Bridging the great divide. PvE and PvP.

As the game continues to grow older and players find other means of entertainment, it seems roadblocks pop up everywhere. My main concern: the vicious cycle of GW.

You must have rank to play, but you must play to have rank.

With the game on its last limbs and players leaving left and right, the more hardcore players are left to grind their way towards that GREAT AND HONORABLE r12 Hero title . This is also true for GvG too, but I haven't played enough ranked matches to really get anything from it. I pick up the game from time to time and go to HA for a few rounds, but nobody cares for my r2 Fierce Hero title. But guess what? Right now I'm at 172/180. Go figure.

Because I can't show this title I can't display what little experience I have in HA. I've held Halls several times with an old guild I was in. They didn't care about my rank, they just had simply played with me to know that I can play the game decent enough. After that guild basically fell apart from people finding other things to do, I looked for some type of pvp guild. I would talk to a few players looking for new members and they would ask my rank. I would say I don't have one. Then they would reply, "Sorry, this guild is for r8+ only".

To be honest I probably would've had a decent hero title, if I bought the game when it came out, but I've had a hard time finding cool people to play only because I bought all three campaigns about a month after Nightfall was released. It seems te only thing I did right in the eyes of the MMO community was buying EotN when that came out.

Now, I did take a break from the game after I found out casual players aren't wanted amongst the elite "keyboard and mouse warriors". I just started playing again a few days ago, so I must ask. I know people look for high ranked players to avoid idoits and to actually win a match or two, but I just want to know what happened to people playing for the sake of enjoying the game. When did people get so competitive about how they can press buttons better than the next guy?

And one more thing. Let's just hope in GW2 that high-end pvp isn't eclusive to people with their eyes glued to a computer screen.

bottom line: this has nothing to do with the age of the game. No one wants to play with nameless scrubs and lose. Not all pvp'ers have r9 friends that help them play in the game. -.-

Posts 2, 13, and 16 illustrate the divide nicely. And I'm not sure there's a way to bridge that gap.

Look at all the PuG and SpeedClear/Perma threads: The general gist of them can be summed up as "I don't like to lose."

That's what failing an area is. That's what not finishing a dungeon is. That's what party wipes are: losing. And it becomes evident that no one want to lose. It's possible to fail for several days at something and then finally get it.

But PvP is pretty much predicated on losing. One side MUST lose. At the top end, I guess, the chances of someone losing are close to one in two: fifty percent. Depends on lag, the other team, luck and skill.

At MY end, my chances of losing are closer to one in one. If I got into TA or GvG, since I'm an unranked PvP scrub, I would, as many people in this thread have pointed out, LOSE. A lot. I would learn a lot, sure, and I would get better at PvP over time.
But I probably would not win for...weeks. Months. This isn't like solving the riddle of a HM dungeon.
I could go ages before I see the same combinations of skillbars.

And to be honest, I'm not sure I want to spend all my time losing. I can tolerate it. I blew a lot of time last night on a Deep trip that failed at Kanaxi. Blew through the rest, and failed miserably at the very end. Fine, that takes some tweaking. But to do that for weeks without success would not strike me as much fine, and yet that seems to be something that many in this thread suggest would pretty much happen.

Second...Monsters aren't publicly mean, petty, spiteful, and rude (except the occasional charr pulling /rank.). But again, look at the threads in which people complain about the attitudes they face in this game. "Grow a pair." Great line.

I get hassled by 14-year olds for a living. I don't need it in my recreation as well. And like I said, the above posts indicate some of the rhetoric that fills our gaps.

Many of the above statements--especially paragraphs two and three--are generalizations. I know PvE players don't ALL need to win (just most. and most of the time). I know PvE players can happily fail, and blah blah blah. But I think there's a lot of truth here, to the OP especially, and to many of the smart followup posts.

I don't see the PvP population growing enough, because no one wants to lose--either because he or she is new, or because their guild or team adopted someone new. And not many people like the dialogues they encounter. I hope it finds ways to grow--through perhaps some kind of altered 8v8 arenas which encourage and reward mid-level, organized play. Team Arenas has really tightened, I've felt the last few times I've been there, into a place where I stand no chance, as I have limited experience and no rank.

So what, in your opinions, could A-Net do to encourage longtime players to dip their toes? What would encourage success? Some arena which is limited to accounts with ranks lower than 3 or 4? Some ladder or tournaments (on a regular basis) like that RawR cup, with the C-level teams? Alliance Battles with only one or two central cap points?
Think: what would allow LOW LEVEL PvP players to experience success and still learn the intricacies of PvP and GvG play? That's probably the only way to start closing this gap.

