Curse

Div · Dec 16, 2007, 02:37 AM // 02:37

Trying to restore and improve the high level PvP is a difficult task, one that Anet faced a year ago when they realized the ladder system was constantly plagued by smurfs, PvEr complaints about smurfs, and lack of tournament experience for the common guild. After half a year of planning and design, they come up with the AT system we see today. However, after 7 months or so of it, the flaws are really obvious.

For daily ATs:
- timing is horrible, even most serious guilds can only make 2-3 ATs a week, leaving the rest of the time for ladder noobstomps
- because of the above, you end up with daily ATs with 8 or less guilds playing, and "rating farming" takes place, skewing the ladder and pissing off PvErs
- since tokens were so easy to get, people register guilds just for fun and to add to the number of total guilds playing
- block guilds who forfeits the first round of a tourney from registering in any ATs in the next 3 days.
- still does not allow casual guilds to gain tourney experience, with the 14-day req, high-risk losses and the fact they're generally playing better guilds.

For mATs:
- guilds registered for this should be serious to play, so no forfeits or any bs like that. Every game a guild forfeits needs to count as a loss (including rating), and they keep going in the tournament. That will get rid of problems of a 14-day person erroring out right before match starts, team leader lagging out, etc. After the third round, a guild may become eligible for withdrawing if they wish. If they do not state they wish to withdraw, any "forfeits" will count as losses in the tourney and rating, and they will be put in the next round.
- one day is simply not enough for how unstable the servers are with lag and everything. Tournaments should take place over two days, with employer review of games. If there is an error to the "winning team" as deemed by certain Anet arbiters, elimination games should be replayed, especially since it's single elimination (and not best of 3 or something). This will require more work on their part, which is part of why they don't want to do it anymore.

The AT system didn't resolve any of the original problems, primarily smurfing. Lower end GvG guilds do not participate in ATs, and only ladder. This exposes them to the smurfs and pugs on the ladder they cried about in the first place. Top guilds are in a way, more inclined to use smurfs because of the fact it takes 30 minutes to find a noobstomp match on the ladder. It didn't get rid of pugging. It didn't increase player base for high level tourneys because of problems addressed above, but instead these problems cause people to lose faith in the system and quit the game.

I hope by pointing out some of the major flaws, Anet can make the next tournament series or whatever better (if they decide to continue GW PvP development). Other people should have better ideas for improving the systems, or additional flaws to the current system that they can point out, so feel free to do so.

Lord Natural · Dec 16, 2007, 05:34 AM // 05:34

The tournament schedule is pretty bad. 3 per day, 7 days a week and most guilds can only play in 2-3 per week? The schedule should be based on peak hours rather than this peculiar rotation in which half of the tournaments have 3-4 active guilds. The only solutions I can think of would be to assign the 3 tournaments to peak us/eu/kr peak hours respectively, maybe +/- 1-2 hours as a rotation, or add a 4th tournament.

Ladder play on the whole is a lot more stale in general nowadays. The ladder means nothing without a meaningful impact on tournaments. It's just a mess of smurfs and inactive guilds. Tournaments are ok for the sake of competition, but regular ladder play is pretty much just a champ point grind in between AT's. With a guild below that level, rising the ladder without AT's takes ages, and better AT competition excludes that as an option unless they want to lose anything they've gained.

Ultimately the main problem is still age. People move on over time, and I don't think all the changes in the world are going to bring back huge, insta-match activity, at least for american guilds. But regardless, there is still definite room for improvement with the current ladder/AT setup, and with GW2 still a ways off, keeping players active and interested should be a priority.

Ensign · Dec 16, 2007, 06:14 AM // 06:14

You should keep in mind what the scope of the game is right now, what people really want out of it and how you really want to set that up.

I think it's unreasonable to try and make the monthly ATs something that they aren't. The game isn't trying to support a World Championship anymore, not should it. These days it's more a matter of supporting their competitive community, and providing enough incentive to keep people engaged. I have few complaints with the principle of the current format to that end. A monthly AT as currently set up takes over four hours to finish the swiss rounds; if you're manage to play out the entire tournament you're looking at a six and a half hour commitment. Quite honestly I don't really want to devote more of my weekend to GvG than that. Sure, things go wrong and people error, while single elimination can be very luck dependent and swingy. But aren't those acceptable, when the alternatives would be tourneys that devour your entire weekend - or like the old qualifiers, need to keep the team together and playing every weekend for season after season? The new monthlies have opened up a much wider, if more casual, playerbase, and given the state of the game I think that's unquestionably a good thing.

