HA and GvG Zaishen Quests On Week End Only

Hello everyone,

I do believe it would be more interesting to put Heroes Ascent and Guild Versus Guild zaishen quests on week end only rather than randomly ...

Reasons :
- It doesn't change anything at the inactivity on week... People are still playing on euro evening only, and it's dead otherwise
- It's better if put on weekends because those formats will be active all the day
- More people can play on weekends than on week ( apart evening obviously, due to work and stuff)
- JQ/Fa/RA quests on weekend is stupid, people already play a lot the format

You might ask me 1 thing: What about Codex Arena and Alliance Battles ?

Well, those 2 formats are usually completly empty even on quest day, because JQ/FA rewards you more points than AB... and because Codex is full of syncers and people even prefer RA

The point is an other way to fix inactivity at least a little....
Waiting your comments ,

biased towards higher end pvp and fairly pointless. suck it up like everyone else and play when it comes around

I have to disagree with most op said.
I dont do pvp ( i hate it :P ) but even i can see that there are ppl doing most of pvp so i cant see how its dead ( unless your using only euro servers ).
Quite a lot of euro players play on american servers because they are more active than euro servers.Few of my guildies did the jq/fa weekend and from what i gather they had NO PROBLEMS getting into matches not did they say how empty it was.
If you look at recent posts on guru to do with pvp you will see some players posts saying how bad xxx is in pvp but the amount of replies from players still doing pvp shows its nothing like you seem to state.
Players will farm the pvp zquests so they will follow the pvp zquests around and that makes some days busier than others.

Think you'll find that the weekend just gone was double faction in CMs so of course your guildies will say its busy and have no issues getting a game.

To see how dead HA is I suggest you visit ID1 throughout the day, even on quest day ID2 is pretty empty. For someone to comment on something that they never do and haven't had to experience is hardly adding to the debate.

I'm all for anything that will liven up HA/GvG at any time but, imo, these retarded fluxes are keeping people away even more, I know myself that I'm avoiding it this month.

You come up with some good ideas, just a shame to see all these PvE'rs come along and poo poo them all when they have no experience in it.

/agree. People can't compare CMs which are casual PvP to serious PvP!
/agree x2. Flux is destroying GvG at least, it was indeed a good idea to counter FD a couple of months ago, but now? I can't stand playing everytime against invokes dealing so much damage. PLEASE don't buff healing to counter that damage btw! It's more then enough the powercreep crap that anet is been doing for all this years.

Regardless of the points you made with FA/JQ and RA, AB and Codex... not letting them in on weekends seems unfair to me, I understand the difference on highend GvG/HA and those, but that doesn't really make it less unfair imo.
GvG and HA do get their turns in weekends too... oh that regular week daily doesn't change anything... not completely true. My guild does GvG regularly... on weekends... but last night they played some too, although not our normal GvG day, that was because it is the daily.

GvG and HA should be more important than other PvP format since those are the elite formats while other are just casual. So this is a great idea and it would make at least weekends enjoyable and fun to play on.

Also, someone mentioned flux destroying GvG. That is completely incorrect, simply because those are long battles and pressure is always better than massive damage (a.k.a. eles). So flux destroyed all other formats but not GvG. Telling you that from my own experience.. had no problem winning against any build which included one or more eles (in GvG ofc, other formats are just a joke now...)

Yep...as a top 50 player I can agree with most of these statements. While this flux has definitely not been GOOD for GvG, it has certainly hurt that format much less than the other formats (RA/HA/JQ)

That was exactly my point... When i logged last 2 days and saw 4 players in id1, written on B " last Hall Win 12 hours ago" this made me laugh quite a lot...

The same goes for GvG when i see a 3 round AT, 1 guild having 3/0/0 and all others being forfeits... last top GvG battle 16 hours ago...

Have you thought about using different districts ? All i see is you saying about id1 and i dont think anywhere in gw is a real busy id .Most euro players switched to american dists which also explains why id1 was dead for you.

id1 is the usual district for HA group forms......

