Would you play ranked if the rewards werent that much better than unranked?

ReaverKane.7598 · November 19, 2018

@Amaranthe.3578 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
I don't think the question is exactly the right question, but honestly at this point i really don't know how i'd phrase that better.
@Amaranthe.3578 said:Ever wonder why your ranked games are so dumb?65% of the people are there for the rewards :DNo news there. It took a nose dive since they added ranked seasons for a reason. Sure it coincided with the poor, poor balance that came with HoT release. But people were still playing a lot of PvP between HoT and Season 1. Thing is, that time, people that enjoyed PvP were palying PvP, people that didn't weren't. Then, they added more easy to farm stuff onto PvP, most of it PvE-centric rewards that were exclusive to PvP or that were easier to farm in PvP.So guess what? PvE players that dislike PvP started farming PvP. This skewed all the numbers, and led to the complete and utter failure that is current sPvP.

Arena Net can't not know this. They have the numbers of players and matches, and there must be a huge dip between Season and off-season. That would be enough to tell them that people are playing PvP for the rewards (because people that are serious about sPVP will play unranked to keep sharp in the off-season, or even ranked without rewards, not sure you can do that though).

Arena Net devs have seemingly learned nothing in the 2+ years that we players have been noticing a decay in sPvP quality, and have done little or nothing to improve it. Removing titles? Like that's what's on the line, the titles...I've lost all faith that we'll ever see proper PvP when @Ben Phongluangtham.1065 answered a question about Team queue by saying he thinks teams are less competitive than solo queues. That's when i knew we wouldn't ever have the good old days of proper sPvP. Because, the people in charge are pretty much saying the opposite of just about every other competitive game out there. What Arena Net were/are saying themselves. There's no solo AT's there's no solo queue World championships, and yet solo queue is where the competitive scene is? Sense is being made, right?

PS: Tagged Ben, because i don't like talking behind people's backs, and i'm sure it would be interesting to see him defend that point of view.

A DEV said that??If solo is more competetive why did they allow TEAMS on their ESL? xDI honestly cant believe that a game dev would say that seriously... perhaps to placate the community which is casual for the most part.

No, he said that teams aren't competitive, he didn't establish how or why.

Here's a link to the comment:https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/652017/#Comment_652017

I asked

Will a team queue ever be an option?Ben answered:

We don't have any current plans to bring 5 person queuing back to ranked queue.

I don't feel it's competitive.

On-Demand tournaments and AT's will be our method of support for people who prefer to play in 5 person teams.Of course anyone that tried AT's knows that it's not easy to fit their schedule, heck i've never managed to have a team online at once while an AT was running.The poll and it's timing just shows how poorly the competitive team does their homework, because while they were doing their vote, Riot and League of Legends were in of returning team queue in the form of the current Flex queue. While Arena Net took the exact opposite direction.

Seriously, just look at the history of the game, and you'll see that the current system does not work. We had way more people (or feels like it, but i'll keep to this claim until i see a dev show me numbers) and way better matches when we barely had any rewards for PvP, and no leagues, than we do now.> @Durzlla.6295 said:

@Amaranthe.3578 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
I don't think the question is exactly the right question, but honestly at this point i really don't know how i'd phrase that better.
@Amaranthe.3578 said:Ever wonder why your ranked games are so dumb?65% of the people are there for the rewards :DNo news there. It took a nose dive since they added ranked seasons for a reason. Sure it coincided with the poor, poor balance that came with HoT release. But people were still playing a lot of PvP between HoT and Season 1. Thing is, that time, people that enjoyed PvP were palying PvP, people that didn't weren't. Then, they added more easy to farm stuff onto PvP, most of it PvE-centric rewards that were exclusive to PvP or that were easier to farm in PvP.So guess what? PvE players that dislike PvP started farming PvP. This skewed all the numbers, and led to the complete and utter failure that is current sPvP.

Arena Net can't not know this. They have the numbers of players and matches, and there must be a huge dip between Season and off-season. That would be enough to tell them that people are playing PvP for the rewards (because people that are serious about sPVP will play unranked to keep sharp in the off-season, or even ranked without rewards, not sure you can do that though).

Arena Net devs have seemingly learned nothing in the 2+ years that we players have been noticing a decay in sPvP quality, and have done little or nothing to improve it. Removing titles? Like that's what's on the line, the titles...I've lost all faith that we'll ever see proper PvP when @Ben Phongluangtham.1065 answered a question about Team queue by saying he thinks teams are less competitive than solo queues. That's when i knew we wouldn't ever have the good old days of proper sPvP. Because, the people in charge are pretty much saying the opposite of just about every other competitive game out there. What Arena Net were/are saying themselves. There's no solo AT's there's no solo queue World championships, and yet solo queue is where the competitive scene is? Sense is being made, right?

PS: Tagged Ben, because i don't like talking behind people's backs, and i'm sure it would be interesting to see him defend that point of view.

A DEV said that??If solo is more competetive why did they allow TEAMS on their ESL? xDI honestly cant believe that a game dev would say that seriously... perhaps to playcate the community which is casual for the most part.

He was talking about straight up 5 man team que matches vs solo que matches. And he’s not wrong, there’s a reason why there’s no actual team que in League nowadays,because the actual teams don’t care about it because they’ll just play in tournaments, and your not as amazing players won’t even bother with it.

Actually, he was talking about bringing team queue back. Never said anything about other queues.And there is a team queue in LoL, and it was returned when Arena Net was removing theirs. In fact league's current team queue (Flex Q) works exactly how GW2's Ranked queue used to work.

Hell, automated Tournaments fill the roll team que would much better, and makes it so that teams don’t end up just fighting like the same 2-5 other teams that are in their bracket like a team que would.
No, they don't because Tournaments aren't always available. Tournaments would be a good compliment to team queues, but they don't replace them. Again, returning your example of LoL. They now have a similar system to AT's PLUS FLEX QUEUE and solo/duo.
TLDR: Team Ques sucks because they stagnate easily and no one even bothers with them if solo que is an option.Proof?Because, when there was a Ranked Flex (aka team) queue, that's when the game had the most population. The only stagnation i see came after that was removed.Also, just look at how much win-trading, and other toxic behaviour grew after team queue was removed and tell me that solo/duo is the better answer with a straight face.

Bossun.2046 · November 19, 2018

Pips are the only reason I play ranked

Duncanmix.5238 · November 19, 2018

I play both ranked and unranked. I'll admit that quality of matches is generally higher in ranked. My issue is that its 80% forest or legacy. People feel comfortable playing them, and aren't willing to mix it up in ranked. I'm so sick of forest and legacy that I would rather play spiritwatch or any other map. So that's why I often drift to unranked.

Durzlla.6295 · November 19, 2018

@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
I don't think the question is exactly the right question, but honestly at this point i really don't know how i'd phrase that better.
@Amaranthe.3578 said:Ever wonder why your ranked games are so dumb?65% of the people are there for the rewards :DNo news there. It took a nose dive since they added ranked seasons for a reason. Sure it coincided with the poor, poor balance that came with HoT release. But people were still playing a lot of PvP between HoT and Season 1. Thing is, that time, people that enjoyed PvP were palying PvP, people that didn't weren't. Then, they added more easy to farm stuff onto PvP, most of it PvE-centric rewards that were exclusive to PvP or that were easier to farm in PvP.So guess what? PvE players that dislike PvP started farming PvP. This skewed all the numbers, and led to the complete and utter failure that is current sPvP.

Arena Net can't not know this. They have the numbers of players and matches, and there must be a huge dip between Season and off-season. That would be enough to tell them that people are playing PvP for the rewards (because people that are serious about sPVP will play unranked to keep sharp in the off-season, or even ranked without rewards, not sure you can do that though).

Arena Net devs have seemingly learned nothing in the 2+ years that we players have been noticing a decay in sPvP quality, and have done little or nothing to improve it. Removing titles? Like that's what's on the line, the titles...I've lost all faith that we'll ever see proper PvP when @Ben Phongluangtham.1065 answered a question about Team queue by saying he thinks teams are less competitive than solo queues. That's when i knew we wouldn't ever have the good old days of proper sPvP. Because, the people in charge are pretty much saying the opposite of just about every other competitive game out there. What Arena Net were/are saying themselves. There's no solo AT's there's no solo queue World championships, and yet solo queue is where the competitive scene is? Sense is being made, right?

PS: Tagged Ben, because i don't like talking behind people's backs, and i'm sure it would be interesting to see him defend that point of view.

A DEV said that??If solo is more competetive why did they allow TEAMS on their ESL? xDI honestly cant believe that a game dev would say that seriously... perhaps to placate the community which is casual for the most part.

No, he said that teams aren't competitive, he didn't establish how or why.

Here's a link to the comment:

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/652017/#Comment_652017

I asked

Will a team queue ever be an option?Ben answered:

We don't have any current plans to bring 5 person queuing back to ranked queue.

I don't feel it's competitive.

On-Demand tournaments and AT's will be our method of support for people who prefer to play in 5 person teams.Of course anyone that tried AT's knows that it's not easy to fit their schedule, heck i've never managed to have a team online at once while an AT was running.The poll and it's timing just shows how poorly the competitive team does their homework, because while they were doing their vote, Riot and League of Legends were in of returning team queue in the form of the current Flex queue. While Arena Net took the exact opposite direction.

Seriously, just look at the history of the game, and you'll see that the current system does not work. We had

way

more people (or feels like it, but i'll keep to this claim until i see a dev show me numbers) and

way better

matches when we barely had any rewards for PvP, and no leagues, than we do now.> @Durzlla.6295 said:

@Amaranthe.3578 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
I don't think the question is exactly the right question, but honestly at this point i really don't know how i'd phrase that better.
@Amaranthe.3578 said:Ever wonder why your ranked games are so dumb?65% of the people are there for the rewards :DNo news there. It took a nose dive since they added ranked seasons for a reason. Sure it coincided with the poor, poor balance that came with HoT release. But people were still playing a lot of PvP between HoT and Season 1. Thing is, that time, people that enjoyed PvP were palying PvP, people that didn't weren't. Then, they added more easy to farm stuff onto PvP, most of it PvE-centric rewards that were exclusive to PvP or that were easier to farm in PvP.So guess what? PvE players that dislike PvP started farming PvP. This skewed all the numbers, and led to the complete and utter failure that is current sPvP.

