Agree, looking back on my time playing pvp, i now see i had fun in burst when matched with players near my own skill level, but then in comes someone who is absolutely impossible to hit, perfect dodges every time and plenty of CC to kite my entire team for as long as they please. It just takes the fun away and make the game seem broken when one player just clowns an entire team.
@@ItsBoyRed I had a bot user BRAGGING on chat about he would not get banned by the devs, I summited a ticket with screenshots of the chat and reported his 3 acounts multiple times and last time I played he was still around. Also afk... I absolutely HATE afk players in pvp.
Yeah not allowing good players to q so you can have the feeling of playing PvP 😂 nice solution. We're just going to throw our own matches so we can stay in your MMR and continue having matchs. If you do that PvP is definitly dead
yeah especially the matchmaking fix. I'm so done getting fried in 1 second before I can even realise what is what within the macro frenzy of skills that have just been directed at the area I happen to be virtually existing at the time.
I agree with the matchmaking part. The main reason I cannot get into this mode even though I'd really want to, especially because I was a competitive player my whole life in FPS games, is how boring it is to get absolutely destroyed like 80% of the time. There's nothing to "git gud" at, I don't even understand what are they doing to me since death recap is also very lacking. Teammates just walk out solo to die in front of the spawn from a random Willbender or Mesmer and there's just nothing you can do.
From a semi-pro player here, by reading your comment i can already tell your positioning in fights might not be the best. I main necro as to play competitive, and there's this thing called pathing and kiting spots, where enemies cannot port due to pathing, or where you stay above your enemies to reduce line of sight. You can fix this buy watching some guides. I remember Helseth made a guide with a bunch of kiting spots a few years back. Let me ask you: 1. How often do you look at the map to understand the enemies positions before you get "absolutely destroyed"? 2. As for every class has their way to sustain themselves, do you know how to evade damage or mitigate this damage on the classes you play? (necro entering shroud or elementalist going in to mist form for example). 3. Do you play with the expected roles or do you just randomly build and go in? (There are roles in pvp, most people don't even bother learning this but they work like this: sidenoder, roamer, teamfighter, support, please check if your gameplay fits one of these and try to fit them in. If you don't know what they mean and what to do when playing them, then you can watch another guide, I think Mightyteapot had one a few years back explaining each one. 4. Do you watch pro players often and try to match their gameplay? (PvP in gw2 is all about efficency and know how to position yourself on the map accordingly with your team's movement and enemy team's response.) Cheers.
@@luisoliveira4599 If only pvp's problem was just a 'positioning' and 'efficient' skill issue. It isn't. You can say that in the beginning to noobs, but not to people who actually tried. MMR is really the biggest damn problem of the game. Getting proper matched games feels damn good, even if one loses. Getting lopsided to all hell where you barely get any points and kills because the other team is a bunch of platinum+ players just being matched to a gank fest.. is NOT a 'position yourself better' problem. Your comment only makes sense if we didn't have back end issues flushing skilled players into low-skill or newbs just absolutely wrecking them. Despite popular belief it does not force people to 'git gud' when there was no hope to begin with. Follow that up with 5+ losses in a row. Yea.. not much to learn mate. But when its actually even- its amazing. Too bad the systems have just been neglected WAY too long.
@@luisoliveira4599these are all valid but sometimes as a peak 1650 mmr player and a thief main every now and then i get games like these where theres no way i can do my job. were perma outnumbered around the map cuz ppl in the team dgaf.. theres something off with pvp all balancing and shit going on aside imo
Having a strict matchmaking will maybe hurt the players on the high end of the ladder, but it has the potential to even benefit them in the long run : with new and lower elo players not getting absolutely stomped in most matches and actually fight opponents of their skill level, they will actually learn better, and may want to keep playing the game because it's fun for them (well for everyone). So they stick to playing PvP and slowly get better and better up to the point they join the people in diamond. Suddenly, there's not just 20 people in diamond hoping for a match but multiple hundreds and the waiting time is much lower. And players new to PvP get more attracted to it and the population keeps growing. So this is a very good idea, and while the current MM system is often done that way because of a low population, it ultimately slowly shrinks it even more.
Anecdotally, I have no desire to enter PvP because of that. I would rather have a long queue with an equal fight than a short queue where I get utter curb stomped. When there's a Rush week I do them via the Personal Lobby.
I would argue that what the high elo players want more than short queue times is new opponents to fight. If people actually stick with the gamemode because they aren't getting curb stomped, it would really help add players to the ladder and assist in driving wait times down.
@@onicar The issue is that none of these things will actually solve the issue, they'll just provide a placebo in the short run. The fundamental issue lies in the performance aspect of the combat system and I have no idea if the code can survive making the necessary fixes.
-- "Having a strict matchmaking will maybe hurt the players on the high end of the ladder" Even if it does hurt them and doesn't benefit them. So what?? it's a fraction of a procent of a minority. And the am players they push away from the game or/and game mode is alot higher. It's not a sport with a pro side with an audiance and and amature side watching and following and playing them selfs (the pvp player base is fare to low for that to be the case). It would be healthier with a wider amature base playing, then how it is now.
I couldn’t even get to PvP Rank 20 to go into Ranked Matches because most of the time either my allies or my opponents had all the PvP/WvW trinkets lmao. What kind of matchmaking gets the noobs against the very top people who grinded who knows how long to get those items
Another way stun locking might be addressed would be to make stuns (and other totally debilitating effects) on already stunned/debilitated targets not do anything. That's how it worked in GW1, and it make it so correctly chaining stuns/knockdowns was a pretty high skill thing to do, especially across multiple people. If you just dump everything on someone with no coordination you'll be losing almost all your stuns in the process.
Yeah yesterday have a match with a Mesmer, a guardian and a warrior just dumping all Cc at once and it was a nightmare because no matter how much condi cleanse you have, you are dead on the reaction time needed( less than a seconds), was unranked so some new people got the a bad impression on the mode /: and would likely never return
mass stuns in gw2 are not directly worth, if you get stunned by a 3 second cc but 0,5 seconds after it by a 1 second daze, the daze overwrites the stun and you are technicly not locked, every stun gets overwritten.
@@ElVid oh really? I guess we're not as far from my suggestion as i thought. I still think the gw1 way is better though, since cancelling out a new stun is more punishing to the stunner than the new stun overriding the old one.
#4 is, in my mind, the biggest one. I like your solution quite a bit. If the rewards were good enough, players would hop in. But the rewards would have to be on that fine line between good enough to incentivize hopping in, and not quite good enough to make players artifically create that AFK situation.
4:05 - as an addition to issue #4 I find some people will "AFK at the keyboard" example purposefully sit in spawn and keyboard warrior complain about teammates like "I don't play with trash". I have placed these people on my block list and they still show up in my matches non ranked 6-12 months later. Solution: is 2 parts, 1) revamp player reporting more similar to the league of legends reporting format. 2) actually take player reports of match manipulation seriously and take appropriate action. Being bad isn't an issue, refusing to play because you think your team is bad, is a problem
These players are sadly common. They only "win" if they are the first player to kill, first player to cap, and are the highest scoring on the team. If someone gets a kill before them, suddenly the "team" sucks and are going to lose, they then proceed to afk and keyboard spam and whisper enemy team about their teams moves and builds to make them lose. Being able to move them out of the match would make everyone happier and discourage the behaviour.
i'd love to see role queue. because sometimes its either full dps or full support and in lower leagues like gold 2-3 people dont communicate much before match starts. that often leaves team with- u guessed it. 3 core guardians and 2 eles :)
(Warning long post) PvP needs accessibility in learning first! This will make learning the game less painful and make people stay until they get decent at the game which is where the game starts getting really enjoyable, also resulting in healthier matchmaking. Those are MY proposed solutions - INSPECT BUILD! Let people right click and inspect someones build, their runes/sigils/stat and traits as well as weapon and utility skills! The most painful side of PvP is "WTF just happened", "why was I immobilized for 3 years (inspect to see a druid and his immob build)", "why did I die by hitting myself (inspect and see confusion build on memser)", "I got CC for a CENTURY (hammer warrior maybe he only has a single stunbreak)" etc. This will make death timers filled with learning what the enemy does. Not by going to the wiki, not by having to play other builds but by checking in match what others can do. This is also the best way to memorize things. If you are going to inspect a warrior 20 times in a span of a week you will eventually remember what things do! - Better death recap! Recap right now is bad. It needs to show the skill tooltips like logs do. They need to have a dedicated tab for CC skills!!! They need to show what skill did all that condi damage. They need to hide damage calculated when on downstate as it misleads the readings of the death recap (I think this is how it works, might be wrong) . Even veterans often get confused on what killed them at times. -DUELS! Duels are a fun way to dip your toes into PvP even at level 5! It doesn't have to be balanced in PvE but having someone to test skills while leveling helps you understand your class and other classes. Duels in the open world might also be really fun to observe! Let peepos press their buttons at each other in an accessable (not guilds, not wvw, not pvp lobby) environment. Condi cleanse and stun breaks, condi corruption, even how torment and confusion works. Waiting for a world boss to appear? Have fun in a duel.
The open world fights would be amazingly fun. Maybe arenas in certain maps can be free for all arenas like in the pvp lobby. People can come and watch. Heck, make it a carnival game where you can spend a map currency to drop stuff in some arenas like boosters, food, traps, mobs to make it more like a smash game. I think they already even have the programming for most that. 👍
Yea accessibility is super important and GW2 just does not have it at all. Match replays would be another big addition - this is not an deathmatch fps, you need to sometimes look at more things to figure out why did you die.
Apparently (from like the single picture teaser) that they put out -- Their stated goal with the new PvP game mode' is to be something that feeds in to' conquest. Altho for the life of me, I can't figure out what this would look like while being both effective and still being fun for Vets as well. Accessibility & incentives are a huge part of why people play anything at all tho. 😄 Let's hope ANet can pull off a miracle.
