HA in Crisis

As i told it a few months ago in some thread , HA is now completly dead .

During half of the day , you can get at best 1 opponent in The Underworld after 30mn-1hour. During the last half of the day, there are a bit more teams playing , but there are still too many restarts , skips , etc, which are removing all fun( i especially want to talk about uw --> court/hall skips when it comes to ganked or rock/paper map.. )

So , to make aswell a link with pvp on american hours , as you can imagine , many people just cannot play that arena at all anymore. That's why i think something should finally be done in HA , or even in any PvP arena , to prevent the fact that they will be for sure empty in a few months . Here are a few suggestions :

- Revert Back to 6v6 , or allow more henchs in party : it takes usually an hour to find an infuser for example , thus while waiting , people are leaving , etc... Aswell , as you know , when you get an afk/dc and then lose , your team has 99% chance of disbanding ....

- When someone DC's , there should be an option to ask party members whether they want to replace the guy with an hench.

- Making HA/GvG quest more regularly : it was suggested it wasn't really good idea , but it seems that a lot more people play those arenas when it's quest day...

I know that , for many players , they might consider this as " who cares of HA anyway " , and there are others who got no idea what HA is and are just going to post having read what some people said .Thus , it would be nice to not have such posts here and just try to elaborate a serious discussion . As i said , nothing was done for a year and half now , and it's time to do something ...

I'm afraid little can be done for HA, or for PvP in general. The above suggestions will only delay the inevitable decay that preceeds it, and PvP as a whole for GW1 is on the path to permanent inactivity. Once GW2 arrives, the final blow will be dealt, and there's just nothing that can be done to prevent this. I commend you as well as anyone else that strives desperately to save the very little that's left of PvP, but all good things must come to an end. Look on the bright side though, many awesome games are coming! GW2, D3, Star Wars MMO, etc.. *cheers*

Anet has a very long list of things to do and pvp has been sitting on that list for way too long. /signed for pvp love

However, them working on HA and pvp in general will make a lot of people angry. Anet's sitting between a rock and a hard place.

Better solution: those people currently playing HA, r6+ let's say, may form teams with noobs, ping them their builds for the beginning, tutor them through the first few games.
I'd love to get into HA, even just occassionally, but it's damn hard to find a group unless you're r3+ hero or r3+ glad.

Yea I agree with drkn there is much complains from the ones players that play HA but they have themselfs to blame for a person with no rank there is practical imposseble to get a team if you dont know someone.

It would be nice if people that got no idea what they're doing here and that aswell aren't contributing to the discussion ( such as 2 above posts ) , which is to make HA revive , stop posting thanks....

@ drkn : i understand your point ; on those dead hours , i personally take anyone , but the problem is that there is usually noone to fight here ( or at best , we get 1-2 opponents during 2 hours..). That's not really a rank problem imo....

Rank-discrimination drove away unranked players, both newcomers and seasoned. It's no surprise that HA is where it's at, now. I even went to HA about less than a month ago, and there were barely enough people to form two whole groups to enter. I saw a player with a party size of 3... wanna know what he was spamming?

---> "lf r9++ [insert build type here]" <---

Then I was all like, "bro... look around you... do you really think you can be picky with less a small handful of players in here? and about half of them are prolly afk, too..."

So if you ask me, HA's in a crisis solely because of this kind of discriminatory behavior towards players. I want to give you my sympathy... I really do, but... ... ...no.

" who cares of HA anyway "

when you creat team and ask r9-10+ then what do you expect

HA isn't in crisis.
Theres plenty of people there.

Stop asking for r7+ or some other BS and you'll easily get a team together

[qoute]- Revert Back to 6v6 , or allow more henchs in party : it takes usually an hour to find an infuser for example , thus while waiting , people are leaving , etc... Aswell , as you know , when you get an afk/dc and then lose , your team has 99% chance of disbanding ....[/quote]


No wont work, theres a reason why they changed/remove that. More henchmen means its PvE making fame more meaningless. 6v6 forces more constraints on builds aka less diversity. It's pretty hard to put foes grasping, rupts and song efficiently on a 6member team,aka less build diversity.