Arena Net can't not know this. They have the numbers of players and matches, and there must be a huge dip between Season and off-season. That would be enough to tell them that people are playing PvP for the rewards (because people that are serious about sPVP will play unranked to keep sharp in the off-season, or even ranked without rewards, not sure you can do that though).

Arena Net devs have seemingly learned nothing in the 2+ years that we players have been noticing a decay in sPvP quality, and have done little or nothing to improve it. Removing titles? Like that's what's on the line, the titles...I've lost all faith that we'll ever see proper PvP when @Ben Phongluangtham.1065 answered a question about Team queue by saying he thinks teams are less competitive than solo queues. That's when i knew we wouldn't ever have the good old days of proper sPvP. Because, the people in charge are pretty much saying the opposite of just about every other competitive game out there. What Arena Net were/are saying themselves. There's no solo AT's there's no solo queue World championships, and yet solo queue is where the competitive scene is? Sense is being made, right?

PS: Tagged Ben, because i don't like talking behind people's backs, and i'm sure it would be interesting to see him defend that point of view.

A DEV said that??If solo is more competetive why did they allow TEAMS on their ESL? xDI honestly cant believe that a game dev would say that seriously... perhaps to playcate the community which is casual for the most part.

He was talking about straight up 5 man team que matches vs solo que matches. And he’s not wrong, there’s a reason why there’s no actual team que in League nowadays,because the actual teams don’t care about it because they’ll just play in tournaments, and your not as amazing players won’t even bother with it.

Actually, he was talking about bringing team queue back. Never said anything about other queues.And there is a team queue in LoL, and it was returned when Arena Net was removing theirs. In fact league's current team queue (Flex Q) works exactly how GW2's Ranked queue used to work.

Hell, automated Tournaments fill the roll team que would much better, and makes it so that teams don’t end up just fighting like the same 2-5 other teams that are in their bracket like a team que would.
No, they don't because Tournaments aren't always available. Tournaments would be a good compliment to team queues, but they don't replace them. Again, returning your example of LoL. They now have a similar system to AT's
PLUS
FLEX QUEUE
and
solo/duo.
TLDR: Team Ques sucks because they stagnate easily and no one even bothers with them if solo que is an option.Proof?Because, when there was a Ranked Flex (aka team) queue, that's when the game had the most population. The only stagnation i see came after that was removed.Also, just look at how much win-trading, and other toxic behaviour grew after team queue was removed and tell me that solo/duo is the better answer with a straight face.

Sorry, I should’ve clarified when I said team que I was referring to straight up full man team que, a Flex Que would be doable, but would likely still be worse than a solo Que for the same reasons the only flex que ranked mode sucked in the first place. If they added a secondary Flex Que that might work, just give it different titles or w/e I guess?

However, the main problem that we had when flex que was the only ranked system was that if you weren’t in a team you had a good chance of just getting fucked. Because for whatever ungodly reason Anets matchmaking system wouldn’t weight premade teams properly and would regularly throw 5 randoms, or 3 randoms and a duo against a full premade team. Or you could end up being the lone wolf with a 4 man squad or two duos which was equally awful because you never had any idea what their plan was or what they were doing.

Also, Anet added in the rewards because the PvP population was awful, there was absolutely no one playing but the most dedicated of PvPers. They even mentioned that the PvP population has gone UP since rewards were added, which isn’t surprising, however I wouldn’t be amazed if that increase would evaporate as soon as rewards were removed.

Azure The Heartless.3261 · November 19, 2018

If I still cared about ranked, I'd be playing only if they paid me, either in rewards or titles.I'd rather fight in unranked with a team I know and have trained with and lose, than scrape out a win based on RNG in ranked. Loot only slightly moves the needle the other way, but its enough to make me consider it. Or it was. Idk now.

ReaverKane.7598 · November 20, 2018

@Durzlla.6295 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
I don't think the question is exactly the right question, but honestly at this point i really don't know how i'd phrase that better.
@Amaranthe.3578 said:Ever wonder why your ranked games are so dumb?65% of the people are there for the rewards :DNo news there. It took a nose dive since they added ranked seasons for a reason. Sure it coincided with the poor, poor balance that came with HoT release. But people were still playing a lot of PvP between HoT and Season 1. Thing is, that time, people that enjoyed PvP were palying PvP, people that didn't weren't. Then, they added more easy to farm stuff onto PvP, most of it PvE-centric rewards that were exclusive to PvP or that were easier to farm in PvP.So guess what? PvE players that dislike PvP started farming PvP. This skewed all the numbers, and led to the complete and utter failure that is current sPvP.

Arena Net can't not know this. They have the numbers of players and matches, and there must be a huge dip between Season and off-season. That would be enough to tell them that people are playing PvP for the rewards (because people that are serious about sPVP will play unranked to keep sharp in the off-season, or even ranked without rewards, not sure you can do that though).

Arena Net devs have seemingly learned nothing in the 2+ years that we players have been noticing a decay in sPvP quality, and have done little or nothing to improve it. Removing titles? Like that's what's on the line, the titles...I've lost all faith that we'll ever see proper PvP when @"Ben Phongluangtham.1065" answered a question about Team queue by saying he thinks teams are less competitive than solo queues. That's when i knew we wouldn't ever have the good old days of proper sPvP. Because, the people in charge are pretty much saying the opposite of just about every other competitive game out there. What Arena Net were/are saying themselves. There's no solo AT's there's no solo queue World championships, and yet solo queue is where the competitive scene is? Sense is being made, right?

PS: Tagged Ben, because i don't like talking behind people's backs, and i'm sure it would be interesting to see him defend that point of view.

A DEV said that??If solo is more competetive why did they allow TEAMS on their ESL? xDI honestly cant believe that a game dev would say that seriously... perhaps to placate the community which is casual for the most part.

No, he said that teams aren't competitive, he didn't establish how or why.

Here's a link to the comment:

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/652017/#Comment_652017

I asked

Will a team queue ever be an option?Ben answered:

We don't have any current plans to bring 5 person queuing back to ranked queue.

I don't feel it's competitive.

On-Demand tournaments and AT's will be our method of support for people who prefer to play in 5 person teams.Of course anyone that tried AT's knows that it's not easy to fit their schedule, heck i've never managed to have a team online at once while an AT was running.The poll and it's timing just shows how poorly the competitive team does their homework, because while they were doing their vote, Riot and League of Legends were in of returning team queue in the form of the current Flex queue. While Arena Net took the exact opposite direction.

Seriously, just look at the history of the game, and you'll see that the current system does not work. We had

way

more people (or feels like it, but i'll keep to this claim until i see a dev show me numbers) and

way better

matches when we barely had any rewards for PvP, and no leagues, than we do now.> @Durzlla.6295 said:

@Amaranthe.3578 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
I don't think the question is exactly the right question, but honestly at this point i really don't know how i'd phrase that better.
@Amaranthe.3578 said:Ever wonder why your ranked games are so dumb?65% of the people are there for the rewards :DNo news there. It took a nose dive since they added ranked seasons for a reason. Sure it coincided with the poor, poor balance that came with HoT release. But people were still playing a lot of PvP between HoT and Season 1. Thing is, that time, people that enjoyed PvP were palying PvP, people that didn't weren't. Then, they added more easy to farm stuff onto PvP, most of it PvE-centric rewards that were exclusive to PvP or that were easier to farm in PvP.So guess what? PvE players that dislike PvP started farming PvP. This skewed all the numbers, and led to the complete and utter failure that is current sPvP.

Arena Net can't not know this. They have the numbers of players and matches, and there must be a huge dip between Season and off-season. That would be enough to tell them that people are playing PvP for the rewards (because people that are serious about sPVP will play unranked to keep sharp in the off-season, or even ranked without rewards, not sure you can do that though).

Arena Net devs have seemingly learned nothing in the 2+ years that we players have been noticing a decay in sPvP quality, and have done little or nothing to improve it. Removing titles? Like that's what's on the line, the titles...I've lost all faith that we'll ever see proper PvP when @"Ben Phongluangtham.1065" answered a question about Team queue by saying he thinks teams are less competitive than solo queues. That's when i knew we wouldn't ever have the good old days of proper sPvP. Because, the people in charge are pretty much saying the opposite of just about every other competitive game out there. What Arena Net were/are saying themselves. There's no solo AT's there's no solo queue World championships, and yet solo queue is where the competitive scene is? Sense is being made, right?

PS: Tagged Ben, because i don't like talking behind people's backs, and i'm sure it would be interesting to see him defend that point of view.

A DEV said that??If solo is more competetive why did they allow TEAMS on their ESL? xDI honestly cant believe that a game dev would say that seriously... perhaps to playcate the community which is casual for the most part.

He was talking about straight up 5 man team que matches vs solo que matches. And he’s not wrong, there’s a reason why there’s no actual team que in League nowadays,because the actual teams don’t care about it because they’ll just play in tournaments, and your not as amazing players won’t even bother with it.

Actually, he was talking about bringing team queue back. Never said anything about other queues.And there is a team queue in LoL, and it was returned when Arena Net was removing theirs. In fact league's current team queue (Flex Q) works exactly how GW2's Ranked queue used to work.

Hell, automated Tournaments fill the roll team que would much better, and makes it so that teams don’t end up just fighting like the same 2-5 other teams that are in their bracket like a team que would.
No, they don't because Tournaments aren't always available. Tournaments would be a good compliment to team queues, but they don't replace them. Again, returning your example of LoL. They now have a similar system to AT's
PLUS
FLEX QUEUE
and
solo/duo.
TLDR: Team Ques sucks because they stagnate easily and no one even bothers with them if solo que is an option.Proof?Because, when there was a Ranked Flex (aka team) queue, that's when the game had the most population. The only stagnation i see came after that was removed.Also, just look at how much win-trading, and other toxic behaviour grew after team queue was removed and tell me that solo/duo is the better answer with a straight face.