@@Tevesh42 Replays or watching an AT with delay or after the match end was one of my initial requests but its very hard to make. In comparison something like the inspect build ALREADY EXIST! Its in the game, you just can't inspect other players unless they share the build themselves.
What's wrong with pvp? 1. Matchmaking (only really affects ranked): Low pop games with duo queueing and profession matching is a recipe for disaster. You can't really fix the low pop issue, but you can remove duo queueing and remove the game's attempt to match professions. 2. Gameplay: We have disproportionate power creep out the ass (e.g., ranger mace/mace, warrior spear, etc.), and it only gets worse each new expansion. This results in the very bursty, one-shotting gameplay we see. It also results in immortality of some sidenode builds (e.g., spb) or absurd mobility (e.g., deadeye). Power needs to be reigned in across the board. A good start would be eliminating superspeed (or making swiftness stack similarly to might), add diminishing returns to hard and soft CC, reducing boon application uptime and healing of non-support builds (tone down the base healing and compensate with more healing power and concentration scaling; you could even add a concentration/healing power/toughness or vitality amulet for more support-oriented gearing), and cutting back the amount of gap closers and teleports.
It may seem crazy.. but by god you could be right. The weapons haven't been touched in years and are probably the most 'balanced' after all the fiddly power creep with the land ones.
I played pvp in WoW for 12 years. Won't touch pvp in GW2. I've seen people play and not only is the skill ceiling absurdly high because you have to know all the classes, abilities, builds, attributes, equipment, counter-plays, maps, and animations, but just the minimum amount of skill and knowledge required to not get obliterated instantly is also very high. If there was a way to play with other noobs and never see a skilled player until I had a grasp of everything, I would jump into pvp in a heartbeat. But I have no interest in getting killed so fast so often that I never have time to learn.
You really dont need to know all that to be decently good though. Maybe a few of the heavily telegraphed bursts or cc skills you want to dodge but you pick that up pretty quickly.
Especially with how similar most abilities look. The GW2 VFX team really never learned visual recognition and silhouette importance in ability design. It's not uncommon for 20+ skills to have the same animation across different classes...
There used to be a way; it was the Hot-Join servers. You can hop in and out on a whim and swap teams, look at people's builds, and chat. Rewards weren't that great so you didn't feel like you needed to WIN. Then anet killed them because we aren't allowed to be chill in PvP. We have to be there to compete.
My biggest problem with PvP in GW2 is that i cant learn anything. Learning is imperative to being able to improve and deal with situations, and when 90% of those end up either giving no information to work off of or giving information that goes directly against what I've learned previously, I'm worse off than i started. This vicious cycle has entirely put me off PvP as a whole in this game, and the only reason i do WvW is because it's the only way to make legendaries (for some reason, why do we need Gift of Battle for 90% of legendaries?). I WANT to learn, I WANT to improve, but PvP in this game is just too mechanically toxic to be able to do so.
Personally I hate PVP and only played it before "just for participation" because it was the faster way to get some items needed for leggies or some skins. The change they did that I really appreciate is that you can chose your daily/weekly to be exclusively Open World now. I'm just hoping they make the gift of battle available outside of WvW at this point...
I have near 9k matchs played(7k as ranger lets go!) and tbh the matchmaking is the mostly thing that makes me annoyed(in special if i trying a class i not much used to it), some times I get people that are from leaderboard and some times I get people who literally just start, this make me feel awful in both ways! That is the only thing that stop me to play pvp daily, if this was fixed totally I would 100% play pvp non-stop. All the points you bring up are totally valid and i agree with them in special for the PvP scene grow up, this changes would help a lot! Thanks for the video Muk!
Having separeted MMR for each proffesion is not solution. On begining of your video you mentioned you would rather wait hours to be faced againts some skilled players. But knowledge of the game itself and how to move on the map is also something what you have to learn, and you would have big advantage on your new proffesion just because your MMR would be low there. As you mentioned, there is lot of things behinde the development and what they have to take into concideration and its not easy. But thank you for brining this topic into video!
I do agree with most of those, however i do think the main problem for me is that not every class is equal, and what is a PvP balancing if not to provide ability for every class to be playable in PvP. Anoter thing that would really help is a death recap of like what abilities did what kind of damage, so you could treat it as a feedback for yourself, but also would help devs with some of the balancing parts of the game. Condition based builds are really annoying to fight against, as often they live you with no feedback of what hit you, they build up fast, and most of the time they require you to bring a lot of condi clense, leaving you with almost no utility for yourself. Knowing how much damage was dealt to me from what source could really help in improving for some of the players.
You do have damage recap after you are killed. There is small icon i - from center look to lower right. Though it cant be clicked/accessed after respawn.
While it is true that we do have one as PetrSzturc said, it is extremely poor. For example if you had a dot ticking on you while you were in down state, the entire death recap will just show dot ticks and not what bursted you down in the first place.
Very regular PvPer here, and all the issues you highlighted are spot on. I of course dont agree fully with every solution you offer, but you nailed some of the biggest issues. PvP is in dire need of help if it ever wants to be a healthy game mode again, and I am not sure Anet cares much about that. It feels like the MEH, is okay with them and as you said its a shame, the combat mechanics for pvp in GW2 are pretty awesome and a blast to play in together, just a few tweaks need to happen and I think the mode would hold a medium playerbase, enough to function anyway. The BIGGEST issues with MMing is not enough people fr. MMing works decently when PvP rush is happening for example because the population swells for a brief period. The PvP community is TINY. I look forward to meeting you on the battlefield one day sir. o7
I've recently decided to try pvp, played enough to unlock ranked, played ranked and got placed in gold I was certain I would drop that rank and it doesnt really matter to me, I just wanted the rewards and some fun stuff to do day to day, then in several matches I got stunned used my cc break... got stunned again... got feared.. knocked back... knocked down... stunned... basically spent a good 10 long seconds without being able to play, then I remembered why I dont play pvp in mmorpgs
In other words you saying the pvp is very broken in this game which is quite true :D :) I do love casual pvp in games thou but starting to think should skip pvp in guild wars 2 when its hard to enjoy with so many problems, cant play what I like, or well I play what I like but cant perform at all close to the level of certain classes, many blocks, immunes, cc spamming, insane damage, insane heals, super bad matchmaking and so on goes the list...
I haven't seen that much toxicity in pvp compared to popular games of that genre, but making "play nice" a factor in getting your rank up would still be appreciated
From what I understand, the matchmaking tries to pair two teams of similar profession makeup against each other, the two of the same class thing is often abused by people duo queuing to try to get an opponent team that has a bad team composition like 2 daredevils and then swap to fix their own team comp. But aside from that, matchmaking based on professions isn't very smart because a profession can be pretty much any role, so it's a dice roll if you're getting a good team comp no matter what. Maybe they should have user assigned roles for stuff like "DPS, Support, Duelist, and Roamer" or something like that. It could get abused, yeah, but it's probably better than the current nearly complete randomness.
You can't force people into having a bad comp, so that's not the way people abuse that factor of queueing. At this point, 2 daredevils isn't even bad for a ranked comp. Top players use the two of the same class specifically to make sure a certain player gets put on the other team. This is usually because they believe that player will intentionally or unintentionally grief them if they get put on the same team.
I think the one that I agree the most is the low priority one. I've been playing a lot of PvP in the past 2 months, and I'm also a Dota 2 player, so I can tell from experience that REAL consquences and a reporting system that actually works goes ways to improve a game. Dota got a lot better in the last year after they started really focusing on the "conduct" points, also the "like/dislike" system, where you can rate if you liked playing with a particular player or not, so the matchmaking will try to make you avoid the disliked player in your team. Right now GW2 feels like you can afk, verbal abuse or whatever without any consequences. This feels bad when it happens and you just know nothing will happen to the culprit.
As someone who hates pvp and only did it for guild missions/ astral rewards before I realized you could change it, I would've GREATLY appreciated a low stakes game mode more in line with being able to farm like in pve.
I broke my mouse cause of stuns in PVP during Rush Week. I was on Necro first then switch to firebrand cause it was ridiculous. I was stunned and downed almost instantly out of a fresh Stand Your Ground 30 secs into the match by a spell breaker / Druid duo. I haven’t been in PvP since.
Good video Muk! More discussion around PvP is always welcome! 😄 Imo. the other Meta-Issues are 1) That you can still dupe with another player up to plat 2, instead of always or not at all, 3) That half the maps are good vs half the others have secondary objectives that literally do nothing. Meaningful comeback mechanics go a long way towards the "fun/rubber band-ability of games. And 3) that when you kill and opponent it *rallies your entire team* instead of the 1 person that it does in WvW. It basically makes whoever wins the first fight dominate the entire rest of the match practically. I have no earthly clue why this is, instead of the 1 person it is in WvW. | And yes MMR is 100% fake. I agree with a lot of this tho. Let's get that discussion rolling!! 😁⚔️😁
New player, started to play not too long ago. Struggling a lot with that facing plat players against me in gold 2, who basically destroy me and my experience with their insane 10 y.o skill. Another thing is one-shot builds that kill isntantly and spellbreakers, I basically lose all motivation to play a match against spellbreaker. SP are so tanky, durable, kicking damage with new spear skill that it is impossible to fight against them, they feel like raid boss. Also want to mention condi reapers, after 1k games there are 90% of games when there are a these guys in enemy team, it is so boring to fight same enemy over and over again.
I used to play Champions Online which has a separate Knock and CC resist system. Every time you are hit by either you get a stack that gives you a percentage resistance. These stacks up to three times to give you full resistance for several seconds and they all fall off. For this game it could be CC duration reduction so you are still effected, but it can end up turning CC spam into interruptions so there is quick response capability.