HA's reward for consecutive wins is soo great that elitism will always prevail. I myself will not play with any1 who is r10 no matter what. I barely play with most of the r12,13s because I think most of them are idiots and fame leechers. Anyways its people like me that is causing HA to die and honestly I rather not play than play with idiots. Why?? because I play to farm HoH chest or get 10+consecs, and I don't find farming the first 3maps fun, which is what most of what ID1 is mainly capable of. Also the players I know in HA don't even use ID1 to form groups(I'm sure alot of the sucessful groups do the same thing), if their friendslist isnt on they wont play. What this means is that any1 that forms in ID1 will get raped by the people that form with their friendslist, no one likes to get raped so newbies rage quits, no new player gets into HA blah blah blah HA dead.

Typical answer from someone who didn't read the reason of the thread. It's supposed to fix inactivity in that place at some hours . You prefer " PvE'rs making fame " or noone being able to get any team and opponent ????

Btw , since you obviously didn't understand , not everyone do play the game between 9-11pm GMT , and if you think it's so easy to form even a randomway at 6 am GMT for example , then show me some proof

wont work because you are fixing one problem with another problem. I have no problem finding 7other players that wanna play HA, you have. I have a problem with ha being 6v6 or hench based at its current state, but you don't.

reset all player's hero point to zero, it will come back to life instantly

if this happens then we'll see "GLF until recently r7+"

Say all you want about rank discrimination, the ranked people will just moan at you.

I tried telling them months ago but you won't sway them.

This is entirely true. Iv tried to get involved in HA over the years but I haven't been able to being r1 hero and r0 glad (and Iv only gotten r1 b/c a friend of mine used to lead an HA guild). At this point in time, iv kind of just given up even trying for a group. I mean back when I played for this friend's team, I learned how to play some of the HA midline builds pretty well, but even then, I had no way of proving that to other pugs. Currently, no matter how good you are, it doesn't matter as long as you don't have the rank. If older players would allow us newer players into teams and teach us the current builds/tactics, that would certainly get me back into playing HA. I don't really have the opportunity to gvg since Im not in a GvGing guild and I dont know anyone who could guest me, but I would love to be able to HA.

Unless changes are made to make HA more casual friendly, it's going to keep dying. Making it 6v6 isn't enough.

Here's the problem: casuals drive pvp and keep it alive. They are your grassroots and without them, you've got very little. However HA is extremely non-casual friendly in part because of how pvp is in GW.

Two words: relative fame.

The amount of fame rewarded for a victory should depend on your relative level versus the opposition. If two elite and experienced teams fight, it should reward normally. If two groups of complete novices fight, also normal reward. But if a group of random nobodies manages to defeat an elite team with an average rank of 12, it should be more rewarding than defeating a bunch of fellow scrubs.

Likewise, defeat should reward fame if your opponent was sufficiently higher in rank. That way, a group completely new to the format can get their rears handed to them, but still gain experience, and that experience translates into a minor fame bonus which will help them join groups later. It would only kick in when they fight elite teams, groups against which they will almost inevitably fail, thus providing them with an incentive to stick with the format even in the face of defeat.

There's no point in HA if it takes hours to find a team, and inevitable defeat gives you absolutely nothing when you get mauled by an elite crew. The first step towards getting around this is to help alleviate the rank discrimination that plagues the format.

1) Rank Discrimination
--- First, you have the elitist snobs who won't let anyone into their group. I've managed to get myself into a few r10+ groups, and honestly, they were awful. Sure, I got some fame points, but playing with people that shallow and rude sucked the fun right out of the experience. Second, if you PUG your own group with randomway, you're guaranteed to get at least 4 people who have no idea what they're doing. That's fine; everyone has to start somewhere, but if no one knows what they're doing, how are they going to learn how to PvP? There's only so many times a person is going to put up with utter failure before they give up entirely.

2) There's No One There
--- It takes almost an hour to find a decent group of people, and by the time you've gotten yourself past the Zaishen, it can take dozens of timer resets to get into the Underworld. That situation has nothing appealing about it for anyone, much less the casual gamer. You're wasting an hour and a half for nothing. Why bother?

3) Template Exclusion
--- I can't count how many times I've seen people thrown out of groups by idiots who think that the builds on PvXwiki are the only way to PvP. Meta builds are great to use as guidelines to let people know what's popular at the moment, but yelling at someone because they didn't copy skill for skill the build shown on the BBway Team page of PvXwiki is just retarded. Do people not have any ingenuity anymore? There's hundreds of skills in Guild Wars and there's only about 30 being used.

Conclusion: What we're going to have to do is start taking the initiative. It's obvious the higher ranked people don't give a damn about anyone but themselves, and it's obvious we aren't going to change their minds. If you want to play in HA, you're going to have to find people like yourself and play with them. Start groups. Start a guild. Look for a guild. Don't be shy! Add the idiots who trash talk to your ignore list. Watch the HoH matches in-game (press B). I do this a lot. You can learn from those. Pick a profession you like and watch what the person does. You bought this game; you have every right to play all of it.