OT: I do agree with the OP, HA and GvG are indeed some more 'important' forms of pvp

HA PUGs have formed in international districts since before Factions launched. It dates back to prophecies before asian and european districts were added. Americans would come to international district of ToPK to PUG euros. It just stuck when HA moved to the battle isles.

This is a good idea as most people play during weekends.

However, I think a permanent fix would be to make GW HA/GVG free to the public.

You will have enough people of all levels to make it fun.

Could be cool also yes... Atm, we just went to try to GvG considering there were few opponents on TV.... After 30mn we had no opponents, and then noticed that guilds were just syncing fights to get 1200 rating...( main guild having afks, opponents all being N/A 6/8...)

This is just not fun for people who wanna play fair and then i believe that having a permanent quest could be an option if well done, let's say if rating 950+...

What do you mean, "Free to the public"? IT doesn't cost anything, currently, to enter a ladder match in GvG or play HA.

I guess he meant easier to access( i.e hench teams or better incentives to play).. You know, when you see that either last hall win was 3 hours ago, either hall is farmed by syncer( happening every day between 2-11 am GMT) and the main district is quite empty... it's hard to think that it doesn't cost anything to play HA...

You need to find players, but also find OPPONENTS... Randomways obviously aren't going to waste their time if there is some syncer or r12 team farming 1v1's

I meant people being able to play PVP without paying for the game. It will put them straight into PVE. If you want to do more than GVG/HA/RA/Codex, you will need to pay. Anet does not make any money from people who want to pvp. They make their revenue from PVErs. It will also be a good advertisement for GW2.

Honestly I'm not sure how many people that would attract to the game at this late point, but it's a thought.

Many games have gone free to play. The biggest one would be LoL and it got them to 16 million players but its also based off of a popular WC3 map. Its a good idea actually but with GW2 being a huge money pit in Anets pocket it raises serious doubts of ever happening. Of course there are ways to profit. Giving only one character slot to a f2p account might make people buy more slots and playing PvP might get players to check PvE out and buy the trilogy. If done right it could work, but are they willing to take the risk?

TBH they should just scrap the PvP unlock packs in the store along with unlocking skills and weapon mods in game. At this point its all about HoM/titles and having to unlock everything is akin to doing the dishes. It very well could get a lot more people into PvP and revive it.

Dude, it's been 13 *** days that i can't do anything in this crap game when i log.. People syncing HA while id1 is empty, people syncing codex , probably people syncing low rating GvG, probably few zulu syncs in RA

I'm sorry but this game just rewards people for syncing while fair players can't do anything else than logging off... they better add back 7 hench parties ( at least during few hours each day) than allowing these joke i never ever saw in any game...

At least, doing this is better than nothing ( i.e what we had for about 2 years)... anything that will make syncers less able to do it and players more able to even GO IN will do good...

Your upset, understandably so. Unfortunately PvP is never ever gonna get active again to what it once was, and from reading ur posts in general i presume you play during the asian timezone? At which point your basically screwed anyway. Its really not suprising that nobody plays during that timezone, anet deleted the asian server. Nobody wants to play competitive GvG/HA with 400+ ping, because you simply cant compete. Circa 2008/2009 when the last of the asians did still play, they couldnt play decent builds anymore and basically had to just run around spamming hexes cos their ping was so bad, not fun for them, or for anyone facing them. No suprise they stopped playing

There is no solution to the issue, by this stage its a problem that cannot be fixed, but the best advice for anyone is to just play the AT's. All 3 AT's are somewhat active, you'll get at least a couple of games, and usually entering ladder an hour before/after an AT will get u a few more games. The AT times are fairly well spaced across a 3hour time span during the week in each timezone, so as to allow all players the chance to play at least 2-3 per week. The american AT's run at around 9-11pm(?) EST, earlier for pacific players, the euro ones are between 8-10pm GMT, and the Asian ones are at about 9-10pm(?) Australian time i think, the times are pretty good, and do cater for most players who want to get involved.

