Rant About Rank

The new players should learn how to ask. They shouldnt pretend to know what they are doing so they wont be made fun off. A noob wont get any teams because pvp requires alot of skill thinking. You can't just bring your W/Mo and expect to get a group. If i was them i would take the time to go into the forums and start reading and im pretty sure they will get into a good group and maybe soon enough get to R3. If every new player did this then even non rank group will be competetive. It's just a lil bit of research.

I really love the idea of having these LFG things you said celios,

really nice post

I think A.net should put this in the game with some nice adjustments, this is really important for faster learning experience and easier acces to setting up builds, this doesn't only gives a nice opportunity for new players but also for Guilds.

The leader can click on a certan build wich he created, and with a private option or something so that everyone of the guild can see it.

This really sounds promising but I don't think its that easy to make (don't know anything about programming )

After ch2 is out, A.net should do something with this idea

Another problem is that people in general have stopped making as many groups. Instead they just want to join them. That's why there are so many people standing around in tombs groupless. This is because of groups like IWAY, where each person plays one simple role each time and never learns the whole functionality of the group as a whole, so they can't make one themselves.

I am now rank 2, 143 fame, so this problem kind of implies to me.

I got about 80 fame by IWAY, 20 as gale-warrior and the rest ranger/air-spike.

I see a few problems which have been mentioned before and some solutions, which in my opinion don't work.

I have this problem a lot, when I join a team and it fails the first/second round, there are at least 3 people who leave. And most of the time it are those who are hardest to find. Causing an extra half-hour wait for me and my team.
And can I help it that those people leave? I mean I really don't leave if we lose the first few times, but I do have to wait half an hour between every game.

I don't think a LFG-system will work; for me to get into a group it's important that there is no-one with the same role but a higher rank in the same district, cause if we are exactly the same but the rank of the other is higher, they are going to choose the higher-ranked person.
If you implement a LFG-system for the whole place, it will be even more difficult for us new people to get into teams.

I joined my current guild because of friends, and I really do want to learn PvP, but I and many others would no-way consider leaving the guild we are in now.

Thanks for the responses. Very good insight and suggestions! I didn't want anyone to have the impression that I think that we should all link arms and dance down the Yellow Brick Road. PvP being PvP, well... such personal harmony just isn't going to break out on a widescale basis, I agree.

I totally understand that someone thinks "I have three hours to play today, I don't want to waste my time with noobs, I want to win." Winning is the objective, yep. What I was thinking, though, was the guild-based concept of "raising the next generation" sort of thing. The "give me a try, what can it hurt?" Taking a chance may land a guild with a fantastic player from time to time, and I think that if the guild is focused on high-level competition, it's fair to say that next season's Master Player may be joining the game next week or next month, may be looking for a guild, may need a start. (Come on, it could happen!) There's only so much training arenas can give. So how does that potentially-exceptional player get in a good guild, and how does he/she gain the map and competition familiarity to excel? I think it's through experience, and that means having barriers to even getting into the matches is a shame. Understandable, but also limiting.

Certainly we could include more mechanics that support players getting into the game. Some updates to party forming are on the to-do list, I'm sure. But maybe at least a few of the barriers are in players' heads, too, and we might want to take a look at those, too.

Anyway, keep the ideas coming -- it's great to hear your suggestions and get your insight.

I am not currently able to read the thread in its entirety, so I have no idea if someone has suggested this already, but what if an aproach similar to that of the lvl-restricting arenas was taken. There could be an r2 and below area, an r6 and below area, and an open area, all offering the same maps and rewards (ie fame and rank). Only the area open to all ranks would decide the favor of the gods, but the lower areas could offer a way for players to gain rank and learn all of the maps without the grind and impossibility of finding a good group suffered by unranked players today.

well you cant really blame ranked groups for not wanting to waste time with unranked players who are in general alot less experienced than others
I was doing tombs back when rank wasnt that important since i suppose not many back then had rank
but now those same people that were doing unranked groups are now r6-r9+ while iway allowed a more recent crop of people get to r3-r6+

one way to help ease new players in getting into ranked groups is give an alternative method of gaining fame.
maybe allow fame to be gained in 4v4. Every 5 wins you gain 1 fame, ever consecutive 5 scales the same way as in tombs. Once you hit r3 it will take every 10 wins to get 1 fame. Rank 6, every 20 wins, and so on. This will help newer players get to r3 more smoothly while also allowing them to learn some good basics of pvp as I believe 4v4 is where everyone should begin for pvp and then work their way up to tombs/gvg.

