GvG in Crisis.

For those who are reading the thread and are interested in trying out GvG, I'm still looking for some new recruits. I'm also looking for an alliance, preferably pvp newbs like us but more experienced people are good too I've given up on the daily GvG goal since it's pretty much impossible to meet at this point and gives new members false expectations but I'm aiming for some weekend GvGs. No experience or vent needed, just a pvp slot and a good attitude, you know the drill.

After an initial wave of new members though, my guild roster is practically empty right now, and a few people haven't logged on for days. I have a day job and other hobbies and I can't really afford to spend whole days recruiting on GW. I'm thinking that the obstacles in the way of a vibrant pvp communities are logistical at this point - there just aren't enough new players, and not enough active players, left in the game.

I don't really think it's worth playing GvG " for competition " , as tournaments , etc due to players mentality + restrictions on it + point that most teams you are facing are much more experienced than you ( to give an example , Les Disciples de Baal[Ball] r500 getting 0/5 in mat at the moment ..).
However , it's still fun playing some Byob with friends when quest day ( not coz of reward , coz of more opponents..) ... It's less fun after you lost 4 times to same triple melee ranger necro , but well , still a fun moment ...

Btw , it's nice asking many new players to just give a shot to GvG , but when all top players just guest on low rating guild to farm quest , it's not like many players are going to appreciate ( right now fought many people from [wtf] , from [mojo] , [buho] and so.., al lfights were usually 4-5 of those guilds )..
This just looks like asking low players to get farmed ...

More activity across the board makes it easier for the Ladder system to actually work, where as when people are inactive you will get alot of unfair pairings.

Ah all the memories of GvG from 4 years ago. Makes me want to come back and play this game. =( Too bad none of my friends play anymore.

Make new friends? Lemming is always on the lookout

Not sure if this has been mentioned as I only read 3 pages of posts, but the first and only real difficulty that pops into my mind is keeping 8 peoples motivation up when they're getting their collective rears handed to them repeatedly. It's hard enough keeping people motivated when they're on top, let alone average, and it's difficult to imagine what it's like to try to lead a team that just keeps losing.

I used to have the kind of energy it takes to do something like that. I'd love to beat my own chest and give a few examples but it's pointless. All I will say is it is exceedingly rare to find someone who can take a losing team and turn them into a competitive force, let alone winners, even if the team has the potential. Incredibly rare. I pretty much just pve now due to disappointment with joining 'startup' gvg guilds that collapsed after less than 3 matches. If my guild started doing some gvg, I'd be there, but I wouldn't expect them to play many matches before they started really struggling to fill a team.

One thing I want to point out that I'm not sure if it's been addressed in this thread yet or not is this:

GvG is a format in Guild Wars that - until you are at the highest level of its play and have people with you who are playing at the highest level - is a personal competition for improvement, not a team one.

It's great to play with friends, and it's great to see your own team improve. But more than 99% of the time, if you see yourself wanting to play competitively and being successful at the higher levels, you are not going to end up with the same first, second, third, fourth, and maybe even tenth group of people at all from which you started with. It is your own personal improvement/understanding/knowledge that is going to get you to higher levels. The second (and possibly even more important) aspect is making contacts and friends in better guilds than the one you are currently in. The unfortunate truth is that while you are still in the process of getting better, friends and teammates need to become separate things. Now I'm not saying swap from guild to guild once a week and be a jerk about it, abandoning people. Obviously you want to stay with each group of people who you enjoy playing with for as long as possible. But eventually, the time will come where you will just know when it's time to move on.

Guest better players to play with your current guilds, make friends with them, ask them for advice, and most importantly see if they could take you along sometime with a better group, maybe a pug of better players or something. Try to guest for guilds who are significantly better than you are. The fastest way to improve at GvG is to play with better players. Of course don't just go out and expect better teams to take you in for the sake of being nice. They don't owe anything to you. You need to prove that you are competent enough to be able to play with them. If that involves talking yourself up to more than you actually are, then so be it. Rarely will a player go from nowhere to a top guild without a little lying here and there about how good they are. But when you do start being able to play with better players, it's one of the best assets you can have. It makes your own mistakes much more obvious to yourself when the people around you aren't making the same types of mistakes, and it allows you to correct them instantly, sometimes mid-match, by watching what other people do and don't do. Some understanding of the game will just come from playing, and by being in situations before that you have experienced to know what to do. A large majority of it though is knowledge acquired through information that you gain from better players; by watching how they play, by hearing what they say on vent, and by straight up asking them questions.

