Bridging the great divide. PvE and PvP.

Join or make a guild with like minded people, that's what the people who enjoy PvE do, dedicated HA players and GvG players do. Now with a declined player base it's really the only way, now just building an F list without the influx of players is tougher.

I feel your pain. I would love to be able to get some decent rank in the Hero title, but I'm just too late in the game. I've been playing since release, but haven't given that much time to PvP at all, and now I just don't see it happening for me. I should have just grinded the hell out of all the IWAY teams that used to be so prolific back when Tombs was HA.

Let me rephrase that whole thing, since apparently I am bad at terminology. If you get to and win several matches at Halls, you should have near R3, if not more, depending on how long your Halls winning streak is. Getting to Halls and winning one match at least two times(IIRC that's 10 battles per time? Assuming you had no or limited skipping any of the times) should earn you enough fame to get your R3.

Please don't presume you know my preferences and reasoning better than I do. There is no rule anywhere that says I am required to play and enjoy PvP to be a good GW player. That comes back to people trying to tell other people how to play a game.

Like I said, I don't play PvP in GW simply b/c I don't like and don't want to. Does that make me a bad player that I'd rather play a different game for PvP outside GW. There are all kinds of games with better PvP than GW.

Now, let's be honest, almost ALL games have some sort of PvP mode nowadays, but very few have dedicated cooperative modes(aka PvE) that are good. What's the big deal with that.

Different people have different ways of thinking AND different skills. GW PvP simply doesn't take advantage of how my mind strategizes and it makes it very difficult to play GW effectively. FPS games, RTS games DO take advantage(especially those that are more realistic, since my mind is very practical in nature) of my skills. And I play RPGs for 3 reasons - story, character development and playing a game where I can, on occasion, enjoy the time of completing story/quest objectives together with my guild mates and friends.

Basically it's two different types of people who play PvE and PvP respectively. Or at least, two type of modes, where you primarily are in one or the other. The fact that a game has both aspects doesn't change that. Sometimes all certain players need to change modes and make the transition is to get a taste of the other aspect at the right time and liking it. The liking it part is what we've been discussing, but I think the two different type of modes (and the different types of people) need to be fully acknowledged in a discussion about "bridging the divide". EagleDelta1's last post is a good example.

I see what Anet originally tried to do and salute their visions, but to expect PvE players to buy GW and play the PvE as a preparation for the PvP was naive - especially considering how the game was advertised.

protip: its easier than ever to get fame in HA, not only is the population smaller than before, retard teams with retard builds hold halls. nothing like the 'old days'

So, uh, you haven't been to halls recently eh?

I mean, srsly, you're actually bothering to calc his expected fame based on something that hasn't happened since '06.

Fullruns are a thing of the past. Today's halls wins are 4 and 6 fame wins.

You just have to keep plugging away. Most of us did it at one point or another. Play with people, and if you aren't terribad (and they arent) play with them again. Build a friendslist, blah blah blah, same old song and dance.

GL

I have absolutely 0 (ZERO) interest in PvP, I will freely admit that I'm not that good a player, I have really bad hand-eye co-ordination, slow reactions, and often will use the wrong skills against the wrong targets (Empathy on an Ele or Backfire on a Wammo for example)..

Being told to join up with other 0 Rank players so that higher Ranks can stroke their epeens, is not generally my idea of a very good time. There's only so much fail a person can take before they begin to think "F**k It".

PvE on the other hand doesn't have w**kers who delight at your death, it doesn't have foe's who will fill the local chat with thier opinions of how good your bar is, and how they managed to kill you whilst stroking their giant e-peen.

I play GW because I want to have fun, and spend time gaining rewards for completing goals. Not because I want to play against ranked twerps, most of whom want me to bow down in their presence, all the while I'm supposed to be 'learning PvP'. All I find myself learrning is a bunch of new swear words and more ways of putting them into sentances, when I get ganked again for the umpteenth time.

In short the answer basically is you can't bridge a gap, if there is nothing on either side for the bridge to rest onto.

Well I won halls when I was r2 (admittedly did get lucky with gank).