I agree that there could and should be alternate methods to gain fame. The method you are proposing would be akin to telling someone how much faction you have. I am not saying its a bad thing, just comparing. Just to say someone has 300k faction isnt quite the same as saying that they are rank 6 or whatever in most people's minds.

Many of the older arguments revolve around wanting to know the experience of the person in the tombs environment. This is the only possible failing of expanding the options of how to gain rank. Again im not trying to discourage the implementation of other methods, just throwing back old arguments used against others.

If anything, id be for something that discourages using rank as the guage for experience, but anything to cause that to occur will not change people's minds on how or when the experience was gained. For example, if rank just stopped and people kept their emotes, anyone claiming experience under a new system would still be considered a "noob" and "vets" would just continue to shun them if they didnt know the individual personally.

As for the guild learning suggestion made by others, sure its nice, but its not like the top end guilds just pickup anyone off the street really. Even so, being in the guild and playing with the guild, you are not playing in or learning with different people. Essentially it is just forming a different kind of exclusion that rank simulates between individuals forming pick up groups. Trying to rely on the community to correct this i belive is a mistake as it would have happened already. A new player in would have a better shot at getting into the groups formed by the new japanese/chineese/X new country soon to be included in GW distribution, than they would under most situations with the existing rank issue. That is of course if they could speak the language.

I think the overal goal should be to try to recreate the same experience for new people gaining rank that the old people had when they were first starting up as much as possible.

If this was working i would be rank 12 by now



im assuming that fame means famous, so why do people in guilds like iQ and EvIL get no fame for winning GvG, they are alot more famous then ****'s Team, almost everyone knows who iQ is and thats what "fame" is.

i wont say something like wammo suxk :P it will be to banal

simple if you dont want be adaptive and change your build you wont win

nah the system i proposed wont allow players to easily farm rank forever, it will only be feasible to use until you are rank 3 then it becomes vastly inefficient compared to doing tombs.

TY for the kind comments folks <3

The problem is in the way I phrased it; rank is only an estimate of competence/experience. I've seen r2 players who's awareness and smart play put a good number of r6+ players to shame. Besides, wouldn't a group benefit more from a r2 trapper who knows to bring mantra of resolve than a r6 trapper who's trying to rely on serpant's quickness to get his traps down?

What you're saying is only a half-truth. Any person here, incredibly patient or not, would likely get frustrated by waiting around for an hour for the sake of winning no more than one or two maps. True, some people will stick it out, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who would be thinking "eff this" in the back of their head at that point (and I'm very patient with groups/people). Because of how the system works, long organizing times reap little to no benefits, and that's what gets people.

I have no retort for that, as it is completely true. The system I have suggested is by no means perfect, it's simply - in my estimation - a large step up. The best I can suggest is that virtually anyone in GW, once given the correct build down to every last detail, can put it together and have a reasonably firm grip on what to do. As I'm sure a lot of people have stated already, many "experienced" players are hampering their team's effectiveness by using inferior builds, even as we speak. Meanwhile, some newer players who have a firm grasp on PvP are designing their own builds that will give the team an edge, and are simply unable to find a group based on numbers which, again, do not give an altogether accurate representation of competence or skill. Keep in mind that the system I am suggesting would not eliminate rank - I'm sure people will continue to resort to checking that for a broad idea of that person's experience-level; this would simply reduce rank's meaningfulness, not eliminate it.

True, but it gives you a great basis for easy improvement. Just having a list of skills will give you an idea of how those skills are applied. Having the correct build will likewise make it easier for your team to give you a quick pointer or two that will teach you how best to play it. The reason new players are shunned from competent groups right now is very simple: when faced with an inexperienced player, groups have the choice between a) kicking and replacing them, or b) spending 15 minutes explaining how to reroll their build before even being able to give them those one or two pointers that would increase their effectiveness exponentially.

A lot of people will tell you that, especially in today's fame-farming world, rank means very little. The people who are new to PvP aren't stupid, aren't new to Guild Wars and aren't unable to learn from experience. The problem is that GW fosters an environment that gives you a choice between playing or helping that person out - it simply doesn't allow you to do both at once.

