Curse

wuzzman · Dec 19, 2007, 02:28 PM // 14:28

o plz. Pvp decline happened way before Nightfalls....

DreamWind · Dec 19, 2007, 02:34 PM // 14:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

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.

Good point. Guild War's PvP's biggest problem is that it is barely accessable for the average player. The preparation time(and money to some extent) involved is off the charts.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Riotgear

One way or another, the game has to address its basic playerbase to stay viable.

The lower-level players form both the foundation that the competitive players arise from, and the audience that gives them a stage worth competing on them. Without them, the game is dead.

This is where Blizzard is a genius and Anet is incompetent when it comes to competitive gaming. As crap as WoW pvp is, it will thrive more than GW pvp because it addresses its pve playerbase better.

Even though Guild Wars pvp is superior despite its balance problems, it has no incentive for the general playerbase to play. The other problems stated above just add to the already bad problem.

wuzzman · Dec 19, 2007, 02:48 PM // 14:48

Lower-level players have been becoming more and more uninterested in going up the higher levels of pvp since factions. Nightfalls was simple when alot of shit that has been building up since prophecies exploded. Which makes it a stink pin of "this is were pvp died" because of the huge shift in the meta and the intial overpowerness of half the elite skills.

But the fact of the matter is Guild Wars has been failing long before Nightfalls. Players couldn't find higher end pvp accessible for about a long time, the game continued to fail at pushing the lower end higher up and attracting new players into a itself. So whatever player base we did have started to leave long before Nightfalls.

The gradual decline was of course ignored, like in the days of Noah just before the flood. Pvp became even more unpopular section of guild wars before Nightfalls came out. HA competitiveness been dropped way before the first Searing Flames groups, GvG has long been stagnate before the first Heroway. The top 100 in the game hasn't changed for over 2 years, players still can't get into groups quickly in HA, and over all the impression of pvp as a whole in Guild Wars steadily declining, you want to know why pvp is died now? the pvp community should really stop blaming Nightfalls for killing what was already dieing in the first place.

Ec]-[oMaN · Dec 19, 2007, 09:05 PM // 21:05

Quote:

Originally Posted by wuzzman

Lower-level players have been becoming more and more uninterested in going up the higher levels of pvp since factions. Nightfalls was simple when alot of shit that has been building up since prophecies exploded. Which makes it a stink pin of "this is were pvp died" because of the huge shift in the meta and the intial overpowerness of half the elite skills.

But the fact of the matter is Guild Wars has been failing long before Nightfalls. Players couldn't find higher end pvp accessible for about a long time, the game continued to fail at pushing the lower end higher up and attracting new players into a itself. So whatever player base we did have started to leave long before Nightfalls.

The gradual decline was of course ignored, like in the days of Noah just before the flood. Pvp became even more unpopular section of guild wars before Nightfalls came out. HA competitiveness been dropped way before the first Searing Flames groups, GvG has long been stagnate before the first Heroway. The top 100 in the game hasn't changed for over 2 years, players still can't get into groups quickly in HA, and over all the impression of pvp as a whole in Guild Wars steadily declining, you want to know why pvp is died now? the pvp community should really stop blaming Nightfalls for killing what was already dieing in the first place.

You can blame all that on the need to grind to get into pvp for so long. Anets product model of releasing imba crap and being left with not a single touch for over 3 months at a time, list goes on. Anyone who's been playing since proph knew GW was declining PvP wise after factions and the reasons to leave kept growing by the day far before and after Nightfalls release.

Keithark · Dec 19, 2007, 09:39 PM // 21:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by Byron

As mentioned, smurfing is a big problem. You can't stop people from buying multiple accounts, and you probably can't change the guest system, so this is a moot point.

Not a moot point, easy to greatly curb it. Make the rating of a guild when entering battle = the rating of the highest ranked person on the team..that way less chance you are going to ruin the fun of newer guilds. Sure you would still be able to have 8 ppl all have second accounts and use it for a smurf but at least you would not have 4 on the smurf and the other 4 just getting to easily play on thier normal characters. It would also be less likely that someone would want to have 2 full accounts because of cost. Also if you change guilds you cannot GvG for 2 weeks.

Smurfs are spineless IMO. Why want to go beat up on nubs on a different guild name? Are you scared people of your own skill level are going to beat you? Make you feel big and bad when you beat a team of nubs in 4 minutes? Just play in your guild and stop trying to abuse the system.

Relambrien · Dec 19, 2007, 10:40 PM // 22:40

Quote:

Originally Posted by Keithark

Not a moot point, easy to greatly curb it. Make the rating of a guild when entering battle = the rating of the highest ranked person on the team..that way less chance you are going to ruin the fun of newer guilds. Sure you would still be able to have 8 ppl all have second accounts and use it for a smurf but at least you would not have 4 on the smurf and the other 4 just getting to easily play on thier normal characters. It would also be less likely that someone would want to have 2 full accounts because of cost. Also if you change guilds you cannot GvG for 2 weeks.