Well, i just tried to play on all playtimes but really, there are almost no players except between 8pm and about 1 am GMT... The main problem is that you just can't do anything on other hours :

- People are syncing HA everyday from 2 am until 11am GMT. Once they stop, the format is completly inactive... Besides, you can't win halls because the second account team ganks you... thus, noone is bothering playing the format

- I did enjoy doing C AT's.. but let's be honest: it's all top50 players doing it.. B AT is just 5 rounds with the 2-3 same guilds everyday and is just too much time wasting.. which means some guilds aren't bothering neither

- AB/Codex are empty

I just want to point out that this would be cool if random formats were cool.. but unfortunately they aren't at all because of abusive metas...

I might look like QQ'ing a lot about inactivity, but if you played the game on those hours, you would notice that there's someone complaining in local chat in every PvP outpost.. People just aren't arguing on forums because they know devs aren't playing the game and won't do anything..

Actually if HA/GvG quests were permanent on week ends, then at least we would have 2 days per week where we could do stuff and play a bit more ...
You know, having a quest on tuesday is doing exactly nothing

I agree with you, but hey, next weekend will be champ weekend http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Weekend_events

so at least you will be able to get loads of games + champ points if u care about them. Unlike the last gvg weekend which came directly after the ladder reset (very retarded), so ppl might bother to play this one since theres like 90 or so guilds in the 1200+ range

Missing HB,

PM me, I shall play with your team if I am around. be the team good/bad, I shall stick around. my activity in game has reduced significantly.

IGN in your inbox.

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When i get no one to do pvp with, I do 4v4 gvg with friends + brother. If you dont have enough ppl take hench. You can split/run flags etc. Aim is to kill lord. Thats a good form of PVP too.

We both know double champ isn't going to bring anything... :

-There will be tons of players syncing ( or doing RR) on bottom of ladder for factions
- Although i doubt it a lot, there will be few 1200+ rating playing

So, still no mid- range fights... To have maybe more obvious activity, they should just have made double strongboxes and give less factions for fast wins... because then everyone ( syncers included) would play around 1000 rating...

That would really only increase the amount of syncing/smurfing. Every decent GvG guild I have ever seen has at least 2-5 smurf guilds, which is not helping the format.

I think you might be suprised, im anticipating pretty high levels of activity from top 50-100 guilds over champ weekend. For the rest of the ladder, probably not, as double balthazar faction is a pretty poor incentive to play. In fairness though, its relatively straight forward to get to 1200 rating, just play a spike or split build with tons of defence, and kill some stuff, u'll be up there in a week or two np i'd guess.



99% of decent guilds do not have smurfs. (there are several r200 teams with smurfs tho, but these guilds arent that good so people shouldnt worry about facing them really) There are maybe around 5 "pug" guilds used by the top players late into the evenings (and rarely more than 1 of these guilds at the same time either), because if you've got 1-2 guys online in each of several guilds, its impossible to play in their "real" guilds, so pugs are created. Smurfing/Pug Teams is basically essential though to maintain ladder activity because most ppl who play the format regularly are up into the top 100 by now, at this point you can play 2-3 ladder matches, and then the wait times become horrendous because ur rating is so high, so ur options are basically smurf, or dont play. Smurfing/Pugging is preferable to people logging off because at least it maintains some form of ladder activity.

On the other hand, most people generally have no idea which teams are smurfs, and which are not. The enormous volume of cape leechers around these days, who all then go and guest for random guilds makes people believe they are facing a smurf almost every match. Me and some friends started a new guild 3-4 days ago, we're almost champ range by now, and have yet to face a single smurf (confirmed by the fact that between us we know 99% of the GvG population). Most people see cape leechers or 1-2 guests and start screaming OMG SMURF almost as if its an excuse for losing a match....

Very rarely are actual smurf guilds seen in play anymore, people would do well to realise this. People understanding that a guild with 2 guests is not a smurf would also go a long way... Its exactly that, a guild with 2 guests, im sure the people who complain cant honestly sit there and say they have never ever made use of the guest facility to bring in a good player or two??

Maybe that didn't come across the way you wanted it to. In one sentence you say 99% doesn't smurf...then in another you say it is essential to maintain ladder activity.

In other words....there is only 1% ladder activity of an already underpopulated format?

I wasn't assuming in my statement. I know of at least 30 smurf guilds that ppl I've played with have used. Over the course of many years it's hard to miss the in's and out's of a game.

