Codex Arena....

Rank means experience as long as it was gained legit.
High rank doesn't equal skill, so as low rank doesn't mean someone is bad.
Yet, its much easier to find a good player among ex. rank nine than among nonranks.
This is so obvious that I shouldn't even be telling this to someone leading a top notch guild.

Just by reading this I became more stupid.
It's silly, and has completely no sense.

At least half of GW skills are useless in pvp, but you still got much choice of making builds being able to win much.

Meta builds became favored because they are HARDEST to outbuild/outplay, yet it is still POSSIBLE to do so don't gimme this crap about every build being inferior to meta because it was already played before.

if people are lazy to make builds with a limited skillset, why not impose a skillset on them?

It might not have occurred to you, but if u face opposition at a good level (ie top 100) and you are running some inferior build that u just invented, you will not win. ever.

If u run some new build which isnt very good and you beat some rank 500 guild, congratulations you won. Im sure you won because ur opposition were absolutely terrible and it had nothing to do with ur build. In order to achieve anything you have to run the best builds.

This can be proved by the fact that over the last 2 years if not more the only 'new' builds that have been invented as such have been:

Dervish bars - as a result of a skill update
Seeping wound sins - as a result of a skill update
a few variations of flaggers - as a result of skill updates

Thats pretty much it...
Every other bar has been tried and tested a long time ago, it might change slightly as updates come and go, but you simply cannot make a new bar which is as effective as anything already made. How many people try to do it? thousands i expect, how many successful new bars are made which can compete at a top level? practically nil.

If you still dont agree, get 7 of ur friends together and i'll get 7 of mine, u guys can invent some new bars and we'll run meta, see who wins.

As regards to making new builds in order to slay NPC's in pve, i am entirely clueless but im sure its possible. I merely think that at a competitive level in guild wars, you wont make new bars which are effective that have not been seen before.

And ur first statement is obviously right, you are more likely to find rank 9's with a brain, than rank 2's who know what they are doing. I merely find it incredibly frustrating that people still rely on titles as any indication of skill whatsoever. You have absolutely no way of knowing if he farmed it legit, blood spiked it, or even bought his account on ebay, who knows. 75% of the people in HA with rank 9-10 have massive ego's and nothing to back it up, they are absolutely useless in most cases.

The cheaters have control of PvP. Now they don't have enough people of whom they can take advantage? Too bad.

That's the opposite . People want to have more or different opponents than " so called cheaters " ( i guess you mean GvG smurfs , CA syncers , HA deadhour abusers )in order to have fun in the format or to even be able to play it ...

Yes, people is lazy. Why walk to work when you can take the bus? Why take the bus when you can drive? You're not going to change human nature overnight. That's why the appeal of organized pvp formats like GvG/HA/codex will always be limited. Why would i go to HA and waste time LFG ("SHOW RANK" "i dont have one". *kick*), when I can go to JQ/FA/RA and almost instantly get a game? Prestige? I don't think the amount of aggravation is worth it. I just want to play and I just want to have fun. end story.

Why? Because some people fancy organized pvp (GvG/HA/CA), which is pvp in opposite to JQ/FA/RA.
If you don't want to be kicked out of HA, get your rank.
In order to get rank, form teams yourself.
Unfortunately, lazy people achieve nothing and its not human nature, its a bad attitude.
Lazybutts waste their time crying about having nothing, instead of doing something to actually get it.

The better players are, the less it takes to form a team, end of the story.

@floor
I never said that the build have to be unique.
Builds that used to work and fell out of meta are still playable, and may counter current favored builds pretty well.
Look at the few of the latest mAT finals, most of them were won by an unorthodox build, which countered the most popular meta build.
I don't really understand why you keep saying that meta doesn't change unless theres a skill balance, or no build can't successfully play against the most common build at the moment.

And I have to refuse to a scrim invitation, because I'm not interested in cockfights.

Yes, because attempting to form a team when you yourself have little prior knowledge or experience is an expedient use of your time. Good one. I'd say more but this horse has been beaten to death many times over.