Most of you have played with a Guild or a set of friends and have been in a situation where they've given you a very precise build you've never played before. I challenge you to honestly tell me that, once you had that build made, a few quick comments and suggestions over the course of your match didn't allow you to play that position as if you had been hammering away at it for a week. Hell, I myself was recently in a position where I was playing a very specific build in GvG I hadn't seen before - but just knowing what to bring let me play that position competently. Within minutes of our first match starting, our group's leader had dropped one or two quick comments on when I should be emphasizing what skill and I was already making clutch plays that were saving the team when healing was an issue, shutting down spikes virtually on my own, ensuring that adren spikes were getting kills instead of just damaging players and generally playing the build as if I had been researching and experimenting with it on my own for far longer than 15 minutes.

The point is that PvP's little specifics are very easy to teach and to learn once you have a solid basis (i.e. the appropriate build) to allow that type of quick help without having to teach the essentials.

Please don't take this the wrong way Gaile, but what's being discussed here has been a problem that smart and high-level PvP players have been seeing and complaining about with few results since GW was first released. The position that it's a problem with the people is naive at best, a justification for ignoring the problem at worst.

The only reason we're seeing PvP polarizing the way it has been so quickly and drastically (only 1-2 builds being played, people relying so heavily on rank) is because this problem with the game's framework has remained unchecked for so long. Unless you folks choose to face rather than explain away the problem, PvP will only become more unbalanced as time goes on. There are possible fixes out there and, while it will cost you time and effort, addressing the issue is the only way to stop and eventually reverse the game's current downslide.

Don't believe me? Ask any of the top-rated guilds you guys interview about what they think about PvP's current woes. I guarantee you they will tell you it's not just a problem with people being in the wrong mindset when trying to put together a quick build to just have some fun.

nono, keep rank and fame out of 4v4.

the simple fact that it is just too unpredictable would screw things over.

ive seen way too many low damage dealing rangers with cripple shot and apply posoin make those matches last hours.

no fame for 4v4
signed superj24

they don't seem to give a care when my unranked monk joins a team. i get lots of invites EVEN THOUGH i say i'm unranked...IWAY is overrated, over exploited, and under intelligised.

Forget IWAY. Go monk.

Rank is the visualization of "Idiots Whipping All You" (Hence, IWAY)

Rank, really is WAY overrated. people use it to show how, "UBER l33t" they are, when they really suck. Rank, itself isn't bad, it's the visualization and "uber l33tn3ss" people think they have when they are ranked, hence, they won't let unranked in a team, unless they are a needed team player.

An great example is when a guildie started a PuG in Hero's, all unranked, and held the HoH for over 3 hrs. Nobody in that group except a monk, had ANY rank.

To encourage people to take newer players, I'd say,
Idea #1: People get better drops from the chest when they have a low ranked person in the group.
Idea #2: Lower Ranked persons in the group give more fame per battle and more faction.

I (and the frog) am Morally opposed to IWAY.

P.S. About the rank/IWAY part, i'm kidding...

I'm sorry but this just isn't the case. The grand majority only care about the goddamn rank. It doesn't matter how well you play your game, if you don't have rank, you will get kicked, mocked, called a noob, and get all sorts of crap. Don't try to explain, they don't care, they don't want to hear it. They only want your rank. If you can't come up with the animal they want, then just keep on walking brother, you are only wasting everybodys time. High ranked players who will give rankless players a chance are practicaly non-existant.

I know this from personal experience, since I have 2 accounts, and only one of them has considerable rank. If I want to PvP in HA with one of my second account characters I usually cannot get a group, regardless of wether or not I explain myself. I once had to log in with my other account, /rank, and then change back again, because I was so fed up with the elitist crap I was getting. Yeah, they eventually let me in, but not before saying that I should "raise rank on this one too".

That's the kind of elitist garbage that made me swear off PvP for a while. And though I go back to it from time to time, I doubt I'll be participating as much as I used to until things are fixed. With all the fame-farming going on, to me rank has become little more than another virtual e-penis for jerks to flaunt.

Except it really is a problem with a vast majority of the people in Guild Wars, the cause of which you have already explained so I'm not going to be redundant.

You're right, most people do think in terms of rank, but it would be downright ignorant to say that it's just some random social phenomenon where people won't give anyone a chance. It's become that way because of the game's structure.