Not all guilds are like that, I'm not r8-9 so I can't comment but alot of the glad req guilds i've joined are totally full of retards so you're probably not missing much.

Look at the guild recruitment section, spend 10-20 minutes writing a pm explaining your situation to whichever guild you're recruiting for, alot of the time they'll give you a tryout even if you're low ranked/not got any references.

It's funny how perception plays such a role here. For me, in PvE, it's all fine for me to tell a new player that everything is easy in HM (I mean, it is, but work with me here). It's the same for experienced HA players to say it's easy to someone like me. Sure, it's easy for you, but for someone lacking any idea what they're doing... yeah, it's likely not.

My guildmates and I are attempting to get into PvP these days. Attempting in small ways (TA lastnight, we got our butts kicked ^_^), but none the less trying to learn. Some of us -- not me -- have r3, but for the most part we're unranked scrubs. We expect to fail a lot. We did GvG in April 08, and had a lot of fun... even if we never won. We're not in it to be srs bzns competitors, we just want to play.

I don't know that you can add a bridge to somewhere that nobody wants to take the time to find on a map. If that makes sense.

What Jeff dreamed about did not happen because it was never supposed to happen with the whole GW population. PvP and PvE are very different in terms of objective, style, difficulty. Some might like both, some will always stick to one. There is no magical rainbow that will bridge PvP and PvE. The separation exists because they are different, VERY different.

It was not always like that, but I guess if a game (pvp) is not supported/upgraded, that's what happens, one side of the coin is shiny, the other rusty. I read some very good posts in this thread HOW it happened: too strong focus on GvG, role of weakest link in competitive games, organization problems (EIGHT ppl for a team!), lack of incentive/reward for middle level playing (and casual), etc. But I wouldn't blame the narrow "bridge" between PvE and PvP. If competitive gvg was your thing, you could get there (to beginner gvg level) easily through ab,ra,ta,hvh, if it is not then you are still in pve farming/grinding/etc or left long time ago.

I feel bad for the low rank players now..when i began i had ViM to get a cheap r3 easy, there really isn't an extremely cheap build that lower rank guys can run these days

Dead horse is dead.

Yes it stinks. Yes there really isn't anything you can do unless you have a good guild to get rank now. PUGing sucks and always has. Elitists are pricks and give the rest of PvPers a bad name. Since there is always that one elitist prick in a team of 8 people unranked/low ranked players are never welcome. Having rank shows experience but doesn't show skill. Many people who are highly ranked are just as bad as those who are r0. Of course that isn't always the case. Most people who are highly ranked are good, but with everything, a few bad apples give everybody a bad reputation as elitest pricks who are bad players.
Unranked PUGing is a slow, tedious process as it takes an hour to find a group, only to have half the team rage quit after they lose on the first or second map, and then take another hour to find a group.

All of this is old news. Don't whine about it. It's just how things are.

Hopefully GW2 learns from its mistakes and adapts an ELO style ranking system for all of it's PvP so ranking actually means something. Ie, win you gain fame, lose you lose fame, just like HB and GvG ranking. It's the only fair way to distinguish between a guy who plays thousands of matches and wins 1% of them vs a guy who plays 50 and wins 45 of them.

I'm mostly pve orientated and I admit it, but every now and then my friends and I form a team and go to ha, with our ranks ranging from 1 to 8. Admiditly a good portion of the time we get our ass handed to us a good portion of the time, but we really don't care. We have a good time, get a few laughs in ( which is basicly making fun of each other on vent), and win a few games. But yeah it really doesn't make a difference to us if we win or lose.

not true, with all the skips around then he might only get 2 fame halls win.

Thought u did say u held...now does that mean more than winning and defending once? or 2 wins and then losing.

Step 1: Get players who you like playing with. This includes PvErs. Picking up random players should really be restricted to 1 or 2 people. In dire circumstances, 3 at most.
Step 2: Get those people you like playing with and play with them in some arena. TA is typically the best place to get practice. HA is full of terrible players who never get better.
Step 3: Get some advice from either strategy forums or wiki, or asking someone in game.
Step 4: Play more. Get better. More importantly, learn what you're doing wrong and fix it.