If you want to stay playing with the same group of people that you are with now forever, that's great. It's awesome to be able to play a game that you enjoy, with friends who you enjoy. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Just keep in mind that you are not going to all of a sudden start winning MAT's with them, and probably never will. As stated earlier, until you are within a top team and every single person is incredibly good at the game, GvG is a personal challenge for improving yourself and your placement within it, not a team one - and it is a very challenging one at that.

It's comparable to any competitive videogame - Starcraft 1 and 2, Counterstrike, Quake Live, DotA, etc. I know it's been stated before, but I want to state it again for emphasis: On the most popular Starcraft 1 ladder, it's EXPECTED that you lose your first 50-100 games, if you're new to the game. While not as extreme, and while SC is a 1v1 game, it's exactly the same for GvG. Only when you start to improve at GvG, it's not your team improving - it's yourself improving (and maybe 1 or 2 others on their own), and moving onto better, more talented guilds if you choose to do so. Why do people even do it then? What motivates someone to not have fun for such a long time at a videogame which is supposed to be entertaining? Well, for most people it definitely isn't worth it, and it most definitely isn't fun. But for a minority of people who have a competitive spirit, the drive to improve, and a hunger to be the best, winning serious GvG matches can be just as rewarding as dominating a big Starcraft tournament, pulling off a highly intricate Counterstrike match with your team, or winning at any real sport that you care about being good at.

Err, Angra, you seem to be talking to people who already GvG about ways to find themselves a better team if they're unhappy with the one they're in. I think this thread is more about people who don't GvG.

I'm talking to the people who have been saying that they want to GvG but have been discouraged from losing and from their teams/guilds not doing well or improving, which skimming through this thread, have been kind of a lot.

oh sorry I hadn't noticed any I better read my way through the whole thing haha

... hmm I guess maybe a couple of posters could be interpreted that way.

What I mostly see is people saying their teams get discouraged, and no team, no gvg. They're talking about being discouraged after one or two nights, 1-8 matches, and not having learned very much at all. Not exactly a shining resume to start applying elsewhere, nor much of a chance to build contacts.

If I was going to start something like this I'd title the thread 'New GvG guild recruiting'. Right away you filter out the climbers who want to take the path of least resistance (since that tends to be a personality trait rather than a one off thing) and leech off a team above their skill/experience level.

Then I'd filter out those who can't commit by opening with something like:

'You will lose. Try to learn from it. Then you will lose more. Learn from that too.'

Next you want to get rid of Commander Keen, who likes to destroy team cohesion by acting like he knows just a little bit more than anyone else with his 'friendly advice' (read: constant criticism of everyone but himself).

'You are expected to take responsibility for your own improvement, not your teammates. If people think your play is good enough to value your advice, they'll ask for it.'

Then you want to make sure people actually read and comprehended that.

'These are rules, not guidelines. You will be asked to leave if you lose interest after a few losses. You will be kicked if you offer unasked for advice. You will not be kicked or denied a team place because someone thinks you're not good enough. Please restate these two rules in your own words at the top of your application to demonstrate your understanding of them'.

After that I wouldn't care if the guy was a 10 year old kid with severe adhd and only two fingers on his left hand, or a fighter pilot with ten years experience at high end pvp in twenty different games. You get people who are willing to improve, they improve.

I'm sure there would be a few more things I'd want to know (playtimes for example), but off the top of my head, I'd say those two are the most important characteristics for someone to be able to learn something new in a competitive team environment. The ability to take personal responsibility rather than shift the focus onto what other people are doing wrong, and the ability to understand that improvement comes with experience, rather than getting all butthurt over a few losses in a video game.

You get 15-20 guys like that who can be on at the same time for a couple of hours every couple of days and are willing to play whatever bar the team needs (something else that should be in the app I guess, although I'd also make it clear that I wasn't going to ask someone with 500 ping to play interrupts or infuse or something unless they turned out to be pvp jesus), and you've got a daily gvg group going. If the times are more spread out, or some can only play every 3 days or so, you need more. You don't call it a daily gvg though, or people get upset when you have just one low attendance day where it doesn't get off the ground. You also want to set yourself a bit of a buffer to try and avoid that ever happening obviously.

