Anyone else un-guilded able to get into organized HoH matches anymore?

Because I can't.

For the 5th day in a row, I've sat in tombs for over a hour waiting, just to find an organized group. Now by organized, I mean, at least able to make it to the HoH, having a good group build, all able to *speak* on vent/ts, etc. I finally get a group, which has maybe 3-5 players already, and find myself having to wait even longer for the group to find additional experienced players. Fine. Then, the game actually starts, and we wind up losing the first match, usually more than once. Switch up builds, swap a player or two, then rinse and repeat. This has happened every single day for the past week or so.

It's really starting to get on my nerves, because I only play for a couple of hours whenever I can, and can't join a PvP guild because of the massive time requirements most of the skilled ones force upon you prior to joining. So by playing unguilded, I"m essentially wasting time, having a nice group discussion on vent/ts, then wasting more time, then calling it a night, day after day.

Is there something I'm missing, or has it truly reached a point where you have to join a guild to participate in the tombs on a competitive level? Because personally, I don't think the PUG situation in tombs could get any worse.

Generally, guild groups win HoH battles. They are more organized and have developed deeper strategies... So I doubt many PUGs can compete

Currently... you have no hope for improvement... your best chance? somehow join some PvP loving guild that would choose you to be in the tomb 8 players... That is right, even if you do join a guild... chances are that you might still find yourself excluded even if you have godly skills... why? they likely to want to play with their "closer" guild mate instead of you obviously. Yes, it does sux... You going to need some luck.

I am thinking to start a non-guild based tomb team... where anyone can come to do tomb at an arranged time. Perhaps we have some luck together one day

I salute you my good sir!

Unfortunately that seems to be the trend. In some ways though it does speak to the level of cooperation required for a team to be competitive in tombs. Even many of the PUG's you see winning are actually a bunch of people from some of the better guilds using their smurf guild tags. Your best bet is to start getting names of people when you join a PUG and see if you can't get a regular group together.
That sounds like a cool idea. I look forward to the day that the top guilds actually get a little nervous before facing off against a PUG unlike the current situation where we chalk up a victory before the match even starts.

That's an unavoiable problem with team based games that reward teamwork...
Groups with better teamwork do better, and people that actually know each other have better teamwork.
You just have to figure out how you can get to know more people and guilds are great for that.
Don't think that any guild containing members worthy of PVPing with has harsh time requirements. I'm sure you can find a guild with good players that don't care if you don't play 24/7. It's not like it does them any harm to have you in the guild even if you aren't always online.

I'm sorta in a guild , but since no one is on I do pug groups for hoh, and it's not very pretty. I can win the first match easily, but I have never made it past round 2.

pugs can do great! just depends on where the players of that pug come from =)

seriously tho...no competition atm cuz a handful of guilds and thus a handful of players ownz all...wonder why that is...

I'd been playing PvE mostly but wanted to start playing PvP and ran into exactly the same problem. HoH is impossible to be competitive in unless you already have a good team and to get a good team you have to have proven that you're a good player which you can't do without a good team. The only way that I can see that you have a chance of getting a decent game in the HoH is to join or start a guild.

Right now it's just too hard to get experience at the tombs unless you happen to land in a decent PUG and even then there's usually one or two players who either aren't interested in playing well or just don't have enough knowledge or skill to compete effectively against other players. Most of the time it's hard enough to get people to even target properly much less use any actual teamwork.

The worst part is thanks to the random nature of PUGs it's quite hard just to improve your own play since the standard tactic seems to be rush the enemy, flame everyone else and then quit meaning there's no real opportunity to improve your own tactics or build.

To be honest, i don't really think there is anything *wrong*, even if with the various PUG's I haven't got into HoH i'm still having fun. The only thing i'd like to see is some form of reward at the end of each battle, it can be frustrating to know that after 20mins winning a battle with a 7 man team (some one always disconnects) you aren't going to get anything out of it (especially when you consider how much gold/items you could have collected in PvE).

Well, you get fame after some of the later battles, but that's about it I guess, in terms of reward.

Ironically enough, last night I actually managed to find a nice skilled team to go into the tombs with, and we had a solid flawless run to the HoH, which was a welcomed change. Once there, we got destroyed by a rather interesting build that a pretty good guild was using - first time I've gotten owned so bad by rangers in awhile. The loss itself was fine with me, because not only did we get as far as we did, but we played well getting there. That's really all I want out of a PUG group, and last night, it willingly kept me up till almost 3 in the morning.

The only thing that worries me, is once again finding that group with the capacity to coordinate in the same manner. I love those games where everything just clicks - the healers are all on par, solid target calling, quick takedowns, etc. A lot of you guildies take that stuff for granted, but with PUGs, it's more of a blessing than anything else.