You see, I don't want, need, or consider it important to acquire a HA rank. I'm simply stating why these formats are not popular. Those "some people" you refer to are presumably a small but vocal minority. The average joe GW player doesn't know jack about HA/GvG. And it's those average joes you're going to need to appeal to if you want to have someone to play against instead of yourself. To do this you can either A)rehaul the format, B)teach noobs like what some guilds have done, or C)blame the community for being stupid and lazy because I'm sure thats going to achieve so much.

And thats all im going to say because I don't really give a crap if HA stays dead...elitists and douchebags can continue playing with themselves for whatever satisfaction that gives them

HA is dead, and let it be. Its not like I care anymore.
The thing is... that even those douches, and those who retried already... had the same start as everyone.
I failed too many times trying to teach people how to HA, maybe one per ten improved his skill. People seek easy fame farming, not ability to play better.
I will blame community for being stupid and lazy because its true, whether it changes anything or not.
If average Joe wanted to improve, he would have browsed websites, observed some matches and then asked anyone around for help having a basic knowledge, but all they do is shout 'kindle arrows ranger lfg' and then quit because of rank discrimination.
Sorry, but I prefer HA full of douches than HA full of morons.
(No offense meant, just theorycrafting)

This is totally right.. In fact , people did play for fun or even for hall items long time ago, but today it's only purely for fame points or quest farming... That's due to updates though , leading to very easy game , very easy farms in PvE and you can't blame people for being lazy since the game , for PvE and PvP more and more , makes you lazy....

Anyway , the point of the thread is codex arena , that's not at all the same than HA.. You can't use elitist or w/e term there since there is noone to fight anyway.....

I'll try to make a guide, how to make a codex teambuild in fast and efficient way.
Not sure if there is one already, or if its gonna help at all but I can give it a try.

I kinda wish they brought back Hero Battles and Team Arenas just to remember how much fun they were and how boring it is now.

HB tournaments especially , to bring back some competitiveness accessible by everyone....

They are wanting to revive PvP, by making guru tournies/etc, however they still haven't removed the failure of Codex Arena and brought back hero battles/team arenas.

Replacing fail with fail is a zero sum enterprise. The effort involved in reverting it is no better advised than changing it in the first place.

replacing more fail with less fail, you mean.

Hero Battles wasn't "less fail". All they needed to do was some balance changes and updating hero pathing and behavior. However when any of the top HB'ers told Anet how to make Hero Battles better, Anet stuck their fingers in their ears and screamed lalala, to an extent where the mat hb finals were composed of joke builds and resigners. Which looked extremely bad on Anet, so they just removed Hero Battles from the game.

And even with Hero Battles flaws, it was still fun.

HB tourneys <3. Of all the competitive PvP formats, HB was definately the most accessible to the casual player.

HB and TA were not failures. Codex Arena has failed more horribly than any other aspect of this game.

Correct. They showed complete disrespect to the players after giving us their word that HB would receive the love it deserved.

they needed to do even less for TA. much easier to fix than hero AI.

Haha , nice one... Anyway , i gotta agree with urania that TA would have required very little amount of time to fix instead of HB , since it only concerned " killing " and not capping too nor heroes to deal with ,and i don't really know why they didn't care at all of it ...

On a side note , i can't really imagine HB coming back with terrible metas and other stuff there are out (those dervishs with flux effects , boom boom headshot heroes), but thing is that i don't believe TA( even HB) would have many players aswell if they came back instead of codex the way they are...

out of topic : is it me or GvG mat finals isn't appearing on observer ??

Loved the idea behind CA. Loved jumping into random lulzy groups for the first week after it was introduced. Hate that you need to get a string of five wins to get anything from it besides Balth Faction. That is the big problem, because it's what drove all the casual players just looking for something besides RA away. I wanted CA to be a place where your individual build making skills are tested; instead, it's just another place to get rolled by organized 4-man teams....except the 4-man teams aren't happy because it's more restrictive than TA was.

CA has had its chance at being a competitive arena. It's simply not good enough for that; the rewards aren't good enough and the population isn't large enough. Kill the competitive nature of the arena, introduce some better rewards, and let players earn the title one win at a time. It will be more popular, if only for the fact that it's an alternative to RA and it would be sensible to actually get the PvP points for the HoM without spending over a million gold.