Unless I missed something, I don't think anyone has said that was that cause.

Point taken. But for everyone rank 2 player who is from a top tier GvG guild, there are several thousand whose experience befits their rank. Builds are a poor indicator of experience as anyone can copy a build, but is a decent metric if used to weed out those who are over-ranked.

You have to keep in mind that for groups that are filled with more than 1 or 2 pickups, it will take multiple games for people to become accustomed to one another's style of play.

In group PvP, it is ultimately up to the group leader or build creator to designate skills and builds not the individual players, regardless how much "better" the other player(s) may believe their own builds to be. Players who will not comply with the group leader or build creator have no place in competitive PvP regardless of experience.

Depends on the role that the player has to play, e.g. simply handing the players a trapping build won't teach them how to effectively trap offensively, and being able to takes experience. "Pointers" may help but in no way a substitute for several hundred hours of experience.

If a Guild is willing to take in a player, they can provide a player with a "learning environment", even in competitive PvP if the guild is sufficently skilled and prepared enough.

I have a simple build, Boon Prot - simply knowing the skills and attributes won't teach you healing priority, how to kite and still heal effectively, or how to management your energy (which is simply more than hitting OoB). I can say the same for most builds for other classes. There is a good deal more to playing your class and role than simply understanding why you have those 8 particular skills on your bar.

Anyone remember Myth and Myth II where rank was dropped every 3 to 6 months? Yes, that's what this game needs to do also at least for HOH. GvG is a different story, but, HOH is much like Myth in that people gain rank they become leet for awhile and then all rank is cleared and everyone starts over fresh and new again. When always a known to happen this was easily acceptable in Myth and Myth II. I'd like to see it happen in at least the HOH type arena and then that would stop the elitism for at least a time during those 3 and 6 month periods. Everyone back to zero and then there's no "have to be rank ?" involved in creating groups.

It sounds nice and really something I agree more should do. Would be great to find the next natural talent! The only problem is (and I mean no offence) is the casual PVEr come in and wants to give PvP a shot... once. You devot your matches to teaching and the player ignores your suggestions or just plain bitches about you correcting them.

Now, the people here having trouble getting into teams I would give them a shot. From the few I've read they're detecated to PvP moreso than others. I had this problem and know what it's like.

jeremy wins.

I'll take an unranked player if I'm just doing some quick, stupid IWAY group or some crap, sure! However, that is to say only if you can find your shift key. If you whisper me saying,"Hi plz i am close r3 178 fame plz inv rly good plz," well, 1: learn2type. 2: uh-huh, you have 178 fame, and I'm r15 and I have 4 accounts full of sigils and full stacks of ectos.

But hey, if you can show at least a -shred- of intelligence through your typing / knowledge of the build you're requesting to run, I'm glad to take you! :].

of course I usually farm moreso with the intent of not even holding halls, so at most a 30 fame run at best, but still.

When I run a balanced group with intent to grab/hold halls, I like to take ranked players who I know can hold their build together / know the enviornment we'll be fighting in well .

In one way this is very similar to the situation in football (Soccer to you yanks - I'm English) The top teams dominate and are able to buy the best players, and carry on dominating.

However, I recently have discovered speedway, I don't know all the fine points, but each rider is given a ranking/seeding based upon how well they do. At the end of the season the teams buy/sell players but have to remain under a certain number of total points. The really valuable riders are the up and coming guys that havn't climbed the leaderboard and so are "cheep" points wise, but are actually pretty good.

What I'd suggest is quite simple actually a combination of :
no team can start with too much (or too little!) fame/rank.
And within this fairly wide bracket there would be a "mid point" that would result in a team starting "normal" however, a team that made up of lower ranked/famed players they would get a morale boost to start with, and conversely the teams near the upper limit would start with a morale penalty.

Sorta like handcapping in golf I guess, but based upon the whole team ...

i think HA would be better if it runs ala-"PVE Arenas".


say ranked bracket system. people under the same bracket only fight against each other.

a) novice HA r0-r2
b) average HA r3-r5
c) experienced HA r6-r9
d) i-eat-fame-3x-a-day HA r9-rwhatever

no frustrations. no mismatches. skill (experience) level vs skill (experience) level. whatever build used. fame acquisition should be "grind"-y for every bracket (progression anyone?).

drawbacks: guild HA group cant take rank 1 guildmates to average HA if 6/8 are rank 5s. the twinkers (2nd accounters) of course.


with observer mode, new players will have ideas what build to run and how to run it successfully.

with this ala-"PVE Arena" system, one will gain fame not by "beating-rank-0-noobs-coz-i-r-rank-10" or "free fame" but by beating a team that gave a good match.