If there were a better system to purge AFK players and offer players in queue a chance to fill that spot, that would probably be a good boon to matchmaking. As someone who cares more about playing games than winning games, I am hesitant to further restrict matchmaking based on ranks, but if it were just your rank and one above or below rather than solely your rank, that would probably be fine. This would mean if you are Silver and get matched with someone in Bronze, then the game couldn't match anyone in Gold into that game while Silver and got matched with someone in Gold then no one in Bronze could be matched to that game. Maybe there could also be an opt-in option for "ignore my rank, give me stronger opponents" or such but that would only work for matching up, not down (e.g. a plat couldn't opt-in to match with bronze, it would need to be bronze players opting in to match with plat). Also, can we please not have the queue popup prevent from clicking anything below it? This isn't the case for the WvW queue, but with the PvP queue it will stop you from clicking any menu previous open (e.g. invy, bank) or your skills (can still use keybinds), which is rather annoying, especially when you ready up and then another player takes like a full minute leaving you just stuck with a non-responsive game.
I think that we need a hybrid for issue three. Where raising your mmr on one class slightly raises the others. Because game knowledge is a big part of pvp and you do carry that over with you.
I thought these would be some cursed "fixes" but they are indeed pretty good For the stun break part, I remember in Aion we had a buff every time we used our only stun break, that buff prevented anyone to CC us again for like 15 seconds, obviously there was some other skills to counter that, like sleep (similar to CC but if someone, even the air touches you, you wake up and are able to fight again)
The handful of times i tried PvP i quit almost immediately because i felt like i had no chance of winning whatsoever. It was incredibly frustrating and its not like i could have jumped into ranked for a potentially better experience at my skill level, since that is locked until you reach a certain level iirc.
Sadly they need to do like Crystaline Conflict on FF14. The game became to complex and the breadth of class and weapon combinations is too much to balance and to be approachable by new players. Burden of knowledge is almost as High as the original GW1 where new players can't ever learn to fight because there's just too many factors that they can't even recognize, let alone learn in a fight. FF14 basically created a new game mode where the classes are 'PVP' versions of the class with simplified kits where the game focus on the action and strategy while keeping the classes recognizable. That way you can do whatever you want with PVE skills and PVP becomes a separate experience alltogether
Anyone who cares about rank in a competitive game will choose waiting for long amounts of time to face a proper opponent of their skill, that's literally the point. If you want low waiting times go play unranked...
>>>Anyone who cares about rank in a competitive game As well as anyone who cares about anything but dailies/weeklies. There's no fun in winning 500:20, there's no fun in losing 20:500. Anyone who cares about anything except rewards will obviously choose longer queues - unless they haven't played the game yet to experience such a match.
I got one shot today 3 times in a row (Conquest) and one was when I walked out of spawn point. Not sure if I should continue to play this game. Hell, I dont want to play it, but I spent a lot of money on it, so... It just sucks.
Everybody expects to get dunked on in PvP at first, that’s been a tale as old as Quake 1 or Team Fortress. The difference was that you could leave the server with the high skill players and find newer players to learn against instead. That's traditionally been the way folks have broken into online PvP, even going back to the beginning days of Half-life 1 DM or Counterstrike in its infancy. To be fair, there might have been a few highly skilled players trolling or smurfing on a newbie server, but there were usually ways to avoid them, or not 1v1 them directly (if you're brand new). But in this case, that isn't an option. You’re thrown in directly with the wolves, literally the top players, who know how to stunlock somebody 14 times in a row. Unlike the old days, there aren't 10 other public servers we can join instead. Gotta fix the Matchmaking issue before anything else, and probably triple/quadruple the rewards to incentivize new folks to play.
I quit GW2 pvp when I kept running into people who would 1v3 me and my teammates. they were I guess invuln or somehow took 0 damage or healed it, idk, and just avoided all damage and just killed us like we were naked. I don't even know how to begin to understand what happened and I'm not going to get a degree in GW2 wiki to try to figure it out. Just waiting for GW3 at this point.
I'd say issue # 7 is by design. If I remember well, they did say they wanted bunker builds out of the game mode in the patch notes they removed those statistics.
thanks for the video muk, love that pvp care i think an extremely important necessity for people getting encouraged to play pvp would be a more detailed information panel for the matches, even if it only is displayed after the match ended. 1.- show the build of each match participant (ally and enemy) including selected skills, all items from pvp equipment and the specializations 2.-show a more detailed description of after game stats amount of damage per type, amount of self healing/barrier and ally healing/barrier, boons uptime, personal points gained by kills, objectives and passive, etc 3.-maybe have a tab explaining each pvp map and their objectives could help new pvp players adapt easier to the mechanics of the game mode, instead of going oonga boonga 2 weeks till they get whisper messages of threats 4.-i would love but understand it is a tall hurdle for a replay system that would let you save matches but man would that help a whole ton
I tried PvP during the rush event and I met a lot of nice people and had some fun (I mean it too, didn't have any toxicity), but I still prefer how diverse, freeform and drop-in-drop-out WvW is.
I play pvp regularly and actually faced the problem that during the event I was against new ppl who are not used to gamemode. I felt horrible, like matches would end with 500 - 0. I got to platinum in three days from gold 1 but then after event have finished lost it all and in gold1-2 again
All these changes sound great, especially the matchmaking one. I think that's the biggest blunder when it comes to PvP. Because, like you said, a first timer going in and getting obliterated by top tier players is disheartening at best.
I like the stun suggestion, even for PVE like facing Umbriel. Getting hit by an immobilize, stunbreaking or escaping it, then getting hit by another because an axe is moving, then getting hit because another axe moved, etc. Having it where endless CC use makes it less effective for short term is a cool thing.
As another long-time pvper with 10k games and current top 15 on NA, first I want to say thanks for the video. While I disagree with a lot of your opinions, I appreciate anyone who puts effort into understanding pvp, and what might make it better. At the end of the day, we all love the game, and want to see it do as well as possible. WARNING - LOTS OF TEXT AHEAD I have a few thoughts on your main points. Sorry to anyone scrolling to "show less" XD 1. *Matchmaking is poor* - I really don't want to see 10+ minute queues, but like you suggest, the matchmaker is too quick to make poor quality matches. I have largely stopped playing ranked outside of primetime anyway, because even in low plat 1, you can get put into super lopsided games that are very punishing (as bad as +3 for a win, -18 for a loss). 2. *MMR feels like it never decays* - If you take a break, their primary solution is to temporarily increase your rating volatility - allowing you to more quickly be assessed and placed at an appropriate MMR. This seems reasonable to me, considering there are a lot of players that come back and instantly play at a very high level. 3. *MMR is account bound* - In unranked, it isn't. Unranked uses at least partially profession-based MMR. Considering that's where you should be learning a new class, I think the system is appropriate. A lot of issues would crop up if you tried to apply this to ranked. 3.5 *Lock people to their class* - Please no. A big issue with this is that comp building in pvp is incredibly complicated and constantly changing. There's no automated system that would work well enough in creating appropriate comps. Allowing swaps gives players the agency to do something reasonable, or even do something a little silly if they want to. Unconventional comps work all the time, and can be very fun. Swapping also allows people to queue while doing something on another character. The 2 per class rule is there mainly for lower mmrs, where people are unlikely to swap, and a primitive system can do some good. Limiting class stacking is good for optics in low mmr if nothing else. 4. *People who afk from the start* - First, I want to mention that games end pretty quickly, and you don't lose rating if someone on your team DCd for long enough. This feels like it works well enough at my mmr, but I've heard that in lower mmr, full afks are more common. Your "drop in" idea is interesting, but sounds difficult and complicated to make work. Your remake idea is decent with a small caveat. If a really good or really bad player needs to be replaced, the matchmaker would likely have issues finding another. Rather than just replacing a player, the matchmaker should be allowed to fully rebalance the teams according to who is available. Low priority queue for deserters is also a decent idea. 5. *Add another tier below unranked for guild missions* If Anet were to create a whole new tier, how do you expect it would get enough players queuing? Our matchmaker is already squeezed to try and put together balanced matches across ranked and unranked, so I can't imagine what it would be like splitting the playerbase even further. I'm also skeptical that this tier would be relevantly different from custom matches. 6. *Stun Lock* - Nerfing stun durations and cooldowns is reasonable. Diminishing returns is not the answer. Chilled to the bone with savagery sigil is just silly, along with many other skills. However, DR would be a confusing, un-intuitive mechanic that disrupts the timing and consistency of combat, and for that reason, I absolutely hate it. GW2 has always had more fluid, beautiful combat, and I don't want to see it become more like wow. 7. *One shots* - This is a difficult one. In the higher tiers, even despite the high damage, builds like bunker warrior are always waiting to take advantage of a slower meta and turn pvp into a snoozefest. To reduce damage or bring back celestial, you would also have to reduce invulnerabilities and sustain. So why haven't they done so? The answer is that players love power creep and hate nerfs. No matter what, even if you nerf everyone's numbers, people get upset. To overcome this, I think what could be done is simply adding raw health to every class in pvp. Health is the parameter that always falls behind in power creep, so rather than nerfing everything else in the game, it's probably easier and less unpopular to increase health pools, directly reducing the strength of one-shots.
On point 7 I don't agree that buffing hp across the board is the answer. A moba called SMITE tried that in it's season 9 patch and was very controversial, and after a couple of seasons of trying to make it work they eventually undid the hp changes of that patch and went back. Power creep is always creeping and so giving into it via more max hp is only a temporary solution. You can kick the can down the road but you're going to have to clean up the problem properly eventually.
@@zephyruspring They've held off on increasing max hp for 12 years. I'm not that familiar with smite, but it looks like rather than an across the board buff, it specifically buffed level 1 health by 40% which is pretty massive. I imagine it drastically shifted the gameplay of early levels.