Also, if you have people waiting to get in, rotate after every match, don't make exceptions even if it lasts 3 minutes. You're trying to cover the basics, not build a #1 team. Get everyone a bit of experience, you could have pvp jesus in the queue, and he's going elsewhere if he never gets a look in. The primary team will form itself, some players will be there every. single. day. and will thus naturally spend more time playing together.

Even then it still wouldn't be easy. No matter how motivated people are, they do get discouraged when they're losing regularly, and that can form a vicious circle in a couple of different ways. It's a constant struggle to keep motivation up. You're running hard just to stay in place, so I wouldn't recommend trying it unless you are really up for a challenge like nothing you've ever faced before. If you think getting into a number one team is hard work, this is not for you. Getting good enough at a game to join a number one team is absolute cake compared to leading a team even to the middle from the bottom. If you have any doubts about that, take another look through this thread and notice one of the things that has been discussed is how all the experienced players give up on trying to teach new players. Props to some of them who stuck it out for a very long time. Also consider how almost all of them left struggling teams for better ones rather than try to keep the team active and improving. Probably the biggest problem you'll face is your better players jumping ship tbh, because it's just so much harder to help a team get better than it is to help yourself get better. As for leading a team to the top from the bottom.... well, guild wars 2 is out soon.

If you have 15-20 guys, do scrims against each other to get the feel of things. Trying to ladder asap is like trying to join competitive soccer leagues without knowing what you're doing.

I was talking about 15-20 guys who can be on every couple of days = 7-10 daily. But yeah you do make a good point if you can get 15-20 on at once.

Don't forget about obs mode either guys. Obs mode is an outstanding tool for learning builds & maps & how to play specific maps. It's also great for learning tactics. Really the only thing obs mode can't help with is improving your technical ability. Almost everything else can be learned by watching the best players play.

The point is that people mentionned that reason because of top players rerolling on low rating guilds when zquest , thus leaving no chances to new/less experienced players , and as usual , those posts were deleted for no reason...
I don't have much problem here , fighting pro players can make you better , but fighting ONLY pro players will make you bored and you won't learn really fast how to play/enjoy GvG ....
Fact is that in HA , there are much more players from correct level and a few from top level , thus even if top players are holding hall, on normal hours , rest can still have fights against people from their level...
In GvG , there are too many players from top level , and every new comer keeps getting rolled by those guilds , due to the fact that there are NO other players....

So , this thread was a good idea at least , but that zquest abuse wasn't at all a good idea to support it ...

ps : hope this won't be deleted......

Here's a suggestion that might work a bit better since it would be a lot easier: All you regular gvgers need to start feeder guilds. Then you can go out and spam 'rank x gvg guild recruiting, no experience needed, just be willing to learn gvg'. If you're a highly ranked guild I think you would find yourself inundated with apps.

You put the recruits in their own guild and tell them they need to practice if they want to move into the main guild. They'll go out and play a ton of matches, win or lose. They'll get better, and hell, you might even get yourselves a good recruit or two out of it. You can guest for them and give some advice if you want, but there's no pressure to do so, which obviously makes it a much more enjoyable thing to do.

If every guild had a feeder guild full of people with no experience playing daily to try and earn a spot in the main guild, the bottom comes back into the elo system, and gvg would take off since there would be a starting point for people where they could come in and compete against people of their own skill level instead of being matched against much more experienced players for their first game.

The entire training guild system has been tried before. For various reasons that have been brought up in this thread, they weren't particularly successful.

Are you honestly expecting top guilds to expand their rosters or bench players to offer spots to fresh trainees? That's painfully unfeasible. At this point in the game, the process of ascending from zero experience to competitive play has been visibly accelerated. All it takes is the right attitude coupled with a couple of breaks to get in. The point of having experienced players offer their expertise is to provide more opportunities to make the connections that lead to the breaks, not to provide a fast-track to a core spot.

I'm not sure you understood what I said lemming.