I have no complaints about how the monthlies are currently handled.

The big complaint I have is with the daily AT schedule. You would have a hard time convincing me that the current daily AT schedule received any serious amount of review. The daily start times are almost designed to exclude both American and European prime time, and consequentially the Pacific Rim timezones as well. Our world is convenient in that the heavy industrial population centers are situated at roughly 8 hour intervals - it's not very difficult to set up a schedule that does a good job of making the daily ATs accessible to a clear majority of your players. When the new schedule comes out in January, I expect to see a much better job done on slotting AT times.

The other problem that needs serious attention is the number of forfeits in the first round. In a daily AT the first round is almost always a bye, meaning you show up in your guild hall to go AFK for half an hour; even more problematic, in the Euro timeslots the ATs tend to be overstuffed with teams that the brackets split into smaller tournaments, that typically only have 6-10 teams actually playing in them after all the teams forfeit out. There are plenty of proposed solutions to this; A.Net simply has to go and implement one of them.

Sure, part of me would like to have serious, World Championship tournaments again. But that's not what the game needs; it needs to make PvP more accessible and to encourage more people to play, not to put in huge incentives for the most serious of players to really break the game down. If the daily AT schedule and forfeits were addressed, I really wouldn't have any complaints with where the game is at, tournament style - just enough to maintain a serious competitive community.

Byron · Dec 16, 2007, 06:33 AM // 06:33

As mentioned, smurfing is a big problem. Because of this, new guilds are hard-pressed to begin gvging, since most of their matches will either come against highly experienced smurfs or heroway nonsense. So, new guilds for the most part dissolve because they become discouraged. This really inhibits new players from joining the gvg tier of play, which is lame. You can't stop people from buying multiple accounts, and you probably can't change the guest system, so this is a moot point.

Keeping a ladder with no resets and no ATs would probably be dull. MATs are the only thing that are really exciting in gvg play anymore.

I don't see the problem being fixed without huge changes to the ladder or the introduction of something new, or a few new things. The ideas that come to mind at the moment: unrated GvG match finding, issuing direct challenges to a guild (ie, no randomness), player-made tournaments.

I think the real problem is that the elite class of gvgers is shrinking but still dominating. Top-tier competition is small and most gameplay becomes highly-organized-really-good players versus casual players, instead of good vs good, as it used to be.

rohara · Dec 16, 2007, 03:24 PM // 15:24

i'd like to see better ATS timing and a few changes to the ladder itself.

inactive guilds need to be removed from the ladder, period, to make room for active guilds who want to climb. i'd also like to see the matching system improved. N/A guild vs top 50 guild is no fun for either team involved. my guild recently re-formed and we can't for the friggin life of us get on the ladder cuz we face top 100 guilds (or their smurfs) 7 out of 10 matches, on average.

a ladder system that allows 20 or so guilds to completely dominate the ladder is a failure of a ladder. new guilds simply don't have the opportunity to get better. we either roll some N/A guild or get rolled by a top 100.

then we have the daily ATS. which is often badly timed (3am? wat?) and dominated by the same few guilds that are dominating the ladder. gg? no wonder so many pvp guilds focus on HA instead of GvG.

Doji · Dec 16, 2007, 03:56 PM // 15:56

Quote:

Originally Posted by rohara

i'd like to see better ATS timing and a few changes to the ladder itself.

inactive guilds need to be removed from the ladder, period, to make room for active guilds who want to climb. i'd also like to see the matching system improved. N/A guild vs top 50 guild is no fun for either team involved. my guild recently re-formed and we can't for the friggin life of us get on the ladder cuz we face top 100 guilds (or their smurfs) 7 out of 10 matches, on average.

a ladder system that allows 20 or so guilds to completely dominate the ladder is a failure of a ladder. new guilds simply don't have the opportunity to get better. we either roll some N/A guild or get rolled by a top 100.

then we have the daily ATS. which is often badly timed (3am? wat?) and dominated by the same few guilds that are dominating the ladder. gg? no wonder so many pvp guilds focus on HA instead of GvG.