No you didn't. Getting to Halls twice should have given you an R3. Holding Halls just once, depending on how long you hold, should very nearly give your R3, if not more.

Maybe so, then again very little similarities between chickens running around in a group with their heads cut off, thinking they are doing something, world pvp. Compared to structured PvP instances, with set builds and players in an instance, much more competitive and thought out.

In the end all you have is different tiered and skilled players, even without the implementation of titles and such. There will be a divide, and the PvE player base that jumps the bridge to World PvP will probably never really partake in Structured PvP GvG.

All you can do is pave the road. Some will drive slow and others fast.


I see what Ensign is saying, but it still wouldn't do much in the sense that the mass player base, only wants everything to be easily accessible, and they still won't migrate over to higher competitive areas of PvP. As in most will just partake in World PvP sorta like what we have now that is AB.

Also Apollo and everyone else, as others have already mentioned earlier in the thread. Like in endgame Prophecies the bridges are already there, the roads are paved, there is RA/TA, AB, HA/GvG, does the community really need to be forced or hand fed into following the format progressions currently already ingame, judging by some of the posts I've read, they do.

Maybe with GW2, Anet can provide the more friendly and easily accessible PvP for the masses, as long as they also provide PvP areas of a more competitive nature that's fine too, but then isn't that a divide again?.

They incorporated elements that had the potential to prepare PvE players for PvP.
And then they incorporated way to many elements that made PvE into something completely different.

There's hundreds of other unranked people looking to play. Find them, and play with them.

When you fail miserably in a group full of unranked players, you'll find out why nobody wants to play with you.

Also, getting a skip to halls and getting a single lucky win isn't 'holding'.

GL!

Yes,
Yes,
and Yes.

Arenas capped at certain rank levels would allow, I think, interested but self-conscious players to join groups of people like themselves.
Here's what this would need, however: A fast way to reduce waiting times for forming and matching groups.
People have lives, and the changes in the SIZE and availability of the game's community has altered the ease of forming groups and matches. (By availability I mean both that people are spread into 4 campaigns, and that they're in different time zones, feeding the kids, going to class, etc.). To fix this, either ANet needs to get crackin' on the PvP henchmen (since heroes...create lotsa problems in PvP), especially healer/protter hench, or design the arenas to allow groups to roll in with key slots unfilled. We know monks are always in demand. No one wants to wait an eternity for one in a casual match. AB largely neutralizes the need for monks (although a good monk in your 4-some is great). So, can a group of 8 Rank 1 players stroll in, form up with...one monk? and get going in a fair, competitive match, in a couple of minutes? And hope to have at least a slim chance of success?

As another poster pointed out, a "public notice" system to match unranked' casual guilds looking for unranked' casual PvP would also be great. Some public movement towards PvP would be a benefit to the community.
However, let's consider...how many guilds would REALLY move to that? How many PvX guilds are there that are looking for those kinds of matches?

The PvP "gap" is itself daunting--there's a huge difference, as several here pointed out, between RA, AB, JQ, FA, and then TA, and then HA and GvG. The biggest step, I think, is between the first four, and Team Arenas. The levels of coordination change dramatically, and part of the problem is in getting players to coordinate well. Ventrilo and Teamspeak go a long way to easing that, but how do you coordinate in a mid level arena, with people of multiple guilds and alliances? Consider a 5-minute staging area and map preview, so people can talk tactics?
Sure, people should join the 21st century and talk live while gaming...but there are limits. Players WILL need to find ways to coordinate (and I think coordination should be an element of the game here), but not be overly penalized (i.e kicked in the ass by every other team) by a lack of it.

What if the arena featured some kind of five minute limit to matches, with a 3-match round robin of some kind? So players NEED to commit for, say, 20-30 minutes at a time (for team formation and transition). they would play some kind of 5-minute match, then transition out, play a 2nd team, and then a 3rd team? Each map could be of a different variety, and include a walk-through (like AB's got)... dunno, just thinking here of ways to get from low to high.

People won't keep it up if they don't experience some success, however they define it...victory, learning, some kills and balthy faction, so whatever happens needs to really find ways to reward players for their efforts, and move them towards highly competitive games over time. I don't think we need a kindergarten-style "everyone's a winner" nonsense, but without positive reinforcement, people won't move. There's a reason people are following the z-coins....