Forming a group/guild needs to be easier for the high end pvp getting 8 competent players of about the same skill level is hard enough and then getting them to play regularly at set times is harder, then keeping the guild together after one loss against other well established guilds is pretty hard, especially for a guild of fairly inexperienced gvgers.

Some things that could be done
1. lower the team size so that forming a stable team with real life friends or a few good internet friends is more realistic (5-6 seems good).
2. Perhaps some form of PUG gvg seperate from ranked gvg so that people can learn the game with out going through the hassle of forming/finding a guild.
3. In game voice chat, basically every team needs vent to be competitive, this would be especially important for pugs.
4. Although not as important for gvg in HA TA and any other pug formats being able to post templates in party search and increasing the party search limit would go a long way towards speeding up the process.

More actualy interaction between pvp and pve is needed as well as is there is no reason for a pver to do pvp. The HoH affecting favor was a cool idea but ultimately was a fairly intangible form of interaction for most pve players and it was too easy to just let someone else handle getting favor for you. Exclusive pvp items that a decent (not godly) pvper could obtain would be cool and just generally more incentive to pvp. As is the only incentive is really the title; hero and glad have been disregarded as worthless and champion is impossibly hard for most people. I like the idea of every match giving champ points and the amount you get scaling with the rating/rank of your guild and your opponent. Lastly if there is a way to obtain the same reward from both pve and pvp the pvp version needs to be more proffitable (assuming you win). The perfect example is AB where you gain absymally low lux/kurz in comparison to pve, pvp is harder and should give just rewards otherwise there is no incentive.

To sum up what I think the main problems are, no incentive to pvp and if you do decide to try pvp learning the game and forming the group is far too much work for a video game.

If it weren't titles, it would be something else for "elitists" to judge people. People hate losing, and want the best chances to win.

You're never going to be able to get into any sort of top pvp team without being a top pvper, rank shows that you've been around for a while anyway, and everyone knows HA players have terrible attitudes so please stop talking so badly about a game I like.

Merged these two threads, they're basically the same topic anyway.

I wonder if GW2 will be different for the people that wanna HA with no rank...most of the "high rankers" will all be in same guild/know each other/and group up (if they still play). So that would leave rank discrimination kinda...

I'm mostly a PvE player, but have some experience with PvP (eg, I'm R3 from playing in balanced groups), and the thing that would do the most to get me to PvP more would be the ability to play against people of my own ability. Going into AB and steamrolling a bunch of people with no PvP experience gets old fast. Going into high end PvP and getting my rear end handed to me on a platter by people who are way better at PvP than I am also gets old fast. The biggest attraction of PvP for me is playing against people of roughly my own skill level, where I don't know whether I'm going to win or not, and if I do win, it actually feels like an achievement.

There should be something like TA -- low end but structured PvP -- which has rank matching. Getting 4 people together for TA is way easier than getting 8 people together for GvG, but TA is a lottery as to who you'll be up against. The odds of coming up against another team at the same level as you are is fairly small. RA is even worse, since you have the same problems with people on your own team as well, not to mention sync joiners.

It will be hilarious to see the same elitists on GW2 thinking they are better than everyone else on day one!

"Must have r8+ in GW1 to join"

Maybe they should buff Ursan, and allow it in PVP, so everyone runs UrsanWay, and then all the PvE's could play...

This is where your PvE friends come in. See, in PvE, you were supposed to get to know at least 8 people in that 100-man-guild of yours... and then make the journey to PvP.

People keep thinking that moving to PvP means leaving your PvE friends forever, when in fact, it's quite the opposite... you're supposed to start PvP with people you already know.

Yeaaaaaah, because we all run ursan/perma/easy button (lol no).

Some of us do pay attention to obs/read forums/follow discussion and have an idea of what skills to run. We may not (yet) be able to correctly make all 32/64 of those skills work seamlessly together, and have the team coordination to do so, but we're not running in with subpar skillbars :/

1) Skill based gameplay.

In every single gameplay format, each team member matters. Each sub-performing teamamte is liability.

This is true even in low end/fun formats.

