Problems With PvP: Looking at the Bigger Picture

[Demon.6743]

I rarely see devs involved into pvp forum, but if you try to post something on pve, you almost get insta reply from devs and 100+ replies from players in a day.

[BlaqueFyre.5678]

Those are all symptoms not the overlying issues in the OP, the issues are a highly abusable Matchmaker, lack of diversity for gametypes for competitive form in PvP, extremely poor Balance for the Pvp gamemode, Pvp Devs limited in proper maintenance of their gamemode, lack of incentive for competitive Pvp population, lack of support for organized Pvp population.

Fix those issues and the symptoms will shrink.

[Daishi.6027]

@Les.4872 said:

@"Daishi.6027" said:Kill conquest, balance for 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 arenas and people will have a game that can draw players, and keep investment in.

I wonder what makes you think this is such a good idea in the first place. You can balance conquest around holding points. What are you going to balance 1v1, 2v2 and 3v3 after? Killing other players as a sole objective? Closest thing we have to something like that was courtyard and it was horrible to play. The meta will be horrible with only 3 to 4 viable bursty ranged classes and no one's going to want to play it. Conquest 5v5 is competitive and all the devs need to do is to balance better and maybe lower the pace of the game so that lower tier players can keep up. Right now the game is very fast paced which the higher tier players are great at but lower tier players can't keep up so they fall victim to 1 trick pony builds and classes and start crying on the forums.

First off I said balance around it, so the idea of only having a few viable builds is irrelevant. If a-net properly balance around the mode we should not have that problem.

And yes balancing around killing players is a fine objective, this is PvP after all, a ton of successful Games are. Sure Dota and LoL might be about breaking the nexus, but a vast majority of that is taking proper team fights on a significantly more structured map, while everything prior involves jousting in your lane... Which usually means 1v1, 2v2, or avoid gank while beating your opponent to death or submission.

As for 5v5 conquest, it doesn't matter how good and competitive you "think" it is, it's how good it actually is long term.We are years in, it has failed to maintain players, and promote a healthy and thriving competitive environment.Unless you consider petting zoo, hambow, 3 eles to a team, chronobunk, and the ever expanding list before and after these, to be competitive with a-net's refusal to change mid way through.

Right now we end up losing more big players with very little to take it's place, and the population is only kept in check by PvE farmers who half the PvP community yells at to get out, and stay in their own game.

One of the biggest issues with numbers as large as "5v5" is visual noise.It kills the barrier to entry, and the entire possibility of succeeding as an e-sport."Conquest" Fails because even if you got past the visual noise issue, it's not very appealing to watch. I realize this is a subjective thing, but viewership numbers don't lie.As a more minor side note unlike mobas where a lot of the game is seen through remaining towers, and the tug of war; GW2's score board is literally a count up timer, which is also very unappealing for viewership marketing reasons.

A reason why conquest is bad for the player, is no one wants to rate because someone made a bad rotation, or someone didn't win a match-up they were supposed to.This is the nature of ANY team game, but it is even more punishing in GW2 when unlike a MOBA where you can regroup or try to actively defend something with a solid defenders advantage, here in GW2 you just lose momentum for the whole team.You can call it fair or just part of the game, but again no one wants to rate based on it, so why make it worse for the actual experience?

Smaller games allows for "plays" to be the core focus. Directly out playing players, you may consider it subjective, but is typically part of what makes PvP in most games so good to play, and more interesting to watch.Plus with smaller games it solves the problem with the amount of visual noise that tends to deter viewership.

[Vlerk.4761]

No, no, no, no. Pvp is fine as it is.