Update - January 5, 2012

It can be a random format and a team game in its own right. It wont be as organized as the original HA but the high organization requirement is what killed it in the first place.

They were. Now they're a ghost town because of the way they were designed.

The reward for playing should be fun above all else..

Want to know why PvP is dead? PvPers killed it. Elitism, Requiring rank, a lack of acceptance by the "average" PvP player. Its the same handful of players determining who can and cannot play... Simple solution? Its been said already, randomize HA, eliminate syncing, make it worth everyone's time to play, AND most of all PvPers need to tone down their lack of acceptance to new builds, players and their own self importance. Re-link it to PvE and its a win win. Then when we get the skill changes we all bellow for threads like these will be less bitching about what seems to go against the "meta: and more about what to do with said skills.

Every single time HA is brought up in a thread, tons of people come out and say "Omg, but the elitism, I can't play!". Why not take the initiative and form groups with all these other people who can't find groups due to a lack of rank? You can't expect to get into r10+ groups just because you think you can HA, so go out, get some experience (rank) with all these other people who can't find groups because they're unranked and then in a few months you can. If you want something go out and work for it.

And this is why PvP is dead. Read what I wrote, people complain that their format of choice is dead, but refuse to break the cycle themselves, they search for a Dev to fix a problem caused by the very community who is complaining. so in a few months , while the few stragglers willing to be subjected to the flat out refusal of other to allow them to play and learning with the experience given in ranked groups, the attitude stays the same. When these people give up its for this exact reason. "go get the other people we relegate to the dregs of PvP and eventually, we will still pound you into the ground to play with ourselves" Masturbation ( and thats what I define the current state of PvP as, seeing as we only play with ourselves) is a lonely thing. The death rattle of PvP is loud and clear, now its up to the players to pull it back from the light, so to speak, or cry in mourning for the formats we claim to love. 25 people playing HA is what I call a shame. and when those 25 people made it that way, they have no reason to complain.

zzz not this again. Its utter nonsense yet people continually perpetuate this junk.

PvP has always had a smaller playerbase than PvE and now the game is 7 years old, with very few new players coming to guild wars, and increasing numbers leaving for a variety of reasons, its not exactly rocket science to see why the game is dead. PvE is proportionately dead too considering what it was in years gone by, just that with the ability to play entirely by urself, ppl notice it less. Players elitism and ranks etc have virtually no bearing on activity on a large scale whatsoever, this is just an excuse for bad players to be lazy. The majority of people who play pvp seriously had to invest thousands of hours in doing so, sure this might be seen as nerdy but its what people do/did. If your new and are not willing to put in that level of commitment then the problem lies with you, not the elitism of other players.

The reason the lower tiers of pvp disappeared is because of the age of the game, and the associated dwindling playerbase. Those who still pvp, basically got good and only play competitively for the most part, winning is important. Losing = disbands/drama so its all about victory. New players can, and do, make their way into the upper reaches of the PvP scene, its not impossible, but unless ur willing to invest vast amounts of time and able to accept harsh abuse as part of the learning curve, ur simply never going to get involved at this stage. Its not elitism that prevents people participating, its the general unwillingness of players to do whats necessary to get involved, ie commiting 20-30 hours a week of solid HA/GvG. If you cant do this (which most people cant and thats totally fine) then unfortunately u've missed the boat regarding PvP, it sailed 3 years ago.

tl'dr: PvP has always been like it is now from the point of view of elitism, its not that players suddenly became jerks overnight, there simply just used to be more players which circumvented the issue for beginners, and those beginners who did want to get involved generally had a more pro-active mentality towards actually participating/getting good.

source: I didnt even install gw until some time in 2008, after the game died supposedly. I still achieved everything i wanted to in PvP, ie - goldcape, i just had to be pro-active and work at it for a long time. Nothing in game comes easy, just as nothing comes easy in real life either.