Sorry, I should’ve clarified when I said team que I was referring to straight up full man team que, a Flex Que would be doable, but would likely still be worse than a solo Que for the same reasons the only flex que ranked mode sucked in the first place. If they added a secondary Flex Que that might work, just give it different titles or w/e I guess?

However, the main problem that we had when flex que was the only ranked system was that if you weren’t in a team you had a good chance of just getting kitten. Because for whatever ungodly reason Anets matchmaking system wouldn’t weight premade teams properly and would regularly throw 5 randoms, or 3 randoms and a duo against a full premade team. Or you could end up being the lone wolf with a 4 man squad or two duos which was equally awful because you never had any idea what their plan was or what they were doing.

We don't really have any data that backs that up. Sadly Arena Net wasn't very open in such findings. The only quote i can find from a dev on these subjects states only that full solo players vs full 5 man teams had a even win rate with the full solos being a bit ahead. This was somewhere around season 2-3.Being the lone wolf on a 4 man squad, or being the lone wolf with two duos, never mind the fact that the later is possible right now, since it's solo/duo queue. Isn't any different than being a solo player on a 5 man solo team. With the down-side that being the solo guy on a 4 man group, you at least have 4 coordinated players on your team. Being in a 5 man solo group, especially now a days you're more likely than not to find yourself with people just leisurely playing in the spawn, or throwing matches like there's no tomorrow. Personally i'd rather get "carried" by a 4 man group as a solo player than get dragged down by 4 other solo players. But i guess not being a masochist makes me weird.

Also, Anet added in the rewards because the PvP population was awful, there was absolutely no one playing but the most dedicated of PvPers. They even mentioned that the PvP population has gone UP since rewards were added, which isn’t surprising, however I wouldn’t be amazed if that increase would evaporate as soon as rewards were removed.

Awful? It was growing... Before leaving Colin Johanson couldn't shut up at how much PvP was growing. I believe there's a miscommunication here... What rewards are you talking about? Reward tracks? If those, yeah, it went up after those were added, not after ranked league rewards. After ranked came about, and especially since ranked flex queue was replaced with solo queue, there's been nothing but decline. And you can easily see it in how poor matchmaking became.

Amaranthe.3578 · November 20, 2018

@Azure The Heartless.3261 said:If I still cared about ranked, I'd be playing only if they paid me, either in rewards or titles.I'd rather fight in unranked with a team I know and have trained with and lose, than scrape out a win based on RNG in ranked. Loot only slightly moves the needle the other way, but its enough to make me consider it. Or it was. Idk now.

Ive seen people on this forum insane enough to claim gw2 pvp isnt about team play xD

Wisty.4135 · November 21, 2018

Gimme dem rewards. That and there is a small satisfaction of dunking on others who may not be as technically sound with their classes. But mostly the good AF gold and the free ascended armor.

sephiroth.4217 · November 24, 2018

@Durzlla.6295 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
I don't think the question is exactly the right question, but honestly at this point i really don't know how i'd phrase that better.
@Amaranthe.3578 said:Ever wonder why your ranked games are so dumb?65% of the people are there for the rewards :DNo news there. It took a nose dive since they added ranked seasons for a reason. Sure it coincided with the poor, poor balance that came with HoT release. But people were still playing a lot of PvP between HoT and Season 1. Thing is, that time, people that enjoyed PvP were palying PvP, people that didn't weren't. Then, they added more easy to farm stuff onto PvP, most of it PvE-centric rewards that were exclusive to PvP or that were easier to farm in PvP.So guess what? PvE players that dislike PvP started farming PvP. This skewed all the numbers, and led to the complete and utter failure that is current sPvP.

Arena Net can't not know this. They have the numbers of players and matches, and there must be a huge dip between Season and off-season. That would be enough to tell them that people are playing PvP for the rewards (because people that are serious about sPVP will play unranked to keep sharp in the off-season, or even ranked without rewards, not sure you can do that though).

Arena Net devs have seemingly learned nothing in the 2+ years that we players have been noticing a decay in sPvP quality, and have done little or nothing to improve it. Removing titles? Like that's what's on the line, the titles...I've lost all faith that we'll ever see proper PvP when @"Ben Phongluangtham.1065" answered a question about Team queue by saying he thinks teams are less competitive than solo queues. That's when i knew we wouldn't ever have the good old days of proper sPvP. Because, the people in charge are pretty much saying the opposite of just about every other competitive game out there. What Arena Net were/are saying themselves. There's no solo AT's there's no solo queue World championships, and yet solo queue is where the competitive scene is? Sense is being made, right?

PS: Tagged Ben, because i don't like talking behind people's backs, and i'm sure it would be interesting to see him defend that point of view.

A DEV said that??If solo is more competetive why did they allow TEAMS on their ESL? xDI honestly cant believe that a game dev would say that seriously... perhaps to playcate the community which is casual for the most part.

TLDR: Team Ques sucks because they stagnate easily and no one even bothers with them if solo que is an option.

And yet when they were a thing our population was much higher, there were plenty of pvp focused guilds to join and team queue popped quicker than solo queue because the rewards were higher in team, was a good way to fill the 3 or 4 man squads.

Balancing was also much better too because as a small group you could form real roles and builds, it wasnt all "me" builds, they never lasted against a team build.

losingcontrol.1084 · November 24, 2018

@sephiroth.4217 said:Rank is worthless..
If the same loot was in unranked, I would just stay in unranked and keep having fun rather than ruin everyone elses rank just because Ive got no other option.
If the loot was in unranked too, could live up old days of playing with friends and farming together...
I really hate asking who wants to duo and getting 2 or 3 responses, i always feel bad for excluding guildies and friends.

But then a lot of matches would be 5manQ against soloQ guys, and people sit there farm all day, and not much fun for soloQers.

Durzlla.6295 · November 24, 2018

@sephiroth.4217 said:
@Durzlla.6295 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
I don't think the question is exactly the right question, but honestly at this point i really don't know how i'd phrase that better.
@Amaranthe.3578 said:Ever wonder why your ranked games are so dumb?65% of the people are there for the rewards :DNo news there. It took a nose dive since they added ranked seasons for a reason. Sure it coincided with the poor, poor balance that came with HoT release. But people were still playing a lot of PvP between HoT and Season 1. Thing is, that time, people that enjoyed PvP were palying PvP, people that didn't weren't. Then, they added more easy to farm stuff onto PvP, most of it PvE-centric rewards that were exclusive to PvP or that were easier to farm in PvP.So guess what? PvE players that dislike PvP started farming PvP. This skewed all the numbers, and led to the complete and utter failure that is current sPvP.

Arena Net can't not know this. They have the numbers of players and matches, and there must be a huge dip between Season and off-season. That would be enough to tell them that people are playing PvP for the rewards (because people that are serious about sPVP will play unranked to keep sharp in the off-season, or even ranked without rewards, not sure you can do that though).

Arena Net devs have seemingly learned nothing in the 2+ years that we players have been noticing a decay in sPvP quality, and have done little or nothing to improve it. Removing titles? Like that's what's on the line, the titles...I've lost all faith that we'll ever see proper PvP when @"Ben Phongluangtham.1065" answered a question about Team queue by saying he thinks teams are less competitive than solo queues. That's when i knew we wouldn't ever have the good old days of proper sPvP. Because, the people in charge are pretty much saying the opposite of just about every other competitive game out there. What Arena Net were/are saying themselves. There's no solo AT's there's no solo queue World championships, and yet solo queue is where the competitive scene is? Sense is being made, right?

PS: Tagged Ben, because i don't like talking behind people's backs, and i'm sure it would be interesting to see him defend that point of view.

A DEV said that??If solo is more competetive why did they allow TEAMS on their ESL? xDI honestly cant believe that a game dev would say that seriously... perhaps to playcate the community which is casual for the most part.

TLDR: Team Ques sucks because they stagnate easily and no one even bothers with them if solo que is an option.

And yet when they were a thing our population was much higher, there were plenty of pvp focused guilds to join and team queue popped quicker than solo queue because the rewards were higher in team, was a good way to fill the 3 or 4 man squads.

Balancing was also much better too because as a small group you could form real roles and builds, it wasnt all "me" builds, they never lasted against a team build.

I'm not going to claim if the PvP pop was higher or lower back then because i don't know for sure, i'm just on the outside looking in and other than the vague "yeah we have more PvPers than before rewards!" comments from anet we don't have any actual numbers given.

However, I do agree it was nice being able to sit down with your friends and just play together as a team, the automated tournaments are great and all, but due to how they're worked you need to plan around them. Which sucks, I still think it'd be awesome if they added a flex que in ADDITION to solo que, and then make solo que just straight up solo, no duo at all.

And i feel you on the last point, I've always gravitated towards support/bunker builds and those do not do nearly as well as the "me" builds in terms of carrying incompetence in solo queues.

Durzlla.6295 · November 24, 2018

@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Durzlla.6295 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
I don't think the question is exactly the right question, but honestly at this point i really don't know how i'd phrase that better.
@Amaranthe.3578 said:Ever wonder why your ranked games are so dumb?65% of the people are there for the rewards :DNo news there. It took a nose dive since they added ranked seasons for a reason. Sure it coincided with the poor, poor balance that came with HoT release. But people were still playing a lot of PvP between HoT and Season 1. Thing is, that time, people that enjoyed PvP were palying PvP, people that didn't weren't. Then, they added more easy to farm stuff onto PvP, most of it PvE-centric rewards that were exclusive to PvP or that were easier to farm in PvP.So guess what? PvE players that dislike PvP started farming PvP. This skewed all the numbers, and led to the complete and utter failure that is current sPvP.

