I think Anet's direction has gone wrong

By not even considering to stop ignoring it.

omg don't make the game more dumb!

I liked this idea that Anet has brought. It made me want to try PvP more. Even my guildies were putting together a codex group which i NEVER saw happen before.

I agree that for high end PvP the barrier to entry is pretty high. I am getting close to accomplishing everything in PvE that I am interested in doing and now thinking about finding a PvP guild- but for a casual player like me? I have a feeling it will never really work out.

The new champion emote is meant to be something more to compete over since it is tied to guild rank instead of titles or tournaments. The idea is that players will want to push themselves to be at the top when it has an exclusive emote. I don't know how else you would add to competitiveness besides giving shinier trinkets for winning, and ones that you can't easily transfer are the only ones that should matter here.

Don't know why you think this, but just as an example besides GvG, a player like me now has a real reason to play FA, JQ, and AB again. Previously, it was a waste of my time, because the allegiance faction I would gain from it was useless to me. I already have both of those titles maxed out. Now, I can play for the imperial faction, turn it into balthazar faction, and not have to waste anything.

PvP in GW suffers from a broken mentality that keeps good players playing with themselves and bad players playing with themselves and more often than not pushes bad players out rather than turning them into good players. I doubt any number of updates will fix this.

"BAWWWWWWWW, I DON'T WANT TO LEARN HOW TO PLAY THE GAME."

That pretty much sums up every one of those points as the same thing. It also seems to point out that the learning curve in PvP is very steep, which makes sense, since new players with no unlocks in skills nor equipment, and no knowledge of the greater scope of the game are going to often be pitted against players who have all of these. There is really no place in the game where a divide exists, or where a system facilitates a divide to exist. The game doesn't divide players up by the amount of unlocks they've had or the title progression that they've earned. The players sorta do that themselves, but all they can succeed in is putting players of similar caliber together. They can't force themselves to go against players of similar caliber, which is part of why new players aren't going to enjoy PvP.

By dumbing down the game to a couple simple objectives, you will potentially:

• Remove high-end players from the game because they can't bother to play something that lost its complexity.
• Create a new high-end base of players who do nothing but streamline their ability to complete the new objective.
• Not bring any more PvEers into the PvP scene, because just because objectives are simpler and clearer will not make them any less difficult.

The game can't have everything cater to a casual player, because there is always going to be a population of players that wants to be more than casual. The best thing that the game can do is provide means for casual players to progress to becoming better and more involved. Dumbing down the most confusing objectives of an arena isn't going to be the same as creating a decent bridge between them and the casual playerbase.

yea. you can play causal high end pve, but not causal high end pvp

players who really play pvp are because they play pvp not because they want to aim at the reward, reward is just a bonus for pvp...a successful pvp is even when the reward is nominal or none, players still play it.

the mind set of giving pve rewards into pvp does not affect the core of pvping itself like a skill balance, or map changing.

although the new quest try to narrow down and connect the learning curve from ra to ca to ha, it is not enough to allow players to understand the whole complexity within just a few games or 2, mostly they will just play a few games and got the reward, get beated up by the elite and move on....it still takes too long to learn it, I think perhaps maybe it takes at least half a year to get the gist, which it should be around at most 10 days,

is like in a game of rock/paper/scissors, you have to use months to learn how to form a rock, and months to learn rock can beat scissors, but not paper, before 2 players actually engage in a real fight of rock/paper/scissors.

I understand there are good points in complexity, but too complex, players will simply get deterred by it, at least I prefer 500 elites in a less complex system than only 10 elites in an extremely complex system, the competition is too little in the current HA, it can simply by looking at the number of map skipping.

reducing the complexity does not mean it will become more causal in pvp, (which is different from pve, because player vs player, is harder than pve in the sense of randomness), it just mean that players take less time to get a competition going before you have to do this and that in order to play.

and I thought initially Anet suggest that when you put down the game, after awhile you come back, the game will still be relevant .....it is true HA is still relevant to players in the sense of how scarcely populated since faction or nightfall, which the problem is too long hasn't been addressed correctly in my opinion.