Issues 6 and 7 have been around for too many years. I'm an on and off PvP player who really only plays GW2 for the PvP and the burst meta has ruined PvP at multiple points. There's no counterplay to getting bursted or stunlocked, other than stunbreaks and blocking which some professions/elite specs don't have easy access to. On my Virtuoso all of my utility skills are stunbreaks and they are nessary if you want to be viable. It really halts all build potential unless you want to take a stunbreak out.
My fix for pvp is to try and treat it like Smash Brothers. you are there for fun and to mess around, not necessarily to win. I think regular updates to "Default/Suggested" builds would help a lot with that along with maybe a short description of what you are supposed to do with it kinda like the Profession and Trait descriptions. (Yes I'm aware that players do not read.)
I do really hope that the matchmaking is added, I still continue to think that pvp in this game has the potential to be much much bigger than it is! The automated tournaments give actual rewards unlike things like events in league of legends that still give dog water benefits for the cost or attempt(Yayyyy a skin shard and that's it, how cool) and the skill expression in a game like guild wars leads to mastery expression of a profession going way above what some think is possible. I'd personally love to see something like a dedicated balance team fine tuning things in pvp specifically more often than pve gets since in pvp, sometimes how much fun you're having is directly proportional to how oppressive power creep has become. Though the matchmaking fixes would be a great step in the right direction in regards to tackling the same issue since lower skilled players are less likely to perfectly execute the one shot capability.
I cannot agree with your fix to Issue #3. Tying MMR to specific profession instead of the account would allow high ranked players to abuse matchmaking even more. What do I mean by even more? It already happens. Players queue as Thieves to force a Thief on the enemy team and then reroll. Because Thief is very hard to play and master in PvP they effectively end up with an advantage.
thank you mukluk, you are someone that has representation in the gw2 community and that has visibility. I wish, i pray and i hope that the changes you proposed get implemented, by the love of this game, dev please listen and improve the game, you are killing the gamemode, and you have the best combat system in the absolute mmo scene.
I'm suprised that you called out 1-2 sec time to kill, and yet not mention that four classes have oneshot combo (sometimes several), that can be cast out of stealth, with no way to see it coming, with only counterplay being literal cheats. That's #1 issue in my opinion.
This is more of a "game mode" video than a "balance/systems" video imo. | If we want to talk about ^ we should start with Downstairs, predominantly Ranger. There's no earthly reason why any class should be balanced' / still be hilariously stronger than all others in downstate in 2024
@@crashthenoise8445 the "kill combo's with no counterplay exist" it the same vein of complaint as "TTK is too fast". Except you can justyfy short TTK. You can't justify sub-2sec kill combo starting with a hard stun, coming out of nowhere, with no tell or warning to the person being attacked.
I am mainly an open-world player, I did some PVP and got to Wolf Rank mainly I was doing PVP back in 2015, and now when after many years tired of PVP, boy... The AFK is really egregious espiecally now that people want that JW armor sets, I don't really care whether I win or not, but I hate leeching. I can't stand that people who don't even want to practice in mode get the same amount of progress in tracks as me.
celestial in pvp its the worst idea i've ever heard would have the same effect as in wvw but worse, numbers on pvp are "usually" smaller than on wvw, and the only amulets with healing power are 4 stat ones, with healing as minor stat and supports are still real, adding cele would only end up in 2 results: stacking cele builds, or 4 cele builds and a support, ending in everyone with a bunker build. the only solution to have cele on pvp would be really low stats, and then it doesn't work anymore, its not a stat bloat, and its not useful anymore and gets replaced by the already existing condi/power/support amulets that already exists on their respective roles, and by then why even add cele. thing that i forgot to mention and edited: if you want to survive high damage, getting a bunker build its not a solution, or a band aid, its an amputation, just reduce the damage from their end, there are 3 amulets, with 1200 condi damage on it, lower it to 1000 and add 200 of something else, the same way valk + zerk trinkets work in pve, the only 1200 power amulets its berzerks and valks, valks has no precition, lower power to 1000, add 200 somewhere else, berzerker, same thing. that or leaving only the 4 stat ones (it would need some new ones to take some of the spots left by the 3 stat ones) or just lower the general stats of all trinkets, or the simple way of doing it: big pvp balance patch with coefficient nerfs all around, its still work, but it requires less reworking of systems.
You make good points. I think adding a pvp trinket or a new slotted item that allows to break stuns or be invulnerable to them for a second would be a game changer. Biggest problem for me is lack of game modes and maps. They have so many great PVP modes throughout history of video games and all we got is domination. Wouldn't hurt to have king of the hill maybe Team deathmatch payload or Capture the flag. Wouldn't also hurt to have a WVW Map that is smaller maybe 30v30 or 15 v 15.
I am an game developer and I really like your suggestions. One addition, show the good players when the waitingtime is low, so they can finde good spotts for playing.
Honestly impressed about the matchmaking points you presented like the sub in system, I like that a lot! I think the balance ones specifically with cc aren’t the best though. There are some builds that have/had too much cc for sure, but overall I don’t think we need to add some kind of defiance system. PvP at its core is very well designed with its maps and ability to use positioning, most people who die to chain cc or get 100-0d in two seconds were out of position and didn’t have the cooldowns to justify their risky placement. And I don’t really have a problem with builds being able to 100-0 you quickly if they have one burst combo to do it. Most things in the game have enough defensive to survive one burst, but some things like willbender or soulbeast can burst you, force your cooldowns, then continue to burst you. I think things like the eod release power untamed, or chronomancer are perfect. They both did too much damage, and justified damage nerfs, but both of them had counterplay to avoid the bursts and if they missed they were out of position and could be easily killed (with the exception of continuum split). Mirage being able to split surge spam, deadeye spamming rifle, willbender ect are the real issues with the balance design. Back to the stunbreaks for a second, resources should be impactful. If you are expected a situation you might be chain cc’d, hold your stunbreak until you have the other resources (mobility/evades) to get out of that situation. Again some builds are problematic in terms of cc, but they should be targeted. I don’t think people should be rewarded for mindlessly using a resource in a pvp game mode, such as mindlessly pressing stunbreak upon first being cc’d and then being immune to follow up pressure. Edit: I thought a little bit more about how to articulate my thoughts on dps in spvp, all the high damage builds at the moment are really difficult to kill. Willbender has insane damage with stab/resistance/3 stunbreaks/aeigis/healing from attacks and willbender flames/decent cleanse/it’s healing skill heals for 8k and cleanses. It’s just packed, same with spear spellbreaker. If the dps builds were more like chronomancer and had actual risks and flaws/difficult to play, it would be mostly out of lower ratings where people are still learning to deal with them and would be much more fun to play against. I do agree that there is such a thing as too much damage, but I think the bigger issue right now is how risk free the damage is.
What keeps me away from PvP is the changes to the skills compared to the PvE environment. The same skills now behave completely different: this one was an ammo skill, this one isn't, etc. I fully understand why it is that way, absolutely. But that doesn't make it easier. As someone who plays multiple characters and classes, having to not confuse the same skills, with the same name, and then change how to use what when is just too much to ask. I would try it: maybe it's not as bad as I think, but in a "baby" mode for people completely unfamiliar with PvP. The current issues that you mention with the match maker really do no push me to even try that.
I'll never forget getting 3 games in a row where a team mate was AFK from start twice in a row, then next game we lost the first fight and another teammate gave up... This is the *ONLY* competitive game that I played in the last 20 years where this happens almost every single damn match... In Overwatch 2 if a teammate is AFK or dcs the first few minutes it ends the match and gives everyone priority queue times
Problem: A ton of players don't want to play PvP/WvW but are forced to because of the reward track system, some of which don't even have other sources. (GoBs anyone?) Solution: Add a reward track system for PvE (eg, trade 50 exp bar per track instead of gaining spirit shards). So people who go into PvP/WvW modes, are those who actually want to be there.
Problem: A ton of WvW players don't want do play PvE but are forced to because legendary weapons and trinkets are PvE only! What's your solution for that? ;)
Counter-argument: this way PvP would lose many less skilled players since the main reason why they play PvP at all is the reward track, similarly to WvW - most of the people that play this snoozefest do it for the reward track. I know your solution sounds great but you have to realize that this mostly affects the lower brackets, where skill is already all over the place. I don't think these brackets need less players in matchmaking pool just to have bit more balanced matches on average.
@@mechanicalhorserider2512 I mean they already try to with the reward tracks letting you complete parts of visions and aurora but never let you fully finish them in PvP and WvW. Also you can buy the statues needed for Gen 3s but it still requires you to farm out map completions and favors for the blessings of the jade empress some reason. So they already have had that idea partially implemented but abandoned it midway through for some reason...Multiple times.
Two more suggestions: 1. rank does not matter unless you are in top 1% - give more rank rewards at the end of the season, maybe even a reward when you first reach a certain tier and then another reward at the end for your final rank 2. group size is locked way too low (2 in 5-man mode, for example) - let us q with as many people as we want in the party, and then match us up against similar sized teams
nah 5 man party for ranked and the game is dead. Top players just go ranked with perfect comp and you wont win a single match anymore. Ranked just gets a longer MAT where still always same players will be on the top
@@bijuu2853 If you are doing full five man teams against full five man teams, you will get a LOT more serious pvp players. The biggest issue with the current matchmaker is that no one queues for it, and that is largely because you have to q solo or duo and deal with a majority of random people on your team, no matter how serious you are.
@@bijuu2853 Once every few hours, if you have a full hour+ to bother with waiting 50%+ of that time for your next match... and that gets even worse if you stomp your opponent (or vice versa) and the other matches are long close ones... yeah, super fun times there...