I might be assuming a bit here...but in one sentence aren't you admitting to just starting a smurf guild?

I got to completly disagree on this... I played all afternoon with 4 henchs due to quest on quite low rating, and the only thing we faced were generally smurfs..

Upon about 4 hours :
- we fought 0 henchways, yes 0
- 0 team of PvE'rs
- 2 teams with people who were obvious beginners

Hold on, i'm not saying any team not corresponding to that is directly a smurf... I generally call smurf a guild where i see at least 5 guests or players i know from top150( considerin that's what we usually face on AT's).. Probably, you don't consider some r90-100 players good because you're used to higher ranks... but that's not the case for every players...( for me, this makes no diference as if on starcraft 2 4v4, u faced bronze team having 1 bronze guy and 3 master guys in team....)

There should then just be a GvG outpost to pug people to make it fair for everyone....

An other issue, off topic though is the joke strongbox/grogs system... really, this 5mn wait requirement is just a joke as opponents usually resign before due to this meta...

Also : i guess top guilds playin MAT need to practice somewhere, as there are usually no matchs on ladder....

He said new guild. There is also such a thing called a reform.

Also I think he meant that smurfing/pugging is essential but 99% don't do it either way which I find hard to believe since [AmeN] and [wtf] are laddering on smurfs pretty much daily.

AmeN, KvZ and wtf, smurf regularly out of the "better" teams. If you can name 30 currently active guilds who have smurfs, i'd be extremely suprised.

The only possibly somewhat misinterpreted part of my previous post, is that smurfing is not directly necessary to maintain ladder activity, although pugging/guesting definitely is.

There is pretty much a difference between smurfs and pugs, that a lot of people dont see, or simply choose to ignore. PUG teams (or ones with lots of guests) are exactly that, a lot of ppl who just group together in order to play, this sometimes happens to be a lower rating, sometimes it will be in a higher one, just depends who the group of friends are, and which guild happens to have 2 members in it so that playing is actually possible.

On the other hand, smurf teams are guilds who are purposely playing at a lower rating than they perhaps ought to be, with either the intent of testing new builds vs less difficult opponents, or more likely just beating the crap out of bad people for fun. Pretty much a form of griefing i guess.

Fortunately, a lot of the so called smurfs are actually pugs, just random guilds with a lot of guests forming up to just play the game, sure they might be good teams but they dont intentionally play to beat the crap out of you, they just enter to play guild wars. Unfortunately, a lot of people dont realise this, see 1 guest, scream SMURF!, get mad cos they lost and log off.

Guesting is important cos its the fastest way for guilds to learn stuff, by guesting top players to point out ur mistakes. Fighting against guilds with lots of guests is also good because you actually get to test urself against more skilled opposition, learning from ur mistakes if/when you obs the games back (i bet very few ppl bother to obs matches they lost back anymore and see what they did wrong). Sadly nobody rly cares about improving anymore, ppl just want to enter and win, and if they lost, then ofc it must of been a smurf....

For the record, ive done over 100 GvG's this past week (i nerd this game a lot), ive faced AmeN a couple of times, and KvZ once. 3 smurf teams out of 100 odd games, not too bad. All these ppl who claim to face 10 smurfs every night, i'd love to know exactly who these so called smurf teams are lol

1- I would also like to be explained why a lot of guilds ( you can just check gvg ladder) got a win/lose ratio roughly equal if not above 10...( I mean the tons of " unknown" guilds who got like 30-3 ...)

2-3- The problem is that the game, especially due to meta, has turned into " who has the best monks"... Obviously, if you make a fight between 2 teams of " low level", one having monks from [tD], we both know who's going to win... And here i come on your third point : you don't learn anything being carried by top monks... Good/Bad Monks is a problem i'm actually experiencing for 2 years... And reversly, you don't learn enough by losing to the same top guilds over and over because you don't have any worthy opponent to test what you learned...