That's hilarious. "All they needed to do" was fix the AI? You say that like it was so simple...."all" they needed to do was code AI for heroes that would only be useful for HB. A format that had been plagued with imbalances and dedicated capping builds since the week it was introduced. A format with a community so dense that they decided that they'd throw hissy fits during monthly tournaments because they thought that it was just soooo simple to fix the format. Do you have any coding experience? Have you ever coded AI? In GW? No? Then shut up with the "it would have been so easy to fix" BS, because you have no idea how easy or hard it would have been to fix. Even if they did fix it, that still wouldn't have fixed RR, which was going on for far longer than people in this thread claim it was, and the only reason people claim that it wasn't was because they want to claim that everything wrong with HB was ANet's fault. The community decided to do RR for title points well before it became common on quest days.

TA had the issue of being a competitive 4-man arena with skills balanced around 8-man formats. CA was an attempt to make that workable. It's failed miserably, so I say bring TA back and turn CA into a casual arena, because it was a lot of fun when it was all about that. HB doesn't deserve to come back until they fix the AI so it's functional, and even then the arena will be more about capping than killing by design. It doesn't just need an update, it needs a complete overhaul, and I don't think it's worth it.

You know , i will say it once again i hope i won't have to anymore , RR wasn't the reason why HB was deleted , it was just a consequence of their announcement so that people farm quests and title the last month.... Before zquest , there was actually almost noone farming title points , and the few people who did usually had an account on top level also and weren't total noobs.....

An other point is that , although having some flaws , people did manage playing TA and HB , did manage microing heroes ( thinking of HB), did manage finding correct builds to buildwars the buildwars ( thinking of TA)....

CA didn't have its chance , it never ever got any update, and i can remind you it was ( HB+ TA)^sealed = win!... where's the HB part in it ?? ( i could even ask where's the TA part in it in fact ....)...

I'm not going to argue more about it since they said they will work on improving PvP , but if you got no idea what you're talking about, just don't post...

Why cant we simply have a hero arena with no capping / flagging required?

Just load up 7 hero bars and battle it out with other players. Even without any kind of title, points or leader board, this would become massively popular and most players would love it.

I did do CA for a while and I really liked it. However the complete absence of any opposing teams made me stop wasting my time.

One of the suggestions that's was brought up constantly when Hero Battles was around was just make the heroes phase-able in Hero Battles,meaning you could walk through them. So the problem of body blocking and making the hero stand there while you cap a shrine isn't an issue.

However that thought, or any thought, was never taken in by Anet regarding Hero Battles in my opinion. Which made serious competitive HBers became enraged because in their opinion Anet did not take Hero Battles as a serious competitive format of PvP, such as GvG or HA. So the HB'ers became defiant against Anet, and as you can see, Anet simply pulled the plug on Hero Battles.

Obviously the coding wouldn't be done in a day, and wouldn't even have to be perfect if they worked around the hero AI such as implementations of phase-able heroes/etc. And the reward of bringing an entire new competitive balanced format to Guild Wars PvP would be unfathomable in the playerbase and business aspect. And they did so much coding and changing of AI to the monsters in UW, that i think Anet is capable of making somewhat fair and decent hero AI.

And if you think that RR day was the reason Anet took out Hero Battles, you have no idea what you're talking about. I would advise you to read one of my previous posts.

I hate you're trying to fit in HA mentality (the guaranteed fame/match gain) to where it doesnt belong to start with.

What more likely drove them away are:
1) the long times to figure out proper group builds and find people,

2) (more important and also influences point 1)the fact that the arena demands a player to have above-basic understanding of the game - to skim through all available skills and immediately be able to tell what kind of group build set-up is viable to take and separate it from utter trash AND also to be able to tell when something is not completely bad, but not good enough to take up a character slot for it (e.g., no real rupts apart from d shot (and lets say there are strong skills like dom hexes or woh/hburst that need shutting down because they decide matches, and ofc lets not forget rez sig locking), but no apply or any useful preps, nor anything good in pet line - so you take d shot on other melees/ranged/even caster characters). most casuals wont ever be able to do so, most they can do is copy a build that steamrolled them and still lose to it at the end.