I'm actually not even sure how you managed to interpret that as 'expecting guilds to bench players' tbh, but no, that's not the idea. I'm a bit unsure how to make it any easier to understand. Reading over the post, it's fairly clear I think. I'll try though.

1. Start a guild, call it X
2. Recruit people for it by making sure they know that your high ranked guild watches guild X for potential recruits.
3. Explain that they need to play if they want to get better.

That's it. The recruits go out and gvg on their own, with a view to improving their skills in order to find a place in a high ranked guild. They may or may not improve enough for that to happen, irrelevant. They don't care about losses or their rating since 'it's just training anyway'. So rather than playing 3 games and giving up, they keep playing and fill out the bottom of the ladder.

One of the problems with elo is that the people at the bottom often just quit, and that brings everyone else down, and raises large barriers to entry, which in turn makes new players quit faster, etc. I've actually put some thought into how you would go about developing an elo system that encourages the lower ranked competitors to keep competing, but that's not the point here. The point here is that if you want a healthy ladder, you need some way to keep the players at the bottom interested. This is one way you could go about that. It's basically just a motivational tool.

The concept of feeder guilds is a pretty old one btw. There used to be high end guilds in a couple of games (eq1 and shadowbane spring to mind, I'm sure some gw guilds have done the same) that you couldn't actually apply to, they only recruited from their 'entry guilds'. If you wanted, you could even ask all your apps to join the feeder guild so you can observe them playing a few matches as a trial before they actually become a member, but it's not necessary. It's certainly a good way to gauge them though.

That's one of the reasons why I stopped with GvG. I knew that after improving to a certain point, there were 3 or 4 of us in the team that could carry on and get higher than 400-500 rank (which was the highest we got with our guild) but the rest were just at their peak and probably couldn't improve further, or at least not in the team that we were playing in. Also the drama that we weren't going ahead any longer was unbearable. But I didn't have that much motivation to go further without all of my buddies. So in the end I just stopped GvG-ing all together and most of us are just jerking off playing PvE nowadays, and only 2 are still trying with GvG (and still being at 400 max with their current guild). It's a pretty big roadblock when you have to ditch your regular team and just go on for yourself. I'm not that kind of a person and really like the people I play this game with, and for me games are meant to be fun and being competitive above all else was just not something I could do.

Admittedly, I may have misinterpreted your post, but the following line seemed pretty clear:
As can be seen by testimonials in this thread, new players run into a couple of recurring problems when starting out - losing, and not being able to identify why they're losing. What purpose would throwing a full team of new players into the deep end accomplish?

If there could be some way of securing a population of several guilds to play against each other, this could potentially be made to work. Unfortunately, as of now, there's just not enough interest. Judging from the relatively tepid response to attempts to reach out, there's not a whole lot of people to work with.

There's already plenty of incentive to play ladder, if you're interested in the long run of pvping - not only gaining experience, but also making the connections that give you more opportunities in the future. Promising something unfeasible doesn't seem like it'll help - those motivated enough to actually have a chance under that kind of program are going to be succeeding even without that kind of incentive, and those who aren't going to won't get anywhere regardless.

I know. I just can't see it working in this application.

I went through the same process when I first decided I wanted to get into GvG. Some people are just going to be more driven than others; it's unavoidable.

Those who find that they like it might decide that exploring further is worth going on alone. Naturally, this won't be normal for everyone.

I had the same problem when I started out gvging. I stayed in the same guild for a year and it did help me get better yeah, but near the end it just wasn't going anywhere and you just have to leave them in order to move up. You still have them on your friendslist, you can guest for them, you can play with them. You could leave a second account in the guild, but if you really want to get better, you have to play for yourself, not for your friends. It works the same in any other competitive sport.

Nothing wrong here , but point is that you probably started GvG years ago when it was way more active. You can't deny the fact that 90% of active guilds now are top150 guilds. If you consider 5% of rest is used as quest farm , plus the fact that it's not really easy to find a same level opponent for newcomers , it's probably not worth trying to start a GvG guild right now , except if a lot of people do it ( thus they will fight themselves..)

Well that is exactly the point I thought I was making lemming. That first post must have been way too obscure sorry. The idea is for everyone who gvgs and cares about trying to improve it to open recruiting to 'entry guilds'. That way you get a whole bunch of them happening.