Arena Net can't not know this. They have the numbers of players and matches, and there must be a huge dip between Season and off-season. That would be enough to tell them that people are playing PvP for the rewards (because people that are serious about sPVP will play unranked to keep sharp in the off-season, or even ranked without rewards, not sure you can do that though).

Arena Net devs have seemingly learned nothing in the 2+ years that we players have been noticing a decay in sPvP quality, and have done little or nothing to improve it. Removing titles? Like that's what's on the line, the titles...I've lost all faith that we'll ever see proper PvP when @"Ben Phongluangtham.1065" answered a question about Team queue by saying he thinks teams are less competitive than solo queues. That's when i knew we wouldn't ever have the good old days of proper sPvP. Because, the people in charge are pretty much saying the opposite of just about every other competitive game out there. What Arena Net were/are saying themselves. There's no solo AT's there's no solo queue World championships, and yet solo queue is where the competitive scene is? Sense is being made, right?

PS: Tagged Ben, because i don't like talking behind people's backs, and i'm sure it would be interesting to see him defend that point of view.

A DEV said that??If solo is more competetive why did they allow TEAMS on their ESL? xDI honestly cant believe that a game dev would say that seriously... perhaps to placate the community which is casual for the most part.

No, he said that teams aren't competitive, he didn't establish how or why.

Here's a link to the comment:

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/652017/#Comment_652017

I asked

Will a team queue ever be an option?Ben answered:

We don't have any current plans to bring 5 person queuing back to ranked queue.

I don't feel it's competitive.

On-Demand tournaments and AT's will be our method of support for people who prefer to play in 5 person teams.Of course anyone that tried AT's knows that it's not easy to fit their schedule, heck i've never managed to have a team online at once while an AT was running.The poll and it's timing just shows how poorly the competitive team does their homework, because while they were doing their vote, Riot and League of Legends were in of returning team queue in the form of the current Flex queue. While Arena Net took the exact opposite direction.

Seriously, just look at the history of the game, and you'll see that the current system does not work. We had

way

more people (or feels like it, but i'll keep to this claim until i see a dev show me numbers) and

way better

matches when we barely had any rewards for PvP, and no leagues, than we do now.> @Durzlla.6295 said:

@Amaranthe.3578 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
I don't think the question is exactly the right question, but honestly at this point i really don't know how i'd phrase that better.
@Amaranthe.3578 said:Ever wonder why your ranked games are so dumb?65% of the people are there for the rewards :DNo news there. It took a nose dive since they added ranked seasons for a reason. Sure it coincided with the poor, poor balance that came with HoT release. But people were still playing a lot of PvP between HoT and Season 1. Thing is, that time, people that enjoyed PvP were palying PvP, people that didn't weren't. Then, they added more easy to farm stuff onto PvP, most of it PvE-centric rewards that were exclusive to PvP or that were easier to farm in PvP.So guess what? PvE players that dislike PvP started farming PvP. This skewed all the numbers, and led to the complete and utter failure that is current sPvP.

Arena Net can't not know this. They have the numbers of players and matches, and there must be a huge dip between Season and off-season. That would be enough to tell them that people are playing PvP for the rewards (because people that are serious about sPVP will play unranked to keep sharp in the off-season, or even ranked without rewards, not sure you can do that though).

Arena Net devs have seemingly learned nothing in the 2+ years that we players have been noticing a decay in sPvP quality, and have done little or nothing to improve it. Removing titles? Like that's what's on the line, the titles...I've lost all faith that we'll ever see proper PvP when @"Ben Phongluangtham.1065" answered a question about Team queue by saying he thinks teams are less competitive than solo queues. That's when i knew we wouldn't ever have the good old days of proper sPvP. Because, the people in charge are pretty much saying the opposite of just about every other competitive game out there. What Arena Net were/are saying themselves. There's no solo AT's there's no solo queue World championships, and yet solo queue is where the competitive scene is? Sense is being made, right?

PS: Tagged Ben, because i don't like talking behind people's backs, and i'm sure it would be interesting to see him defend that point of view.

A DEV said that??If solo is more competetive why did they allow TEAMS on their ESL? xDI honestly cant believe that a game dev would say that seriously... perhaps to playcate the community which is casual for the most part.

He was talking about straight up 5 man team que matches vs solo que matches. And he’s not wrong, there’s a reason why there’s no actual team que in League nowadays,because the actual teams don’t care about it because they’ll just play in tournaments, and your not as amazing players won’t even bother with it.

Actually, he was talking about bringing team queue back. Never said anything about other queues.And there is a team queue in LoL, and it was returned when Arena Net was removing theirs. In fact league's current team queue (Flex Q) works exactly how GW2's Ranked queue used to work.

Hell, automated Tournaments fill the roll team que would much better, and makes it so that teams don’t end up just fighting like the same 2-5 other teams that are in their bracket like a team que would.
No, they don't because Tournaments aren't always available. Tournaments would be a good compliment to team queues, but they don't replace them. Again, returning your example of LoL. They now have a similar system to AT's
PLUS
FLEX QUEUE
and
solo/duo.
TLDR: Team Ques sucks because they stagnate easily and no one even bothers with them if solo que is an option.Proof?Because, when there was a Ranked Flex (aka team) queue, that's when the game had the most population. The only stagnation i see came after that was removed.Also, just look at how much win-trading, and other toxic behaviour grew after team queue was removed and tell me that solo/duo is the better answer with a straight face.

Sorry, I should’ve clarified when I said team que I was referring to straight up full man team que, a Flex Que would be doable, but would likely still be worse than a solo Que for the same reasons the only flex que ranked mode sucked in the first place. If they added a secondary Flex Que that might work, just give it different titles or w/e I guess?

However, the main problem that we had when flex que was the only ranked system was that if you weren’t in a team you had a good chance of just getting kitten. Because for whatever ungodly reason Anets matchmaking system wouldn’t weight premade teams properly and would regularly throw 5 randoms, or 3 randoms and a duo against a full premade team. Or you could end up being the lone wolf with a 4 man squad or two duos which was equally awful because you never had any idea what their plan was or what they were doing.

We don't really have any data that backs that up. Sadly Arena Net wasn't very open in such findings. The only quote i can find from a dev on these subjects states only that full solo players vs full 5 man teams had a even win rate with the full solos being a bit ahead. This was somewhere around season 2-3.Being the lone wolf on a 4 man squad, or being the lone wolf with two duos, never mind the fact that the later is possible right now, since it's solo/duo queue. Isn't any different than being a solo player on a 5 man solo team. With the down-side that being the solo guy on a 4 man group, you at least have 4 coordinated players on your team. Being in a 5 man solo group, especially now a days you're more likely than not to find yourself with people just leisurely playing in the spawn, or throwing matches like there's no tomorrow. Personally i'd rather get "carried" by a 4 man group as a solo player than get dragged down by 4 other solo players. But i guess not being a masochist makes me weird.

To be honest, all of the speculations on the PvP pop would be much better, and more accurate, if Anet gave us any concrete numbers, literally no one but anet has an accurate idea of how much the pvp population has increased/decreased at any point. It makes it really hard to actually know whether it's just confirmation bias on the numbers or not but w/e.

For the 4man +1man scenario, the main problem is in pure 5 rando solo mode, people will still typically either draw on the map or say something in chat, where if it's a 4 man those 4 are in Voip so the lone wolf gets 0 info since it is significantly easier to just yell "3 inc mid" in voip then it is to type it out. That being said as i've mentioned previously I'm all for a flex que being added back, even more so if they split it so there's 2 queues a strictly solo and a flex, would make both sides happy.

Also, Anet added in the rewards because the PvP population was awful, there was absolutely no one playing but the most dedicated of PvPers. They even mentioned that the PvP population has gone UP since rewards were added, which isn’t surprising, however I wouldn’t be amazed if that increase would evaporate as soon as rewards were removed.
Awful? It was growing... Before leaving Colin Johanson couldn't shut up at how much PvP was growing. I believe there's a miscommunication here... What rewards are you talking about? Reward tracks? If those, yeah, it went up after those were added, not after ranked league rewards. After ranked came about, and especially since ranked flex queue was replaced with solo queue, there's been nothing but decline. And you can easily see it in how poor matchmaking became.

When people just say "rewards in PvP" in lump them together, so i'm thinking both reward tracks, and the ranked rewards. Personally, I doubt the ranked PvP rewards are what's causing people to stop playing PvP. What's probably causing people to stop playing PvP is how the community has shifted since the ranked PvP rewards.

ReaverKane.7598 · November 24, 2018

@losingcontrol.1084 said:
@"sephiroth.4217" said:Rank is worthless..
If the same loot was in unranked, I would just stay in unranked and keep having fun rather than ruin everyone elses rank just because Ive got no other option.
If the loot was in unranked too, could live up old days of playing with friends and farming together...
I really hate asking who wants to duo and getting 2 or 3 responses, i always feel bad for excluding guildies and friends.

But then a lot of matches would be 5manQ against soloQ guys, and people sit there farm all day, and not much fun for soloQers.

Again, that's a bit of a myth... Arena Net, maybe because of the dev's opinion was lax in confirming or denying this, which means we can't really for sure say this.But there was one quote on the subject of full solos vs full 5 man teams. It was from the patch notes when they changed the algorythm to make it impossible for full 5 man teams to be matched with full solos. And if that isn't enough to assuage your fears, their statement said, although it was somewhat rare, and they were getting rid of it, from their data the win rate for those were roughly 50-50 with the advantage going to full solo teams.What you have to understand, is that back then the population was healthy enough that the matchmaker could work without problems, so full solos were usually matched with teams of weaker players because matchmaking algorithms inflate the ranking of premade groups so they get matched with stronger players. It happens in every game out there, and it's one of the reasons why a lot of people will compete as solo queues, not because it's harder to win vs teams, but because as a team you'll be fighting out of your league. And, sadly, because a lot of GW2 "PvPers" come from a strictly PVE background, this reality is lost to them.

