassed by just giving couple more buildtemplates or smthing... Dunno how much cash anet makes off of those. But ya with that i actually would be on side with locking classswap.

At least in Ranked, that would be appreciated. Apparently its an even bigger and more elaborate dealio in ATs, but I hardly ever play those so iunno for sure.

3 hours ago, Luvo.6350 said:

Ya dunno about the ``figure it out as you go´´ philosophy. I think the pre-match info would make the game more fair and actually enhance tactical gameplay since it reduces the reliance on Luck on who finds the squishy players first and pushes ppl to play a tactic according to the teamcomps. That goes especially for newer players who dont know which builds are typically played.

Idk difference in philosophy I guess. I'm of the mind where I prefer playing the game to maximum metagaming.

While its true that if you throw people in blind, that does introduce some RNG mechanics, and RNG isn't very competitive.

But a healthy RNG system or two under the right circumstances can be competitive.

Without that RNG, there would be no figuring out who the squishy players are, yes; because you'd already know if you could look at everyone's build, meaning the time it takes players to identify and focus down these squishies would be significantly lower than if this information was hidden.

No matter what really, the advantage is going to be with the top players there. I'm sure it would be helpful to a new player to know what everyone else is playing, but a new player looking at this information is basically just copying stuff down, whereas the old heads would be able to see it and know exactly how to counter and what to do with it.

It would be a bit more gamey, but that's ok I think. I like my games gamey. Consider american football and how different that would be if both teams were forced to truthfully explain their plays to the other team. The lack of deception would take out a lot of creative strategy out of the sport, and what was there would be slower and way more predictable.

But then again its american football, it doesn't matter how slow and predictable it is, i'm still not going to have a clue what's going on.

3 hours ago, Luvo.6350 said:

Hell even if anet wants to go with that  play blind and hope for luck at lest they could add a in depth analyses of the performance and build of all players after the game, so ppl can at least learn on what killed them etc.

I think either way, that's something sorely needed is a better death recap.

'Cause right now it tracks things in downstate too. A new player enters the game, dies, checks the death recap and notices they died to burning doing 50k damage in a few seconds, and then its off to the forums to beg Arenanet to delete some kind of menace.

But what the death recap doesn't tell you is that most of that 50k damage ticked while the person was in downstate, making that information useless for one, and bordering on fraudulent in some cases.

Absolutely with you on that.

[pukish.5784]

Bring more quality players from Valorant Overwatch2 CoD MW2 and maybe LoL. It will help this game mode alot. Bring F2P players, PvE carebears never help. Ranked NA matchmaking is already broken corrupted.

[Luvo.6350]

10 hours ago, Multicolorhipster.9751 said:

 

Idk difference in philosophy I guess. I'm of the mind where I prefer playing the game to maximum metagaming.

While its true that if you throw people in blind, that does introduce some RNG mechanics, and RNG isn't very competitive.

But a healthy RNG system or two under the right circumstances can be competitive.

Without that RNG, there would be no figuring out who the squishy players are, yes; because you'd already know if you could look at everyone's build, meaning the time it takes players to identify and focus down these squishies would be significantly lower than if this information was hidden.

No matter what really, the advantage is going to be with the top players there. I'm sure it would be helpful to a new player to know what everyone else is playing, but a new player looking at this information is basically just copying stuff down, whereas the old heads would be able to see it and know exactly how to counter and what to do with it.

It would be a bit more gamey, but that's ok I think. I like my games gamey. Consider american football and how different that would be if both teams were forced to truthfully explain their plays to the other team. The lack of deception would take out a lot of creative strategy out of the sport, and what was there would be slower and way more predictable.

But then again its american football, it doesn't matter how slow and predictable it is, i'm still not going to have a clue what's going on.

Yea personally i find it illogical to have RNG in competitive game modes. And even with all this pre game info you still would have to make up a strategy to actually get to the squish targets, especially if classswap would be locked too. But ya thats just me personally and i guess anet as to decide what they go for.

 

10 hours ago, Multicolorhipster.9751 said:

I think either way, that's something sorely needed is a better death recap.

'Cause right now it tracks things in downstate too. A new player enters the game, dies, checks the death recap and notices they died to burning doing 50k damage in a few seconds, and then its off to the forums to beg Arenanet to delete some kind of menace.

But what the death recap doesn't tell you is that most of that 50k damage ticked while the person was in downstate, making that information useless for one, and bordering on fraudulent in some cases.

Absolutely with you on that.

Agreed the current recap is indeed mighty misleading.