Wow, I'm so glad this topic got recognition! Even from people on ANet! The first comment on this topic said "Rant's don't go very far on these forums." and I presumed it dead after the first three or so responses. Only yesterday did I come back and see four pages. I've read some excellenet suggestions and I think that this problem could be fixed. The past few days have wielded the same results: denial because of rank.

For now I'm turned off from the HA and shall continue my Random Arenas...

To bad that doesn't give Fame.

Please, please, please don't devalue rank further by giving it out for RA where the team the get matched with has a far bigger influence on how many wins you get than player skill.

Its a pity you are turned off from HA because you can't get into ranked groups, but i think it sort of sums up the attitude of a lot of pve-ers. They do just expect to walk into winning teams and dont realise that is totally normal to lose *a lot* more than you win when you start pvp.

I can't even get into losing groups, that's what turned me off.

But it's true, not many people who are under rank 3 and also generaly under rank 6 know the layouts of the gold maps and even if they do it's funny watching teams that don't know what to do (caping altar at 8 mins).

Well, just thought i'd throw my 2c in ...

I agree with the OP that finding a good group without rank is more difficult than if you have a nice Deer/Wolf/Tiger to flash at someone, but not impossible.

I've decided to give up on finding good random groups, and to just make some friends that do HA frequently. I've played with them in other arenas (and PvE, in some cases) so they know me and where my skills are best used. This is the advantage most new HA players don't have, but anyone can (presumably ) make friends to help out.

Am I rank 3? Not yet! Do I know what to do on altar/relic/priest maps? You betcha, but only because i've seen them, and had some helpful hints from teammates explaining different things ... instead of "ZOMG, you don't know what to do? you are teh noob! Kick this guy!". It's the same sort of thing going on in the "Biggest Jerk" thread: alot of people have no patience to teach someone new, no matter their potential, forgetting that they themselves were new once and required the same help.

They are under the preconceived notion that by allowing new players into their group or giving build hints that they are undermining their chance to earn fame or win in HA ... what you are doing is alienating the people who could potentially be a great asset to you in the future.

An addendum: balanced team of friends yesterday, only 2 of which were rank 3, walked all over the rank 6+ team that rejected several of us only minutes earlier ... certainly not the norm, but it did feel good to trounce some elitist jerks for once

One of the things I don't see in this thread is that most new-commers are in a very similar position that the nowadays "elite" players were when they started.

And the difference between both situations is that new comers aren't going to the same processes, at least not those who I'd see posting in this thread.

When this game started, there was no rank, there was no builds, there was not anything but a bunch of people exploring Tyria and doing missions together and all that, those people started PvPing, exploring the Tombs of primaveral kings, they had the ground to experiment and be inquisitive about new combo's, strategies and other ideas.

Today, all we see is PvE coming guys, who lack basic knowledge of game mechanics, because they went to Tombs (new Heroe's) and saw a tiger and said, hey that's cool, I want one too. But instead of fighting their way there, they spent the whole day PMing the guy with the tiger, hoping to get into his group.

The biggest problem about rank segregation is not the r9+ saying no to the r9-, because r9+ is only a very small part of the population. The problem with rank segregation lays on the rank 0~2 players segregating themselves and not getting anything done at the end of the day.

Rank is ALREADY useless.

No it isn't. Its usefulness may be limited, but it is most certainly better than nothing.

Why should rank have any "usefulness"? It's just an emote. It doesn't tell a player's skill, only that he's managed to farm some fame, just like fissure armor doesn't automatically denote that player as some sort of ubergod.

Yes, my questions are rhetorical.

The players have turned out a gameplay reward into some sort of elitist badge.

How are the rank 0-2 players segregating themselves? It's not through their actions that higher rank players refuse to play with them. It's simple elitism, plain and simple.