Even in RA/AB you want to be good enough so that people would not thing/say "I wish we got someone else as our (4) instead."

There is simply no place for "he sucks, but hey, its another warm body at our side."

I have quite realistic preception of my skills. Being well versed in mechanics and knowing what wins does not equal being to able play that way ('my melee ai is bad'), besides, my ping is at 500ms range most of the time and my connection has some issues that which means that i can not reconnect after DC most of the time. I just do not enjoy sucking, and hence have no reason to dabble into PvP where it is guaranteed for me.

2) Time

As said, to get anywhere in PvP you have to play gw-space. That takes much more time than anyone with casual tendencies has.

And once you get anywhere near interesting people and even in guild you want to be able to be online regulary and able to team with people. And you just can not leave in middle of match.

In PvE having a 'phone-guy' in team sucks, but people can cope with it if they know you because it just means mission takes a bit longer and they can spend that time with bathroom break or socializing. In PvP, its lost match and 7 people that are not likely to be very undestanding becuase they just got beaten at not fault of theirs.

It always felt i would have to be online on schedulle for any more serious PvP, and i despise having to organize my life according to game.

3) Rage.

If I actually participate, and get yelled at ... yep, they usually have a point or at least a reason. I can learn something from it and maybe not repeat that mistake next time. Or learn who is asshole.

But I do not enjoy being yelled at (who does?). And I avoiding that is as simple as *not* playing PvP ... well, I am sold.

4) Reason

There is just no reason to PvP for me anyway.

I don't care about PvP titles, holding halls or winning tournaments. Sure, it sounds cool. But changes of being that "THE Guy" who gets to experience it are slim enough to not bother.

There are goodie rewards for PvE to fuel some titles (y.a.w.n.) or plain gold (y.a.-freaking-w.n.)

I do like the action, but I can get that in nerfed version as PvE slaughterfest or just watch it in observer mode (which sucks without comentaries, <3 SarbeWolf for his videos).

To me, because of point 1 to 3, participation in PvP does not increase amount of fun. It might increase stress levels thou.

And if PvP is not fun for me ... why should i want to go ther and care about big divide.

Understand this:

PvE -> PvP transition is good for game as whole and for PvP players because it brings in new blood that they desperatelly need. But its benefits for PvE player himself are lacking and not really much of incentive unless he can find his own fun in PvP.

And MMO players are bad at finding "their own fun" unless there is yellow exclamation mark above it's head.

Hero Battles was supposed to be a bridge between PvE and PvP, it's essentially a 1v1 format so it's easy to enter, it has a ladder system so you know whether or not you're actually making any progress and you're matched against players with an similar skill level. Unfortunately the format suffers from so many problems that it never accomplished what it was supposed to do and so far Anet never invested time into trying to fix those problems.

Really not needed, as has been mentioned in this thread, that's just the sort of attitude that leads people to think so poorly of PvP'ers, and is in no way constructive.

Zwei2stein, I get the fun point, and some players just don't find GW PvP to be fun, and that's cool, they don't have to play if they don't want to... but what would make GW's PvP rewarding FOR YOU? A friendly, less abusive environment? Or are you looking for more substantial rewards? Faster title progress? Better loot/income from PvP?

Please tell me when
(A) PvP is enjoyable and fun to play, and not so bloody serious.
(B) When there's no rank discriminations.
(C) No abuse of dishonorable because you happened to disrupt someone's RA sync.

Then we can start to find ways of getting more PvE players into PvP.
After all it's a game, not work.

For me personally, I place a lot of weight on a couple of things when it comes to pretty much anything.

Working smarter, not harder
I have no problem putting in effort towards a goal. However, if to achieve said goal, it has to be in the dumbest, least efficient manner possible, I can tell you right now it's going to be a non-starter. If you are telling me that I need to move ten tons of fill dirt into my backyard, but you give me a teaspoon to move all that dirt, I'm going to politely tell you where you can shove that spoon sideways and will consider other options. I can get a wheelbarrow and shovel, I can buy some beer and another shovel and get a friend to help, I can hire some people to do this for me, or I could go and rent myself a bobcat and do it that way. And no, I'm not looking for an Ursan button, for those about to suggest that that's what I want.