Another way to fix these massive glass cannon nukes is to reduce and rework a lot of the invuln and block mechanics. Most the classes you see that can run pure damage and survive (Mesmer for example), also have long duration invulnerability through things like distortion, or a guardian/ will ended with aegis, or a warrior with whatever perma block shit they have. A potential rework could be to allow movement control effects to still take place (like you can be immune to damage but I can still immobilize, cripple and chill you) or make it so condis can still be applied but they don’t effect you until your invulnerability wears off. That at least gives counter play to the mechanic as opposed to what it is now, which is “I’m invulnerable now, nothing you can do except wait while I run away”
On issue #7. A big problem with going from 100 to 0 is the fact that so many classes/specs have access to instant teleports. There is not a competitive game out there that allows long range instant teleports (on low CDs) to your opponent, in addition to being able to just smash your buttons at the same time before an opponent can react. You can look at Cat Woman and MMH in Injustice 1 to see just how broken it is in a fighting game. Also being to teleport without los through walls just adds to how effective it is. I've been playing PvP since release and anytime I've said this (in-game) I always get hate because the reality is this one thing carries a lot players. It pretty much makes positioning trivial, outside of necro. At minimum teleports should require you to have los of target and be in range. Being able to chain multiple teleports to close the gap is also a issue. Unfortunately, it's so ingrained into the game now I doubt it will ever change.
Idea for matchmaking: As the scope expands, have them get a greater and greater debuff of stats or something, but boost the reward. So if they accept to play against "new" players, they'd be crippled(which should stop them dominating) and allow new players to learn. If the veteran player still wins, they'd get rewarded extra for accepting the penalty. Would keep match making times down, but hopefully reduce the new player obliteration experience.
PvP is my fav game mode in this game but I think that is dead and won't change. The next PvP game mode will either became more successful than Conquest and will delete it or will be less popular and entirely fade as Stroghold. but there's nothing ANet can do now to fix the game mode: is like trying first aids in a war zone to a decapitated corpse. And by the way, I think that the changes in WvW (alliances replacing older servers) is having the same effect.
My main issue with PVP is the attached reward systems. And honestly I do not have ideas on how to fix that. Let me explain. There are three PVP modes. Unranked, ranked, tournaments. Tournaments are kind of a thing in themselves, so lets discuss ranked and unranked. In theory unranked is the mode you are supposed to use to learn new classes and experiment. But since it has no PVP season rewards very few people actually play it. On the other hand, in ranked you have PVP season rewards with PIPs that are granted both for winning and loosing. Yes, you get more for winning, but an afk farmer who gets 3 pips per match where he did nothing is getting a better deal that his teammates who try to fight for 15 minutes to get the same 3 pips. I think that PIP system has to be reworked to allow more incentive in unranked and to reward active participation in the match so that people who do fight get more than those who are just there for the ride.
I do agree with matchmaking/MMR, its silly how many times i got matched in silver with top 10 player... we got absolutely destroyed by just this one person.
Hot take: get rid of unranked. There are probably a lot of people trying PvP but scared to participate in ranked, because it has this implied skill floor imposed by requiring players be PvP level 20. Removing that barrier would consolidate the PvP community and prevent the well from drying up when players are queueing. There will always be a problem at the top, because by definition PvP rankings create a pyramid that results in high ranking players struggling to find adequate competition. But the solution to that should never be to engage them with the bottom players, who as you've said, will respond by quitting.
I don't have much pvp experience in gw2, but I have played a lot of smite. In that game, there are many ways to negate cc effects, but the potency of them became such an issue where they did add diminishing returns to cc, and it worked out great. So I think what you say about gw2 cc having DR is a sound arguement.
I would love a practice pvp matchmaking lobby. Unranked is like rolling dice, and Ranked is like being hit by a truck. I need a better starting point, so keeping a practice mode available to people below a certain MMR feels like the best solution to that gripe. Just place minimal rewards in it to keep away those dastardly smurfs
Another issue with PvP is how top heavy the rewards are: Most of the game modes rewards are for winning with you getting at times less then half the rewards if you lose a match(such as in ranked). This is without the worst offender: tournaments. Which rewards wise are more or less a complete waste of time unless you consistently top 3 them. Meaning most players have no reason to partake in tournaments at all. This all adds to making trying to learn pvp worse as you more or less get nothing from losing while you learn it, which further pushes players away from PvP.
I racked up thousands of hours years ago when dueling servers were still a thing in PvP. Coming back now, the power creep and matchmaking has been terrible. It's so easy to 100-0 someone before most players can even react. I feel bad for new, frustrated players in my matches when half the lobby is filled with gold-plat players. I want the PvP community to grow but the learning curve and system in place are really ruining it. Definitely not new player friendly.
All of your observations are pretty spot on, but I think your suggested fixes address the symptoms, rather than the cause. The matchmaking issues you mention are caused by a very low PVP population, and all of them would likely be improved by having more players of various skill levels play the game mode. Arenanet should increase the visibility of the game mode, increase the rewards for ranked and automated tournaments, and improve their handling of player reports, including letting people know that their reports caused something to happen (no details, but enough to let players feel that bad eggs are being dealt with). Have a window in game with suggested builds for newer players, with a bit of a guide for how to use it. Have the winners of each AT show up in global chat and let it have some effect on the world (like winning teams in Heroes Ascent in GW1 affecting access to the Underworld and Fissure of Woe). Make PVP more visible, accessible, and interesting for more players. The gameplay issues are much harder to deal with, and I really don't like the suggestion of increasing survivability with stats, as I feel it would have rippling impacts on the pace of play, favoring slower, beefier builds and supports. At its core, Guild Wars 2 is not a PVP game, and what we have is a very good attempt at making PVE characters fighting each other feel meaningful. I believe the team has done a good job with a difficult task, but put simply, they have a lot fewer knobs and dials to turn and adjust to make it a good experience than they could have had otherwise. Elements of the core game that need to be preserved to make it feel like you're still playing Guild Wars 2 are messing with the play experience of PVP. As an example, I agree that stuns can feel bad, especially when stacked, but without them, super mobile characters would be nearly unkillable - If they had more control, this level of mobility may not have made it into the game, which would lessen the need for stuns. I don't have good solutions here, and I don't think any amount of tweaks can achieve perfect balance, but I would worry a lot about what the game mode would feel like if everyone was harder to kill and stuns didn't work as well. If they can get the mode to a point where it is fun for the majority, even if not for all, then I'd call it a success.
Issues I noticed and that weren't mentioned in the video: 1. There are people who enter ranked just for the chest rewards and they openly say they don't care about rank or winning. I honestly think it's a good Idea to have some rewards accessible only to players playing ranked, but seems like something should be done about it (for example add these rewards to unranked, but make getting them slower or something). 2. Balancing issue. I don't understand how they can just release spear into the game, making Spellbreaker and Willbender who were already strong and present in EVERY game just straight up overpowered and then leave it like this for weeks making pvp less and less enjoyable with every day. This can be fixed in many ways, for example: don't allow new content in ranked pvp immediately on release; more frequent balacing patches and these could just be better, sometimes I don't understand their choices or they do dumb things like nerfing FA Weaver cuz FA Cata was too broken (just nerf cata traits and not things that are shared with Weaver); someone mentioned it in a similar video, but HOTFIXES, if something is utterly broken, just disable it until the next balancing patch. 3. The maps can be extremely confusing for new players, especially the ones with secondary objectives, so there should just be some kind of guide to each of them. Also, even tho I like the secondary objective mechanic, it's dumb how u must do it on some maps and can completely ignore it on others. Anet could make the ignored ones more valuable or impactful. 4. They improved the rewards for ranked and that's awesome (I've been sleeping on mountains of karma thanks to that), but I feel like it could still be a bit better at least or it could count towards some other objectives. Like, idk, getting some infusions or something. 5. Something should be done about the ability to change your class in the lobby. On one hand I don't like that it's possible, hovewer, the way pvp is designed I'd be losing way more games (whether I'm currently in gold or plat) because I just got matched with 3 roamers and 2 supports against sb, chrono support, reaper, willbender and idk, virtuoso. I won many games just by switching from teamfighting spec to a sidenoder or the other way round which, obviously, spared me some frustration, but just shows that the mode doesn't function properly.
*Excellent* suggestions on CC. There are few things that undercut the entertainment of PvP than repeated CC spam. These suggestions could be applied to WvW as well. ANet has done such good job creating solid PvP gameplay in many ways, it is baffling why they think being being constantly stun-locked and unable to move/act somehow makes things more entertaining for players. Limiting CC as suggested would be a big step toward making PvP/WvW more interesting for new players.
Increase the time to kill. Making big cooldowns and other specific abilities more impactful on when they should be used instead of spamming all your cooldowns instantly for a 'max power' boost right off the rip then playing whack-a-mole whenever another cooldown is up.
What's scared me the most about pvp is that I feel like I can't quickly look at someone and know what they can do. I've played a lot of other pvp games like dota and LoL. You can very easily at a glance identify the enemy hero and know what abilities they have. In GW2 you have no idea what abilities, traits, or gear they're using. I'd also like for there to be standard outfits for each profession so you can identify what they are as quickly and easily as possible.
@@isardprat7900 That's awesome, I'm glad that option is there. It's still intimidating to not know what skills, traits, and gear they're running. In shooters the gear loadouts don't change that dramatically and in mobas the game is slow paced enough that you have the time to see what items they're building, but it's a little unnerving in this situation.
I have more experience with wvw than pvp but I 100% agree that CC needs to have some kind of limits in those game modes. There needs to be a cap or a diminishing returns system or whatever, cause sometimes you are just there being obliterated and unable to do anything.
I don't play pvp and I don't think you're proposed changes would change that, but I think they sound great and kinda necessary. I especially like the idea of a practice tier. That might, perhaps, get me to at least dip my toes into pvp when I need it for participation and stuff.