Then what happens when a high-rank person wants to help a low-rank guild? Oh wait, I'm sorry, you have to play the same guilds the high-rank person plays.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Keithark

Smurfs are spineless IMO. Why want to go beat up on nubs on a different guild name? Are you scared people of your own skill level are going to beat you? Make you feel big and bad when you beat a team of nubs in 4 minutes? Just play in your guild and stop trying to abuse the system.

Smurfs are created because at higher ratings, it can take upwards of 30 minutes just to find one match. If there were more active guilds and wait times were lower, smurfing wouldn't have to occur, but sadly, in order to play, higher-rank people find it necessary to smurf. Otherwise, they spend five or ten times as long searching for a match as a low-rank guild, and still end up playing low-rank guilds anyway.

erk · Dec 19, 2007, 11:10 PM // 23:10

Quote:

Originally Posted by Keithark

Smurfs are spineless IMO. Why want to go beat up on nubs on a different guild name? Are you scared people of your own skill level are going to beat you? Make you feel big and bad when you beat a team of nubs in 4 minutes? Just play in your guild and stop trying to abuse the system.

You clearly don't have a clue why smurfs exist at all, go read some of the threads here on that topic before firing off wildly. Do you really thing that top players get satisfaction out of beating nubs in 4 min?

Dzan · Dec 20, 2007, 12:00 AM // 00:00

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreamWind

Good point. Guild War's PvP's biggest problem is that it is barely accessable for the average player. The preparation time(and money to some extent) involved is off the charts.

You can only have two of the following three things in a pvp game: easy accessibility, depth of strategy, or decent game balance. Pick carefully.

DarkNecrid · Dec 20, 2007, 01:17 AM // 01:17

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dzan

You can only have two of the following three things in a pvp game: easy accessibility, depth of strategy, or decent game balance. Pick carefully.

StarCraft.

123456789

Riotgear · Dec 20, 2007, 01:55 AM // 01:55

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dzan

You can only have two of the following three things in a pvp game: easy accessibility, depth of strategy, or decent game balance. Pick carefully.

No, you don't.

Ease of accessibility is accomplished by providing an unbroken avenue from the point of installation to the higher levels of play. You do not need shallow strategy or bad balance to create content that caters to all levels of play, or create a functional ladder system.

Depth of strategy is accomplished by having complex, rewarding gameplay aspects that take time, practice, and talent to master. That does not preclude less-rewarding and less-difficult methods of play, and certainly does not require butchering balance.

Balance is accomplished by having a strong vision of how things should operate and guiding things to that point, while realizing what was better in concept than implementation and shelving it. This vision is essential for deep strategy to begin with, and can be integrated at all levels of play.

As for smurfs, smurfs would not exist if wait times didn't suck ass. Fix the ladder and they go away. And yes, smurfs are a problem that needs to be dealt with.

wuzzman · Dec 20, 2007, 03:27 AM // 03:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ec]-[oMaN

You can blame all that on the need to grind to get into pvp for so long. Anets product model of releasing imba crap and being left with not a single touch for over 3 months at a time, list goes on. Anyone who's been playing since proph knew GW was declining PvP wise after factions and the reasons to leave kept growing by the day far before and after Nightfalls release.

I think its safe to say that between 70-80% of the reasons new players aren't coming aboard the pvp train, and probably including the ones that got off would be:

crap_shit community
crap_shit community
crap_shit community

erk · Dec 20, 2007, 03:37 AM // 03:37

Quote:

Originally Posted by wuzzman

I think its safe to say that between 70-80% of the reasons new players aren't coming aboard the pvp train, and probably including the ones that got off would be:

crap_shit community
crap_shit community
crap_shit community

Unlikely, yes there is major ego/snob thing going in HA, but not in the other areas of PvP. Party finding is the biggest hurdle in 8v8 across the board. RA and AB are doing just fine. HB I don't know never tried it.

wuzzman · Dec 20, 2007, 03:44 AM // 03:44

When I talk about pvp I'm usually exclusively considering HA, GvG, TA and to some much lesser extent HB. In which case, RA and AB is like having the best WoW battleground match in your life with less people ^_^. in which case TA was dead before Factions came out, GvG had the same guys in the top 100 for I'm sure 1-2 years, and HA was already declining. Guilds need to smurf so that they don't wait 30 minutes for matches against 1000 guilds?^_^? You can say nightfalls was a tipping point, which there is no doubt about that, but that is like saying video games induce violent behavior. You can it's a factor, but you can't intelligent say that is the sole or main factor at that.

Gigashadow · Dec 20, 2007, 03:50 AM // 03:50

Quote:

Originally Posted by Relambrien

Smurfs are created because at higher ratings, it can take upwards of 30 minutes just to find one match. If there were more active guilds and wait times were lower, smurfing wouldn't have to occur, but sadly, in order to play, higher-rank people find it necessary to smurf.

While that's all true, what exactly do the smurf guilds get out of those kind of games? Is the resulting 2 minute noobstomp really so much better than just not playing at all?

