Guild-hall and Arena.Net on PvP

Comparing video games to sports isn't a very good comparison in my opinion and I agree with Blackace that replacing "skilled" players that leave the game is not easy. First off, the number of people that play sports and devote their lives to going pro is quite huge when compared to the number of people that are trying to go pro gamer (or even be competitive). So right off the bat the population from which you're trying to create new talent is much much smaller. Second, sports has the incentive of multi million contracts going for it. GW has the incentive of um .... NOTHING. So the people that get good at GW are a small cadre of players that enjoy competitive gaming. Most people are not like this. You cannot turn your average player into a Zrave or Ensign. They simply do not have the desire or want to be that good let alone the ability. The population of players that have the potential to become exceptionally skilled is small and finite. This should be obvious since the number of players that will even start to play GW in the first place is finite.

Let's keep this uncomplicated:
it will be bad for GW if the topguilds go. period.
Are they unreplacable? don't know. one might thing that in a pool of what? 20 korean, 2 american...let's say 23 million players there are some good still hidden? But that is speculatiion. Some of this talent may never break through simply becuase there is no structure (read: organised guild) to guide this talent.
so back to basic:
it is bad if top guilds go. period.

But such is the nature of life, of evolutionary processes, that if a niche is opened up it will be filled. Maybe not immediately with the talent to "replace" the current group, but over time just as good as in their own right.

Then you'll have the ageless questions of whether guild "A" from yesterday could have beaten guild "B" from today, and a whole new line of threads will start.

Let me try and rephrase your argument to make sure that I understand it and that we're all on the same page here.

You mention repeatedly that there are fewer people playing GW than playing sports. You didn't state the conclusion to that thought, but what I believe you're getting at is that if only 1 in X people have the potential to be a great player, and X is rather large and the population Y is rather small, then there will only be Y/X good players. Since we already have a number of good players that is close to Y/X, there will not be many more to come along.

The argument makes sense in a certain respect, but I'd like to think about it a little more. I'd like specifically to think about /why/ only 1 in X people are good players. I would say (and I think from reading your posts that you might agree) that few people have the patience to sit down and learn the intricacies of the game, the willingness to commit the knowledge to memory, and the ability to parse the information and use it to create interesting and "good" strategies. So really, we're talking about certain uncommon traits. Now if we were drawing a random sample from the US population, and we were only drawing till we hit population Y, I would agree with you that Y/X is what we will have. However, areanet doesn't pick names out of a hat and mail those people copies of guild wars, instead people choose to go buy guild wars.

Now I would argue that people with the mental characteristics described above, may be more likely to purchase guild wars. Why? As stated by others (and I believe yourself) GW enjoys a certain PvP reputation right now. I would argue that people with the mental characteristics mentioned will often seek out exactly these sorts of games as they enjoy the challenge. Hence, with a self-selecting population, I think that you may find more than our 1 in X people.

In an earlier post, someone mentioned that they felt angry that they had helped establish a PvP community only to be lied to by ANET. The only part of this claim that I'd like to mention is the "PvP community" which, if it does exist, will continue to draw more PvP people of the type I've mentioned to the game.

I /very/ strongly doubt that everyone interested in this game and PvP is here already. I personally know a number of exceptionally bright people who just won't touch any mmorpg for the first 6 months as they consider any game needs at least that amount of time to tweak problems.

Anyhow, my claim is that so long as there is a PvP community, there will continue to be newer and better players. /ESPECIALLY/ if this skill depends on knowledge as Blackace claimed:

And I appreciate all the work that IQ has done to find these sorts of things out, but that knowledge will now be absorbed by others and built upon. I don't see how, if knowledge is the issue, that people cannot help but continue to grow better and better. And if the issue is skill, I believe that people will continue to be attracted to GW.

-Diomedes

Varyag to the rescue!

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...d.php?p=341225

The reasonable solution to most harmful of the current problems.

of corse this has been said about 1000 times, but let me makes this more clear, when people leave, arena.net lose money because they wont by the expansions. if a guild of the week ends up asking questions about the pvp, galie will have to start asking the gw team about what they are doing... because this is just getting rediculus. either anet isnt listening to these pvp threads or they just plain dont care about pvp. or ironically they could be making their patch to fix all this bs right now and on wednesday its out... for their last attempt at fixing their game, lets hope they do. the game is right about at it's peak before it dies if nothing is done. only pve'rs remain and pvpers find their next game. at this point, im just about ready to dl diablo 2 exp 1.11. sounds fun! because you can pvp all day and never get bored for a few reasons: 1, you can use maphack and get advantages, whenever you kill someone your insulted and called a newb, and then when you kill them again, they start begging for mercy or insult more calling you a newb which is very funny because they're the one that has their corpse on the ground . hope sumthin changes soon though...