3) because most get stomped by the remnants of a few good players if they bother to drop by every now and then. but thats the case everywhere, really.

indeed it had a chance to turn into sth awesome - IF the due updates had been delivered in time (certain skill ban like aura of sanctity+promised tournies). there's not much of this so-called competitive nature left anywhere, so why do you wanna kill it even here? i vote for title removal instead and upping bfactions. the players that only come to get their HoM title wont last, so why bother? it needs a stable and regular player base, not a one month wonder. TA had it and was still eliminated, same as HB, so i see little reason why trying to draw in trash player base when there's enough of it in ra already.

AI doesnt belong to pvp. As long as there's a healthy player base, at least. And if they absolutely MUST have it, then the iron rule "2 heroes max" should be followed.

its not like TA regulars wanted a perfect balance situation - minor tweaks to skills that never needed a buff to start with, minor arena adjustments like the codex rules would have eliminated half the gimmicks (inc the infamous shove and rtl spikes). but with the current state of affairs as it is atm, neither should come back, really. sadly. i see enough multi derv synchs in RA already, no need to see the crap in TA too.

Anet made the HB community a promise, ignored it for months, then killed the format without ever delivering. I don't blame them for not being happy.

If the prize in GvG monthlies were as low as those in HB monthlies, I'm sure you'd have seen some forms of protest at some point.

Also, RR was not a problem.

Hello there Mr. Clueless
I suggest that before you come back here making further remarks about Hero Battles, you take the time to fully understand the format and it's history like myself and several others in this thread. Perhaps if you had paid some attention to HB (and the HB subforum here) while it was still around, you wouldn't have made those horribly innacurate statements.

It will take more than just fixing the AI to improve HB. Of all the things needed to be done, fixing the AI would probably take the most effort. Everything else needed to be done should not be difficult to achieve. However, the AI not being fixed does not mean that HB doesn't deserve to return. There is such a thing called micro-management which allowed anyone with decent skill to bypass most of the AI flaws. Whilst fixing the flaws in the AI is a key part in improving HB, there are far more important issues that need to be addressed. For example, shadowsteps.

You will be able to do that once Joe finds the time to allow heroes into scrimmages. He has expressed his ambition to fix that bug when he can find the time to.

Linsey said that they would invest the time to do that if Codex was successful which it certainly is not.

IMO, as long as one player is battling another, it really doesn't matter what else is there. The only place in GW PvP that doesn't have AI is RA/CA annihilation matches.

The throwing of mAT finals had almost nothing to do with the rewards.

and it was not successful because most of the updates did not arrive (in time).

Then you are still only limited to playing against people in your alliance, and you have to spend ages waiting for each opponent to set up their hero bars. There would never be anyone to play against in a HvH scrimmage, and if you do find someone it would take too long to set up your groups.

A random based hero arena where everyone can go in, set up their builds, and click enter for a random match up is what a lot of players would enjoy, minus the tedious flag capping from the previous HB we had.

I definitely found HA a lot more fun when we could use heroes for a short while after NFs release.

Weeee quote dump.
Heh, no. I distinctly remember people going "shh, don't talk about RR or they'll nerf it," long before they announced the format's impending deletion. Hell, let's go back and look at the game updates, shall we? Zaishen Combat quests were added April 23rd, 2009. The /roll command was removed from PvP maps April 28th. Linsey announced that HB would be deleted on August 28th. They were deleted October 22nd. RR started up almost immediately after /roll was banned, and I don't even know how long /roll was popular before it was killed. It was certainly in use before the ZC quests were added, but it exploded in popularity after that (hence the sudden ban). That's at least 4 months of RR before the announcement that HB would die. Relevant link: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Game_updates:April_2009

Lie all you want, the game updates are very clear. HB was abused for months and months before it was slated for removal. Like I said, y'all pretend otherwise because you like to think the format only got griefed after mean ol' ANet told you it was going bye-bye, and that's just not true. I saw the districts exploding with players on "RR DAY"s. I remember trying to get some games going and having players /roll at me, and then call me a n00b and ragequit. And now, I'm sure, some of those "pro" gamers are HB apologists, claiming that it only ended up being a degenerate format because ANet was going to kill it. The facts do not support this claim.

