Sealed and Draft Skill tourneys

I dont know if this has been suggested or not, but I was reading a thread on what people thought of the expansions and its effect on the game. I read one particular post that sparked my interest and this is why I am creating this thread.

The Quote:

The idea:

Sealed Skill Arena, it would be a random arena where you were assigned a pre-made build that you could not modify, and a team and you played. It would be like RA is now but you and your opponents would all be assigned a random premade build making it more of a Random arena.

Draft Skill Arena: For those familiar with Magic the Gatherin Draft tournaments, each player is given 3 packs of cards they each open one pack, look through the cards choose 1 card and pass the rest on to the opponent to their left, who then takes one and passes, etc. You build your Deck based on the best cards you pulled from those packs.

To turn this into a GW tourney each player could be given 3 sets of 8 skills, 1 elite and 7 non-elite skills, the players choose a skill and pass the rest to their opponents, similar to the booster draft in MTG. Then at the end you choose your primary and secondary profession. It could be random teams or it could be that you go in as a team and you can use team chat to let other teammates know which skills you are drafting so that you can form a more organized team.

Sorry if I didnt explain it well, but I think this would bring more casual players into the pvp realm.

This idea brings about a new concept to PvP strategy... i.e. none. It relies even more on the person's skill and knowledge of the skills. Which is fantastic.

Question, you can only take skills from up to two professions, how does the Draft Skill Arena bypass this situation?

Question: the player is given 3 sets of 8 skills. Does that mean they choose an entire skill set? or just one skill.... otherwise, the above question is asked again. Because your 8 skills is closely related to what profession you will become.

Not sure how this would be implemented in game, but it sounds like an interesting 'change of pace'.

What I was thinking for the draft is, that if each person (lets say for 8V8) is given 3 seperate sets of 8 skills each, thats a total of 384 random skills

16 players x 8 skills x 3 = 384

You chose 1 skill and pass the remaining 7 to your oponent who takes one and passes it to his oponent (your teammate) etc. you will be left with your 24 skills that you selected, which will determine the class you play, say I picked 3 necro skills, 1 monk elite and 2 monk skills, 4 warrior skills, etc. then I would maybe go N/W based on the skills I picked.

This is kind of how it works in Magic the gathering, you dont know what color deck you will be playing when you start, but once you get a very POWERFUL card to choose you usually build around that.

So in GW the first random set of 8 (1 of which is an Elite) if the Elite in that set is a very nice PVP elite you would take it, then try to build around that skill, etc.

You may end up with a skillbar that doesnt even have 8 skills, but to make that sacrifice Im sure you selected some nice skills that compliment each other.

I dont know how they could impliment a skill drafting function into the game, but I know this would be a lot of fun.

This is a really cool idea. It would be great if GW crreated a tourny like this.

This could be very fun. I'd think it might work better if the just handed out a random prebuild though (preferably not the existing prebuilds).

Cool idea. I'd love to try something like this. I'd rather do a draft or narrow down a larger "sealed deck" pool, instead of just having a random prebuilt handed to me. Building my skillbar would be a big part of the fun.

This would be great. I _might_ try PvP like that.

This is a fantastic idea. It would really prove to the community that ANet actually prefers skill > time/grind.

Here's a thought on a method of skill allocation through a draft system;

The PvP character creation screen would have to have a special additional type of character that enters the game as level 20, possibly without a secondary at this time, and, much like an RP character, does NOT have access to any unlocked PvP skills.

The players for a draft round are sent to a map with 8 separate rooms with 8 randomized skill trainers with a handful of skills from each profession. The players are given some kind of collector's style item to exchange with the NPC's for skills. After choosing one skill from the list available, the skill is taken off (akin to the item traders who have a limited supply), and the player steps on a portal/talks to an NPC to go to the next room, and upon entering their, they get another collector's item to get another skill in the next room.

After performing a complete cycle, they'd be prepared for the fight.


I'd imagine if the second profession were not chosen at the PvP char creation screen, each room would also have profession changers, so that a character could switch professions if they find skills that would do supplement their primary nicely and need a new one.


Skills acquired this way do NOT unlock for a person's account.


I'd imagine that for a random draft tourny, it'd be 4 vs 4 matches, either randomly assigned, or built from pre-determined teams.

Edit:
As a note, a quest item would probably work better. Upon trading the quest item for a skill, it would complete the quest objective, enabling the player to move on to the next room, and not a moment sooner.

I'm in!!!

My best format was draft in Mtg. Should be a lot of fun.

Time to bring back the skill gems

A Friend of mine made a good point about this, and he said the problem with it that he has is people that would quit after not drafting ideal skills.

The only thing I could come up with to address this is that maybe you would have to win an "entry chip" or something like that in order to get in, there would be a trader for them and you could maybe win them yourself by winning 10 consecutive matches in RA or TA or something like that, or of course you could buy them from the trader or off other players that farmed them out. Which would in a way punish people for leaving.

But I also heard some mention that Anet is working on a "rage-quit" punishment system (I read it somewhere) so maybe that will solve both problems, if they ever implement something like this.

Punish rage-quitters? Uh oh Im screwed

The main idea is pretty good but the entry chip idea isnt. I dont see what makes this kind of PvP so much better that it would require an entry chip. The chips wouldnt be worth that much in the first place so ppl would still rq. If u have to pick skills 1 at a time wouldnt u have to wait for the others to pick their skill and then pick ur next one. This would take 4ever lol. If they gave u all eight skills at once, u'd probably get retarded builds like the PvP char templates. I always laugh when i c some nub in HA go "spell slasher LFG" or "abominable snowman LFG"

Hehe what I like most about rage quiters is when Im in HA after 45 min trying to form the "perfect" PUG, we get the group, go in and the first team we come up against is a ranked guild, we lose and the people quit, Im always baffled, did you think we were going to beat the ranked guild? now you are going to waste another 45 min of your life making a group, then get pwned in 30 seconds and repeat, makes no sense, anyways back to the topic.

It will take a while to finish the draft process, because you do have to wait for others, but I imagine that after people get the hang of the system, it would go somewhat quickly, especially if they grab a nice PVP bomb skill and try to build around that skill, say you draft up Eviscicrate and Tigers Fury and at this point you know you are going to go W/R so you will be passing on skills from other professions when possible, sometimes you will get stuck where you have to pick up a different classes skill so you will take the best one to keep it out of your opponents hands, your skill selection after getting a few good skills will go pretty quickly because you arent going to find as many skills that you can use.

This is just an example, but I imagine after selecting the first few skills, the rest of the skill selection process will go pretty quickly. It can take a while in Magic the Gathering though. But I guess you would know this going into a tournament like this.