GvG should have IP checks

Let me explain incase you are confused.


Currently the system is like you can't face the same guild twice in 5 matches. (I'm not sure if that's actual system, but it's something like that.) The system makes sense, it keeps guilds from syncing each other. And it keeps you from browsing over your guild history, and seeing lost battle vs clan x -6 fifty times in a row.

What's being abused now is there are a couple of guilds (brockback mountain,lol more rounds for u nerds) that are made up of groups of experienced people smurfing and playing against obvious worse players. And when they beat a particular low level guild, they jump over to another smurf guild and face them again. It's extremely frustrating to play against, and it makes players feel defeated, which leaves them with no motivation to improve or get better at GvG.

You need to ask yourself why these smurfs go through the trouble of multiple guilds and the multiple accounts entailed; they ought to just stay in the same guild, get more ladder matches vs. other noob guilds, and then tank their ratings by forfeiting ATs periodically

The answer is that there is literally no-one else to face on the ladder but you. At best if something like this were implemented, you'd just be sitting for half an hour with NOP rather than getting rolled again.

there are guilds playing at their level, they just like farming off of lower level guilds for amusement. And they farm the same guild over and over again by having multiple guilds at the same lower level. Like I said before, it discourages newcomers because they just look at their guild history and see lost match vs the same group of people 50x in a row.

I'm not really sure how you would know what high-level guilds are playing right now being a newbie guild, but regardless it doesn't change the fact that the only way you can hit them 50x in a row is that there is no-one else close to your rating playing, and you'd just be twiddling your thumbs in the hall if such a system were successful. Guild Wars GvG is extremely dead outside of euro primetime and zaishen bonuses. Their behavior is just a symptom of a much larger problem.

That's all the problem really. Whether you are not playing on euro evening or too low rating you usually don't get any opponent....
That's pretty pathetic if you consider you never ever get an opponent in unrated fights , and thus lower experienced on those playtimes will never get better , but well on the other hand , there wasn't any solution done to make more people play GvG..

About IP checks : it would be hard to code in my opinion and the result would be some players wouldn't get any fight at all.... I was in the same case than you last time i played GvG , but i still prefer losing to same guild 5 times than waiting 2 hours with nothing tho...

To be fair, he did mention the fact that they're tanking several guilds to sub 1000 rating with the intent of getting easy/quick matchups. Not that I wouldn't want to have a match rather than waiting for 45 minutes and not get one, but it makes the point about equal rating moot.

I've actually run into this the past few days.
It doesn't really bother me that they smurf but more how much they troll you after they win, especially when they have people guesting from rawr and are obviously playing at a much lower rank.

Who cares, it's kinda funny.

People from rawr still play? Are you sure they aren't just those leechers in that Rebel Rising and friends guild? I find it hard to believe that players of that quality would get any sort of enjoyment out of beating up on players who have no chance of beating them even if they were handicapped 4v8. But then again nothing should really surprise me anymore...

50x in a row was obviously an exaggeration. You don't usually fight these teams back to back, but maybe every 2 or 3 matches. It's still very offputting to newer players trying to get into the format and even the casual regulars at the lower end. Unfortunatly limiting players by IP address would create even worse problems for legitimate guesting.

Maybe they are just characters named after those famous rawr guys who happen to be in [rawr].

It is rawr. They are not smurfing. They are just pugging with other retired gvgers and want quick matches.

so wheres the part about ip checks, why would u want ip checks anyway?

Have the system check the IP when deciding if a guild can be paired with another guild if they already played each other. And have it majority IP so guests won't be messed up.

There are higher guilds playing at their level though. I guest for multiple high ranked guilds in american hours and we usually never have that much of a problem with Q' times where we would need to smurf into another guild.

I would give them the benefit of the doubt, saying that they are just doing this because of the bad queue times, however if this was the case, wouldn't it be so bad that the top ranked guilds would be paired up with the lower rank guilds? And the fact that they are switching guilds just to troll the lower rank guilds over and over again ruins my respect of them.

They farm off of newbie guilds until their rank is high, then forfeit at so they are around the rank of newbie guilds

Ah, who cares. Let the people who feel they have to win through silly methods continue to be silly.

Unfortunately, here's the sad part.

First, they'll run out of challengers once a massive lack of people stop playing. Next, both the hardcore people and semi-HC will get bored and complain that GvG isn't getting attention. Then, ANet does something radically random for GvG and the whole process starts up again with new people thinking they'll do well, when it's simply a form of baiting.

So again, who cares. Going to such lengths is just pathetic.

I know who you're talking about.

They want matches, even if it's against new guilds. I don't like it, but I also can't think of a way to get matches without some new developments happening.

What's the IP of a guild? People trot out this stuff without having a clue what it means.

So they should just stop playing their favorite format?

I remember back when games didn't get updates. You had to deal with it.

Well this is upsetting. The GvG community was putting in a lot of effort with the whole GvG in Crisis message, the live streaming of mAT's and this Guru tourney, and yet a few people just seem to not care at all and are more than fine with ruining newer GvGers experience with GvG all but ensuring that the community stays dead. And to top it all off, I guess they are highly respected members of the community. No wonder the PvP community was never able to shake off its bad image.