I've also been wanting to attempt a few strats I've thought up, but haven't found anyone willing to give something new a try. I guess I'm really gonna need that guild afterall. Or you never know, maybe things will miraculously change in the coming weeks

Well, i dont use guild members to do it... i find plenty of groups where people dont care about things such as that, or the ts/vent crap...

Just gotta look around a bit... heh ^.^

HoH can be seen as a catered success, because it forces you to either evolve in skill, or just be stuck getting owned at underworld. The problem with most casual gamers is that most of them aren't willing to commit some time and effort to get better while alot of "hardcore" gamers do. This makes the casual gamers go "wtf?".

The problem isn't Tombs. Tombs was suppose to be prestigeous in a sense, it is a 24/7 online tournament. Tournaments are not suppose to be for the weak of heart. If your lucky you'll make it past the preliminaries, and sometimes, you might win if everyone else is asleep. But the point of tombs is at that point, your group is the best. You play any other ladder game like starcraft, warcraft, counterstrike, halo, do you see people whining that they aren't on the ladder or that the competition is too hard?

No, because 1. Those games can be self-sufficient. 2. People use tombs as their main PVP course, because GvG seems to have it's own problems ( Though I haven't played it yet :P ), and Arena like I've previously posted before, has not yet the incentives to cater to the casual crowd. No one cares about arena except for half-baked fun. Not enough choices, not enough incentives, not enough everything. The whole point is that Arena is for the majority of the casual players, and if they decide to test their mettle, they go to tombs or gvg, not spend hours going "LFG I HAVE VENT/TS 12 FAME AIR ELE".

The game takes on a decline because of the grind for hardcore players, but more notably because the casual crowd has no incentives to play. Arena has no rewards, not even points. A score chart, one that displays kills, healing rates, rez, etc etc, can help out alot. Both parties are now suffering because of problems, and because Anet isn't addressing them fast enough, though whether or not that is their fault is completely their own matter and not up to us to judge for the time being.

I think the most annoying thing about tombs for casual groups is the burial mounds and huge ffas. The FFA concept is nice, but it shouldn't be used so much times. I rather see more tombs scenarios, ones that promote smaller scale fights, and more varied objectives. CTF/KOTH/FFA/1v1 are the only game modes of tombs right now, and their not balanced at all. You want more scenarios and such, and a less predictable pattern.

I wish they would seperate all guild teams from pickup groups. It takes entirely too much effort to get a pickup group going, a lot more than it should. If they split up players so that the all guild teams just fought each other, which would probably result in better game play for them anyway, all the fat would be cut out and each team should be a challenge to defeat instead of rolling over them 40 seconds. Pickup groups would actually be able to PvP competitively as well since they'd be fighting against other teams of their skill level. There really needs to be some way to split up players of varying skill.

You mean like giving the high fame teams byes in the tournament so that we don't have to waste an hour or so smashing random pugs before we get to real competition? So that the random PUGs get to slog it out in the underworld with each other, with only the best of the PUGs making it to the upper tier maps to face guild teams?

Can't argue with that.

Peace,
-CxE

Concept is nice, but not all guilds are good enogh to face the upper tier competition. Any suggestions on how to filter and such?

I think ensign meant high fame guild teams.

Or non guild teams, since there's a lot of mixing and matching and ringing going on (see: the unofficial Fianna vent guild). Just look at the aggregate fame of a team, and if it's greater than a certain level just drop 'em straight into Dark Chambers or something.

Peace,
-CxE

I'm not sure I agree with this idea... giving players "special privledges". I saw in another forum someone mentioned that instead of just letting "high fame" guys skip everything outright, simply give them a little priority to "fill in the blank spots" in the tournament. That might be a little better, but I'm nor sure.

Although, on the flip side, it might be ok, because you can think of it as the high fame guys "earning" a pass to the HoH.

I dunno, it just sort of rubs me the wrong way... Soon people will complain of the "grind" they need to go through to get fame...
or PvE'ers will complain that PvPers are getting special treatment because of what they like to do (sound familiar to the PvP vs PvE Elites and Runes issue anyone?)

Neither can I. In about a week of playing Tombs pretty much exclusively, I've managed to get a whopping 2 Fame. One group I was in made it to Hall of Heroes (skipping a few rounds), where we fought against Idiot Savants and effectively prevented them from winning. That's the only highlight of the week. The rest of the time has been spent losing to superior teams that actually call targets and use focus fire, or one-trick-pony air ele teams.

My guild doesn't have enough ascended players to make a team either. Plus, we're not nearly as hardcore as the frequent HoH winners.