A GvG outpost for pugs would be a good start...

HA?

If it's a pug it's really not GvG is it?

Thats paradoxical. Guilds and pugs are antonyms in the Guild Wars lexicon.

another approach is to make the current main objectives less relevant to a big objectives

just like in RA/CA, the capturing of a lightning tower, does not affect the main of objective of killing the enemy, but it is relevant in a sense of not as important as to main objective of winning, so you don't have to really care about it, but a more advanced player may care about it more etc..

in my opinion the complexity of system has to tune down at least to the point that the map skipping is not as often as the current it is

5 years into the game we still have new players coming into the game wanting to play pvp.
They are unfamiliar with the game have unlocked few skills and need a hand because they are potentially entering an area where players have been active for 5 years are part of a well honed team and take no prisoners.

However pleasant those experienced players may be it will be a frustrating experience for all.

The newbies will be getting beaten which is fair enough, they will be getting loads of abuse from other players and may well just pack in the whole game.

Starter areas for new players obviously marked as such, with other areas only opened up when you reach a certain rank in pvp.

That way if your not good enough you cannot even get into the game and if you do and behave like a newbie and your called on it at least its deserved abuse.
Equally players who get above a certain rank can no longer enter the newbie areas.
Its a bit like the fire imp disappearing when you get to level 20 or being refused for an underworld party because you cannot show the stones.

Flux Effect for July: In With the New: Hero Rank negatively affects players in HA. -2% dmg dealt, +2% dmg received.

LOL j/k

Unlocks should be purchasable cheaply via ZCoins imo. Or just removed.

It's still a massive entry barrier for new players to have to spend time they'd want to spend trying to actually PvP instead working at getting the builds/items unlocked in order to play them optimally. When i started out it was a massive pain but alright seeing as the game was a lot more newb friendly as it's activity levels were much higher.

Granted you get a lot of them from your time in PvE, but you never have them all.

Just another excuse for something in the online store, but it deals a big blow to casual players.

If you apply that to the current PvP formats...the 'starter area' (I'm not counting the PvE arenas) is RA. And, frankly, RA doesn't really require skill so much as it does luck. You could be an amazing player but if your team isn't a good matchup, or the team you're against is, then you're not going to win, no matter how good you may or may not be.

TA would have been okay for that, had it been kept, but with the current formats available, something like that would not be feasible at all.

If its not feasable then pvp will fail totally because there is nothing to make new players go into pvp and an ever shrinking number of experienced players ending up with nothing to do.

RA is a 4 person team area many new players will be hard put to find 3 other new players and of course the experienced ones will be telling them to get lost.

starter areas for pvp newbies with solo pair and four person teams would help if not its goodbye pvp inside of a year and hello welcome to gw2 and where is the new pvp.

I would love that.

I didn't HA for a long time and when I did recently, I recalled why I stopped going there in the first place.

1. Everyone is asking for ranks.
2. Everyone is an elitist who claims if you dont use their build down to the last skill, then there is no absolute way in hell it would work.

This is why I hate GW high end pvp because everybody there acts like a jerk.

let's just say, most of the people don't know how to play, still they want to get into the most experienced groups immediately, and when they get booted they go to the forum and cry about elitists

People say the same thing about high-end PvE'ers, and I know a couple that are giants dicks 90% of the time, but I also know a lot of friendly helpful people in the high-end PvE world. I am an elitist don't get me wrong, but generally if someone approaches me with a question or a friendly attitude, there is no reason I would act like a dick, yet some people have that impression of us.

Same goes for high-end PvP. There's elitist dicks in there that act like giant RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GOs to everything and everyone, but there are also very friendly and helpful guys out there -might still be elitist, but some people just can't help it, me included-. You just only remember the dicks.