Brilliant.
They could also award fame points, like they do with Balthazar Faction, for each kill.

Rank discrimination is a natural reaction to not being able to play with similarly rated players. No one wants to teach someone how to play every day and players want to play with similarly skilled opponents or they can't have fun. The only PvP format with this is GvG, yet it's even more difficult to play.

No, they're not idiot snobs just because they don't want to play with you. They're just trying to carve some fun out of a flawed format.

HA, RA, and CA will never be good without letting bad players fight bad players so they can actually learn.

And yet they are also complaining about how their fun is being ruined because they don't have anyone to play with. Funny how that works.

It's not funny. It just leads into "we need a new system".

> Skilled players want to fight with similarly skilled players
> New players want to fight against similarly skilled players

Neither group is at fault. The lack of any reasonable method for more players to become better is at fault. It was a degenerative system from the start.

I agree that we do need a new system but i dont think the grouping system is at fault here. For example gvg groups people based on skill. What guild wars basically did wrong IMO was they created a game that relies heavily on your teammates where if 1person fails, the entire team fails(1person affecting 7people's fun).
Every sucessful game is easy to get into with depth and doesnt rely heavily on your teammates, in shooters its easy for 1 person to dominate(1man army carrying entire team)

Look at UWsc, the only reason why the Tway build are requiring stones to join some groups is because in that build if 1person fails, the entire team loses. FOWsc, they take any1 because 1person failing wont get the team to fail.

I think you are right about these three points but there's a little more to it.

PvP in GW is something where you've got to know what you're doing and one person can screw things up for the whole team. It takes work to learn or to train someone to be good and most people don't want to do that for a dying game. So you add in this to your 3 points and you can see why no one with half a brain wants to play HA anymore.

For me the biggest problem getting into HA when i didn't have any rank was not rank discrimination. Obviously it is also an obstacle but i don't think its the biggest.

I started my own teams and joined other unrankeds occasionally (the times i pug'd), however the biggest problems were the impatience of other unranked players who would simply leave after ~30 mins forming and a loss in UW.

Get some patience.

Another example of why rank discrimination sucks

I join up a buddy of mine in a HA guild for a run. We do okay (6 or 7 wins over a few runs), but not as well as they are used to (they regularly win halls back when doing so actually required winning several games in a row). Two of their guildies immediately start blaming me because I'm some "low rank scrub" even though it clearly wasn't my fault we lost the games we lost. The other high rank players as well as the Guild Leader agree that it wasn't my fault and that several other players were screwing up the spike.

Point being, even if you are low ranked and can get into a group, you will still be treated like shit for no reason the moment your team loses. I never played HA with them again. Not because I don't like HA. But because they are assholes.

^This. I have tried time and again to get into HA and a lot(not all) of long time players in there give me zero desire to continue attempting what looks like a fun format because of how they act in TS and Vent. I have no desire to play against rude people and even less desire to be on the same team as people whose vocabulary consists of f-bombs and words backed with anger. Most random HA teams I have been on have a few players that hate each other and are very quick to blame. When they win there is no joy in it because it's expected. I get really stoked when I earn fame, but most teams act like it's an expected thing so it becomes a lose/lose situation. If I wanted to deal with chat like this I can just put on my headset for xboxlive and play Moder Warfare 2 and listen to potty mouthed teenagers cuss at each other over headshots, because seriously, what's the difference?

Why the hell would you want to scare new players off faster?

What Guild Wars did wrong was deciding to be Guild Wars?
I do think that coordinating 8 people is quite an effort that not many get the chance to or have the ability to do (a reason I'm excited for the 6-man equivalent in GW2), but what made Guild Wars 'Guild Wars' was the highly competitive team combat with deck building and a high skill ceiling. It's impossible to remove the effect of 1 player without neutering the competitive value.

The people blaming rank discrimination aren't thinking hard enough. I love helping players and writing analyses, but I'm not going to do it when I actually want to play. The archaic grouping mechanics (or lack of) is the only reason why PvP failed in GW.

And also the ability to lose fame from a defeat if you're a R13+ losing consistently to low ranked groups (I say consistently because otherwise we'll have experienced people griefing using secondary accounts to ruin other people's rank).