If you would get a certain title for finishing UW, fow, doa or whatever, the "elitism" would be even worse in pve. They would also spam "need tank Rxx+" that's completely normal. Why would you play with bad players when you can play with players of your own skill.
Advice: play with friends and not random people so your rank won't be relevant.

I think its rather implied that if they randomize HA they would also think to allow for rank to play a part in team composition. One would also hope at that point that balance would be tuned the same way, and that you wouldn't see a rankless team going against a R8+ team, its slaughter. simple easy solution to allow the casual PvPer and the Hardcore PvPer to play the same format without the "requirements". So to sum up, teams would be matched strictly on their rank, and face only teams of a similar rank. Lowbys get to grind some rank and l2p, old pros get to do what they do best, and fresh blood enters a near death format. Understand? I'm just rallying for the format itself. I get PvPers wanting to face a challenge but when its the same handful of people playing, whats the point? Excluding folks who might have played, save for the poor attitude of the average ranked player, is a sure way to finally kill PvP in GW1.

Unless you're friends with the right people, nobody gets their rank handed to them, or their hand held as they learn to play PvP. Lets be serious here, the real reason you aren't willing to go out and form groups with these hundreds, thousands even of others who are unranked and want to play is either:

A- You know their bad and un-experienced and somehow think you're worthy of playing with r10's

or B- You don't have the stones to take the initiative, lead and learn the hard way.

You can't go in their and expect to win every match. At the start, you're going to lose. A lot. But so did everybody else who got their rank and so many players just have no desire or want to play through that first month or so. I mean hell, you just have to find some guildies/friends who WANT TO IMPROVE and are accepting of the fact that they WILL LOSE AT FIRST and play with them on a regular basis to know each others strengths and weaknesses. You can do it with randoms to, just only f-list the ones with potential and ditch the bad ones with crappy mindsets. It will be hard at first, grinding UW for fame, I'm not denying it. Then when the next double HA weekend is up (this feb) you can roll all the random ways and bad people that come out of the woodwork all the way to your bambi/wolf. Sure, you'll still get beat by people more exp'd/better than you every few games, but that is the cycle of pvp. The only true way this will be broken is by improving yourself, and too many people can't handle this fact and would rather sit on the sidelines and cry elitism.

Again, Isn't it the average PvPer complaining of a broken game? And its broken due to having NOBODY AROUND. Look, I do get it, but defending the "you can't play and if you do try, its going to be loss after loss after loss with no gain." attitude is what put us here in the first place, read the post above yours for a simple elegant solution to one of the problems plagueing PvP as a whole. HA gets randomized, Teams get matched by rank and play within their ranks, newbs get to learn by playing people in their same skill level, Vets get to enjoy exactly the same format, without the long waits, and eventually, new blood is added to the pool.

We've crossed the bridge of no return a long time ago, so I dont believe there's any point anymore in discussing possible solutions to making the format active again.

What I would love for Anet to realize is that GW is "trash" nowadays, and it's never comming back. That way, they would stop trying to sex PvP up to being attractive again -which it never will be- and do something for the old-school crowd instead.

Revert HoH back to Prophecies days (not ToPK though), bring back the Guild Thief, heck, even experiment with VoD again. (current tiebreaker is shit)

It won't lure in the masses, but it'll atleast give 2005 players like me a reason to log in again and atleast try to form a team for nostalgic reasons. Right now, I can't even be asked doing that, because playing HA nowadays is the equivalent of stabbing your own eyes out with salt-layer coated hunting knife...

Hahaha, as much as I agree about HA being that bad, and as fun as the old GvG format was(god i loved the guild thief, then again, I loved when people in the game had to be concerned with HA to get favor.) I would say its still fixable. I've often wondered what would happen if they did a complete revert for a week. People would cry for the way things are now ( remember when... nah, not gonna get into the myriad changes since the beginning). There is plenty of incentive to look at doing some shuffling of the current formats and their respective "meta" builds. Too often old habits die hard. Getting some of the vets feathers ruffled and getting fresh blood in PvP is good for everyone, anyone opposing having more players in these formats and having a fun experience again is most likely trying to farm their titles on noobs.

forcing pve-ers? forcing by itself is bad, worse to the majority of GW

maybe some pvp-only rewards available through HA would do something good

i'm no pvp-er at all, i only do pve, so i think pve should stay as it is, but pvp should get its own stuff

I think you misunderstand what he is talking about, Favor of the gods was related to whose District was winning in HA. People would sit around cheering for their respective district to win, in order to go into Underworld and Fissure of Woe.
It was a great system, and made a big difference in the view of PvP as a whole.