One of my main gripes, as some1 who already plays despite the mentioned flaws, is the utterly useless death recap. Make it so the skills that are shown are given extra info if you cursor over them. Even just saying if they were a projectile, AoE or whatever else. Instead it is ah yes I took 5k damage from "Aura Slicer". What is Aura slicer? Don't know, here have the icon of that skill. Oh and also you died to Burning stacks. How did you get them? Don't know! Useless.
An experienced, engaged customer has more to offer a product than a producer that thinks they cannot benefit from customer feedback 👍 I think your points were solid. In terms of comparison, WoW PvP is far superior in its management on both sides than GW2. I've tried both and the difference is blatant. It's hard to get feedback and change from ANET or Blizzard in modern times, so as much as I wish these changes would be added to increase the flow of PvPers and encourage PvErs to get involved, I don't see ANET lowering themselves from their pedestal to go "You know what, you're right. Our system is flawed and we'll change that." Heck, it only took pointing out a lack of music on one of the maps before the guy overseeing it got sacked (if I'm remembering your story correctly, Muk) 😂
Already love your video when first thing you mention is the matchmaking that is very sad in this game... I love pvp but I play it for fun casually without to much stress required but I often end in one sided matches either on my side or other side, just that makes the pvp matches quite boring... also the spam of ccing is sick in a negative way in this game... no diminish returns or anything in this game... then some insane damage in some builds...but you spoke well all those points so I got nothing to add but just agree :) but in this game its hard to play a class you love cuz it might be bad in pvp, its sad how you do so well with some builds and others dont do well there... I for example cant play what I would love since everyone can counter those easy from what I seen of months of pvp... so I usually play condition berserk since its a lot easier to put pressure or so, and dont go tell me to go play spellbreaker I dont like the style much :)
don't know about the last one, but the others are the same solutions I would propose myself: the only logical solutions to improve the game mode. The "pull player from queue to fill in" thing is perfect even if you want to deny people the possibility to switch alts, by replacing them the moment they switch to login screen, and, IMO, it's the thing with higher priority to be implemented on this list
I came back to GW2 after an 8 year break and decided to try PVP for the first time. It's an extremely unapproachable game mode for new players, and that's unfortunate because the combat is supremely engaging. An issue you didn't mention that I think is worth discussion is unranked vs ranked. As a new player, you are forced to play unranked for about 60 matches (it took me 56 to get to rank 20), just so that you can start playing ranked and theoretically face players your skill level. The problem is that most unranked matches appear to have no MMR logic at all and are dominated by very skilled players. I was routinely being put in games either with or against high level players. So I either got deleted or I watched as the enemy got deleted. In neither case were my contributions important to the outcome of these games. I "won" exactly 50% of my games (28 out of 56) but I would guess that less than 10% of the matches I played, my being there had any influence on the outcome at all. I ran around doing my best, but I'm pretty sure I would have still won close to 28 games if I had just sat at the spawn area in those games. The biggest problem is trying to learn how to play against people so far above your skill level in a game with such a large skill ceiling. What do you take away from a 100-0 deletion in 3 seconds? I should have pressed what buttons exactly? I have no idea and I have no real way to figure it out other than watching videos online and trying to theorize what I am supposed to be doing differently. I'm not currently playing this game mode at all as I have found wvw scratches the pvp itch and is a lot less frustrating (outside high level roamers randomly deleting you when not with a tag - thankfully this is not a normal occurrence in my experience).
Being able to replay matches and see what those other players did to you would drastically improve learning curve for newbies. I wonder why gw2 still does not have those.
as mid level pvp player (49% win rate, usually stays in high gold) who spent years and finally grinded out every pvp legendaries, it's a game mode that i would never go back, here are some of my thoughts reflecting back on my experience. 1. high ranked player unable to find games if block them from joining low level player matches, an issue why is how MMR is counted, it does not take into account of number of matches played, an example I can see right now on ranked there are 3 players currently tied on 1665 MMR, one of them have almost the total number of matches played of the other 2 players combined. So unless ranking also take into account of number of matches played, it's gonna be difficult get higher ranked players to play more. I feel the ranking system needs to be a point system that takes both into account both, while MMR is for matchmaking only. 2. I remember once I took a break for a week, the system keeps a track of your MMR, decay is simply an add-on number that subtracts from your real MMR, only if you lose or accumulated enough wins the real MMR gets updated, so I see no real issue here. 3. In regards to class based MMR, I remember I heard from one of Teapot's stream that Anet does track class based MMR, but chose not to use it. 4. AFK players, there are multiple reason, there are the deliberate offenders to throw the game, and there are cases where the players just gave up because of the huge mismatch of team skills. Obviously you want to punish those are deliberately throwing, unfortunately everyone knows that the reporting system does jack. 5. Guild Missions, I have only seen them in unranked, so I don't see any issues with it. 6. Stun locks, power creep, etc. the great reset that happened 3 years ago (?) that brought big nerfs across the board was good, that was the only period I actually enjoyed PvP slightly; just like raiding, a big discrepancy of player skills could be attribute to understanding the boons, if Anet bring a sledge hammer to nerf the boons, say 90% I can see significant reduction of single combo kills. Say if boons can only attribute to extra 10% increase in power, I think it will simplify the game mode a lot for new players. If you look at why League of Legend is so popular, because it's easy to pickup for new players, everyone can press skills, but to excel to become a great player you need to be able to maneuver better.
I have 1800+ hours on GW2 and most of it was ranked PVP. I stopped playing because of power creep years ago, after the 2nd expansion came out PVP became so hectic and the time to kill became so fast it wasn't fun anymore. I miss when the game was simpler and a little less quick.
One of the biggest issues I have is that I can't right-click a player and request a duel. In other games that is how my brother and I would learn characters before going into mm. But my BIGGEST complaint is that some builds make absolutely zero sense. I don't mind getting one shoted, absolutely clapped in a duel, steam rolled in a team fight, or even butt blasted outside of spawn. What is an issue, is that a build can not only 100-0 you, but also tank 3 people, cap the point, and do my taxes all at the same time. It seems like every new update or patch there is something that's a farming unkillable death bot that makes it know you'll lose the game before the 12min mark. Some of the builds are just straight up out of control. For a DPS class it should take 5 buttons to down an afk player. And if there is any class that should be able to one shot someone it should be one with insane difficulty, not sword-warhorn soul beast from 1200 range.
As someone who HATES pvp, I would try the mode if those solutions were implemented!!
Agree, looking back on my time playing pvp, i now see i had fun in burst when matched with players near my own skill level, but then in comes someone who is absolutely impossible to hit, perfect dodges every time and plenty of CC to kite my entire team for as long as they please.
It just takes the fun away and make the game seem broken when one player just clowns an entire team.
@@ItsBoyRed I had a bot user BRAGGING on chat about he would not get banned by the devs, I summited a ticket with screenshots of the chat and reported his 3 acounts multiple times and last time I played he was still around. Also afk... I absolutely HATE afk players in pvp.
Yeah not allowing good players to q so you can have the feeling of playing PvP 😂 nice solution. We're just going to throw our own matches so we can stay in your MMR and continue having matchs.
If you do that PvP is definitly dead
@@YounesTraining "so you can have the feeling of playing PvP"
What does this even mean, is it not pvp then or what?
yeah especially the matchmaking fix. I'm so done getting fried in 1 second before I can even realise what is what within the macro frenzy of skills that have just been directed at the area I happen to be virtually existing at the time.
I agree with the matchmaking part. The main reason I cannot get into this mode even though I'd really want to, especially because I was a competitive player my whole life in FPS games, is how boring it is to get absolutely destroyed like 80% of the time. There's nothing to "git gud" at, I don't even understand what are they doing to me since death recap is also very lacking.
Teammates just walk out solo to die in front of the spawn from a random Willbender or Mesmer and there's just nothing you can do.
From a semi-pro player here, by reading your comment i can already tell your positioning in fights might not be the best. I main necro as to play competitive, and there's this thing called pathing and kiting spots, where enemies cannot port due to pathing, or where you stay above your enemies to reduce line of sight. You can fix this buy watching some guides. I remember Helseth made a guide with a bunch of kiting spots a few years back.
Let me ask you:
1. How often do you look at the map to understand the enemies positions before you get "absolutely destroyed"?
2. As for every class has their way to sustain themselves, do you know how to evade damage or mitigate this damage on the classes you play? (necro entering shroud or elementalist going in to mist form for example).
3. Do you play with the expected roles or do you just randomly build and go in? (There are roles in pvp, most people don't even bother learning this but they work like this: sidenoder, roamer, teamfighter, support, please check if your gameplay fits one of these and try to fit them in. If you don't know what they mean and what to do when playing them, then you can watch another guide, I think Mightyteapot had one a few years back explaining each one.
4. Do you watch pro players often and try to match their gameplay? (PvP in gw2 is all about efficency and know how to position yourself on the map accordingly with your team's movement and enemy team's response.)
Cheers.
@@luisoliveira4599 If only pvp's problem was just a 'positioning' and 'efficient' skill issue. It isn't. You can say that in the beginning to noobs, but not to people who actually tried. MMR is really the biggest damn problem of the game. Getting proper matched games feels damn good, even if one loses. Getting lopsided to all hell where you barely get any points and kills because the other team is a bunch of platinum+ players just being matched to a gank fest.. is NOT a 'position yourself better' problem. Your comment only makes sense if we didn't have back end issues flushing skilled players into low-skill or newbs just absolutely wrecking them. Despite popular belief it does not force people to 'git gud' when there was no hope to begin with. Follow that up with 5+ losses in a row. Yea.. not much to learn mate.
But when its actually even- its amazing. Too bad the systems have just been neglected WAY too long.