My history was that I played both PvE and PvP, then quit PvP, then rejoined it after purchasing a new account.

Like many have said before, PvE used to be the bridge to PvP. As evidence proven in the Crystal Desert, I'd also like to mention that several of the quests that gave you skills as in prophecies and factions also pits you through various situations that would teach proper usage of the skill. Although this happens in prophecies's campaign more than factions's campaign, I wanted to make mention that it was near nonexistent for nightfall's. Also, let's not forget that getting out of pre-searing in Prophecies requires you to participate in PvP a bit and Factions has missions dedicated to PvP, too.

But the thing that's made me quit PvP wasn't the whole competition issue or the fact that PvP wasn't innately fun. The problem that made me quit was the whole rise of gimmick builds starting with IWAY and then ranger spirit wallers. If you didn't bring those builds or bring hard counters for those builds, you wouldn't win. And if you brought hard counters for those builds, you would get screwed by any other normal team. To sum it up, if you didn't meta-game, you wouldn't stand a chance. Looking at the way things stand now, it seems like there's still a ton of gimmick builds running around.

Now, I actually gave PvP another chance again a couple of months ago and I still PvP off and on. However, I purchased a new account and made it strictly a PvP account. This meant I had to go through the whole process of unlocking EVERYTHING through faction bit by bit. Although I'm a good way through of having all the skills I actually want now with the builds at my disposal and whatnot, I can say that had I not gone through PvE Prophecies or Factions a couple of years back, I would not have a lick of idea on what to do for PvP considering how different some of the skills behave.

The other thing is, if you didn't play meta builds, you probably wouldn't get anywhere. This generally applies for the casual player. Although I don't run meta, I notice that people would snide and snurk at you for not running those cookie cutter builds. This also causes a bit of monotony in the PvP arena and also forces you to meta-game a ton (something that shouldn't ever happen based on what GW used to advertise as their strengths). If you don't instantly visualize the builds after seeing the class combinations, you don't know what to expect. This goes for the general PvE'er.

Ultimately, I could imagine PvP feels like dumping Calc 3 onto a Pre-Calc student for the general PvE'er. Just isn't fun unless you study and study a whole lot before you can even make a tiny bit of progress.

go find friends and grind fame with them like anyone with a decent amount of fame has done

See also the "Bridging the Divide" Thread. This is a great example.

Yes, I understand what you mean. There are alot of other unranked or low-ranked players, I just don't play enough to play with those people regularly. I just want to go to the HA 'lobby', I guess you could call it, and play a few matches.

And thank you for clarifying my definition of holding. One suggests that I'm lying for no personal gain what-so-ever and you actually correct me. Thanks. There are still good people playing the game.

Overall ingame Population is a factor. Remember when there was 6+ of each international and American districts in HA. It's proportional greatly, back then there were a whole lot more lower ranked players willing to play with other lower ranked players. Now as the game is older most of that's left in HA or the PvP formats are the ones with experience, and all the others who couldn't or didn't progress or take the time to just gave up all together. You can see the effects of a declining playerbase in HA and GvG easily, I know for a fact at least just by looking at the GW ladder page that in the last year a minimum of 4000 players who once used to GvG don't anymore; and thats also excluding dead guilds that can sit on the page for 3 months at a time so I'd imagine that number is greatly underestimated.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10387294

More on the great divide. First Page is enough. Remember what people have been saying about the tone of the dialogue?

obviously you have no idea how fame works

Not really. You get fame based on how many consecutive wins you have. Just getting to halls doesn't give you additional fame, and winning halls doesn't give you any more fame either. Plus, you could win UW and just straight to HoH, or win UW and proceed to the next level, and the fame gained would be the same no matter what.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Hero_(title)

I've only won HoH once, and that certainly did not get me anywhere close to rank 3.

It may not be your experience, but it is certainly the way the game was designed....built for PvP from the ground up.

I remember when I first started pvp in HA and GVG. I used to hop over to HA and try to look for a group and the response I get was "you aren't ranked so sorry". So how do people who want to try pvp get a shot at playing when they keep being denied by everyone. Obviously this has been a problem for a long time and we can only pray that in GW2 it can only improve how more people can enjoy pvp without the blessing on an elitist.

a full run (9 wins) is 72 fame, a little under half way to r3

we arent elitist. go to HA and form an unranked pug, then you will understand why no one accepts you