Agreed.

Yes, it was occasionally frustrating when you had a time block in which you could go do FoW or the Underworld --- and your district didn't have the Favor so you had to wait.

I don't PvP except for the rare bout at JQ. But under the old Favor system, I used to love to watch and cheer the HoH teams (even with the time lag). Now, why bother.

Bringing back the favor deal for uw and fow...no no no no no....bad idea. It would be about as bad idea as saying the pvp'ers need to do doa full runs b4 being able to gvg or ha.....it's crap no one wants to do that.

because the format is essentially exactly the same now?

What ur saying (using a real life example) is that you used to place a $10 bet on the outcome of a football match, then you would watch the match ONLY because you made a bet on it and you might win something. Not because you actually like football.

If you genuinely like football, you'd watch it regardless. From your post i can only assume you never actually had any fun watching HoH, you simply wanted the reward, ie - access to UW. If you disagree with this statement and think you actually did enjoy watching the matches, then you answered your "why bother" question. Because you like it, who cares about a reward.

a lost cause you are.

a lost cause you are, too.

why there be a series of replies to trolls like this?
lost causes all of you are.

thread lock maybe?
given this has nothing to do with the latest skill update (that coming from me confirms how much this thread has derailed from its original purpose) and its just damaging one's eyesight. oh and insulting one's intelligence.

Actually I believe the why bother is then we had people to cheer for... now we have the same handful of meta builds running the same bars, no innovation, no creativity, its about efficiency, then it was about people trying to innovate, sure there were gimmicks, but they changed so frequently they were at the least bit entertaining to watch. Now its Rather vanilla.


I would normally say this was offtopic, but for once I think its very related to this update. Skills changed, it effected PvP, we shoot to how to repair PvP, as the update forthcoming may do more damage to an already hurting portion of the game. And about the only insult to anyone's intelligence comes in the form of choosing to ignore the problems and potential solutions to them.

Seconded....

Randomizing HA is a really bad idea.
-All maps requiring some semblance of teamwork would be a clusterf#ck. Nobody would l2p.
-RA would be dead due to HA having better rewards
-Still has the problems of RA (syncers, wildly different team compositon pissing off players)
etc

Well, I should say, its not a perfect Idea, just an idea. The how and what could be fleshed out easily enough.
Perhaps actually relying on Ranked play exclusive to the teams composition. teams composed of r0-2, r3-5, r6+ etc. Perhaps randomize r0-5 exclusive to playing each other, leave r6+ for formed teams and the like. I think perhaps this isn't the place to flesh such ideas out, but Sardelac could use a new thread NOT asking for random stupid crap, If any would care to start a thread there for Ideas to save PvP. Or perhaps I will if no one else wants to, we shall see.

lol @ teamwork and l2p being important. This is a game, and i fully intend to mess around with whatever build and strategies that I find fun. I feel like this is how most of the PvE community and casual PvP community feels, and this is why the most popular formats are the random ones.

Anyway, an 8v8 random format would be a really fun mess in my opinion.

I do like the idea mentioned in the previous post of random formats grouping up players based on their rank for that arena. It may not be possible for a hypothetical random 8v8 format, but it would be nice for RA, since it would save us low-ranked scrubs from having to play with the highly ranked guys. I know that rank =/= skill, but rank does = experience in a format.

The only way to get smarter is by playing a smarter opponent.

Staying on-topic is apparently something they don't teach in school.

(guilty as accused, admittedly)