BS. Meta for HB was all about sin secondaries, and later pack hunter r/p cappers. There was almost no variety, especially before the long-distance shadow steps got nerfed, in part because of GvG, yes, but also because of HB. Before the nerf, no one ran anything else competitively. The format was gimmicky as hell; between the fact that capping was more profitable than killing alone made this unavoidable. I distinctly remember "real" PvP-ers complaining about how HB was influencing balance updates, and how it was a stupid format that shouldn't be even a consideration when balancing the game, because ANet was spending too much time trying to fix it to be anything other than a cesspool (an opinion helped, in no small part, by the prevalence of /roll and RR). Oh yes, I remember those threads.

See above. No one took HB seriously as a competitive format, least of all other PvPers, because it was (through at least 2 separate shadow step updates) a micro-managing minigame where combat barely happened. Anet probably took it more seriously than any "real" PvPers, considering they updated so many skills with HB at least partially in mind.

Hey, at least people still play HA. CA would be even easier to get into, considering you can just enter with whatever and get grouped.
Yeah....I said before, I loved the arena for this reason. I loved looking at a limited selection of skills and making a viable build out of it. What I don't love is the fact the population of non-organized players dropped very, very quickly, such that the only groups you were ever likely to meet were comprised of organized teams that just rolled over anyone else. If you want to have new blood to play with, you need those "newbs", you need people who are getting beaten to enjoy themselves enough to keep coming back for more. That's why people still play PUB games of CS:S (or any other FPS) even if they never break a 1:1 kill ratio, because the game is fun and there's always a chance of getting paired against someone of equal or lesser skill. If the only servers available were clan servers with 10 professional players, do you think any casual player would stick around to get headshotted 15 times in a row?

Yes, players need to help themselves get better, and there is very little of that in this game...but the few players who do want to get better need rungs on the ladder that are lower than "ultra competitive". They need tangible rewards for little victories, especially when they can look at RA or JQ or FA or AB and go "I could get way more there, for way less effort, and having way more fun....so why bother with this?"

Bottom line: you want a format to be healthy, stop complaining that my suggestions would open up the "newb floodgates". That's the point. You'll still steamroll almost every team, you just won't be playing against the same 10 people over and over and over now.

Being individually famous, and getting a shitton of reward points (40 for 1st, compared to the 120 for 1st that GvG got) wasn't enough? Yeah, you got lower points than GvG, you still got way more than most individual players could hope to earn through PvP. That's not even counting the real-world prizes, which were often as not exactly the same for GvG and HB. (First page that I found, here: http://www.guildwars.com/competitive...2007/rules.php)

Which brings us straight back to the old issue of "real" PvPers getting pissed whenever HBers asked for skill updates to fix their broken format.

********

Anyway....I seriously think we're getting something to try to shock life back into CA with this upcoming PvP update. I want them to casual-ify the arena; like all of you said, it's effectively dead competitively. Let the casuals flock to the arena, and you'll be surprised, some of them are (or will get) surprisingly good at picking builds. At the very worst, you'll have players to play with again. I know I'll be there, if the format picks up.

Oh, and just to preempt the incoming comments: I'm not continuing a 5v1 quote war. Y'all can say whatever you like, the game updates and the forum arguments that raged around HB do not back up the BS. If I have the inclination (and my search-fu is strong enough), I might edit this with a couple of links to relevant forum threads, but I doubt I'll have the urge to waste my time further tonight, so don't hold your breath. HB had a ton of problems, for a very long time, and there were many attempts at fixing them, but in the end a format that was completely different from everything offered in every other PvP format was un-balanceable. Shocker.

Your evidence proves the removal of the /roll command and nothing else. We have had plenty of discussions regarding RR and it has been proven time and again that it only became widespread after Anet announced HB's removal. Before the announcement, RR was not widespread. A very tiny minority actually did it (amongst friends) but it was nothing like /roll until the announced removal. I am a HBer (unlike you). I was there the entire time from the 4th anniversary up to it's removal. I would have noticed if people were RR'ing before the announcement but I didn't notice any widespread RR'ing until after the announced removal. I guess you didn't take my advice after all.