Of course I agree with this, I'm not trying to say that I want to see good competition leave the game.

Since the sports analogy didn't go over well, let me try chess. It takes a lot of time and study to become a great chess player, but over the years we've had more and more chess masters, had new and better strategies develop and the game has progressed. Chess continues to attract new and great players.

-Diomedes

and yet every year, the number of people that are interested in chess drop and get addicted to video games

*edit* also to that guy like 2 pages ago who was all statistical about this making people write research repots on it, you dont need math to prove shit. if you want math, 1+1=2, there and now i say faction sucks. i've played over 900 hours now. I pvp very often.

Heres what i've unlocked with faction:
2x Vampiric Sword Hilts = 2000
Quickshot = 3000
Superior Vigor = 2000
Total = 7000 faction in about 24 hours of pure pvping. [not at the same time but just a very very good guess]

its hard to say something isnt wrong with that. for the casual gamer, they have about 1 hour each day. a whole month to unlock all this is kinda stupid, especially if they waste no time doing anything else but pvp.

Sure, so let's treat both chess and GW as two different goods for consumption. The price is your leisure time. Let's say that it takes a very similar skill set to be great at either game (i.e. reading tons of build/strategy pages, parsing information, learning skills/positions, recognizing what an enemy is doing, countering moves, etc). If we used to have X people who had nothing to do with that skill set but play chess, and now we have GW (and other games, starcraft springs to mind), now X is divided up into several areas. People can't do all of them since they only have a certain amount of leisure time to spend.

-Diomedes

EDIT:

Didn't finish my thought there. So if you used to only have one good for consumption (chess) and now you have two (chess and GW), if people have different utility curves (i.e. you and I are two different people and have different preferences even though we have similar skill sets) some people will now consume the first good while some consume the second. They will do this to maximize their utility.

-Diomedes

I farmed 1.2 million XP in one week flat with no immense time investment (just in the evenings, Augie and I had XP farm run competitions lol). The skill I abused: Zealot's Fire. 1.2 mil in a week isn't broken ? Either they are very dumb or poor at math, I hate grind but even that is way too fast.


P.S.: PM me and I will gladly give you the build and how to use it (you need a monk primary)

Good job, atleast you got the 1+1 part correct. The reason I say math is important and needed to prove things is because of your exact post. Assuming you unlocked a lower vamp hilt before unlocking a higher one, that would actually be 2000 faction total. So, you descredit yourself because you either don't know that upgrades cost 1000 a piece, or you just can't add at all anyways. Thank you for proving my point perfectly.

You, plus countless other posts of the math being wrong add up, and can show very false conclusions. That is why you see iQ on these forums so much correcting people on theirs, and doing their very best trying to get it right.

That depends onyour definition of casual - to me, even an hour per night is not casual, but thats for a dif topc.


This thread is severely off-topic now too, we're along way from providing helpful suggestions andare full steam ahead into rhetoric and speculation land.

Gaile has tried to respond calling our claims stupid and frivilous by disputing the number of guilds quiting

we responded by pointing out ones we forgot earlier, adding around 20 more to the list.

Anyway this post might seem stupid, but keep it up in all seriousness, discussion is good and most conversations have periods of idleness but hopefully a spark will hit this one.

Anyway if more people would argue against the claims (pvp being broken or discouraging, I would love to hear more input from the other side of the coin)

I know it is, I have done relatively the same thing with my e/mo. They made it even worse when those scrolls came out. The difference is you actually put some numbers in your post atleast somewhat showing that something is broken, instead of saying faction sucks *insert rant here*.

rpg is great. everything about it is well done except for the predictable storyline. only problem is, it sucks to play it twice, or 3 times just to unlock skills. . There I said something good... yet hork, you didnt seem to finish your last post: Anyway if more people would argue against the claims. Then you just added parenthathees and ended... im confused ^_^

oh and umm i fixed the numbers for you, nerd enjoy. you might want to edit your post too; im surpised being 1,000 off really makes that big of a difference. someone reallly over exaggurates.