I mean, that's the whole idea. It's pointless to try to start with a new guild, as I explained in detail. Anyone who is really interested has their best hope for personal success resting with destroying the teams prospects by having one of their best players abandon them, which will typically take them out of the ladder. Which is why there is no bottom of the ladder, which is why its so hard for new players, ad nauseum.

Elo has been proven to fail when the lower ranked players would prefer to stop competing (admittedly it takes years, but in gws case, it's had years). If you don't have systems in place to encourage them to keep playing, your ladder falls to bits. What I am suggesting with recruitment guilds is a system designed to encourage the lower end of the ladder to keep playing. It becomes more acceptable to them to leave their guilds if they do get a better offer, because everyone in the guild is trying to get a better offer. The focus is taken off winning and ranking, and put onto learning, which is where it should be anyway for a new player, but never is.

If anyone out there in 'the pvp community' is genuine about this:
then I think you should be considering whether or not this idea has a better chance of attracting new players than doing what you are currently doing, which, as near as I can tell, is asking pve players to do what almost none of you were able, start a team and keep it competing. Not blaming any of you of course, you have to do what is best for you personally, and I'm sure many of your old teams kept at the gvg for quite some time.

I just don't see how opening the doors to anyone who wants to try gvg, without affecting your rank, without taking a serious time investment, without really much effort at all, is going to hurt your chances of improving the state of things. You're simply offering them a carrot they want, and a clear, although difficult, path to it. All you have to do is recruit and keep an alt in the guild to observe their matches every once in a while.

It's fine to pretend the path is already there, but it currently relies on each of them finding at least seven likeminded people, the chances of which are very, very low, which is of course made obvious by the simple fact that we are having this discussion. It's also more difficult due to the fact that not only do they need seven likeminded people, without several other whole guilds in the same mindset, they have to face the 'losing for a hundred games' phenomenon that people seem to be fine with having as a barrier to entry, despite the fact that it's likely the main hurdle that has been keeping most of the fresh blood out for years. In all honesty, some of the arguments being presented here make me wonder if a few of you might prefer to keep the barriers in place. Do you want to be part of some kind of exclusive internet club, or do you want a healthy ladder? I'm fine with either truthfully, so I apologise if anyone is going to take that as a rhetorical question. I just get the impression that it's something a few of you need to be honest with yourselves about.

Of course some of you may consider the ladder healthy now, in which case the whole discussion is obviously pointless

Indeed.

I feel our experiences are fairly relevant to this topic. We recently started up gvg agian partly due to the recent threads on guru and mumble commentary on the Monthlies. This compromised of 2-3 experienced friends and 4-5 fresh faced enthusiastic newcomers to gvg after a month of recruiting.

From firsthand experience I can say that the main problem we have encountered as a 'new' gvg guild is 95% of the matches are vs smurfs. There just isn't the lower end playerbase for close / interesting matches. Gvging on zquest day is particularly painful.

The newer players get disheartened by constantly losing, which leads to them dropping out of games / not wanting to play. I believe we are getting better as we tend to get into match winning positions at some point in the games, however the rewards and incentives are pretty much non existant.

Ah well, onwards and upwards!

Please excuse me and my comments if they've already been alluded to previously as I wasn't going to sift through 14 pages before I made my post.

While the notion of expanding the GvG community in the OP's post is a noble goal to strive for, I can't help but feel that it's too little, too late. At this point in the game, there's no real reason for anyone outside the realm of GvG to want to compete in the GvG scene. What's the point? I GvG'd within the middle levels of competitiveness for about 2 years, and even I don't see why anyone would want to play it anymore. I can't even begin to imagine why anyone who has no prior GvG experience would want to either. GvG had its day, and unfortunately that day has passed. GvG along with the other forms of organized PvP are pretty much irrelevant at this point in the game. The focus has shifted to players wanting to fill out their HoM statues before GW2. Pretty much no one outside of the GvG community cares about the GvG community.

Maybe if something like this was done years ago it might have had an affect, but at this point in the game's lifespan it's practically useless. New players aren't going to be attracted to GvG because they're not going to enjoy losing the majority of their games, and even if they did have the motivation to improve to a level where they were able to compete with the best, it comes back to the fact that there are no rewards left in the game. Why go through all of the bullshit of becoming good if you're not going to get anything out of it? The fact that the GvG community is on a rapid decline is even more reason to not try to get into the scene. How are you supposed to improve if you only get like one game every hour because you're stuck in limbo waiting for matches for a half of an hour?