Have you considered asking some of these top guilds for advice or even taken the chance to ask them to guest?

http://www.teamquitter.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3790

http://www.teamquitter.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3841

http://www.teamquitter.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=3842

Ec]-[oMaN · Dec 16, 2007, 04:41 PM // 16:41

Once the details arose about what AT's were going to be and how they were going to play out you could conclude right away the outcome. Furthermore I still saw the biggest problem GW faced was waiting for AT's, and in the meantime playing in a stale +2-2+3-3 ladder for over 6+months, with the kind of lack to balance the game, releasing 2 expansions with imba skills left untweaked for far too long. Killed off the mediocre/mid tiered and even top tier guilds from ever coming back to the game. The players that did stay, faced all of what Divine Ambassador mentioned above, fixing none of the issues mentioned many months ago.
What we were left with is a smurf city normal ladder, heavily deterring any kind of relatively new guilds from staying around, and those that did were left with problematic AT's, with heavy deterrents and minimal crappy rewards.

lacasner · Dec 16, 2007, 04:54 PM // 16:54

The fact of the matter is that there are less PvPers and guild wars players in general. This hampers the whole game, not only AT's, and Anet knows it. How to attract more players however is a different topic, and if they even want to at this point with GW2 planning going.

My biggest problem with AT's however is the rating dysfunction that it causes, as for both GvG and HB it is taking more and more playing for non-At players to keep up with the rating inflation to keep a good rank.

Doji · Dec 16, 2007, 06:14 PM // 18:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by lacasner

My biggest problem with AT's however is the rating dysfunction that it causes, as for both GvG and HB it is taking more and more playing for non-At players to keep up with the rating inflation to keep a good rank.

Rating and rank is irrelavant.

ensoriki · Dec 16, 2007, 06:27 PM // 18:27

The schedule should be changed a bit

IMO there should be no Daily AT (on a weekday) under 12:00 EDT.
Make everything in the afternoon.
1 at 12:00, 1 at 15:00 and 1 at :17:00 (or around that, for weekdays)
Although thats just IMO.

the 14 day requirement is also too high IMO
being in a guild for 3 days is long enough IMO.

Ec]-[oMaN · Dec 16, 2007, 06:35 PM // 18:35

Ideas at this point really are irrelevant and way too late, the player base is gone and if you haven't noticed there isn't a whole lot of middle tiered guilds around anymore, nothing for the r1k+ to hope and win against, and no progression from middle to high tier at least from the American playtime stand point. The same can be said about euro times though, I used to play euro times about a year ago, you can easily notice a 3x reduction in the middle tier there now.

The game isn't growing

Yue · Dec 16, 2007, 08:17 PM // 20:17

No way I'm doing ATs for two days. One day is more than enough straight up gvg.

Ensign · Dec 16, 2007, 09:35 PM // 21:35

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doji

Rating and rank is irrelavant.

They're irrelevant for the good teams, but they're very relevant for newer and middle tier teams who want some sense of progress. I know that one of the goals a middle tier team used to have was to get onto obs mode. That's much, much harder now that you're trying to move up a 5K ladder with a bunch of defunct guilds clogging up the top 100.

The big issue with Guild Wars has been the middle and low tiers of PvP for quite some time. You want your game to encourage people to get into HA, GvG, and form new teams, and that's been progressively harder as the game has matured.

Whirlwind · Dec 16, 2007, 09:53 PM // 21:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by ensoriki

I wouldn't say it's declining either.

It seems more like its just stagnant, not growing, not declining.
Stagnancy is bad however.

While i partially agree, i think its O.K. in this case. Its basicly a lot of free time to finish up anything you never went out and did, and time to finish up your HoM before GW2 comes. Possibly a break from the gw world for a while also that would make gw2 (and online gaming in general) new and fresh. From the way the devs describe it (GW2), they want to make it so good no one will want to play GW1 anyway.

There theres always this comment from the guild wars dev on the front page interview posted here at guru:

Quote:

Jeff Strain: We don’t share the numbers of players, but I can share some general trends. One of the things we’re watching very closely is: How many gamers play every day? Whatever the size of your total user base is, that’s the important number. Since April 2005, when we released the original Guild Wars, the number of players per day went consistently upwards. That has been something of a surprise to us, because Guild Wars was not built to be a sticky game! It was always our expectation that we’d see a large number of players in the months following the release of a new campaign, and that this number would drop over time until the release of the next expansion. That is not at all how it has happened! Our player base stays consistent even between two releases. One of the hidden benefits of our business model is that players don’t have to feel that they are married to the game. You don’t have to think about staying married or getting divorced in any given month – which is the case with all subscription based MMOs. You can put the game in the shelf and then can come back later on. While players-per-day-numbers have been going up constantly, we do see spikes of people coming back into the game when we release new content.