@@luisoliveira4599these are all valid but sometimes as a peak 1650 mmr player and a thief main every now and then i get games like these where theres no way i can do my job. were perma outnumbered around the map cuz ppl in the team dgaf.. theres something off with pvp all balancing and shit going on aside imo
Having a strict matchmaking will maybe hurt the players on the high end of the ladder, but it has the potential to even benefit them in the long run : with new and lower elo players not getting absolutely stomped in most matches and actually fight opponents of their skill level, they will actually learn better, and may want to keep playing the game because it's fun for them (well for everyone). So they stick to playing PvP and slowly get better and better up to the point they join the people in diamond. Suddenly, there's not just 20 people in diamond hoping for a match but multiple hundreds and the waiting time is much lower. And players new to PvP get more attracted to it and the population keeps growing. So this is a very good idea, and while the current MM system is often done that way because of a low population, it ultimately slowly shrinks it even more.
Anecdotally, I have no desire to enter PvP because of that. I would rather have a long queue with an equal fight than a short queue where I get utter curb stomped. When there's a Rush week I do them via the Personal Lobby.
I would argue that what the high elo players want more than short queue times is new opponents to fight. If people actually stick with the gamemode because they aren't getting curb stomped, it would really help add players to the ladder and assist in driving wait times down.
@@onicar The issue is that none of these things will actually solve the issue, they'll just provide a placebo in the short run.
The fundamental issue lies in the performance aspect of the combat system and I have no idea if the code can survive making the necessary fixes.
-- "Having a strict matchmaking will maybe hurt the players on the high end of the ladder"
Even if it does hurt them and doesn't benefit them. So what?? it's a fraction of a procent of a minority. And the am players they push away from the game or/and game mode is alot higher. It's not a sport with a pro side with an audiance and and amature side watching and following and playing them selfs (the pvp player base is fare to low for that to be the case).
It would be healthier with a wider amature base playing, then how it is now.
I couldn’t even get to PvP Rank 20 to go into Ranked Matches because most of the time either my allies or my opponents had all the PvP/WvW trinkets lmao.
What kind of matchmaking gets the noobs against the very top people who grinded who knows how long to get those items
Another way stun locking might be addressed would be to make stuns (and other totally debilitating effects) on already stunned/debilitated targets not do anything. That's how it worked in GW1, and it make it so correctly chaining stuns/knockdowns was a pretty high skill thing to do, especially across multiple people. If you just dump everything on someone with no coordination you'll be losing almost all your stuns in the process.
Yeah yesterday have a match with a Mesmer, a guardian and a warrior just dumping all Cc at once and it was a nightmare because no matter how much condi cleanse you have, you are dead on the reaction time needed( less than a seconds), was unranked so some new people got the a bad impression on the mode /: and would likely never return
mass stuns in gw2 are not directly worth, if you get stunned by a 3 second cc but 0,5 seconds after it by a 1 second daze, the daze overwrites the stun and you are technicly not locked, every stun gets overwritten.
@@ElVid oh really? I guess we're not as far from my suggestion as i thought. I still think the gw1 way is better though, since cancelling out a new stun is more punishing to the stunner than the new stun overriding the old one.
@@paradachshund for me gw2 pvp is far superior to gw1, most stuff you can avoid with a dodge role and movement, gw1 feels way to static
@@ElVid I'm specifically talking how stun and CC chaining work in gw1, not anything else about it.
#4 is, in my mind, the biggest one. I like your solution quite a bit. If the rewards were good enough, players would hop in. But the rewards would have to be on that fine line between good enough to incentivize hopping in, and not quite good enough to make players artifically create that AFK situation.
4:05 - as an addition to issue #4 I find some people will "AFK at the keyboard" example purposefully sit in spawn and keyboard warrior complain about teammates like "I don't play with trash". I have placed these people on my block list and they still show up in my matches non ranked 6-12 months later.
Solution: is 2 parts, 1) revamp player reporting more similar to the league of legends reporting format. 2) actually take player reports of match manipulation seriously and take appropriate action. Being bad isn't an issue, refusing to play because you think your team is bad, is a problem
These players are sadly common. They only "win" if they are the first player to kill, first player to cap, and are the highest scoring on the team. If someone gets a kill before them, suddenly the "team" sucks and are going to lose, they then proceed to afk and keyboard spam and whisper enemy team about their teams moves and builds to make them lose. Being able to move them out of the match would make everyone happier and discourage the behaviour.
i'd love to see role queue. because sometimes its either full dps or full support and in lower leagues like gold 2-3 people dont communicate much before match starts. that often leaves team with- u guessed it. 3 core guardians and 2 eles :)
(Warning long post) PvP needs accessibility in learning first! This will make learning the game less painful and make people stay until they get decent at the game which is where the game starts getting really enjoyable, also resulting in healthier matchmaking. Those are MY proposed solutions
- INSPECT BUILD! Let people right click and inspect someones build, their runes/sigils/stat and traits as well as weapon and utility skills! The most painful side of PvP is "WTF just happened", "why was I immobilized for 3 years (inspect to see a druid and his immob build)", "why did I die by hitting myself (inspect and see confusion build on memser)", "I got CC for a CENTURY (hammer warrior maybe he only has a single stunbreak)" etc. This will make death timers filled with learning what the enemy does. Not by going to the wiki, not by having to play other builds but by checking in match what others can do. This is also the best way to memorize things. If you are going to inspect a warrior 20 times in a span of a week you will eventually remember what things do!
- Better death recap! Recap right now is bad. It needs to show the skill tooltips like logs do. They need to have a dedicated tab for CC skills!!! They need to show what skill did all that condi damage. They need to hide damage calculated when on downstate as it misleads the readings of the death recap (I think this is how it works, might be wrong) . Even veterans often get confused on what killed them at times.
-DUELS! Duels are a fun way to dip your toes into PvP even at level 5! It doesn't have to be balanced in PvE but having someone to test skills while leveling helps you understand your class and other classes. Duels in the open world might also be really fun to observe! Let peepos press their buttons at each other in an accessable (not guilds, not wvw, not pvp lobby) environment. Condi cleanse and stun breaks, condi corruption, even how torment and confusion works. Waiting for a world boss to appear? Have fun in a duel.
The open world fights would be amazingly fun. Maybe arenas in certain maps can be free for all arenas like in the pvp lobby. People can come and watch. Heck, make it a carnival game where you can spend a map currency to drop stuff in some arenas like boosters, food, traps, mobs to make it more like a smash game. I think they already even have the programming for most that. 👍
Yea accessibility is super important and GW2 just does not have it at all. Match replays would be another big addition - this is not an deathmatch fps, you need to sometimes look at more things to figure out why did you die.
Apparently (from like the single picture teaser) that they put out -- Their stated goal with the new PvP game mode' is to be something that feeds in to' conquest. Altho for the life of me, I can't figure out what this would look like while being both effective and still being fun for Vets as well. Accessibility & incentives are a huge part of why people play anything at all tho. 😄 Let's hope ANet can pull off a miracle.
@@Tevesh42 Replays or watching an AT with delay or after the match end was one of my initial requests but its very hard to make. In comparison something like the inspect build ALREADY EXIST! Its in the game, you just can't inspect other players unless they share the build themselves.
Agreed
What's wrong with pvp?
1. Matchmaking (only really affects ranked): Low pop games with duo queueing and profession matching is a recipe for disaster. You can't really fix the low pop issue, but you can remove duo queueing and remove the game's attempt to match professions.
2. Gameplay: We have disproportionate power creep out the ass (e.g., ranger mace/mace, warrior spear, etc.), and it only gets worse each new expansion. This results in the very bursty, one-shotting gameplay we see. It also results in immortality of some sidenode builds (e.g., spb) or absurd mobility (e.g., deadeye). Power needs to be reigned in across the board. A good start would be eliminating superspeed (or making swiftness stack similarly to might), add diminishing returns to hard and soft CC, reducing boon application uptime and healing of non-support builds (tone down the base healing and compensate with more healing power and concentration scaling; you could even add a concentration/healing power/toughness or vitality amulet for more support-oriented gearing), and cutting back the amount of gap closers and teleports.
Clearly the one major solution to fix most problems is to bring back underwater PvP.
Funny, I hadn't played pvp since launch and I coulda sworn I fought someone underwater once! Good to know I'm not losing it
It may seem crazy.. but by god you could be right. The weapons haven't been touched in years and are probably the most 'balanced' after all the fiddly power creep with the land ones.
I played pvp in WoW for 12 years. Won't touch pvp in GW2. I've seen people play and not only is the skill ceiling absurdly high because you have to know all the classes, abilities, builds, attributes, equipment, counter-plays, maps, and animations, but just the minimum amount of skill and knowledge required to not get obliterated instantly is also very high.
If there was a way to play with other noobs and never see a skilled player until I had a grasp of everything, I would jump into pvp in a heartbeat. But I have no interest in getting killed so fast so often that I never have time to learn.
You really dont need to know all that to be decently good though.
Maybe a few of the heavily telegraphed bursts or cc skills you want to dodge but you pick that up pretty quickly.
Especially with how similar most abilities look. The GW2 VFX team really never learned visual recognition and silhouette importance in ability design. It's not uncommon for 20+ skills to have the same animation across different classes...
There used to be a way; it was the Hot-Join servers. You can hop in and out on a whim and swap teams, look at people's builds, and chat. Rewards weren't that great so you didn't feel like you needed to WIN. Then anet killed them because we aren't allowed to be chill in PvP. We have to be there to compete.
Great suggestions! Constructive criticism is so important! I really want to dive back into GW2.
My biggest problem with PvP in GW2 is that i cant learn anything. Learning is imperative to being able to improve and deal with situations, and when 90% of those end up either giving no information to work off of or giving information that goes directly against what I've learned previously, I'm worse off than i started. This vicious cycle has entirely put me off PvP as a whole in this game, and the only reason i do WvW is because it's the only way to make legendaries (for some reason, why do we need Gift of Battle for 90% of legendaries?). I WANT to learn, I WANT to improve, but PvP in this game is just too mechanically toxic to be able to do so.