Shamblemonkee, this thread was never about ideas, I'm afraid. It is this site's example of the "I hate ArenaNet" virus that has swept the GW community. Hopefully, we'll get -back- to ideas before someone closes the thread.


***HINT HINT***

Someone asked for details, so at least in my view, there are three serious problems with the PvP in game right now:

1) Unlocks:

I am an avid MMORPG player and have no problem grinding to unlock everything; I have every rune, weapon mod, and 95% of elites unlocked atm, should be done by tomorrow. However, this game was marketed as not having any grind, therefore we suffered a "bait and switch", which I expect would considerably anger all the people that dislike grind.

Obviously UAS is out of the question by now, but Arenanet needs to realize that people seriously interested in PvP want to have all the options available instead of just what they need for one or two characters. Assuming normal patterns of playing, it takes about 1000 hours of gameplay to achieve this.

Solutions? I would recommend increasing the efficiency of faction skill unlocks by a factor of 2. The weapon mods you usually need only a few (due to poor balancing, but thats beside the point), and the runes if necessary you can just buy, so they are not as big a deal. Farming for skill points is not that terrible at the moment, the new scrolls help a lot. You can get a skill point every 10 minutes and it used to take around 30. However, capping elites is still very troublesome. Making elites more reliable to cap would be nice too - at least for a PvP player, its quite annoying to play for 15 minutes only to realize that the boss didn't spawn, and I'm sure some PvE guys might dislike it as well.

2) Skill Balancing

There are obvious skill imbalances in the game right now. I rather liked how in the BWEs I could design an overpowered combo, only to find that it had been nerfed by the next event. Made it a challenge, you see. However, all skill tweaking has stopped for 3 months now. We are not yet at the point where we can just let metagaming account for minor skill imbalances, there are some serious problems still out there. Just for the sake of completeness, I'll list them here:

PvE

Protective Bond

PvP

Nature's Renewal
Fertile Season
Ether Renewal
Zealot's Fire
Putrid Explosion

There are other threads that discuss these problems in particular. I won't suggest particular fixes because that just opens a can of worms, but the solution here is to start balancing skills again. I wouldn't mind seeing a buff to weak skills as well, which we all know there are plenty of.

The current environment is not a pristine paradise whose delicate balance we should be wary of disrupting, but rather a CORROSIVE SWAMP that needs to get drained, ASAP. If you have pugged casually in tombs and got rolled by a E/Mo smiter in 15 seconds, you know this feeling. I seriously don't know why the casual PvP players haven't just given up by now - losing to imbalance is never fun. For the serious PvP player, it just reduces your options tremendously since we are almost down to cookie cutters by now.

3) Lack of PvP Rewards

The third problem is that there is no goals to fight for. Tombs? Not as much wealth as you could get by just farming, even without figuring in the time it takes to get there. The rank animations and global message are a nice touch though. GvG? Ladder resets, so it doesn't really matter. Oh, and you get some faction, so you can... play more pvp?

What we need is a big tournament. GvG tournaments are starting to spring up, and thats good. Things won't start to heat up until prizes are involved, though. Korea had a big tournament just before launch, and I'm sure that inspired a lot people.

I doubt most people would disagree with the overall point of your post, but the tone, content, and hyperbole contained within it are what are likely turning people off. Both game devs and the general gamer would take it a lot more seriously if it was presented well and refrained from both demonizing the devs and using hyperbole in an attempt to convey a point. A case in point is the increasing numbers of hours being quoted as needed to unlock all skills. First it was 300 hours, then 400, then 500, now I hear quotes of 800. It started out realistic then got progressively more hyped up and incorrect.

Also, stop saying the devs are doing nothing. Are they doing less than you want? Probably. Are they doing nothing? No. Making sweeping balance adjustments in a short period of time is a recipe for disaster. Also claims that the devs viciously lied to you are unlikely to get any traction either.

actually the first Completely unlocked account totalled at

603 hours.

But that was using exploits that where later patched.