A better strategy than trying to superficially appeal to new members, perhaps, would be to try to hold on the remaining members of the GvG community, and maybe even try appealing to former members of the GvG community. Nevertheless, there will not be a significant influx of new GvG players, let alone even a blip on the radar--they'll be gone before you even realise they were there.

As of now this 'open invitation' to new members is merely empty words and empty promises with nothing to back them up.

Empty words and promises? I will guest for any guild as long as I am not busy, and I will speak for all of my friends that all of them would do the same, we will help people who are looking to improve, we will not go out and drag them to PvE and hold their hand all day, iniative on their part is good.

Indeed. I"m in a still-not-so-well-playing GvG guild but a lot of good players have guested for us. It really helps getting things together and practising.

Thanks for posting this, feedback is something we really value, and this will be highlighted in some of our future ideas that will be revealed after the mAT.

Many moons ago when I still played GW, my guild tried this. We thought people would jump at the chance, since we would have loved to have been given that sort of help when we just started.
Note: It was in HA, not GVG, but the principles are the same.
We provided the GH, the essential GH NPC's, vent channel and smurf tag and cape. We put them under our aegis and lent our name for recruiting purposes. The promises made were open access to builds and a wealth of advice. People from the main roster would play in the training guild from time to time to help them grow. When we were short of people, we would tap the training guild before going to friend list.
It lasted about 2 weeks and involved constant repetition of the question, "When are you inviting me to the main guild." We found that no one really wanted to avail themselves of the opportunity; they were only interested in getting into the main guild so that we could farm fame for them.

Yeah I can see that being an issue. You gotta accept some of the responsibility for making that an acceptable question though. The culture of a guild you set up is determined by you. They need to be well aware that they're going to start out a long long way from ready, and it's going to take a LOT of games before it's even worth your time to give them some help and training, let alone a spot in a team. If you get irritated, take it out on them in a scrimmage, that should remind them exactly how far they have to go :P

*queue kung fu movie sequence, 'if you think you are ready, show me!'*

If it really comes to it you just make it a hard rule not to ask. Might help to let it be known that there will be no hard feelings if anyone gets an offer and decides they wish to move into a more midrange guild to continue learning, because that's the likely course most will need to take at some point.

It's not going to work if only one guild does it anyway, and at this stage it doesn't look like anyone will. Trying to come up with other ideas. The commentary games are good, but I don't see them overcoming the main barrier to entry which is getting rolled hard for so many games. Think about ratings atm, 1250 is top 100, compared to what, 1500-1700 a few years ago? Now 1700 is #1, and by a large margin. Low end teams leave, the ladder is deflated, and you end up in a situation where todays newbies are expected to face guilds that newbies from three years ago would never have been matched against unless they were smurfing.

You need something that gets a ton of teams involved at the same time, even if it's just for a few days, because then they get to compete against other newbies. That is all it will take to make most of them stick, which means they get to keep competing against other newbies, etc. Right now you can get a whole new team involved every second day, and each of them will have quit before the next comes in. You could probably get a team involved every few hours and see half of them quit before the next comes in.

If you get a system in place that encourages a bunch of new teams, and that encourages even the losers from those teams to stick with it, you've got a self sustaining ladder.

The problem is once they realize it will take more than a few weeks to get a chance to play at the level they desire, most will quit. If most quit you are left with less than half a team and have to refill the roster. Most of the replacements will come to the same realization and quit. After a while those who stayed will quit because they are tired of getting a new roster every other week which basically starts their growth over from scratch.

If you give people the false presumption that they will be able to play for you someday, then that becomes their sole reason for playing. If it didn't matter to them, they would have already found a guild.