@Durzlla.6295 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Durzlla.6295 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
I don't think the question is exactly the right question, but honestly at this point i really don't know how i'd phrase that better.
@Amaranthe.3578 said:Ever wonder why your ranked games are so dumb?65% of the people are there for the rewards :DNo news there. It took a nose dive since they added ranked seasons for a reason. Sure it coincided with the poor, poor balance that came with HoT release. But people were still playing a lot of PvP between HoT and Season 1. Thing is, that time, people that enjoyed PvP were palying PvP, people that didn't weren't. Then, they added more easy to farm stuff onto PvP, most of it PvE-centric rewards that were exclusive to PvP or that were easier to farm in PvP.So guess what? PvE players that dislike PvP started farming PvP. This skewed all the numbers, and led to the complete and utter failure that is current sPvP.

Arena Net can't not know this. They have the numbers of players and matches, and there must be a huge dip between Season and off-season. That would be enough to tell them that people are playing PvP for the rewards (because people that are serious about sPVP will play unranked to keep sharp in the off-season, or even ranked without rewards, not sure you can do that though).

Arena Net devs have seemingly learned nothing in the 2+ years that we players have been noticing a decay in sPvP quality, and have done little or nothing to improve it. Removing titles? Like that's what's on the line, the titles...I've lost all faith that we'll ever see proper PvP when @"Ben Phongluangtham.1065" answered a question about Team queue by saying he thinks teams are less competitive than solo queues. That's when i knew we wouldn't ever have the good old days of proper sPvP. Because, the people in charge are pretty much saying the opposite of just about every other competitive game out there. What Arena Net were/are saying themselves. There's no solo AT's there's no solo queue World championships, and yet solo queue is where the competitive scene is? Sense is being made, right?

PS: Tagged Ben, because i don't like talking behind people's backs, and i'm sure it would be interesting to see him defend that point of view.

A DEV said that??If solo is more competetive why did they allow TEAMS on their ESL? xDI honestly cant believe that a game dev would say that seriously... perhaps to placate the community which is casual for the most part.

No, he said that teams aren't competitive, he didn't establish how or why.

Here's a link to the comment:

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/652017/#Comment_652017

I asked

Will a team queue ever be an option?Ben answered:

We don't have any current plans to bring 5 person queuing back to ranked queue.

I don't feel it's competitive.

On-Demand tournaments and AT's will be our method of support for people who prefer to play in 5 person teams.Of course anyone that tried AT's knows that it's not easy to fit their schedule, heck i've never managed to have a team online at once while an AT was running.The poll and it's timing just shows how poorly the competitive team does their homework, because while they were doing their vote, Riot and League of Legends were in of returning team queue in the form of the current Flex queue. While Arena Net took the exact opposite direction.

Seriously, just look at the history of the game, and you'll see that the current system does not work. We had

way

more people (or feels like it, but i'll keep to this claim until i see a dev show me numbers) and

way better

matches when we barely had any rewards for PvP, and no leagues, than we do now.> @Durzlla.6295 said:

@Amaranthe.3578 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
I don't think the question is exactly the right question, but honestly at this point i really don't know how i'd phrase that better.
@Amaranthe.3578 said:Ever wonder why your ranked games are so dumb?65% of the people are there for the rewards :DNo news there. It took a nose dive since they added ranked seasons for a reason. Sure it coincided with the poor, poor balance that came with HoT release. But people were still playing a lot of PvP between HoT and Season 1. Thing is, that time, people that enjoyed PvP were palying PvP, people that didn't weren't. Then, they added more easy to farm stuff onto PvP, most of it PvE-centric rewards that were exclusive to PvP or that were easier to farm in PvP.So guess what? PvE players that dislike PvP started farming PvP. This skewed all the numbers, and led to the complete and utter failure that is current sPvP.

Arena Net can't not know this. They have the numbers of players and matches, and there must be a huge dip between Season and off-season. That would be enough to tell them that people are playing PvP for the rewards (because people that are serious about sPVP will play unranked to keep sharp in the off-season, or even ranked without rewards, not sure you can do that though).

Arena Net devs have seemingly learned nothing in the 2+ years that we players have been noticing a decay in sPvP quality, and have done little or nothing to improve it. Removing titles? Like that's what's on the line, the titles...I've lost all faith that we'll ever see proper PvP when @"Ben Phongluangtham.1065" answered a question about Team queue by saying he thinks teams are less competitive than solo queues. That's when i knew we wouldn't ever have the good old days of proper sPvP. Because, the people in charge are pretty much saying the opposite of just about every other competitive game out there. What Arena Net were/are saying themselves. There's no solo AT's there's no solo queue World championships, and yet solo queue is where the competitive scene is? Sense is being made, right?

PS: Tagged Ben, because i don't like talking behind people's backs, and i'm sure it would be interesting to see him defend that point of view.

A DEV said that??If solo is more competetive why did they allow TEAMS on their ESL? xDI honestly cant believe that a game dev would say that seriously... perhaps to playcate the community which is casual for the most part.

He was talking about straight up 5 man team que matches vs solo que matches. And he’s not wrong, there’s a reason why there’s no actual team que in League nowadays,because the actual teams don’t care about it because they’ll just play in tournaments, and your not as amazing players won’t even bother with it.

Actually, he was talking about bringing team queue back. Never said anything about other queues.And there is a team queue in LoL, and it was returned when Arena Net was removing theirs. In fact league's current team queue (Flex Q) works exactly how GW2's Ranked queue used to work.

Hell, automated Tournaments fill the roll team que would much better, and makes it so that teams don’t end up just fighting like the same 2-5 other teams that are in their bracket like a team que would.
No, they don't because Tournaments aren't always available. Tournaments would be a good compliment to team queues, but they don't replace them. Again, returning your example of LoL. They now have a similar system to AT's
PLUS
FLEX QUEUE
and
solo/duo.
TLDR: Team Ques sucks because they stagnate easily and no one even bothers with them if solo que is an option.Proof?Because, when there was a Ranked Flex (aka team) queue, that's when the game had the most population. The only stagnation i see came after that was removed.Also, just look at how much win-trading, and other toxic behaviour grew after team queue was removed and tell me that solo/duo is the better answer with a straight face.

Sorry, I should’ve clarified when I said team que I was referring to straight up full man team que, a Flex Que would be doable, but would likely still be worse than a solo Que for the same reasons the only flex que ranked mode sucked in the first place. If they added a secondary Flex Que that might work, just give it different titles or w/e I guess?

However, the main problem that we had when flex que was the only ranked system was that if you weren’t in a team you had a good chance of just getting kitten. Because for whatever ungodly reason Anets matchmaking system wouldn’t weight premade teams properly and would regularly throw 5 randoms, or 3 randoms and a duo against a full premade team. Or you could end up being the lone wolf with a 4 man squad or two duos which was equally awful because you never had any idea what their plan was or what they were doing.

We don't really have any data that backs that up. Sadly Arena Net wasn't very open in such findings. The only quote i can find from a dev on these subjects states only that full solo players vs full 5 man teams had a even win rate with the full solos being a bit ahead. This was somewhere around season 2-3.Being the lone wolf on a 4 man squad, or being the lone wolf with two duos, never mind the fact that the later is possible right now, since it's solo/duo queue. Isn't any different than being a solo player on a 5 man solo team. With the down-side that being the solo guy on a 4 man group, you at least have 4 coordinated players on your team. Being in a 5 man solo group, especially now a days you're more likely than not to find yourself with people just leisurely playing in the spawn, or throwing matches like there's no tomorrow. Personally i'd rather get "carried" by a 4 man group as a solo player than get dragged down by 4 other solo players. But i guess not being a masochist makes me weird.

To be honest, all of the speculations on the PvP pop would be much better, and more accurate, if Anet gave us any concrete numbers, literally no one but anet has an accurate idea of how much the pvp population has increased/decreased at any point. It makes it really hard to actually know whether it's just confirmation bias on the numbers or not but w/e.

Well... The matchmaker has to put Platinum players in teams with Bronze players... This didn't happen when teams were available... So if nothing else, that's your clear indication to where the population is now. Also back before HoT, during the content drought ColinJ couldn't shut up about how much PVP had grown, and that it had record numbers.

For the 4man +1man scenario, the main problem is in pure 5 rando solo mode, people will still typically either draw on the map or say something in chat, where if it's a 4 man those 4 are in Voip so the lone wolf gets 0 info since it is significantly easier to just yell "3 inc mid" in voip then it is to type it out. That being said as i've mentioned previously I'm all for a flex que being added back, even more so if they split it so there's 2 queues a strictly solo and a flex, would make both sides happy.

LOL. Seriously i haven't played sPvP in a while, but people drawing on the map and saying something? What, once in 10 matches? Come on, don't be ridiculous.Also, just because the 4 man are in VOIP doesn't mean they won't ping the map like any other, or write in chat for the 5th guy's benefit. You're just exaggerating a situation, idk maybe because you never played a good Team PVP game. In all game si play i'm usually in VOIP with my brother and guild mates, and even with VOIP i'm pinging the map constantly and dropping waypoints, be it in LOL, in GW2, Warframe, etc. One thing doesn't replace the other, and you're being disingenuous in trying to claim it as so.

Also, Anet added in the rewards because the PvP population was awful, there was absolutely no one playing but the most dedicated of PvPers. They even mentioned that the PvP population has gone UP since rewards were added, which isn’t surprising, however I wouldn’t be amazed if that increase would evaporate as soon as rewards were removed.
Awful? It was growing... Before leaving Colin Johanson couldn't shut up at how much PvP was growing. I believe there's a miscommunication here... What rewards are you talking about? Reward tracks? If those, yeah, it went up after those were added, not after ranked league rewards. After ranked came about, and especially since ranked flex queue was replaced with solo queue, there's been nothing but decline. And you can easily see it in how poor matchmaking became.

When people just say "rewards in PvP" in lump them together, so i'm thinking both reward tracks, and the ranked rewards. Personally, I doubt the ranked PvP rewards are what's causing people to stop playing PvP. What's probably causing people to stop playing PvP is how the community has shifted since the ranked PvP rewards.

