GvG obs mode

I would like to suggest that instead of having every top 100 guild's GvG matches be publicly observable, all Automated Tournament matches should be instead. In other words, no ladder games will be viewable by the public, and all AT matches will be, regardless of rank.

Whether the last three or two or five most recent ATs are viewable depends on how much Anet's willing to store on their servers, although they seemed to have no problem storing the MAT, Guru cup, regular AT and ladder, gvg quest weekend guilds (remember that every guild that played stores their most recent match for 24 hours), all simultaneously.


Why?

Two reasons:


1. This partially solves the problem of top guilds not wanting to show the public what builds and strategies they are practicing/testing out for the MAT. Yes, their AT's will still be televised (nothing new there), but they can now ladder without the constant spotlight.

Some would argue that's what smurfing is for, but I don't think smurfing should be encouraged at all and this is yet another reason to do it. Besides, in the final week many of the players have to be 7-day members of the guild in order to register, meaning that if they want to smurf as a full team they will need alt accounts.


2. This allows the public to view non top-100 GvG matches.
Reasons why this is a good thing:

a) Completeness. The public will be able to view the whole AT, not just chunks of it depending on how many top 100 guilds decided to play. The best games in the AT could quite possibly be between non-top guilds. Friends in separate guilds can more easily share their important matches with each other - which again, may not involve a top guild.

b) Fairness. Team's attempting to spec each other will not be disadvantaged because they happened to fight top guilds and their upcoming opponents did not. Similar to reason 1, guilds in the top 100 will not be disadvantaged by always being in the spotlight while others (smurfs?) are hidden.

c) Spectator Variety. This is mostly personal preference. What prompted me to write this post is when I thought back to the recent Guru tournament when we were given the rare treat of spectating low and mid level guilds fighting each other in a tournament setting. While it's apparent they were not as polished and mechanically excellent as the top guilds we are used to seeing, battles could nevertheless be more interesting.

Since more mistakes are made on each side, battles are prone to swing back and forth more often. Power plays tend to see more fruition since the enemy might not have that quality backline who can always save team mates and follow damage effectively. More ballzy strats and builds are employed at the lower levels, which can be refreshing after watching top guilds run nothing but meta for months and months.


Many of the ladder games now on obs are either higher guilds vs other higher guilds, or higher guilds stomping lower guilds (basically the latter during american hours). At the very least this would inject more variety, keep things fairer, and help non-top 100 teams distinguish themselves to the public.



Thoughts?

Good idea since it would " in theory" prevent people from syncing... which means other guys could reach higher rating more easily( it's not really fun to get either +0/1 against wizard's isle leavers or -9 against some kind of smurf..)...

But, i'm still convinced that people would change guild after doing a MAT , and that on the simple fact that C At usually regroups best guilds from MAT, i think it will have a negligeable impact as those guilds could still be antibuilded ... and you need to consider the little diference between obvious smurfing and guesting...Sure there are some smurfers, but some are just people guesting in some other guild because there are not 2 guildies in their own...

Besides, i can tell you that some guilds will come back with selling champ points on really dead hours( although the good point here is that they won't know when other top100 will play, which means they could risk losing some rating ..)

Having a minimum rating ( i.e not below than 900 for example) would put an end to all those syncers and make people not waste time having +0 but +4-5( if they do insist syncing) and AT's would aswell not be about 5 rounds with 3 guilds playing.... but on the higher ratings not much can be done to motivate people, apart of maybe making champ pts won against any guild as long as ou have 1200+ rating( or just lower it to 1100 vs 1100)

I think you missed that there will be no obs in MM, so there will be less risk for sync guilds (but more risk for ATs). I'm still seeing the same 200 rating sync guilds I obsed months ago so I don't think that risk was very much to begin with.

Also, I'm sure guilds will have reason to switch after the MAT but that's not really covered by this topic.

The point is to provide better, more relevant, and more interesting matches on obs mode.

Good idea, although I do like obsing ladder games occasionally. But it's true that 90% of the ladder games are just a high level guild stomping a low level guild.

Another thing that would be interesting is to increase the observable guilds to top 300. It should increase the number of observable matches enough so that you can still remain semi-undercover if you're laddering with a new build.

I proposed something like this last year, and I still think it is a great idea. They also should have made a separate channel for snowball at's because it has been impossible to watch matches this entire month.

Nope, still not true. At all.

If anyone plans to post to the contrary, please post statistics.

Not really a statistic, but this is pretty much how obs looks everyday;
(taken on monday jan 2nd, 17.30 GMT)

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/811/obsf.jpg/

Most of the time, there's 3 different top 100 guilds on obs. And usually they aren't even playing at the same time, the three of them. So if you're lucky you get 1x top 100 vs top 100 game and 9x top 100 vs lower ranked guilds.

It would be much more interesting to see the games of the 9 lower ranked guilds facing eachother than 9 different lower ranked guilds getting beat by (or occasionally beating) the same team.

Currently On My obs there are 9 different top 100 guilds in the normal GvG area. It depends on the time mostly. During American times there only exist like what 6-7 top 100 guilds of which most likely 1-3 of them will play at a time if your lucky? During euro hour you see plenty of different top 100 guilds play.