Also the assumptions that even two years ago you hardly had to face top guilds is completely false. Back when I played low to mid tier GvG over half the guilds I'd face where ranked at least top 300, which is equivalent to top 100 nowadays. While there were more guilds at lower range back then, the situation wasn't that much better then it currently is. The difference is people back then were actually patient and didn't mind losing 30 games in row. My guild went through a period every 2 weeks or so where we would lose a minimum of 10 games in a row. The difference is, none of us cared. It didn't bother us. We kept playing. We knew we'd break out of the slump eventually and we did. We'd gain all the rating back (which didn't matter then and still doesn't) and then some. It was more about just enjoying the 7 other guys you were playing with and less about the outcome.

Nowadays well over half the newcomers have their farming mentality where they have to win, they have to win fast, they have to win easily, and they have to win often. It won't happen. It never did. The game won't change because the player base's approach to it does. I'm honestly convinced the people who were cut out for PvP have tried it and have come and gone. There is a decent sized player base out there who would like to try GvG. But very few of them are actually cut out for it. And not nearly enough to actually get the bottom of the ladder rolling again.

The game is old and the influx of suitable PvPers is dead. The things the community is doing to try to keep it alive are nice and admirable, but I don't expect them to even leave a visible dent. If you disagree with me, then I wish you the best of luck and would like to urge you to keep on trying. But unfortunately I really don't see anything being successful.

Yeah, it's natural decay. Although you're mistaken about it only being nowadays players who want to come in and win, that's always been the case, or you wouldn't have a problem at all. It's just that nowadays it's even harder, and there is less population entering. Even if the same percentage of players are willing to stick with it like you guys, you're still going to get less people who actually do. You don't get the same percentage though, because, as I said, it's even harder now. I mean top 300? That's 1077 rating atm. Almost every single match a brand new team plays is against top 300, because, as always, teams below 1077 aren't that active, and teams below 1000 barely play at all.

When the game is new, people start playing gvg. Some win, some lose, others break even. Rating points begin to transfer from the losing teams to the winning teams. 1200 teams beat 1100 teams beat 1000 teams beat 900 teams. What happens when some of the 900 teams think 'well this is kinda pointless' and start leaving faster than new teams join? The 1000 teams don't have anyone to beat, they keep losing rating but they can't win any. They're the new 900 team. The 1100 teams, who were previously above average, are now the 1000 teams, who new teams have to face. Repeat the cycle for five years to find where we're at today. New teams are playing every game against teams that will utterly smash them, because the average skill level of the competition relative to rating has gone up, not only due to experience, but due to ladder decay. If you think ratings are lower now because the competition is weaker, you've got elo systems backwards.

Elo is great when low end players are exactly as motivated to stick around as high end players. New players still lose a few games to lack of experience, but they quickly find a level they can compete at and start improving from. When the players on their level are not there anymore, you get a mess. Inflation of the mean, deflation of the median.

Rating floors might have helped years ago, but they open the door to a lot of griefing. Basically you need an elo system that accounts for activity in some way. Or one that starts players low and injects rating using some other method. Maybe there's other solutions, I don't know. The ultimate aim is to improve the chances newbies have of vsing newbies, rather than 'average players', who tend to be a lot better than newbies, with the gap widening as the ladder ages.

I empathize with the OP's message. However, the time commitment to PvP is pretty high. Other than this, I would love to be reintroduced to GvG.

Azazello is right that the skill gaps are just pretty big in the ladder. Newbies will lose to guild's with 950 rating (that have been playing at that rating for a while) all the time. The fact you start at 1000 rating and lose to guilds 50 rating lower than you is pretty depressing I can imagine. I don't know what you could do about this besides telling people they have to lose a 100 rating before they're at their actual rating they 'should be' at.

I think that's generous. Most newbies will still be getting crushed without a chance at 900, if not for the reasons I suggested regarding the median rating, then for the fact that there aren't even any 900 rated teams active, they quit. I saw the rank #8 guild on obs the other day vs an unranked team with 3 players and 4 henchies. IDK how that even started, I guess someone dropped.

Call me a pessimist though, maybe there's tons of 900 rated guilds playing, I haven't sifted through each teams activity on the ladder site to find out.

There aren't . Upon the few fights i did 3 days ago , i fought only 1 real guild rating 1020 , rest were either top150 either smurf guilds ( mine was newguilds , thus 1000)

In general experience of my guesting 2 low rank guilds about 6 times the past month or so there are a large number of people playing low ranks each time i guested, we only faced 1 top 250 guild who we almost beat as well.