The potential is always there to learn from guests, doesnt matter if they are monks or frontliners. The important thing is that they actually speak and bother to tell you whats going wrong. I play monk, and if im guesting for a bad team, i'll still tell them to spread out, use shield sets, you can tell whos got the wrong armour on, you can call some tactics if you like. To call big plays you dont have to be a frontliner, anybody in the team can call, doesnt really make a difference. Theres always a lot you can do for the team ur guesting for, and a lot they can learn if they open their ears and actually hear what your saying, and then remember it, and re-apply it later.

The answer to the whole 30-3 thing i dont know for sure, although i can speculate that a lot of them are invoke spike guilds, some are dead/failed guild reforms, some will ofc be smurfs and others who just pug a lot and abuse the guest system. I might be wrong though, but i would also imagine that for a somewhat competent team, 30-3 stats are not unthinkable, as ladder by nature is generally a lot easier than tournament play which is where the big boys hang out so to speak. A team with 30-3 should also be nearing champ range, so i'd assume they wont directly affect the lower reaches of the ladder which is mostly where this discussion is aimed i thought. Whilst i do sympathise with ur point of view about the number of top player pug teams, in my own experience of laddering with friends guilds at rank 200-400, 90% of our match ups are against relatively similar standard guilds. High ranked teams or much lower ranked casual and henchway teams arent that often seen, maybe 1 or 2 out of every 10 games. Although this is ofc just my own experience of playing during euro hours. Outside this timezone the ladder is even more dead so i can only assume the problem is exaggerated further.

Your final point i agree with in part, but not wholey. If you face the same top guilds over and over again, then you should really be learning from your mistakes and gradually improving, whilst this wont be an immediate process, and likely not even one for the medium term, there is far more potential for self-learning from games that you lose, rather than in those that you win, because you're forced to adapt and operate outside of your comfort zone. The issue here though is that probably in order to learn things, teams need to be stopping after matches that they lost and obsing it back (at the very least you should obs 'some' of the games u lose...). Peoples mistakes at a micro level, such as a monk getting power blocked 10 times in a row (as a side note this is my own personal biggest failing, i eat a whole lot of power block ><) or a fire ele tanking all damage on a 40/40 set. Or bigger problems such as team strategy and cohesion, Should you have flag pushed more? Did we react wrong to their split? Would it have been better if we did this? Why did we let them kill our flagger with 3 guys? There is always a lot to learn in defeat. People who refuse to obs games back and better themselves by asking simple questions as above, shouldnt really complain about losing to good players, because they themselves have no aspirations to improve personally. Unfortunately a lot of players would rather just hit enter battle again, try again and make the same mistakes, and continue to cry about smurfs, rather than actually getting better. Someone mentioned earlier in the thread [AmeN] as one of the "top" teams, i dont think they would mind me saying that certainly 12 months ago, they were far from the top, they've just played a lot of matches as a team, and clearly improved a hell of a lot, especially in the last 3-6 months. With the right mindset, reaching the top is never impossible. My current monk partner for example joined us from a rank 500 guild, hes only gvg'd for about 6 months or something, and now hes in the top 20-50 and playing well, its just having the right mentality and willingness to learn, mixed with a bit of luck and actually being noticed by a guild somewhere along the line.

Oh and also, assuming you are a guild of a lower rank, facing top guilds repeatedly seems highly unlikely. Certainly during the peak euro hour, which is basically the only possible time to play ladder anyway, there are enough teams laddering around the 1050-1150 rating mark in order to get some decent match ups. Teams outside of this range will by default get excessive unfair match ups due to the relatively small number of guilds playing at their own level.

Seeing as you cant face the exact same guild twice within either 6 matches or 24h, whichever is first, (i think this is right, but citation needed) its also impossible to face the same team over and over, just for the record. Unless ofc they keep swapping guilds just to purposely farm you, which seems like unecessary griefing and highly unlikely.

Well it seems that i was wrong about Heroes Ascent quest on week end... I had several restarts in burial so i went to do something else, and now i'm back 4 hours later and i see my mate is still there waiting...( i might be told it's RA week end, but is it really fun to just camp 40/40 set as ele and spam 123456, as player or opponent... i don't think so...)

I'm probably boring with heroes, but i'm pretty sure that's then the only way to be able to play on these hours... Basically, one guy logs in the district, see 7 afk dudes and goes away and that's it for hours and hours...