Yep, you have no knowledge of Hero Battles. For one, HB was not all about sin secondaries and r/p pack hunters were around for a very long time (since 07). Long distance shadowsteps were not nerfed and Anet never spent anytime trying to fix HB. I honestly don't know why you are still posting about HB.

The reward was 1000 for HB. It's obvious that you know nothing of HB. I suggest you stop kidding yourself.

As long as HB requires one player to fight another, it is PvP. Besides, skill updates to GvG have also affected other parts of the game (like HB).


You must have already accepted that you are in a losing position, thank you. Fyi, there is a difference between what is said on a forum and what is happening in the game so any "sources" you may pull out (I know all of them) will not support any of your claims. Here is one for you to read which will show you that your RR claims are completely false: http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/a...t=Hero+Battles

Arena probably should've removed RA instead of TA instead. Sync is never going to be fix because of codec, so might as well keep the PvP that won't be sync. On topic, Codex arena should be like the halloween games. Yes, it would take out the specialty of the holiday pvp, but it's a good game that needs to be all year round. Have a set build bar mix with hero-pvp arena play. That'll get a lot of attention.

they play it because of the shiny emote, not because of the fame gaining system.

GW used to be fun, even though it wasnt perfectly balanced and was plagued by many gimmicks and other type of skill abuse. But continuous bad balance decisions and fail format removal decisions took their toll.

that's the problem with RA, jq and fa (in terms of reward, the latter 2 outclass AB by far) - too much reward for virtually no effort in comparison to more demanding formats like CA and TA.

if you want a game (format) to be healthy, you need all 3 levels of players - high end as well as utter trash and those in between. as soon as one of those is no longer present or is in decline, its only a matter of time before the arena/game in question turns to either a ghost town or a nub fest. And for that not to happen, you need a game thats worth sticking around, not a dump yard for trash balance decisions and a playground for another game.

You're forgetting that simple reward increase doesnt bypass the requirement to know the game inside out in order to get somewhere in CA.
Moreover, a healthy pvp player base has a fairly big amount of players who wish to become better, to improve and learn from their losses - those who just come for zquest or weekend farm are not it, and those just playing casually...well, if they arent competitive they have little reason to care if they keep on getting rolled to start with? they do serve as good training ground for middle level players, but if there is no more high end levels present, they wont really ever move on from that middle level to start with, nor will they feel like the game is still interesting (because there will no longer be any proper competition).

you still dont understand - middle to high end level players gain absolutely no satisfaction from bashing on helpless casuals 24/7. I usually quit after 10-15 wins if i keep on facing trash.
you'd be surprised how horrible most players, even middle levels, nowadays are. ra synch is a bad way to l2play, im afraid.

No way. I like RA because I can simply click on enter battle and be in a group without having to waste time to set one up, and then having everyone rage quit after.

TA was a heaven for gimmick builds, but I think it should still be in the game, and that is should have been changed to 6v6.

I never understood why they didn't have some straight deathmatches in HB.

If you played HB at a correct level , you would know that it was a pain usually to face a mo/w with 3 packers or 3 n/a's on 4v4... It was possible to kill , but it required a very high level of microing compared to what monk had to do....

Deathmatchs with heroes could be nice with codex arena rules in fact ( owait , isn't what Codex was supposed to be ?) and would prevent situations i mentionned since there wouldn't be 3 bars same per team

This is pretty much how the format started, as only the morale shrine granted any morale period. It was basically spirit spam vs eles.

Sorry, but this is too good to pass up:
B-b-b-b-bullshit. I was there, I used it for a few "RR days". The fact that /roll was widespread enough that it warranted a ban a week after the introduction of ZC days conclusively proves that people were willing to cheat the format, and honestly /roll was popular long before that, just for the title points. People sync now for title points, and you expect me to believe that they didn't fix HB matches?

Ever think that maybe, just maybe, you didn't see how widespread it was because your rank kept you from playing against the masses of low/average players who used it? Maybe the high end players were more honorable than that; more likely, they weren't happy with averaging a 50:50 win record.

They were nerfed to not work outside of compass range. What, you forget that? It was a big deal at the time.