Most days there are plenty of guilds playing around the 900 mark, perhaps you got unlucky or was it quest day?

I have the same experience. There are plenty of guilds inbetween the 850-1000 rating that are playing pretty consistently. Not to say that complete newbies wouldn't lose to 75% of those teams.

Well I dont gvg because I dont have a stable schedule where I can be online at the same time everyday. Alot of players are in the same boat as me. To get 8people plus a bunch of benchwarmers who can be online at the same time everyday is a tough accomplishment. Shit happens in real life and people have to leave the game to do things. Imo one reason of what brought the downfall of GvG is its 8player based team combat. It is really hard to maintain 8people in your team. And I do agree when one leaves, you have to start from scratch and usually the entire team dynamic changes with 1new player. GvG couldve easily been a 5v5game if the skill balancing was geared toward it and im pretty sure it wouldve been just as complex if skill balancing made it possible to 5v5 gvg. heal/prot couldve easily been combined, frontlines whos main role is DPS couldve easily be balanced with more utility skills while making their DPS viable can remove the need for more midliners. Anyways what I am getting at is its easier to build a team of 5(gw2's magic number) than team of 8.


Look at the meta build of gvg atm
1DPS
2DPS
3DPS/splitter
4DPS/rupt/movement control
5DPS/some with little bit of movement control
6keep team alive
7keep team alive
8run flag/keep team alive

most of these single player builds just serve the same function

I don't know. I couldn't get into a group in most PvP formats for love or money five years ago, and I doubt I could today. Case in point, I've played the game since release, and to this day I've been able to accumulate 149 fame. To anyone who has ever played regularly in HA that probably doesn't sound like much, but I consider it quite an accomplishment. Not because I think 149 fame is a lot - quite the opposite in fact – but because I know about the countless hours of sitting around spamming LFG that it represents. Getting that fame is the most grueling, difficult, frustrating thing I've ever done during all my time in Guild Wars. And I'll never do it again. I did have fun when I eventually got to play, but was it worth the investment? No, not by a longshot.

Even with A.Nets latest invention, the Codex Arena, rank discrimination thrived from day one, and it was entirely impossible to make any progress toward the title so that you could actually get into better groups and get to that ever elusive tipping point where the snowball effect takes over (though I believe this was mostly A.Nets own fault for designing what in my opinion is a flawed reward system). In fact, I never got as much as a single honor point.

As for actual GvG, English-speaking European guilds were always a relatively rare commodity in my experience, and the time zones make it difficult to hook up with US ones since most of them play during the evening, which is in the middle of the night for me. I did get to play some GvG from time to time, but mostly on a casual basis. I wish I had gotten the opportunity to play even more (casual GvG can only teach you so much), but it's difficult when you come from a guild that is mostly PvE-based and don't know anyone who's a permanent part of the GvG scene.

I'll also add a positive note though. The one PvP format that I did get to play during my time in GW, alliance battles, was also the one I enjoyed the most. I played them like crazy ever since the release of factions, and eventually managed to play my way to a maxed kurzick title from scratch, almost exclusively through ABs. That, of course, was a couple of years ago and these days I hardly ever touch GW anymore, but it's the most PvP I've ever played and the most fun I've ever had in the game.

The bottom line, though, is that in my experience it has never been easy for new players to get into PvP, and I don't think that's about to change. I wholeheartedly invite you to prove me wrong, and I applaud the initiative. In the meantime, PvP has made its own bed coffin, and now it must lie in it. Also, the very nature of the guild setup means that historically GvG just hasn't taken very well to the concept of inclusion – which is a shame, because it remains the crown jewel of the whole PvP system. And even if you get past all that, as has already been mentioned many times over, the game is just too old, and you're too late.

As do I.
I would also like to add that it while it may be frustrating to lose a lot at the start, it is a lot of fun to see yourself, and your guild improve over time.
If you read guides and get understand the basic mathematics your skill will improve very significantly.

As for adressing it's inaccessabillity:
It's not too bad. You just have to find 7 players who will stick by you. If you do the same in HA, you will improve and automatically gain more fame. The most PvE'ers have a PUG-idea of high-end PvP. This is something that stops them from ever playing it.
PUGs are however annoying and barely ever decent.