Reward tracks actually kinda helped PvP grow, but Ranked rewards overreached, and caused the community to see PvP not as a competition, but as a farm, because it has stacked so many PvE related rewards.You're exactly right, the cause of people leaving PvP was the shift in the community. And what was the cause of that shift? The heavy influx of non-competitive players that just want to farm the ranked rewards and will cheat, or just afk, because you still get the reward from not doing anything, just takes a bit longer. That, and because Arena Net also removed the only tool that allowed players to offset this, which was the ability to form their own teams without having to be subject to these players.

Look, what's the 100% solution you'll always get in other game modes when you complain about a "toxic" part of the community? It's always "Start your own LFG/Guild/Raid/etc". The thing is, in sPvP you can't do that anymore. The only way to do that is through Tournaments, which are on a schedule that not everyone can follow. Ranked team queues were the way to counter the poor balance and the poor community while still being able to form ad-hoc "unscheduled" groups. Also ranked team queues and "flex" queues are also a good way for players to start their way into more competitive scenes like scrims and AT's. Instead Arena Net decided to forego the embryonic "Ad-hoc" stage and focus on the "fully competitive" aspect, forgetting that they don't have a community to forge that, and renew itself.I mean, even LoL which has a community the size of what Guild Wars 2 can only dream of decided to create a flex queue to foment this process, acknowledging that its the only way to keep the community going.

The sad thing is that GW2 was actually ahead of giants like LoL in creating a flex queue that was working, and even in the AT format, which before the current iteration was the actual "ranked" play in sPvP when GW2 launched. LOL only created their version of AT's this year. But like many things in GW2's development since 2015 it was 1 step forward 3 steps back. And they've put themselves so far behind that the current form of sPvP can only be described as a bad joke by anyone that actually played sPvP before 2015.

Durzlla.6295 · November 24, 2018

@Durzlla.6295 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Durzlla.6295 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
I don't think the question is exactly the right question, but honestly at this point i really don't know how i'd phrase that better.
@Amaranthe.3578 said:Ever wonder why your ranked games are so dumb?65% of the people are there for the rewards :DNo news there. It took a nose dive since they added ranked seasons for a reason. Sure it coincided with the poor, poor balance that came with HoT release. But people were still playing a lot of PvP between HoT and Season 1. Thing is, that time, people that enjoyed PvP were palying PvP, people that didn't weren't. Then, they added more easy to farm stuff onto PvP, most of it PvE-centric rewards that were exclusive to PvP or that were easier to farm in PvP.So guess what? PvE players that dislike PvP started farming PvP. This skewed all the numbers, and led to the complete and utter failure that is current sPvP.

Arena Net can't not know this. They have the numbers of players and matches, and there must be a huge dip between Season and off-season. That would be enough to tell them that people are playing PvP for the rewards (because people that are serious about sPVP will play unranked to keep sharp in the off-season, or even ranked without rewards, not sure you can do that though).

Arena Net devs have seemingly learned nothing in the 2+ years that we players have been noticing a decay in sPvP quality, and have done little or nothing to improve it. Removing titles? Like that's what's on the line, the titles...I've lost all faith that we'll ever see proper PvP when @"Ben Phongluangtham.1065" answered a question about Team queue by saying he thinks teams are less competitive than solo queues. That's when i knew we wouldn't ever have the good old days of proper sPvP. Because, the people in charge are pretty much saying the opposite of just about every other competitive game out there. What Arena Net were/are saying themselves. There's no solo AT's there's no solo queue World championships, and yet solo queue is where the competitive scene is? Sense is being made, right?

PS: Tagged Ben, because i don't like talking behind people's backs, and i'm sure it would be interesting to see him defend that point of view.

A DEV said that??If solo is more competetive why did they allow TEAMS on their ESL? xDI honestly cant believe that a game dev would say that seriously... perhaps to placate the community which is casual for the most part.

No, he said that teams aren't competitive, he didn't establish how or why.

Here's a link to the comment:

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/652017/#Comment_652017

I asked

Will a team queue ever be an option?Ben answered:

We don't have any current plans to bring 5 person queuing back to ranked queue.

I don't feel it's competitive.

On-Demand tournaments and AT's will be our method of support for people who prefer to play in 5 person teams.Of course anyone that tried AT's knows that it's not easy to fit their schedule, heck i've never managed to have a team online at once while an AT was running.The poll and it's timing just shows how poorly the competitive team does their homework, because while they were doing their vote, Riot and League of Legends were in of returning team queue in the form of the current Flex queue. While Arena Net took the exact opposite direction.

Seriously, just look at the history of the game, and you'll see that the current system does not work. We had

way

more people (or feels like it, but i'll keep to this claim until i see a dev show me numbers) and

way better

matches when we barely had any rewards for PvP, and no leagues, than we do now.> @Durzlla.6295 said:

@Amaranthe.3578 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
I don't think the question is exactly the right question, but honestly at this point i really don't know how i'd phrase that better.
@Amaranthe.3578 said:Ever wonder why your ranked games are so dumb?65% of the people are there for the rewards :DNo news there. It took a nose dive since they added ranked seasons for a reason. Sure it coincided with the poor, poor balance that came with HoT release. But people were still playing a lot of PvP between HoT and Season 1. Thing is, that time, people that enjoyed PvP were palying PvP, people that didn't weren't. Then, they added more easy to farm stuff onto PvP, most of it PvE-centric rewards that were exclusive to PvP or that were easier to farm in PvP.So guess what? PvE players that dislike PvP started farming PvP. This skewed all the numbers, and led to the complete and utter failure that is current sPvP.

Arena Net can't not know this. They have the numbers of players and matches, and there must be a huge dip between Season and off-season. That would be enough to tell them that people are playing PvP for the rewards (because people that are serious about sPVP will play unranked to keep sharp in the off-season, or even ranked without rewards, not sure you can do that though).

Arena Net devs have seemingly learned nothing in the 2+ years that we players have been noticing a decay in sPvP quality, and have done little or nothing to improve it. Removing titles? Like that's what's on the line, the titles...I've lost all faith that we'll ever see proper PvP when @"Ben Phongluangtham.1065" answered a question about Team queue by saying he thinks teams are less competitive than solo queues. That's when i knew we wouldn't ever have the good old days of proper sPvP. Because, the people in charge are pretty much saying the opposite of just about every other competitive game out there. What Arena Net were/are saying themselves. There's no solo AT's there's no solo queue World championships, and yet solo queue is where the competitive scene is? Sense is being made, right?

PS: Tagged Ben, because i don't like talking behind people's backs, and i'm sure it would be interesting to see him defend that point of view.

A DEV said that??If solo is more competetive why did they allow TEAMS on their ESL? xDI honestly cant believe that a game dev would say that seriously... perhaps to playcate the community which is casual for the most part.

He was talking about straight up 5 man team que matches vs solo que matches. And he’s not wrong, there’s a reason why there’s no actual team que in League nowadays,because the actual teams don’t care about it because they’ll just play in tournaments, and your not as amazing players won’t even bother with it.

Actually, he was talking about bringing team queue back. Never said anything about other queues.And there is a team queue in LoL, and it was returned when Arena Net was removing theirs. In fact league's current team queue (Flex Q) works exactly how GW2's Ranked queue used to work.

Hell, automated Tournaments fill the roll team que would much better, and makes it so that teams don’t end up just fighting like the same 2-5 other teams that are in their bracket like a team que would.
No, they don't because Tournaments aren't always available. Tournaments would be a good compliment to team queues, but they don't replace them. Again, returning your example of LoL. They now have a similar system to AT's
PLUS
FLEX QUEUE
and
solo/duo.
TLDR: Team Ques sucks because they stagnate easily and no one even bothers with them if solo que is an option.Proof?Because, when there was a Ranked Flex (aka team) queue, that's when the game had the most population. The only stagnation i see came after that was removed.Also, just look at how much win-trading, and other toxic behaviour grew after team queue was removed and tell me that solo/duo is the better answer with a straight face.

Sorry, I should’ve clarified when I said team que I was referring to straight up full man team que, a Flex Que would be doable, but would likely still be worse than a solo Que for the same reasons the only flex que ranked mode sucked in the first place. If they added a secondary Flex Que that might work, just give it different titles or w/e I guess?

However, the main problem that we had when flex que was the only ranked system was that if you weren’t in a team you had a good chance of just getting kitten. Because for whatever ungodly reason Anets matchmaking system wouldn’t weight premade teams properly and would regularly throw 5 randoms, or 3 randoms and a duo against a full premade team. Or you could end up being the lone wolf with a 4 man squad or two duos which was equally awful because you never had any idea what their plan was or what they were doing.

We don't really have any data that backs that up. Sadly Arena Net wasn't very open in such findings. The only quote i can find from a dev on these subjects states only that full solo players vs full 5 man teams had a even win rate with the full solos being a bit ahead. This was somewhere around season 2-3.Being the lone wolf on a 4 man squad, or being the lone wolf with two duos, never mind the fact that the later is possible right now, since it's solo/duo queue. Isn't any different than being a solo player on a 5 man solo team. With the down-side that being the solo guy on a 4 man group, you at least have 4 coordinated players on your team. Being in a 5 man solo group, especially now a days you're more likely than not to find yourself with people just leisurely playing in the spawn, or throwing matches like there's no tomorrow. Personally i'd rather get "carried" by a 4 man group as a solo player than get dragged down by 4 other solo players. But i guess not being a masochist makes me weird.

To be honest, all of the speculations on the PvP pop would be much better, and more accurate, if Anet gave us any concrete numbers, literally no one but anet has an accurate idea of how much the pvp population has increased/decreased at any point. It makes it really hard to actually know whether it's just confirmation bias on the numbers or not but w/e.