As it is currently, we seem to have the teaspoon option, or if we're lucky, maybe the beer and friends option. (I suppose also the hiring people option (fame farming service) is available, as is the bobcat option (ebayed acct), however, those options are just icky imo and off the table, for me at least.) I congratulate those who had the tenacity to bang your heads against the wall and suffer thru pugs to achieve your rank, good for you. Not good for me, I'm not inclined to do something stupidly because "that's the way it's done." Not for me it's not. It's not done at all.

If the beer and friends option were somehow made to be less of a pitfa to actually accomplish, then I'd consider putting more effort towards some pvp goals. There have already been some suggestions as to how to accomplish this, hopefully Anet is seriously looking at options for this in gw2.

Return on investment
Like I mentioned above, I don't have a problem investing time and effort to achieve something. But as it's been pointed out by several previous posters, the time spent setting up a pug group only to have it fall apart or otherwise fail, one has to consider if this is a good use of their time. Is it a wise investment of my valueable liesure time to spend it on hour after hour after hour of frustration and pain with irritable shitheads? To what gain?

Well, I guess it'd help if I defined what I'd like for my roi. Maybe to not get roflstomped by r9 groups and instead be able to team up with similarly skilled players to fight similarly skilled players. Maybe to not spend a lot of time with our thumbs up our asses waiting for teammates to come along to round out the group and instead have a more efficient lfg/friendslist/networking system. I guess for me, my time is more valuable than the actual reward, so minimizing my time wasting is more important to me than shiny carrots and emotes and stuff. Emotes, meh, I'm indifferent towards. I can buy carrots, I can't buy time.

These two aspects play a big part in why I think many people stay away from pvp. It's not laziness or thin-skin or being a giant care bear that necessarily keeps people out of pvp (broken/stale meta's notwithstanding). Spending/wasting considerable amounts of my limited liesure time banging my head against the wall in an environment fraught with drama and frustration in pvp, well, it's not that difficult to see why people would alternately rather spend less time rolling their faces on their keyboards and winning in pve.

This just made me laugh. I hope GW2 is really different as to make all start out equal in PvE and Pvp. If it has the same skill sets and setup as we have now the 2 communities will remain at war. If it is all new to everyone it will take a while to start the infighting again. I guess maybe the 2 just can't be bridged, hopefully a little more tolerance for each.

As I've stated repeatedly in the past, the party system creates an artificial barrier to entry (artificial in the sense that the barrier has nothing to do with actually playing the game). Currently, it doesn't matter how good you, personally, are at the game if you can't find seven other people who are just as good or better.

Furthermore, PvP isn't for everyone to begin with. People like Bristlebane above wonder why PvP is so "serious", because apparently games should never be taken seriously. These people will never succeed in a competitive gaming environment, and PvP is inherently competitive. PvP is not, and never will be, for them.

Bridging the great divide. PvE and PvP -- It is really only for those who would like to really bridge the gap. So, blaming the steep learning curve between RA and any sort of organized team based play, is not right. People who like to HA, will continue to like till they attain their goals. People who like to RA, will continue to RA and sport their mighty (pun intended) glad title regardless of what others think about it. I don't believe any action from ANET or handholding from others will be needed to bridge the gap.

So, to understand how to bridge the gap just ask the traditional 6 questions starting with the following:

Who…What…Where…When…Why…How…

1. Who will do it? You. No one else. Regardless of the number of friends you have today, it is ultimately you who will go through the process for yourself.

2. What will be needed to do it? Attitude and Patience. [A lot of patience needed to deal with kids on vent raging at every thing around them or the usual idiots (including you, no offense intended as the most times, it is you who is goofing up and not the other guy).]

3. Where will you start? Forums (team IQ was good place but, I don't believe it exists anymore) and then, focus one thing at a time. For example, try to understand how to select targets...who to go after and when...(see you are again faced with traditional 6 questions, its an iterative process).

4. When will you participate? Best time will be when most people from your geography is around. Gives you more productive hours through the No-Ops (if they still exist today).