An ideal system should really only have a maximum of 5 ranks, representing 5 different skill levels (Novice, Average beginner, average, above average, very skilled) and that's it. The current system has too many levels and it just distorts the facts (R13 really isn't that much better than R12, and R3 isn't really that low of a rank considering how the proportion of experience players vs beginners have changed).

Nah but , players mentality is terrible in guild wars. You can join any team ( ANY really..) you can be sure you disband after you lost . That mixed with inactivity , you get strong arena...

I am not playing HM sinds end of 2006.. so I have no idea about the builds
that are used, and I'm no fan of pvx so I wont look over there.
But when you say HA is dead does this mean that it would be possible for starters with a random team build to get fame couse they have the chance to
win with those builds..
If so why not announce this in outpost. Might sound stupid. but instead of
asking to join guilds..ask in towns for random teams in HA maybe people listen.
And it might give some fun aswel

When i say HA is dead ( at some hours , not al lday ) it means it's just completly impossible for anyone ( unranked , r12+ , whatever ) to form a team or to find an opponent ...

Quoted the truth.

+1

It's hard for a GWAMM & 50/50 to find a team who'll accept him if he's unranked / low rank player.

I say remove fame all together.... if anyone remembers back in early proph days when HA was in tomes and fame was non existent... it was easy to get a team

I think that the level of HA/GvG inactivity/crisis is irreversible. The damage is done in GW1 PvP, and has yet to be done in GW2. GW1's history will also repeat itself, I promise you that. None of you can do anything to stop it either, but you can try like hell and perhaps slow it down some. It's all a matter of time.

NOPs are simply inevitable at this point. I also find it funny how even in a dead arena such as HA, players still require rank and spend hours trying to recruit r9+ teams, all to experience but about 1-3 matches every half an hour...

I guess the high-ranked players shouldn't have been so hostile and discriminant in the first place?

...oh well, it's not like they care about the game's health anyways. They only ever cared about getting their emotes just so they can belittle everyone of lower rank than them all across the entire game.

tl;dr version: Yea, HA's in Crisis, and nothing can bail us out of this dilemma; elitists that denied newer players only ever added to the problem.

Once upon a time, there were enough players that the completely green ones could actually get better by playing against each other and mixing with those who have low rank. Naturally, that isn't the case anymore.

Keep this in mind: almost everyone trying to form a rank-required pug is someone with no connections and is probably either a douche or just plain bad at the game. You'll never get a lot out of those kinds of groups, so don't expect anything.
This is the core issue.
Puggable builds are popular because they minimize the build component of failure - they've been demonstrated to work reliably given reasonable amounts of competence, so there's nothing to blame there. You can't blame players for wanting to maximize their chances of success in pugs. After all, the stereotype of PvEers trying to GvG for the first time is that of someone taking a meta bar and ruining it by bringing all sorts of skills that he likes better.

Premade groups with friends tend to be a lot more tolerant of offbeat bars, some of which were indeed the foundation of meta bars. It takes a little understanding, though, which you really shouldn't expect from a pug.
Indeed. I believe that people are far understating the personal motivation aspect of getting into PvP. It takes effort on your part to get in and get better; this isn't something that can be hand-fed to you. The resources needed to improve are there, it's up for players to absorb them in preparation for exercising them.
Pretty much.
That's how it should be working. The correlation between those two accomplishments and PvP aptitude is extremely weak.
Nostalgia is a fatal flaw. Rank discrimination was worse back when the only way of demonstrating your experience was with an emote. The only reason you're remembering it that way was because there was actually a critical mass of low-ranked players to play with.

I think HA can be improved, but part of it is going to require a culture change: more guilds going in there, players being friendlier to others, people willing to train newer pvpers, etc. This is something that can be done without dev help.

About fame, I think I'd rather see it limited to a smaller number of ranks. Make fame high enough to show that a person has experience in HA, but not so much people are going after crazy titles. For pugging, you basically just need to know if someone has played before or not.

Yup, It would be nice if a "recruiting drive" of sorts, kind of like what the gvg community tried to do on guru was started to teach those of us that want to learn HA but can't due to the already-mentioned issues. Of course, we don't know how the whole gvg thing is going to turn out but I still think it would be a step in the right direction.

What HA and TA needed was a personal and invisible rating system to match teams. Ofcourse this is easier said than done because 4 top players playing with 4 noobs isn't exactly equal to 8 average players, but in most cases it should match teams correctly. Otherwise noobs don't fight other noobs, they lose many one-sided matches and get discouraged, then quit. Next thing you know, there's no one left.