Meanon of Te

PvPers will always complain that they have to play the game, even though the Reward system with faction makes it pretty easy to unlock everything if you Only play PvP you will unlock skills for new character builds rather quickly. If you are PvE and PvP as I am, then you have BOTH options for unlocking which is even quicker. I had most of my stuf unlocked by the time faction came to be, and once it did I started banging away at the harder to find runes, and weapon unlocks. I can now build 4 of the 6 classes with the skill sets I want... There are still a few build I'm working on, but truthfuly I doubt I will ever use them. I'm now working on the last two professions. Mesmer and Necromancer, which I plan to play PvE with cause I have No clue how to use them effectively yet... and would rather learn then have to stumble around in PvP and making an ass of myself with them.
As to playability, well I enjoy the Story missions and quests for myself, but anymore I have been playing it as a single player game... with the occasional CoOp with my friends in my guild.

When I want to play against others I head for PVP. this is also our guilds major gold producer as the Sigils are still highly valued at NPCs. The GvG is nice but still not very popular in my book. we are spread all over the world and its hard to get enough people in the guild that are interested in doing GvG at the same time. all any PvPers ever want to do is Tomb HoH... so its hard to draw them away from that. and most PvEers in our guild don't enjoy GvG either (which I fault for lack of a practice mode for GvG) but thats another issue.

Now that the game is gaining popularity with new players the old players are getting disgusted with the same old thing. well good riddance to you I say. I played this game since January Betas (which I rushed through for testing). Since the Launch I took my time and Enjoyed what I liked and played when I wanted too, not like a Fanatic Addict trying to maintain a fix. So I don't have much pity for those that Ran to the end of the game just to act like they are Elite. whatever. Do what you want. I like where Arenanet is going and I have seen some of the goodies they have planed, much of which they took from our suggestions from beta and alpha. In my personal opinion this is still a simi finished product. it will not be truly gold till chapter two comes out. But they wanted to get it out there and start production runs ASAP. and since it is still a MMORPG people are used to changing environments and gameplay, so I'm sure it was no big issue to them that a few things were not implemented yet.
The mass influx of cheaters(Gold Ebay Buyers / Sellers ) and market inflators at the launch was a problem at first, but they took action and fixed much of that for PvE. Then they addressed PvP with added faction rewards. Now they are working on their Competitive Tournament with spectator...

The new Missions and Explorable areas for PvE will come soon.

After that its back to GvG by adding some goodies in their Halls, as I understand it.

Some more minor updates for traders and crafters are expected, and new bonus areas in the Temple of Ages with the 3 other spirits are also expected for PvEers (but prob not till Chapter Two)... so they are doing what they can for all players. I think once they launch Chapter two, chapter 1 will be near perfect and need little done to it afterward... All new efforts will be directed to the new chapters... Which is expected to expand both PvP and PvE experiences. Cantha is a whole new continent after all, completely separate from Tyria.

No those numbers are clear and precise in demonstrating ''broken shit''. How can you not see something isn't broken ? Zealot's Fire applies the same way to PvP. I think you should stop your carebareism for ANet and realize this game is spiraling downwards.

I repeat, to anyone who wants the build I will give it to you. I want ANet to see huge numbers of people headed to Talus Chute and amassing crazy XP. Let's get rid of grind once and for all

P.S: Please show us numbers on how the game isn't broken and what we're ranting about is indeed properly working. The reason people rant is that intuitevely they feel something is wrong. When you're sick you feel it. You don't have to go to your doctor and tell him ''my white blood cell count is X ppm, and my eardum pressure is Y Pa thus proving signs of an ear infection''. No, you just tell him: I feel like shit and my ears hurt. That's what people do in GW: they come to forums and say ''Hey ANet, get your head out of your ass and listen to us, you're screwing up''. Trust me, I make a living out of numbers but the first thing they teach you in engineering is it's your common sense that will prevail and tell you something is wrong.

faction isnt a quick way to unlock everything it is in some cases years (arena), and is actually ridiculous.

83.4% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

603 hours was posted, and actually a dev James Phinney responded to it.

It was not made up.

Faction is Very quick if guilds play GVG but they Still do not. so I still don't have much pity... the majority of PvPers Still only play for the Hall of Heroes or Areans which is a real shame cause GvG is excellent as well... And has Very good Faction rewards for winning...

And 600 hours sounds a little high to me. seems I saw a fully unlocked build on another forums with an age clock of 300 hours... with a combanation of PvE and PvP / GvG faction unlocks.

If you want to know what the PvP communitys wanted, especially the top guilds, more namely what LotD has been wanting for quite a time now is...