Well... The matchmaker has to put Platinum players in teams with Bronze players... This didn't happen when teams were available... So if nothing else, that's your clear indication to where the population is now. Also back before HoT, during the content drought ColinJ couldn't shut up about how much PVP had grown, and that it had record numbers.

Actually they probably weren't actually bronze, with my job i'm out of town a lot and it's not uncommon for me to get "decayed" the full 700pts, and if your rank is 1600 or lower that'll kick your rank all the way down to bronze, without changing who it matches you with in just about 7ish days or so of not playing. I'm very familiar with this absolutely ridiculous system, and have learned (much to my disbelief) it doesn't even change who it matches you with, just your rank and how many "points" you gain or lose when you win/lose.

For the 4man +1man scenario, the main problem is in pure 5 rando solo mode, people will still typically either draw on the map or say something in chat, where if it's a 4 man those 4 are in Voip so the lone wolf gets 0 info since it is significantly easier to just yell "3 inc mid" in voip then it is to type it out. That being said as i've mentioned previously I'm all for a flex que being added back, even more so if they split it so there's 2 queues a strictly solo and a flex, would make both sides happy.
LOL. Seriously i haven't played sPvP in a while, but people drawing on the map and saying something? What, once in 10 matches? Come on, don't be ridiculous.Also, just because the 4 man are in VOIP doesn't mean they won't ping the map like any other, or write in chat for the 5th guy's benefit. You're just exaggerating a situation, idk maybe because you never played a good Team PVP game. In all game si play i'm usually in VOIP with my brother and guild mates, and even with VOIP i'm pinging the map constantly and dropping waypoints, be it in LOL, in GW2, Warframe, etc. One thing doesn't replace the other, and you're being disingenuous in trying to claim it as so.

I've actually had it happen a lot recently, and I was as dumbfounded as you are lol, maybe i just found some anomalies or something I'm not sure. But in LoL and other games it's normally pretty hit or miss on if the premades actually ping or not. And i definitely exaggerated a bit, it's not mutually exclusive, it's just not AS common for people using voip to actually alert the pugs.

Also, Anet added in the rewards because the PvP population was awful, there was absolutely no one playing but the most dedicated of PvPers. They even mentioned that the PvP population has gone UP since rewards were added, which isn’t surprising, however I wouldn’t be amazed if that increase would evaporate as soon as rewards were removed.
Awful? It was growing... Before leaving Colin Johanson couldn't shut up at how much PvP was growing. I believe there's a miscommunication here... What rewards are you talking about? Reward tracks? If those, yeah, it went up after those were added, not after ranked league rewards. After ranked came about, and especially since ranked flex queue was replaced with solo queue, there's been nothing but decline. And you can easily see it in how poor matchmaking became.

When people just say "rewards in PvP" in lump them together, so i'm thinking both reward tracks, and the ranked rewards. Personally, I doubt the ranked PvP rewards are what's causing people to stop playing PvP. What's probably causing people to stop playing PvP is how the community has shifted since the ranked PvP rewards.

Reward tracks actually kinda helped PvP grow, but Ranked rewards overreached, and caused the community to see PvP not as a competition, but as a farm, because it has stacked so many PvE related rewards.You're exactly right, the cause of people leaving PvP was the shift in the community. And what was the cause of that shift? The heavy influx of non-competitive players that just want to farm the ranked rewards and will cheat, or just afk, because you still get the reward from not doing anything, just takes a bit longer. That, and because Arena Net also removed the only tool that allowed players to offset this, which was the ability to form their own teams without having to be subject to these players.

Look, what's the 100% solution you'll always get in other game modes when you complain about a "toxic" part of the community? It's always "Start your own LFG/Guild/Raid/etc". The thing is, in sPvP you can't do that anymore. The only way to do that is through Tournaments, which are on a schedule that not everyone can follow. Ranked team queues were the way to counter the poor balance and the poor community while still being able to form ad-hoc "unscheduled" groups. Also ranked team queues and "flex" queues are also a good way for players to start their way into more competitive scenes like scrims and AT's. Instead Arena Net decided to forego the embryonic "Ad-hoc" stage and focus on the "fully competitive" aspect, forgetting that they don't have a community to forge that, and renew itself.I mean, even LoL which has a community the size of what Guild Wars 2 can only dream of decided to create a flex queue to foment this process, acknowledging that its the only way to keep the community going.

The sad thing is that GW2 was actually ahead of giants like LoL in creating a flex queue that was working, and even in the AT format, which before the current iteration was the actual "ranked" play in sPvP when GW2 launched. LOL only created their version of AT's this year. But like many things in GW2's development since 2015 it was 1 step forward 3 steps back. And they've put themselves so far behind that the current form of sPvP can only be described as a bad joke by anyone that actually played sPvP before 2015.

Yeah, like i said i'd really like them to add a Flex Que back, but to keep solo que for ranked as well, which if i'm not wrong is how they HAD it, before they fucked with it. That being said, i wouldn't remove the league rewards, or how it's set up, i think it's a good system mechanically, they just need to add other stuff to prevent people from abusing it, like the AFKing in spawn.

Abelisk.4527 · November 24, 2018

I play Ranked because there's more competition and it's more realistic

ReaverKane.7598 · November 25, 2018

@Durzlla.6295 said:
@Durzlla.6295 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Durzlla.6295 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
I don't think the question is exactly the right question, but honestly at this point i really don't know how i'd phrase that better.
@Amaranthe.3578 said:Ever wonder why your ranked games are so dumb?65% of the people are there for the rewards :DNo news there. It took a nose dive since they added ranked seasons for a reason. Sure it coincided with the poor, poor balance that came with HoT release. But people were still playing a lot of PvP between HoT and Season 1. Thing is, that time, people that enjoyed PvP were palying PvP, people that didn't weren't. Then, they added more easy to farm stuff onto PvP, most of it PvE-centric rewards that were exclusive to PvP or that were easier to farm in PvP.So guess what? PvE players that dislike PvP started farming PvP. This skewed all the numbers, and led to the complete and utter failure that is current sPvP.

Arena Net can't not know this. They have the numbers of players and matches, and there must be a huge dip between Season and off-season. That would be enough to tell them that people are playing PvP for the rewards (because people that are serious about sPVP will play unranked to keep sharp in the off-season, or even ranked without rewards, not sure you can do that though).

Arena Net devs have seemingly learned nothing in the 2+ years that we players have been noticing a decay in sPvP quality, and have done little or nothing to improve it. Removing titles? Like that's what's on the line, the titles...I've lost all faith that we'll ever see proper PvP when @"Ben Phongluangtham.1065" answered a question about Team queue by saying he thinks teams are less competitive than solo queues. That's when i knew we wouldn't ever have the good old days of proper sPvP. Because, the people in charge are pretty much saying the opposite of just about every other competitive game out there. What Arena Net were/are saying themselves. There's no solo AT's there's no solo queue World championships, and yet solo queue is where the competitive scene is? Sense is being made, right?

PS: Tagged Ben, because i don't like talking behind people's backs, and i'm sure it would be interesting to see him defend that point of view.

A DEV said that??If solo is more competetive why did they allow TEAMS on their ESL? xDI honestly cant believe that a game dev would say that seriously... perhaps to placate the community which is casual for the most part.

No, he said that teams aren't competitive, he didn't establish how or why.

Here's a link to the comment:

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/652017/#Comment_652017

I asked

Will a team queue ever be an option?Ben answered:

We don't have any current plans to bring 5 person queuing back to ranked queue.

I don't feel it's competitive.

On-Demand tournaments and AT's will be our method of support for people who prefer to play in 5 person teams.Of course anyone that tried AT's knows that it's not easy to fit their schedule, heck i've never managed to have a team online at once while an AT was running.The poll and it's timing just shows how poorly the competitive team does their homework, because while they were doing their vote, Riot and League of Legends were in of returning team queue in the form of the current Flex queue. While Arena Net took the exact opposite direction.

Seriously, just look at the history of the game, and you'll see that the current system does not work. We had

way

more people (or feels like it, but i'll keep to this claim until i see a dev show me numbers) and

way better

matches when we barely had any rewards for PvP, and no leagues, than we do now.> @Durzlla.6295 said:

@Amaranthe.3578 said:
@ReaverKane.7598 said:
@Amaranthe.3578 said:
I don't think the question is exactly the right question, but honestly at this point i really don't know how i'd phrase that better.
@Amaranthe.3578 said:Ever wonder why your ranked games are so dumb?65% of the people are there for the rewards :DNo news there. It took a nose dive since they added ranked seasons for a reason. Sure it coincided with the poor, poor balance that came with HoT release. But people were still playing a lot of PvP between HoT and Season 1. Thing is, that time, people that enjoyed PvP were palying PvP, people that didn't weren't. Then, they added more easy to farm stuff onto PvP, most of it PvE-centric rewards that were exclusive to PvP or that were easier to farm in PvP.So guess what? PvE players that dislike PvP started farming PvP. This skewed all the numbers, and led to the complete and utter failure that is current sPvP.

Arena Net can't not know this. They have the numbers of players and matches, and there must be a huge dip between Season and off-season. That would be enough to tell them that people are playing PvP for the rewards (because people that are serious about sPVP will play unranked to keep sharp in the off-season, or even ranked without rewards, not sure you can do that though).

Arena Net devs have seemingly learned nothing in the 2+ years that we players have been noticing a decay in sPvP quality, and have done little or nothing to improve it. Removing titles? Like that's what's on the line, the titles...I've lost all faith that we'll ever see proper PvP when @"Ben Phongluangtham.1065" answered a question about Team queue by saying he thinks teams are less competitive than solo queues. That's when i knew we wouldn't ever have the good old days of proper sPvP. Because, the people in charge are pretty much saying the opposite of just about every other competitive game out there. What Arena Net were/are saying themselves. There's no solo AT's there's no solo queue World championships, and yet solo queue is where the competitive scene is? Sense is being made, right?

PS: Tagged Ben, because i don't like talking behind people's backs, and i'm sure it would be interesting to see him defend that point of view.