TheOneMephisto · Dec 20, 2007, 03:54 AM // 03:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by wuzzman

When I talk about pvp I'm usually exclusively considering HA, GvG, TA and to some much lesser extent HB. In which case, RA and AB is like having the best WoW battleground match in your life with less people ^_^. in which case TA was dead before Factions came out, GvG had the same guys in the top 100 for I'm sure 1-2 years, and HA was already declining. Guilds need to smurf so that they don't wait 30 minutes for matches against 1000 guilds?^_^? You can say nightfalls was a tipping point, which there is no doubt about that, but that is like saying video games induce violent behavior. You can it's a factor, but you can't intelligent say that is the sole or main factor at that.

I don't know what you're talking about. GvG peaked around the GWFC IMO. And if you're talking about TA, then you definitely don't know what you're talking about, as the TA community was extremely vibrant shortly after the introduction of the gladiator track, if anyone remembers the days of dedicated TA guilds like [TA] and [EaT] along with tons of high-end GvG guilds playing in downtime.

Even right after Nightfall PvP was generally going well as the metagame was still in flux. It was right after people began discovering and exploiting all the ridiculous stuff that was introduced that things began to fall apart.

wuzzman · Dec 20, 2007, 04:26 AM // 04:26

GvG in GWFC reached its height but it really was with the same old guilds really, even though tons and tons and tons of guilds were playing. The top 100 changed very little back then. I remember dedicated TA, I also remember the mass exodus when AB was invented.

Relambrien · Dec 20, 2007, 04:30 AM // 04:30

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gigashadow

While that's all true, what exactly do the smurf guilds get out of those kind of games? Is the resulting 2 minute noobstomp really so much better than just not playing at all?

Yes. Any sort of playing is better than waiting to play. And if you're just going to do a 2-minute noobstomp anyway (when the system finally gets around to pairing you with extremely lower-ranked guilds than your own), why wait 30 minutes when you can wait 90 seconds?

erk · Dec 20, 2007, 04:45 AM // 04:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gigashadow

While that's all true, what exactly do the smurf guilds get out of those kind of games? Is the resulting 2 minute noobstomp really so much better than just not playing at all?

It's unlikely that a smurf is going to stay at rating 1,000 very long, so they should shoot up the ladder quickly and get a lot of middle ladder games which are usually not noobstomp and can be quite good fun.

twicky_kid · Dec 20, 2007, 06:29 AM // 06:29

I never really understood why people complained about smurfs so much or the fact that you were matched against a high ranking guild.

When I was in lower rank guilds I loved it when I got matched against a 50 or above team. I loved the challenge. It was a great test to see how far our guild had come as we climbed the ladder. Even when we lost at VoD against a top 10 team it was a great match. We were happy with that loss and drove us to do better in the future.

Anet should have changed the system a long time ago to allow you to be matched quickly instead of having the time restriction to expand the search. Again another failure of Anet. It shouldn't matter whether you play the #1 guild or #200 guild. If you are going to be a part of any tournaments you'll have to face them at some point. If you are not going to be a part of a tournament why should you care if you lose?

ATs are a complete failure because of 1 thing. I don't need Anet to tell me WHEN my team can play. Seasonal tournaments are fine but not on a daily basis. After the announcement my guild came to the conclusion we would wait to see what the ATs were like before deciding to quit the game. We waited 3 months (Anet's claimed release date) but still no ATs. Some players didn't wait for the ATs to come before they quit. They got tired of waiting on a frozen ladder. By the time ATs got here only 3 of us were left.

Then Anet introduced the 30 day limit. We were left with building a team of people that had to wait 30 days from the time the LAST person was invited to the guild to be able to play. We decided it wasn't worth the effort and a huge waste of our time. Then on top of that no more World Tournaments. There was no more incentive for us to play.

All Anet had to do was change the time restriction on game matching. Instead they introduce a 30 day limit that shut people out. You can only play ATs at certain times of the day shutting even more people out. Every one of Anet's policies resulted in shutting players out of pvp.

So....how do you get back on track? I really don't know if you can at this point but if I had to do the job these are the things I'd do.

1.
Have a monthly Tournament at the end of every month within the brackets you have now. Remove ATs altogether and implement the ladder system again. The current points system is fine that was a good move.

2.
During the month impose restrictions of skills and classes based off chapter. Like during the GWFC you were restricted to core skills + factions. This is really the best way to deal with imba skills. You cannot change skills to be perfectly balanced with everything else at all times. It will never happen. Anet needs to realize this. This would promote more interesting builds and strategies. It would also allow some other players that do not have all the chapters to join in pvp. Every month change the Chapter of skills and classes that can be used.

3.
Remove the time restriction on match making. This will stop smurfs if teams don't have to wait 30 minutes for a match. Either that or the team will smurf and still end up being a noob stomp. Its the same result either way. At least with the time restriction gone you won't have 50 smurf guilds cluttering up the ladder and tanking other guild's rating.

Riotgear · Dec 20, 2007, 06:54 AM // 06:54

Quote:

Originally Posted by twicky_kid

I never really understood why people complained about smurfs so much or the fact that you were matched against a high ranking guild.

Because fair matches are more fun, and more entertaining. Why do you think the ladder exists in the first place?