Let me share a bit of my own experience:

I'm one of the co-founders of Idiot Savants, but we've only existed for just over a month. I hear our name mentioned a lot, and I like to hear it, but our story shouldn't be too shocking: I started playing with 2 friends, we met a few new people we all liked playing with, so we started playing together. Not enough to field a full team by any means. Then we met another group in a similar situation. We discussed merging, privately and publicly, and put the merger together just before the game went retail.

Why did we merge? PUGing is tough, and I didn't particularly enjoy it. I like to win, and I prefer playing with friends. Both together? It's a win-win fun-fun situation.

I think iQ has an excellent group of skilled players, and I'm confident we'll remain one of the tops guilds even when the rest of the competition gets more organized. The key here? Organization. We put together a (powerhouse, IMO) group and committed to playing with each other. Before that, just a month ago we were in roughly the same situation as it seems like many of the frustrated people are in.

Get organized, get more skilled, get better. The exciting part about being involved in a new game is that we have a chance to set the tone, instead of conforming to the status quo.

well depends on the group. i built a pickup group that won the hall of heroes a few days ago. no ts or vent even. just some good team players that knew how to support each other. and some awesome monks

lol, that was us. we were the only ones using mass rangers last night =)

though we had trouble keeping the hoh for longer than 4-5 runs at a time because we didn't have enough aoe dmg. atm, i don't mind playing the lower maps and against pugs...i'm about 400 points from rank 9 and the spiffy tiger emote =)

xellos, the guild i'm in right now is just an alt guild we use for gvg, so you could've joined us if you wanted. we were testing new recruits anywayz.

I'm in a guild with real life friends who aren't into PVP. So I'm stuck playing Arenas or random groups in HOH. But here's my real problem... I can't even get into ANY groups in HOH because no one wants a Ranger. Not just any Ranger, a Ranger/Warrior. I've been booted countless times from groups to get someone "better"

The Arenas are getting old and I'd just like to play in the Tombs, but sometimes I literally have to wait for an hour for someone to accept me into their group. I guess I need to find some PVP buddies.

EDIT: Ohhh I just read Sama's post. A Ranger group? Damn where do I sign up?

Unless they get some kind of real ladder system that seperates the nubs from the pros this game will swifty be replaced by something else on my desktop. The killer reason why WC3 held my attention for so long was because after you reached a certain level you didn't have to worry about getting teamed with nubs. Even at level 10 you cut out most of the fat. Dawn of War lasted me a week because of the terribly designed multiplayer. Another solution is to give rewards for doing PvP other than in the HoH. At least make me feel like I'm doing something....

This is what I have been trying to do, but it's getting increasingly more difficult with each day that passes. I imagine it was easier in the beta simply because the game was still new and fresh, and many didn't have any serious guild commitments yet.

This doesn't seem to be the situation anymore, as virtually every good player that I've played with (which, in itself is rare) has been part of a larger competitive guild. With all of these massive guilds already established, it's extremely difficult to assign any worth to me or my little guild of friends, regardless of our particular skill. My fame itself is actually still pretty low (despite nearly 4 weeks of playing), which is another hindrance because some people actually believe that individual fame is an accurate representation of player skill - thus limiting my options even further.

I think the key problem here is that in order for these guilds to form, the PUGs have to be a viable option to meet other players who you would want to recruit. During the beta, this may have been the case. As it stands now, it's hard to find people, let alone groups, who fall under that category.

It really matters on who you know and whether or not they know if your good or not.

Personally tombs winning groups are a popularity contest on who knows who, to get into what group. Long as you have connections into the group and your skill level is good.. you have high chances of getting in.. most groups I've been in.. higher skilled players want to play only with other high skilled players.

Yeah I broadcast at the tombs Mes/nec lfg, for at least 10 minutes. Not one invite, when I even started my own group, no one would even want to join. I think by now the major pvp intensive guilds have formed and are probably leading the charge in the HOH.

I think the problem is that even casual gamers look to tombs for casual PVP, then whine when they see 2 hour setup groups own them. This is ridiculous. The problem lies in Arena, and how it's so pathetic at the moment, it doesn't promote incentives, nor does it promote skill, nor does it promote improvement. At this point, Arena is a joke besides testing out skills. Team arena is a bit fun, but it's still boring. It's pretty sad how the casual players have to play in the hardcore players territory in order to have fun because their own territory has some shack.