A DEV said that??If solo is more competetive why did they allow TEAMS on their ESL? xDI honestly cant believe that a game dev would say that seriously... perhaps to playcate the community which is casual for the most part.

He was talking about straight up 5 man team que matches vs solo que matches. And he’s not wrong, there’s a reason why there’s no actual team que in League nowadays,because the actual teams don’t care about it because they’ll just play in tournaments, and your not as amazing players won’t even bother with it.

Actually, he was talking about bringing team queue back. Never said anything about other queues.And there is a team queue in LoL, and it was returned when Arena Net was removing theirs. In fact league's current team queue (Flex Q) works exactly how GW2's Ranked queue used to work.

Hell, automated Tournaments fill the roll team que would much better, and makes it so that teams don’t end up just fighting like the same 2-5 other teams that are in their bracket like a team que would.
No, they don't because Tournaments aren't always available. Tournaments would be a good compliment to team queues, but they don't replace them. Again, returning your example of LoL. They now have a similar system to AT's
PLUS
FLEX QUEUE
and
solo/duo.
TLDR: Team Ques sucks because they stagnate easily and no one even bothers with them if solo que is an option.Proof?Because, when there was a Ranked Flex (aka team) queue, that's when the game had the most population. The only stagnation i see came after that was removed.Also, just look at how much win-trading, and other toxic behaviour grew after team queue was removed and tell me that solo/duo is the better answer with a straight face.

Sorry, I should’ve clarified when I said team que I was referring to straight up full man team que, a Flex Que would be doable, but would likely still be worse than a solo Que for the same reasons the only flex que ranked mode sucked in the first place. If they added a secondary Flex Que that might work, just give it different titles or w/e I guess?

However, the main problem that we had when flex que was the only ranked system was that if you weren’t in a team you had a good chance of just getting kitten. Because for whatever ungodly reason Anets matchmaking system wouldn’t weight premade teams properly and would regularly throw 5 randoms, or 3 randoms and a duo against a full premade team. Or you could end up being the lone wolf with a 4 man squad or two duos which was equally awful because you never had any idea what their plan was or what they were doing.

We don't really have any data that backs that up. Sadly Arena Net wasn't very open in such findings. The only quote i can find from a dev on these subjects states only that full solo players vs full 5 man teams had a even win rate with the full solos being a bit ahead. This was somewhere around season 2-3.Being the lone wolf on a 4 man squad, or being the lone wolf with two duos, never mind the fact that the later is possible right now, since it's solo/duo queue. Isn't any different than being a solo player on a 5 man solo team. With the down-side that being the solo guy on a 4 man group, you at least have 4 coordinated players on your team. Being in a 5 man solo group, especially now a days you're more likely than not to find yourself with people just leisurely playing in the spawn, or throwing matches like there's no tomorrow. Personally i'd rather get "carried" by a 4 man group as a solo player than get dragged down by 4 other solo players. But i guess not being a masochist makes me weird.

To be honest, all of the speculations on the PvP pop would be much better, and more accurate, if Anet gave us any concrete numbers, literally no one but anet has an accurate idea of how much the pvp population has increased/decreased at any point. It makes it really hard to actually know whether it's just confirmation bias on the numbers or not but w/e.

Well... The matchmaker has to put Platinum players in teams with Bronze players... This didn't happen when teams were available... So if nothing else, that's your clear indication to where the population is now. Also back before HoT, during the content drought ColinJ couldn't shut up about how much PVP had grown, and that it had record numbers.

Actually they probably weren't actually bronze, with my job i'm out of town a lot and it's not uncommon for me to get "decayed" the full 700pts, and if your rank is 1600 or lower that'll kick your rank all the way down to bronze, without changing who it matches you with in just about 7ish days or so of not playing. I'm very familiar with this absolutely ridiculous system, and have learned (much to my disbelief) it doesn't even change who it matches you with, just your rank and how many "points" you gain or lose when you win/lose.

This show how much you now, and how up to date you are on this...Read a bit in the forums, look for posts tagged Arena Net.

For the 4man +1man scenario, the main problem is in pure 5 rando solo mode, people will still typically either draw on the map or say something in chat, where if it's a 4 man those 4 are in Voip so the lone wolf gets 0 info since it is significantly easier to just yell "3 inc mid" in voip then it is to type it out. That being said as i've mentioned previously I'm all for a flex que being added back, even more so if they split it so there's 2 queues a strictly solo and a flex, would make both sides happy.
LOL. Seriously i haven't played sPvP in a while, but people drawing on the map and saying something? What, once in 10 matches? Come on, don't be ridiculous.Also, just because the 4 man are in VOIP doesn't mean they won't ping the map like any other, or write in chat for the 5th guy's benefit. You're just exaggerating a situation, idk maybe because you never played a good Team PVP game. In all game si play i'm usually in VOIP with my brother and guild mates, and even with VOIP i'm pinging the map constantly and dropping waypoints, be it in LOL, in GW2, Warframe, etc. One thing doesn't replace the other, and you're being disingenuous in trying to claim it as so.

I've actually had it happen a lot recently, and I was as dumbfounded as you are lol, maybe i just found some anomalies or something I'm not sure. But in LoL and other games it's normally pretty hit or miss on if the premades actually ping or not. And i definitely exaggerated a bit, it's not mutually exclusive, it's just not AS common for people using voip to actually alert the pugs.What the hell are you talking about? Are you making things up as you go, and hope other people are less informed or what?Even Pro players, guys that practice together professionally and use voice comms while standing next to each other will ping the damn map. I've NEVER seen a LoL game where people aren't pinging. Sure some will be more communicative than others. But you can be 100% sure that if there's a premade, they're pinging for each other.

Also, Anet added in the rewards because the PvP population was awful, there was absolutely no one playing but the most dedicated of PvPers. They even mentioned that the PvP population has gone UP since rewards were added, which isn’t surprising, however I wouldn’t be amazed if that increase would evaporate as soon as rewards were removed.
Awful? It was growing... Before leaving Colin Johanson couldn't shut up at how much PvP was growing. I believe there's a miscommunication here... What rewards are you talking about? Reward tracks? If those, yeah, it went up after those were added, not after ranked league rewards. After ranked came about, and especially since ranked flex queue was replaced with solo queue, there's been nothing but decline. And you can easily see it in how poor matchmaking became.

When people just say "rewards in PvP" in lump them together, so i'm thinking both reward tracks, and the ranked rewards. Personally, I doubt the ranked PvP rewards are what's causing people to stop playing PvP. What's probably causing people to stop playing PvP is how the community has shifted since the ranked PvP rewards.

Reward tracks actually kinda helped PvP grow, but Ranked rewards overreached, and caused the community to see PvP not as a competition, but as a farm, because it has stacked so many PvE related rewards.You're exactly right, the cause of people leaving PvP was the shift in the community. And what was the cause of that shift? The heavy influx of non-competitive players that just want to farm the ranked rewards and will cheat, or just afk, because you still get the reward from not doing anything, just takes a bit longer. That, and because Arena Net also removed the only tool that allowed players to offset this, which was the ability to form their own teams without having to be subject to these players.

Look, what's the 100% solution you'll always get in other game modes when you complain about a "toxic" part of the community? It's always "Start your own LFG/Guild/Raid/etc". The thing is, in sPvP you can't do that anymore. The only way to do that is through Tournaments, which are on a schedule that not everyone can follow. Ranked team queues were the way to counter the poor balance and the poor community while still being able to form ad-hoc "unscheduled" groups. Also ranked team queues and "flex" queues are also a good way for players to start their way into more competitive scenes like scrims and AT's. Instead Arena Net decided to forego the embryonic "Ad-hoc" stage and focus on the "fully competitive" aspect, forgetting that they don't have a community to forge that, and renew itself.I mean, even LoL which has a community the size of what Guild Wars 2 can only dream of decided to create a flex queue to foment this process, acknowledging that its the only way to keep the community going.

The sad thing is that GW2 was actually ahead of giants like LoL in creating a flex queue that was working, and even in the AT format, which before the current iteration was the actual "ranked" play in sPvP when GW2 launched. LOL only created their version of AT's this year. But like many things in GW2's development since 2015 it was 1 step forward 3 steps back. And they've put themselves so far behind that the current form of sPvP can only be described as a bad joke by anyone that actually played sPvP before 2015.

Yeah, like i said i'd really like them to add a Flex Que back, but to keep solo que for ranked as well, which if i'm not wrong is how they HAD it, before they kitten with it. That being said, i wouldn't remove the league rewards, or how it's set up, i think it's a good system mechanically, they just need to add other stuff to prevent people from abusing it, like the AFKing in spawn.The game doesn't have enough population for two queues, if everyone that plays PvE suddenly became an active PVPer, maybe. But then...No, actually, the rewards in league are the root of the whole mess... And honestly from your previous answers, i'm not surprised to hear you want the rewards kept.The whole problem with pips, not only in sPvP, but in WvW is that they encourage toxic behaviour. When you make something that's more expedient to obtain by not playing, then people won't play. It's easy as that. And it's more expedient to just AFK or semi-afk to keep from being kicked, than to actively engage.Now, if, like LoL, rewards were backloaded to the end of the season, with most of it being delivered according to your final rank, then people would be more actively seeking to improve their game and their rank.Also, the reward shouldn't be as profitable as it is... Reward tracks alone, coupled with the gold reward, already made PvP very profitable. With Ranked rewards they kicked it up to a point where there was nothing quite as good for a long time.They've been taking what have been, in my opinion, the very worse choices in terms of how to handle sPvP, from the length of seasons, the cadence of balance, the rewards, the teams, championships gone, and the results are showing.

MithranArkanere.8957 · November 25, 2018

Ranked is bad, but unranked is worse.

I would play more of either if we got some much needed improvements. Mechanics to adjust things on the fly so we don't have to wait for skill updates, AI taking over characters when the players go AFK or disconnect, better matchmaking including being able to queue with more than one character and locking characters at the start...

Would you play ranked if the rewards werent that much better than unranked?

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