1. Faster Unlocking, so that it doesnt take hundreds of hours of hardcore playing in order to unlock everything.

Other things desired are

1. PvP Content, which has been non-existant.


Theres more, such as stats, etc, but thats the basics.

Good god man, let me explain again (sorry, im usually more tolerant, but this is getting stupid)

They did not run because they were elite, they ran because they needed elites. THEY DO NOT LIKE PVE. That is fundamental. You may enjoy pve, many others do, but there is a large amount of people (myself included) who did not buy this game to pve, but to pvp, under the false impression through misleading advertising that either a) everything will be ready to pvp, and there the challenge will ly, or b) the unlocking process will be short and painless. Neither of these options have come to pass, it takes 300 hours min of pve (best way) to uau, and thats not what they said. This isnt about bitching, whining, or any of those other fob off words, this is about -they said something would happen
-it didnt

Noone cares about the new pve areas. Well, some do, some will enjo. However, this 'expanding' of the pve does not fix the problems of pvp in any way shape or form. Maybe, some miracle cure is also being inserted in the summer update ,but i doubt it.

Ebay aint cheating. Another topic tbh.

Faction rewards, as having been stated many times, was a plaster, not a fix. Ive probably hit 10,000 faction since it started..... thats 10 skill........ out of 450 :S

Im not going to continue, i think you see what i mean. Can we stop repeating ourselves here?

Yikes, did you ever learn even basic debating in a class. First, the burden is on the claimant to prove their case. The defenders of Arena.Net don't actually have to show anything since they are simply tearing down the claimants assertions. Second all your posts are rife with logical fallacies and lack of evidence. Lets see; Ad Homs, Hasty Generalization, Prejudicial Language, Appeal to Popularity. I fear for humanity if you truly make a living in numbers.

ok maybe i am a pvp noob but when you say PvP content, what do you mean? i thought pvp was kill or be killed? what else do you need?

Heh heh... you're so embedded in attack mode that you completely missed the joke.

Time to open the tequila and take of the shoes.

pvp content..... balancing first. you cant have two teams fight fairly in a game like this unless the game is balanced. the mere existence of fotm says this. im not saying 'trends', but stuff like nr is imbalancing.
uau, again, this is balance. if two teams fight, and the counter one side knows it needs but hasnt unlocked it is there, then they loose. Was it 'only player skill', no, they hadnt grinded enough.
thats the main points, but other things gripe on personal levels. Personally, id be happy if they just fixed those two things.

oh, well that makes sense then. thanks!

I've been following this topic since it started, and I think it's gone so far off course that it needs to be closed. Nothing productive is happening here, aside from a few people on both sides who are calmly trying to stay the course. It has degenerated into nothing but flamewars between PvEers and PvPers and accusations against ANet. I really do hope the issues in the game get addressed, but it's not happening here.

yeah I am sorry I cant explain it very good, personally I am not a good writer.

But I do have a lot of love for the game and want it to be good, if for some reason my posts seem stupid blame it only on emotion and high school writing classes

heh Im more a Calc and Physics type person.

Anyway hopefully even if you can't understand you can take a stretch and see there is a problem when all these PVP teams leave

This is where it will start though.

I hope so, I really do. If there is going to be any positive change, the community itself is going to have to be a driving force. And the way to do that is through constructive, positive discussion... not random accusations and flames, which is unfortunately what this thread has become. I for one will be happy to be part of any positive discussion on the state of the game.

I think I'd have a better perspective if I did more PvP stuff... just seems that whenever I find a guild promising active PvP etc.etc. it never really happens. So, I PvE, UW, etc.

a while ago i would say join BE

one week into retail we had two teams in tombs regularly

in fact we had 2 BE teams at the HoH once..

now we are a memory.

Then make a new guild (or rekindle BE). Understand that things are the way they are, expect them to be fixed (if not overnight) and get the ball rolling again.

Might be worth a shot.

Might be more productive.

Might even give me a chance to learn PvP skills.

OK, it's not a perfect system, but why not work within the system until it's fixed. Might as well have some fun in the meantime, no?

OK, so old folks won't come back.

There's new folks out here that never played the game prior to release that like it and manage to have fun. Perhaps it's beneficial not knowing what was or wasn't in Beta, Alpha, etc.

Grab the newbies, start over, and go play!

Remember, when you're dead, playtime's over.