There is a difference between playing the game and doing what the OP has described. They are switching guilds so they can constantly play against the same teams so they don't have to sit and wait for matches. I sympathize with them, because waiting sucks and in a lot of cases playing anyone is better than not playing. But they are doing this at the expense of the enjoyment of newer GvG guilds which deters them from playing. And I doubt they don't know that, they probably just couldn't care less. It is like going to the store to buy a new movie, then finding out the last one is in the possession of a little kid ready to purchase it and then taking it from the kid and buying it yourself. Yea you got the item you wanted, but at the expense of that little kid.

They do know that, and they indeed do not care. I believe the common phrase here is "The care hats are off."

We play on random pug guilds because American hour is dead, we would play AT's, but you face generally the same opponents and it takes 2.5 hours for 3/4 matches, the higher ranked guilds you're talking about are maybe 100 or so rating above you at most and we still play those guys.

I've been farmed and shit talked by many guilds over 6 years of playing GW, simply do what I did and wait 6 years to become mediocre enough to win

My guild has been trying to get into gvg lately. Most of us are new to it, but we're trying to get better. We've run into this issue quite a few times. Since we have no chance of winning against them, so it's all very discouraging. Those matches aren't even all that useful as a learning exercise in what to do right, because we can just watch Obs for that. Hopefully something is done to get more guilds into gvg, but I have no clue what that could be.

Due to the number of people playing during American hours there are really only two options.

Option #1:
Do excessive smurfing, tanking and remaking guilds on a regular basis, to the point that people complain about actually facing good guilds (back when I was trying to get better, I loved playing good guilds because it was a chance to learn). The top tier teams end up playing lower tier teams for easy matches, but at least games are played.

Option #2:
Play normally, stay in one guild, and hit the enter battle button. Because there are only a handful of guilds playing, this means that you will get the same opponents as Option #1, but it will take at best two to three times longer to get those opponents.

Option #3:
Stop playing the game.

Needless to say, Option #3 is by far the most popular with Option #1 being the compromise a few people make because they still have fun playing the game. It seems most people in this thread are ignorant enough to want to push players from Option#1 to Option #3. Because that's really the best way to get GvG active again right?

Fair point, but it would be hard to learn from top players if they are trolling you during the match as claimed by some people in this thread. Their trolling would just deteriorate the learning experience of these beginner GvGers.

people WILL ALWAYS troll you in PvP. Get it as a common fact. It counts not only for GW but for any PvP game in the world. Btw any competitive environment trolls worst players. Have you seen how PvEers troll people for being bad? It constantly happens.

Also this:

ive just fixed it a bit.

Option # 3 is the way to go i think.

What's with the horrible analogies this week on guru?

This issue is one of the reasons why there are so few people on the ladder, that and a general lack of interest in PvP. There is no entry level anymore. The whole smurfing phenomenon has pretty much killed it. I mean no one wants to just get rolled every match. It takes the incentive right out of it. The worst part about it is these people who do the smurfing are some of the same people that cry about the state of GvG never bothering to realize that they are part of the problem.

Hardly.

If there weren't a lack of people playing, period, they wouldn't need to smurf to get matches.

and if they didn't smurf to get matches more people might play GvG instead of getting frustrated with getting rolled almost every match, but if there were more people playing then they wouldn't smurf as much and roll people every other match, but at the same time if they weren't smurfing more entry level guilds might get involved with GvG and bolster the ladder. We'll be at this all day.

would basing the match's off or partly off players pvp rank help?

or perhaps make matches shorter and with entirely random guilds

I dont really know much about the pvp stuff, so :\

The currently described scenario of a group of players rotating between guilds to get the same couple of opponents repeatedly isn't a common occurrence. Most of what new players describe as smurfs holding them down is a mixture of misinformation and excuse-making, fluffed up by hyperbole.

A couple of misconceptions to clear up:

*Smurfs are out to get you

This is only slightly true in American hours. There really aren't matches to be had except against low-ranked guilds, so you can legitimately argue that by smurfing, they're going to be running into lots of new players. Still, regardless, the main purpose is to get matches faster.

Something else to keep in mind: searching for a match on ladder is dependent on guild rating. The range of guild rating in which a match is looked for begins at 50(?) rating and gradually increases until 6 minutes, when rating stops being a factor. Given enough time in the queue, even the highest rated guild can be paired against a rating 900 guild. In other words, during dead hours, you'll be playing against them at some point anyway. The fact that they're on a rating 1000 guild just means that it'll take three instead of six minutes to get paired up.

In European hours, this is definitely false. There, smurfs are genuinely used for things like testing out new builds, since there's actually matches against reasonably-skilled competing guilds or other smurfs.

*Every match we get is against a smurf

Just because they have player or two with a tag you recognize doesn't mean that they're a smurf. Just because you lost to them in 2 minutes doesn't mean that they're a smurf (although this may well be true).

If anything, most guilds actually want their smurfs to be moderately high rating - if they're trying to trying to get some valid data out of testing a build, they don't want to play against guilds that'd be pushovers.

Luckily, with the current ladder k-value of 15, new smurfs don't stay in relevant range for more than a few matches. For Europeans, this means that smurfs get away from playing rating 1000 guilds fairly quickly. The problem arises when there's not a lot of guilds playing ladder (i.e. American hours), since the rating disparity basically stops being a factor in matchmaking.

tl;dr: The problem arises from no one playing. Smurfs are grossly exaggerated as an actual reason for the dissuasion of new players from getting into GvG.