5. Why is it important to do it? You will ask this yourself again and again as you go thru' the ranks whether it is RA, HA or GvG. Is it really worth it for me? Then you will go back to answering why to keep yourself engaged or to give up at some point. For some people, Tiger was the answer to their Why.

6. And lastly, How will you do it? How depends on what motivates you: is it the glory of holding halls or devastating the opponent guilds through your tactics or killing the random scrub trying heal sig under frenzy? So, you have to choose your own glory and decide on your path.

IMHO, ANET has provided more than one ways to enjoy PvP. But, it is us who kind of tore all the things down and made them look bad. Mostly the Playerbase is the enemy of its own and is the bane of good game-designs.

/antiflameshield ON

If PvE was actually hard you'd have the same 'rank discrimination' and 'elitism' in PvE that you have in higher levels of PvP; in fact, we started to see it at points in DoA, and everyone without titles or rank there complained about it as well.

People will always prefer experienced and talented players to inexperienced and talentless players on their teams on the whole; people just don't put a lot of effort into making the distinction when what you're doing is easy. Sure, it's discrimination, but it isn't remotely unfair. If you want established, better players to take you on their team, you need to demonstrate some capacity for contributing on their level.

The complaint should be that there isn't that low level, social PvP through which people can demonstrate ability; instead people are stuck trying to form rank 0 PUGs, which at this point is a futile exercise is rage. Most of those players are unranked for a reason, and it's a miserable slog to rank 3 trying to scrape out wins with those teams; it's gotten progressively worse as those teams relied on other teams like them to eke out their initial fame before, and as there are less of them they're increasingly fodder for everyone else. You really want something akin to AB or world PvP where people gain some measure of experience from which they can make the jump.

This goes for PvE as well; if you're going to include actually hard content you need to create systems and areas where people can demonstrate competence and make the social connections to get onto better teams if they are able.

Honestly it would make the transition easier but it wouldn't solve the problem as to why people are not making the transition in the first place. It could increase the number of players slightly but High-end competitive PvP will always be an extremely small pool of players compared to the PvE portion of the game.

The problem isn't really even a problem to begin with. It is just more, unfortunate circumstance. High-end competitive PvP takes time and dedication. It takes the ability to set your real life schedule around the game so that you can coordinate a time where your team of 8 can play. It takes patience to know that you are going to suck and you are going to lose exponentially more than win when you first start off. You have to be able to tolerate losing. You have to have thick skin. You are going to get raged at for making mistakes. This is a competitive environment. People want to win. If you prevent winning from happening, you will hear about it and you will have to fix it.

There just aren't a lot of people who are willing to do what you have to do in order to be a competitive high-end PvPer. And the main reason is because there is no incentive right now. The only incentive is fun. To some of us, this is fun. We love competition. We love playing against the best, and being the best. We are competitive people. Others just aren't. If they still had real life prizes or free trips to places in the world like they used to, there would be another incentive for people to play and put up with those things. But those are gone and the people who played solely for those reasons are gone with them. And all we have left are people who are competitive by nature and find this area of play to be fun.

The problem is finding 7 other players of about your skill with the commitment needed to get anywhere in gvg that can play consistently at scheduled times. Even if someone were in one of these 100 man pve guilds it wouldnt be easy. I've played with plenty of rank 100/200ish guilds and even then its not easy to get a team together.

My original post was in response to what anet could do about gw2 by the way not about the other merged in topic.

GuildWiki: "It is intended to be a more relaxed bridging point between PvE and structured PvP."

I don´t see how that is fulfilled if the opponents are completly or in small groups on teamspeak, have complementing builds etc.... and you don´t.
This would be exactly like syncing in random arena. That is what I mean.

So either you are on teamspeak with all that mentioned above too, or you won´t have much fun.

World PvP, form a group, amount of players in a group unknown at this time, go insta gib someone thats targeted out of hundreds, rinse repeat. It really aint fun, the fact even current or soon to be released MMo coming this Fall have done away with World open PvP settings and gone the instanced route says enough. I hope as another year passes GW2 will still implement structured PvP.