IMHO I've discovered recently that rank means NOTHING. You can get a team through to HoH without having a ranked team. And you can fail miserably at the ghosts with a ranked team. More over (particularly in international districts) unranked players are far better behaved and more likely to be easy going.
I can say this because I've had some very nasty ranked experiences recently.
The worst was 2 days ago when playing IWAY with my guild we needed two extra players and we got a rank 6 warrior and a rank 9 ranger. I was initially apprehensive because the ranger wanted to go as martyr, my guildies and I thought, wth let's give it a go.
I play order necro for my guild. Like playing monk, it is a thankless job and you are heavily constrained by a severe lack of energy - that is until your team mates kill something, or get themselves killed.
We thought that we would have a good team, we had already been consistantly winning the majority of maps up till HoH that night and our two new recuits were well ranked. Logically our lovely fame farming should have continued.
Well it didn't. We didn't even get past the ghosts. Why? Well that rank 9 martyr ranger decided he was going to run into the middle of the pack and take out the rangers at the back.
Now for those who don't know much about IWAY, the order necro operates a little like a monk. I've been playing it more like a monk in recent times too because it has been working marvoulously well. So there the ranger is getting himself killed and I hurry in to heal him. I get backfire, diversion, and clumsiness cast on me by the mesmers. Now #3 isn't an issue, I don't play order necro on the offensive. #1 and #2 WAS and issue. If I cast things would go badly. So I do what I normally do. Not cast till the hexes wore off. With three members down the guildies on our team agree to suicide and start over.
So we die and get back to HA and the ranger starts flaming me. I'm a noob order apparently. I tell him I can cast when I'm hexed up like that. He kept flaming and I put him on ignore. He DEMANDED me to apam my emote, I refused. This was a guild team. He knew that when he joined and there was no way in hell I was going to satisfy the idiot. Meanwhile the rest of the team is asking him why he rushed in and why he didn't once use martyr after the warriors spammed that they were blind. He blamed the order. "If the order wasn't a rankless noob we would have been fine, we wouldn't have died and we'd have had a 10% bonus."
Now this incident has really marred my joy of pvp. I've got almost all my 200 fame from playing IWAY order necro. I'm not perfect, I can use all the help and tips that I get, but when it comes to playing the part I cartainly think that I'm far from a noob. Furthermore there were others in the group whose rank was below mine. I think perhaps what bothered me even more was that my guildies of higher rank left me to stand up for myself. This guy just kept flaming and flaming until he was kicked (on my request - I ACTUALLY HAD TO REQUEST that my guildy kick him) by the leader.
The funny thing is that we had much more fun and success with completly rankless pugs earlier in the evening. So having a rank 9 behaving like a complete a-hole severely marred my desired to ever visit the international district at HA again.

I made it through pages 1,2,3,5....I skipped 4

Some Blinding Flashes of the Obvious that some people in this thread refuse to acknowledge:
-It is a catch 22.
-It is elitism plain and simple.
-It's a stupid way to do things and/or behave.
-80% of the time, guilds aren't big enough to PvP, or not enough be be worthy of HoH. I know, I've gone through 22 guilds, 21 had inactivity issues, #22 were just jerks.
-Friends can be from all over, no guarentees they'll be on, or that 8 will be on.
-Though they don't say it, most have tried forming groups, but that's just a reverse, ranked generally won't touch the group.
-Rhetorical Question: Nowadays, which is more likely; someone is R2- because they can't PvP well, or they're R2- because no one lets them in a group that has a chance to win? (If you answered the former, you're either dense or elitist.)
-PvE has its vitues in PvP. It teaches you how to adapt in the first place...in fact, generally, the only reason new builds come about anymore is because a few creative (and ranked) PvEers modify a really good build they found in PvE for PvP. If the task were left to the Elitist PvPers, they'd use the same cookie-cutter builds forever.

And heres a mild suggestion: Provide a group bonus for how many lowly ranked players are in their groups. A really good incentive, like an extra 2%^ per R2- player, or more faction, or SOMETHING. Even an elitist can spot an incentive, and maybe, just maybe some R2- can get the training they need to get better.

They segregate themselves because they avoid playing with each other.

And about elitism, what's wrong with it? People with rank fought they way there and if any right they have, is to play with whoever they want to play, should rank be used to decide yes or no, then let that be.

Instead of writing rants about rank and how meaningless it is, people should go out there and play the game. It is not in anyone but other than oneself, the ability to make a group and lead it or join a group and let be led.