Riotgear · Dec 16, 2007, 10:50 PM // 22:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

The big issue with Guild Wars has been the middle and low tiers of PvP for quite some time. You want your game to encourage people to get into HA, GvG, and form new teams, and that's been progressively harder as the game has matured.

I've been saying this for a while and I'm still not sure what the solution is.

The problem is that if there's a format where you can control who your allies are, experienced players are going to roll newbies constantly. If you can't, then there will just be nothing but bad players and no way to improve.

erk · Dec 16, 2007, 11:35 PM // 23:35

It's declining, we waited for over an hour to try and get a GvG in Australia last Friday night. Eventually gave up. The only two guilds that were playing we knew of we had played in the last 5 games so we couldn't play them again unless we smurfed. Before the AT's came out we would have gotten 5-7 games in on a Friday night easy, mostly Euro and Asian guilds. We are the wrong time zone for America GMT+10.

A lot of casual guilds have lost interest in GvG, I think for two main reasons.

Firstly, the AT's have screwed the ladder, despite what others might claim, the GvG players I talk to on the popular local vent servers, do think that rating and rank are important to guilds that are not in the top 100.

Secondly the spiritway nerf has made it harder to come up with a viable 4 player + heros build that works. (Not a bad thing I hate playing against heroway) So overall the anecdotal evidence I am getting, plus first hand experience, both say that it's much harder to get a game. I have to conclude that there are less people playing GvG nowadays at least in our time zone.

I don't think the proposal for random GvG's is a good one, GvG is organized PvP, that's it's main attraction, you can't disorganize it and expect it to survive.

As a possible way of getting more GvG's going, I would like to see a guesting system like the Party window that you use in AB etc. to find a team. That way you can scrutinize the players looking for a game before you invite them, but have access to a pool of players that are outside you alliance/friends list.

rohara · Dec 16, 2007, 11:39 PM // 23:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doji

Have you considered asking some of these top guilds for advice or even taken the chance to ask them to guest?

oh yes, we guest lots of people, even from your guild

most of our members chat with top players regularly, asking for advice etc. we've managed to finish 3rd in daily ATS a couple times. but advice is hard to put to the test when you get rolled in 6 min or less by a top 100. we just don't have many opportunities to have a "GG" by fighting other guilds with approximately the same skill level as us. those are the ones we learn the most from.

Ec]-[oMaN · Dec 16, 2007, 11:39 PM // 23:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by ensoriki

GW has more than enough Potential pvp players.

Yeah but making a random GvG setting doesn't actually address the deterrents pertaining to new guilds which consist of;

Pugs/smurfs still rolling over the new players who decide to take the next step and do normal ladder, because the middle player base simply isn't there to have an opponent found in a timely fashion for the higher ranked guilds, hence why top players guest or smurf

Won't change the current mentality of potential GW PvP'ers which choose not to stick it out and improve

AT play times and requirements, rewards, and loss of rating toward lower ranked guilds

If someone thinks of potential criteria that will promote players that have left to come back, lower ranked guilds to continue to play and improve therefor making middle ranked guilds visible please post. A ladder reset may spark some interest for a couple weeks.

I'm thinking about RAWRs Tourney setup composed of the different categories for the different tiers of players to compete vs each other. This would help address just the current difference in skill difference but something would still have to be done to make getting into the Tourney less prohibitive to the casual players. If they go this route though it still doesn't change the fact that Anet favors AT's and the normal ladder would still be plagued.

ensoriki · Dec 17, 2007, 01:10 AM // 01:10

Rank/Rating should be important.

It gives incentive to GvG
Also... they should put something to lure PvE players into GvG.
Theres tons of them, and if they converted to Playing Both PvP and PvE

There would be less problems.

Quote:

I highly doubt that playing a format that is entirely based on tactics and communication will work with 8 randoms. Especially when you can't guarantee classes or builds, so no monks = autolose.

I believe you are right, im just throwing an idea about creating a random GvG map or so..
Theres also more RA players than GvG, it be nice if A-net looked at why this is and then fixed that up.

HA has its chest thats a little incentive for players.
Wtf does GvG have?

Riotgear · Dec 17, 2007, 01:35 AM // 01:35

Sealed deck might help. The emergent gameplay in Costume Brawl was quite a step up from RA/AB.