Not according to the link I posted. Go on, click it, scroll down; everything I posted is true. The point was that HvH got 1/3 the prizes of GvG, and roughly equivalent out-of-game prizes.

LOL, a thread from 2010. Y'all have been running the same sad story since the arena was removed, I already knew this, thanks.

Try this on for size: a thread from April 28th, 2009, immediately after the removal of /roll (specifically because, as the OP said, people were using it to farm the title and the ZC quests). Look at the 4th post. The 4th f***ing post!
Are you f***ing kidding me?!

Oh, btw, the 6th post confirms my suspicions as to why you think RR wasn't a big deal in the arena:

Want more? Here's more: a thread from April 2007 concerning rampant /roll-ing for title points in HB. Note that /roll-ing dropped precipitously after they added ranking (note also that I posted in this thread, stating as much, because, yes, I used to play HB)...which only really means that it dropped for people who cared enough about their rank to fight. Once people figured out they weren't going to get anywhere with ranking, they resumed /rolling for the title, it just was invisible to all you top-ranked players.

More reactions to /roll's removal. Note the posters saying it was "2 years too late". Note how different the experiences of the players who had decent rating:
were, compared to the players who had terrible ranking:
Oh, and yet more mentions of RR, immediately after the death of /rolling.

So....yeah, every single one of your responses was BS in some form or another. You're an HB apologist, and the facts simply do not support your position. You (and the other few people who actually played it competitively) have been repeating these stories to each other for years now, but that doesn't make them true. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you simply didn't see a lot of the craziness that was going on in HB around that time (because you were waiting for a match against a real opponent, most likely), but that's as far as I'm going.

And look where those "demanding" formats have gone. No scalable rewards for poor players = no incentive for new players to come into your format = no new blood populating your arenas = your format dies, end of story. This is precisely why they're consolidating all competitive PvP in GW2 into 5v5 matches. Lower level matches will be random and hot-joinable, and they'll scale up to organized teams playing in official tournaments. That is how you keep fresh players playing your formats, and learning; that is why you can actually work your way up from a random PUB player into a clan player in online FPS games. This notion that new players should have to scrape and suffer in order to get anywhere does not improve the format; they should have to put effort in, and try to get better, but it should be an enjoyable process, not a constant beating that they endure until they catch a lucky break.

You know , people did /roll , /rr , or whatever , but the biggest proportion of players abusing it happened after it was announced they would delete HB..... If you read at the reasons they removed HB , it was mainly because the format was "unfixable" according to them......I hope you realize how easy it would be to RR in GvG quest ( people are already doing it anyway) , but there are simply not many doing it people because there was no thread suggesting it....
Aswell , top players wouldn't be annoyed at all ( and for HB , there was no more RR around 1060 rating, which corresponded to rank 4000 lol....)....

I can remember of the players who suggested that idea to farm title at very low rank , these were Ares , Howls , and other players which were all top200 if not top30 players....

Then , people decided to use it to just make mass zkeys easily .. Guess why they didn't delete HB for it ...That's a way of farming , not bannable i guess... and i see no difference in this at the easy way of getting ectos thanks to some skills in PvE sorry.....


Anyway , you mention " new players should not have to scrape and suffer in order to get anywhere "... Isn't a format such as HB the best for those since they can play it when they want to , with no rank required , no party forming needed , having parts of competitiveness ?? Players come from PvE with their heroes , then get on PvP have to develop their tactics with heroes and that's it.... It's also a good training for GvG to be honest....

They better make something about Codex in near future ( they said they would improve PvP rewards ) and stop ignoring the format like " guys , (HB + TA)^sealed =win! " and 2 months later " lalalala what is codex ??"

Hero Battles is uniquely easy to abuse. It's not exactly new that ever since the title track was introduced, people have been /rolling for points. The people you've pointed out as clamoring in the update thread that red resigning is a viable alternative just happen to be the people who are less stupid.

There's a difference between people abusing it on a small scale and it being advertised publicly as an easy, harmless way to get free titles and zkeys, with hundreds of districts of people doing it.

Yeah, 1500 RPs for 1st, ~1000 RPs for 2nd during the timeframe when finals were being thrown to make a point.

If you're good enough to make the finals of an HB monthly, 500 RPs is peanuts.