Resources are infinite, forums, in game networking, observer mode. People don't have other excuse to develop themselves and be sucessfull but their own lazyness.

And regarding the rank segregation. I am going to quote 'Valor' in one of the posts he did on guild-hall.net forums talking about him getting pmed all the time for groups (When the times Lara Valor's team/Patient Relaxed People has won the battle in the hall of heroes was a very common message for all of ur to see)

~peace

So Far:

Rank was the stupidest (yes I said stupidest) addition to GWs ever implemented.

I have been here since BETA. It was not needed then; it was not needed upon release; it wasn't needed two months after release. It has been the foul mother of all the other "elitest" crap that goes on now....whether it be "only echo-nukers" in PVE or cookie cutter builds in PVP. The pyschology backfired. Instead of being something that showed an accomplishment, a carrot, it has simply used more as a stick. Give me scalps, give me Tokens, give me something else that shows you (may) have more experience in PVP, but that something should not be a bar to new players entering HA.

The stupid emote has changed the mindset of the player base (for no good reason) and has made the game both less interesting and less fun to play for many newer people.


Instead of creating something to mark a "distinction", it has instead overwhelmingly reinforced groupthink/lemming behaviour. People just look for an excuse now to be like everybody else. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

May have been good on paper.....it bites upon execution. Just my opinion. You don't like.....I have an emote I'll flash you with one hand.

Hmmm...must be why I was able to get into plenty of unranked PUGs the past weekend.

Some people probably do, but not all, and I'd guess not the majority either. Plenty of unranked PUGs happening all the time. The more common segregation is amongst those with rank versus those without.

If you don't understand the problems with that attitude, then it's pointless for me to explain it - you either get it or you don't. You have choosen to ethically see no problem with it, and that's your decision to make. When you're at your next Klan rally, tell Bubba I said sorry that I won't myself be making it this week.

Then why are you here? Shouldn't you be flashing your emotes in district 1 of HA? Bashing n00b unranked IWAY groups in Broken Tower?

Oh, so it's THEIR fault they can't play with better players to learn how to be better themselves, gotcha. Whew, I thought it was the whole segregation thing again. Stupid lazy players, GET OFF YOUR ASS!

Such an enlightening and very forward thinking post! You're a brave new man of the 17th century!

I also just LOVE the ironic name of that person's guild - patient relaxed people INDEED! Valor too! It's like a double date with Irony!

Read my previous posts, I said the people that post in this thread, specifically those who bash the rank system because they can't get into higher ranked groups.

At least the one segregation people like to point out and make posts about.

I posted because I see people posting rants about rank, specifically targeted to ranked players. And people looking for solutions to the problem. And yet again, I see a lot of solutions, I see posts everywhere with builds and detailed information of how to play them. Tips and recommendations given by experienced players who had to figure all the details out themselves. Strats and multiple, if not inmense amount of information about game mechanics. Yet again I see all the people complaining because they keep asking, that thing the most ranked players cannot or are not willing to give. A spot in a team of 8, which is usually filled with friends, people they have gone a long path with and whom they are not willing to leave behind.

I am here to post my point of view, which in a way is close-minded and selfish from your point of view. From mine it is about integrity, I play for the joy of the people I play with. To celebrate their company and honor our long paths together, regardless how old fashioned that sounds, that's how I feel and nothing can change that.

I don't flash my emote in district 1 because there's really no reason why I should or would. And how funny you mention my favorite map, but no, I don't bash on r00b unranked IWAY groups in Broken Tower, in fact, I don't bash on anyone, at all.

The reason I am here, is to give what I can actually give, information, product of my little, yet again knowledge. I could discuss my understanding of game mechanics, strats or builds with anyone anytime.

No, it's not their fault. It is the higher ranked people's fault, as I said before, because they are being asked the only thing they can't and are not willing to give. Unfair? I don't think so. Ranked players are not here to serve anyone.

Save your sarcasm please.

If you knew them personally, you'd know they are very patient and relaxed indeed, no ironies at all. And if you knew Valor, you'd know he's in fact a very brave player. So please don't talk about people you don't know.

Now back to the topic.You have to realize that each day it becomes harder and harder for everyone to gain rank. This is because of the closed nature of the HA's system itself. One team can only be holding halls at a time and it is by infortune, more than by inability to win that most parties go back to district. Even high ranked groups lose in Underworld you know?