Curse

[DE] · Aug 08, 2009, 03:44 AM // 03:44

I. Preface
Let's go back to 2005 and 2006, the nostalgic years that everyone wishes they could go back too. The nostalgia for this time period exists for a lot of good reasons, and one of which was the GvG ladder. During that time period the GvG ladder was the only one that existed. It functioned almost identically to the one we have today, with the exception of the k-value amount and other such small details. However, what set the old ladder apart from the one we have today is that it had resets. The old ladder was constantly going through seasons. Each time an old season ended and a new one began, the entire ladder was reset. Every guild had their rank and rating put to default (N/A and 1000) and this allowed for fresh starts going into the next season.

Something that's important to note is that after every season the top of the ladder was posted on www.guildwars.com. Most seasons had the top 20 guilds included on the 'Historical Ladder', two of them didn't but that's not what's important. What is important, is that these historical ladders preserved the guild names of previous top guilds for all guildwars.com visitors to see. This was truly a way of preserving the ladders of previous seasons in a historical way, and it worked quite well. However, as most people know, Anet decided to change all this. For some reason they decided that seasons weren't the direction they wanted to head in with the ladder, but they still wanted to keep it historical. In my opinion they decided to change this because of the possible conflict of Season Finales with the introduction of Monthly AT's and the confusion it might cause. This is understandable but I feel as though their implementation of the new ladder was subpar.

For those who have been living under a virtual rock, here's what Anet did.. They completely removed ladder seasons and reset the ladder for the last time. After that reset they said that this would allow for a more historical ladder since rating would never be reset, letting guilds from different time periods rival each other on the ladder. A true ladder of all seasons I suppose. However, there are a lot of short-sighted problems with this implementation. Historical ladders are meant to preserve the history of good guilds, and yet inactive guilds are removed off the ladder after 1 month of no GvG's. I understand that no one wants to see a ladder full of nothing but dead guilds, but this goes against Anet's ideology of the current ladder. If old guilds disappear off the ladder then it's not historical at all, it's just a current ladder with a possibility for limitless rating.

II. Suggestion
Reset the current ladder and re-implement seasons to correspond with Monthly AT's. The beauty of this is that the historical ladder for that month won't be the same as the MAT final listing, however the MAT will majorly influence your final outcome on the ladder because of the huge rating gains and losses it can dish out.

III. Implementation
Like I mentioned in the suggestion, implementation should be fairly easy and straight forward. Have the seasons correspond with the Monthly AT's. They should start the day after the MAT and end as soon as the next MAT ends. Since there are no more World Championships (

) you don't have to worry about having weird starting dates for certain seasons. Everything can be standardized and executed automatically. In fact, I'm sure you could set up an Automated Ladder system in much the same way they created Automated Tournaments to run by themselves.

Alternatively, you could break up regular seasons with some fun seasons. These would mainly be put in to break up the repetitiveness of having just regular season after season. These could be down once a quarter (four times a year) and last for a week or so. However it would retract a week from the next regular season and I really don't view a fun season as historically worthy. But I think that Anet is to ever go back to seasons, it will need to break them up with something. Perhaps not exactly fun seasons, but something of the sort.

IV. Reasoning
There are a lot of reasons why I believe in bringing back ladder seasons, but I'll just list a few of the major ones in order to keep it relatively brief.

1. More Historical
This is what it's all about right? Anet tried to change the ladder and still keep it historical, but we can all agree that failed. The seasons in '05/'06 did a great job at this.

2. Make Ladder Matter
Ask any top GvG'r and they will tell you 'Ladder doesn't matter.' This is sad, but true. Ladder rank currently doesn't matter because it doesn't mean anything. You're not fighting for a slot on a historical season. You're not trying to make top 18 in order to qualify for a World Championship. You're not trying to grind out that last bit of rating to beat your rival guild on the ladder. The only thing the ladder is good for right now is seeing whose in champ range and who is what smurf (and smurfing hardly matters anymore!). Instead, you're busy not giving a fck because if your guild ever goes inactive or disbands, it will disappear off the ladder and never be remembered. Because of this, people tend to only care about MAT placement and if they're in champ range or not. That's cool and all but bringing back seasons would change all this, and actually give the game some excitement.

3. Keep Guild Wars PvP alive.
I honestly see this as a major reason to switch over to ladder seasons. As of right now, GvG is about to go back on the downward slope. The activity of the scene always kicks up during the summer when people have free time, but come mid-August you'll start to see it die down again. Not only will more players be swamped with school, but the incentive won't really be there to play. Think about it, what incentive is there currently to play GvG? There's no real historical ladder. You won't get your name engraved on a shiny cup in GToB. People want champ points but you don't see tons of people playing specifically for them. Likewise, gold capes are always an incentive but the more MAT's that go by, the more saturated they become. Some people may play the game for fun, but that's not going to be what keeps GW PvP alive. It needs a draw to it, it needs a good reason for old and new players to play the game. And yes, I'm resting the fate of PvP in GvG because HA/HB/TA/whatever obviously never had the draw or the scene that GvG did, so deal with it. A correctly done historical GvG ladder may be the small spark the PvP scene needs to keep it going. At the very least it can't hurt anything.

V. End
tldr; Reset ladder and revert to ladder seasons to promote the Anet promoted idea of having a historical ladder.

Thanks for reading this suggestion. I'll probably have to go through and edit some grammar mistakes and what not, but hopefully you get the gist of the idea.

Comments, suggestions, improvements are all welcomed.

{IceFire} · Aug 08, 2009, 03:47 AM // 03:47

I'm going to have to agree with this; well thought out and well reasoned. Also a ladder season would be amusing and MAYBE give that "spark"

Shayne Hawke · Aug 08, 2009, 03:57 AM // 03:57

I never have done a GvG, but I would enjoy seeing something like this done, just to feel like I'm a little closer to the GW I bought, played, and enjoyed years ago.

Still Number One · Aug 08, 2009, 06:35 AM // 06:35

I love this idea but think it needs some slight modifications. First off I don't agree with changing it every month. I personally feel like if you finish #1 on the ladder it should mean something and you should be rewarded for it. Whether it is gold trim or some very rare in-game item. And I think doing that every month will be overkill on handing out gold capes. Therefore I think it should be every 4 months then a reset. Whoever places in first after 4 solid months of play wins a gold. This would reward consistency and not just someone who happened to have no life one month and get extremely lucky in the mAT.

Overall great idea though.

Artisan Archer · Aug 08, 2009, 08:29 AM // 08:29

I agree with the above poster. Longer seasons might work better. If you do quarterly or even 6 months season, you can still have mAT's as sort of 'inbetween finals' and have a Seasonal Final for the top 20 guilds at that moment, at the very end.

Aeon221 · Aug 08, 2009, 03:19 PM // 15:19

It would be nice to have some sort of major GvG event every few months, along with a changing of the cup. It used to be you'd hear chatter about the prospects for the Championships even amongst pvers -- now, not so much. Although I suppose there were some discussions of the XTH events, but most in game folks weren't so interested in that.

On topic, a seasonal model is certainly easier to keep track of, and the ability to win a season would be nice. Monthly might be too frequent, but quarterly would be fine.

[DE] · Aug 08, 2009, 06:07 PM // 18:07

Now that I think about it, monthly seasons would probably be way to short. Quarterly would definitely be the way to go on these.

As far as cape trims go, I would love to see gold capes only handed out at the end of each season based on ladder rank. This is because not only would your trim be based on ladder play, but also on your average placement in the MAT's considering how heavily weighted those matches are. However, I don't think the community would want to only have trims given out once every 3 months, even if it might be better in the long run for the game.