Hey Blackace, I distinctly remember PUGing with you in tombs the other day. I was playing on "I Smasha You Face" and we all had a blast. Thought I'd give you a shout.[/offtopic]

I find that it does get very difficult to find teams that truely know what they're doing for tombs. This is in part mostly to people that are new to PvP, or people that are new to the entire game. Hell, I had a guy in a PUG that told us how he was a very good healer since he loaded his character up with 4 major healing runes from his RP character. Most of these guys are just looking for some advice, or some friendly faces. What I've been doing is trying to single out the people that I've PUGed with in tombs and particularly enjoyed playing with, due to skill or friendliness. Those people I will talk to a bit more, get to know them somewhat, and ask them if I can add them to my friends list. This builds up a decent network of people that I would love to PUG with, so when I do feel like PUGing I simply open up my friends list and whisper everyone on to see if they've got any room.

If you start building your social network in GW, then I think you'll have much better experiences.

What can be done though?

I'm not a white english-speaking male (ok, only 1 out of 3 is true, I'll let you guess), so using vent/ts would only be a distraction for my group, even if my mic was working. I can read much faster than most people can speak, anyway. I'm not a terrible player (I'm reasonably good at my profession, listen to instructions, etc) and I got a fair bit of experience from beta, but no one wants me. With a fame of only 20 that I managed to get during the first few weeks after release, I can't hope for anything better. My current guild is small and not into PvP (my previous guild thought they were hotshot PvPers, but I had no wish to stay in a guild that talked almost exclusively on Vent, even *normal chat*, when I'd rather listen to music than hear a bunch of pimple-poppers mumble all day).

The only place I can PvP is in random arenas, where the character builds I like to play are not suitable for fast paced 4v4. I get "OMG ****ing noob" if I don't bring res sig on my R/E because I actually *use* all 8 of the skills I bring all the time. This is after I watched them all get slaughtered because they chose to ignore any and all called targets. On top of that, the random groupings are plain broken, and my groups may as well just stand there and die when a R, R, E, N gets paired up against a W, Mo, Mo, E because we have no hope in hell of winning. Even if we do win, there's no reward, just a pat on the back telling us our consecutive wins.

I don't mean to sound like I'm complaining, but it's rather frustrating when you can only play half of a game. I like both PvP and PvE in GW, and it's a slap in the face to see PvPers whine that they *have* to go through PvE if they want skills/etc., when people like me are simply unable to enjoy the other "half" because of the "bar" the hardcore PvPers have in place.

Sure, social networking... how well is that going to work when your friends and ignore list is limited to a combined total of what? Only 20? I've already got a healthy number on my ignore list of people I hope to never see again.

Personally, from my experiences, you can take someone off ignore after a week or two, and they won't bother you.

Either way, you don't have to just social network from within the game, you can get to know some people here in the forums, and arrange to meet up some day to go for a tombs run. I know that I'd love to go on a tombs run with ya! Just stick in there, tombs PUGs can turn out as good as they can bad, it's just a matter of sticking with it, and not giving up (or whatever they say on the greeting cards)

PM me on here or whisper me in-game, and I'll be more than happy to group with you.

Names:
Hugo The Horrible (main RP char)
I Smasha You Face (main PvP char)

The only way to win in a PUG is to play at a time that no one else is playing so there is very little competition. Try to get into a decent Guild Tombs group if you can. You'll like what you see. The difference is night and day.

-Virt

I consider myself one of the nicer posters here, so take this with that in mind... I don't think there's enough cheese in Wisconsin to go with all this whine.

PvP is challenging? PUGs aren't as coordinated as guilds? Certain guilds control the HoH? The casual gamer doesn't do as well as people who put major time into the game?

Correct. Next?

I AM the casual gamer. Like so many of you, GW is just a free time hobby for me. My guild would rather play Mechwarrior online for the most part. It's where we came from. When we play GW, however, we do alot of PvP, sometimes together, mostly apart. I've been to the HoH a whopping one time, and it was with a PUG that just happened to be incredible. Everytime I go out there though, win or lose, I practice or hone a new strategy for monk or mesmer. I've gotten a few good ideas from the paladin build I just created. I bought the game for PvE, but PvP is what I mostly play.

With that said, there are a few things I know:
PvP is Challenging.
Guilds usually beat PUGs.
The great guilds keep winning.
I probably won't do as well as someone who does this all day, every day.

Dejavu!

With GW, for every frustration there has been a solution. I don't like to see people get frustrated with the game because they think they've hit a wall. The original poster may very well have some problems getting better without joining a Guild, but what did he expect with a game called GUILD Wars? I think the most important point in this thread was by Scaphism. A month ago his guild was like every other, and now they are doing quite well. Want to know the secret to success at PvP? Go back to page 1 and reread his post. Want to know the secret to happiness with this game? Check the first sentence of this last paragraph.

Edge

So true whats a 43-0 run outside of HoH? Jack! I mean come on gotta be something for that.