Personally I hate PVP and only played it before "just for participation" because it was the faster way to get some items needed for leggies or some skins.
The change they did that I really appreciate is that you can chose your daily/weekly to be exclusively Open World now.
I'm just hoping they make the gift of battle available outside of WvW at this point...
I have near 9k matchs played(7k as ranger lets go!) and tbh the matchmaking is the mostly thing that makes me annoyed(in special if i trying a class i not much used to it), some times I get people that are from leaderboard and some times I get people who literally just start, this make me feel awful in both ways! That is the only thing that stop me to play pvp daily, if this was fixed totally I would 100% play pvp non-stop. All the points you bring up are totally valid and i agree with them in special for the PvP scene grow up, this changes would help a lot! Thanks for the video Muk!
Having separeted MMR for each proffesion is not solution. On begining of your video you mentioned you would rather wait hours to be faced againts some skilled players. But knowledge of the game itself and how to move on the map is also something what you have to learn, and you would have big advantage on your new proffesion just because your MMR would be low there.
As you mentioned, there is lot of things behinde the development and what they have to take into concideration and its not easy. But thank you for brining this topic into video!
I do agree with most of those, however i do think the main problem for me is that not every class is equal, and what is a PvP balancing if not to provide ability for every class to be playable in PvP.
Anoter thing that would really help is a death recap of like what abilities did what kind of damage, so you could treat it as a feedback for yourself, but also would help devs with some of the balancing parts of the game. Condition based builds are really annoying to fight against, as often they live you with no feedback of what hit you, they build up fast, and most of the time they require you to bring a lot of condi clense, leaving you with almost no utility for yourself. Knowing how much damage was dealt to me from what source could really help in improving for some of the players.
You do have damage recap after you are killed. There is small icon i - from center look to lower right. Though it cant be clicked/accessed after respawn.
While it is true that we do have one as PetrSzturc said, it is extremely poor. For example if you had a dot ticking on you while you were in down state, the entire death recap will just show dot ticks and not what bursted you down in the first place.
i played mainly pvp. never do raids and rarely fractals, wvw only for the gift. it s so hard to stay motivated right now. u realy hit the nail there.
Very regular PvPer here, and all the issues you highlighted are spot on. I of course dont agree fully with every solution you offer, but you nailed some of the biggest issues. PvP is in dire need of help if it ever wants to be a healthy game mode again, and I am not sure Anet cares much about that. It feels like the MEH, is okay with them and as you said its a shame, the combat mechanics for pvp in GW2 are pretty awesome and a blast to play in together, just a few tweaks need to happen and I think the mode would hold a medium playerbase, enough to function anyway.
The BIGGEST issues with MMing is not enough people fr. MMing works decently when PvP rush is happening for example because the population swells for a brief period. The PvP community is TINY.
I look forward to meeting you on the battlefield one day sir. o7
I've recently decided to try pvp, played enough to unlock ranked, played ranked and got placed in gold I was certain I would drop that rank and it doesnt really matter to me, I just wanted the rewards and some fun stuff to do day to day, then in several matches I got stunned used my cc break... got stunned again... got feared.. knocked back... knocked down... stunned... basically spent a good 10 long seconds without being able to play, then I remembered why I dont play pvp in mmorpgs
In other words you saying the pvp is very broken in this game which is quite true :D :) I do love casual pvp in games thou but starting to think should skip pvp in guild wars 2 when its hard to enjoy with so many problems, cant play what I like, or well I play what I like but cant perform at all close to the level of certain classes, many blocks, immunes, cc spamming, insane damage, insane heals, super bad matchmaking and so on goes the list...
I haven't seen that much toxicity in pvp compared to popular games of that genre, but making "play nice" a factor in getting your rank up would still be appreciated
From what I understand, the matchmaking tries to pair two teams of similar profession makeup against each other, the two of the same class thing is often abused by people duo queuing to try to get an opponent team that has a bad team composition like 2 daredevils and then swap to fix their own team comp.
But aside from that, matchmaking based on professions isn't very smart because a profession can be pretty much any role, so it's a dice roll if you're getting a good team comp no matter what. Maybe they should have user assigned roles for stuff like "DPS, Support, Duelist, and Roamer" or something like that. It could get abused, yeah, but it's probably better than the current nearly complete randomness.
You can't force people into having a bad comp, so that's not the way people abuse that factor of queueing. At this point, 2 daredevils isn't even bad for a ranked comp. Top players use the two of the same class specifically to make sure a certain player gets put on the other team. This is usually because they believe that player will intentionally or unintentionally grief them if they get put on the same team.
I think the one that I agree the most is the low priority one.
I've been playing a lot of PvP in the past 2 months, and I'm also a Dota 2 player, so I can tell from experience that REAL consquences and a reporting system that actually works goes ways to improve a game. Dota got a lot better in the last year after they started really focusing on the "conduct" points, also the "like/dislike" system, where you can rate if you liked playing with a particular player or not, so the matchmaking will try to make you avoid the disliked player in your team.
Right now GW2 feels like you can afk, verbal abuse or whatever without any consequences. This feels bad when it happens and you just know nothing will happen to the culprit.
As someone who hates pvp and only did it for guild missions/ astral rewards before I realized you could change it, I would've GREATLY appreciated a low stakes game mode more in line with being able to farm like in pve.
I broke my mouse cause of stuns in PVP during Rush Week. I was on Necro first then switch to firebrand cause it was ridiculous. I was stunned and downed almost instantly out of a fresh Stand Your Ground 30 secs into the match by a spell breaker / Druid duo. I haven’t been in PvP since.
Good video Muk! More discussion around PvP is always welcome! 😄
Imo. the other Meta-Issues are 1) That you can still dupe with another player up to plat 2, instead of always or not at all, 3) That half the maps are good vs half the others have secondary objectives that literally do nothing. Meaningful comeback mechanics go a long way towards the "fun/rubber band-ability of games. And 3) that when you kill and opponent it *rallies your entire team* instead of the 1 person that it does in WvW. It basically makes whoever wins the first fight dominate the entire rest of the match practically. I have no earthly clue why this is, instead of the 1 person it is in WvW. | And yes MMR is 100% fake. I agree with a lot of this tho. Let's get that discussion rolling!! 😁⚔️😁
Players going afk in matches are a serious issue
Game should stop the winner win and the loser don’t lose . But their should br more conditions
New player, started to play not too long ago. Struggling a lot with that facing plat players against me in gold 2, who basically destroy me and my experience with their insane 10 y.o skill. Another thing is one-shot builds that kill isntantly and spellbreakers, I basically lose all motivation to play a match against spellbreaker. SP are so tanky, durable, kicking damage with new spear skill that it is impossible to fight against them, they feel like raid boss. Also want to mention condi reapers, after 1k games there are 90% of games when there are a these guys in enemy team, it is so boring to fight same enemy over and over again.
I used to play Champions Online which has a separate Knock and CC resist system. Every time you are hit by either you get a stack that gives you a percentage resistance. These stacks up to three times to give you full resistance for several seconds and they all fall off. For this game it could be CC duration reduction so you are still effected, but it can end up turning CC spam into interruptions so there is quick response capability.
If there were a better system to purge AFK players and offer players in queue a chance to fill that spot, that would probably be a good boon to matchmaking. As someone who cares more about playing games than winning games, I am hesitant to further restrict matchmaking based on ranks, but if it were just your rank and one above or below rather than solely your rank, that would probably be fine. This would mean if you are Silver and get matched with someone in Bronze, then the game couldn't match anyone in Gold into that game while Silver and got matched with someone in Gold then no one in Bronze could be matched to that game. Maybe there could also be an opt-in option for "ignore my rank, give me stronger opponents" or such but that would only work for matching up, not down (e.g. a plat couldn't opt-in to match with bronze, it would need to be bronze players opting in to match with plat).
Also, can we please not have the queue popup prevent from clicking anything below it? This isn't the case for the WvW queue, but with the PvP queue it will stop you from clicking any menu previous open (e.g. invy, bank) or your skills (can still use keybinds), which is rather annoying, especially when you ready up and then another player takes like a full minute leaving you just stuck with a non-responsive game.
I think that we need a hybrid for issue three. Where raising your mmr on one class slightly raises the others. Because game knowledge is a big part of pvp and you do carry that over with you.
I thought these would be some cursed "fixes" but they are indeed pretty good
For the stun break part, I remember in Aion we had a buff every time we used our only stun break, that buff prevented anyone to CC us again for like 15 seconds, obviously there was some other skills to counter that, like sleep (similar to CC but if someone, even the air touches you, you wake up and are able to fight again)
Completely agree, great video. Community maps with the new "instance editor" from homesteads might be worth taking a look at too.
The handful of times i tried PvP i quit almost immediately because i felt like i had no chance of winning whatsoever. It was incredibly frustrating and its not like i could have jumped into ranked for a potentially better experience at my skill level, since that is locked until you reach a certain level iirc.
Sadly they need to do like Crystaline Conflict on FF14. The game became to complex and the breadth of class and weapon combinations is too much to balance and to be approachable by new players. Burden of knowledge is almost as High as the original GW1 where new players can't ever learn to fight because there's just too many factors that they can't even recognize, let alone learn in a fight.
FF14 basically created a new game mode where the classes are 'PVP' versions of the class with simplified kits where the game focus on the action and strategy while keeping the classes recognizable. That way you can do whatever you want with PVE skills and PVP becomes a separate experience alltogether
Anyone who cares about rank in a competitive game will choose waiting for long amounts of time to face a proper opponent of their skill, that's literally the point. If you want low waiting times go play unranked...
>>>Anyone who cares about rank in a competitive game
As well as anyone who cares about anything but dailies/weeklies. There's no fun in winning 500:20, there's no fun in losing 20:500. Anyone who cares about anything except rewards will obviously choose longer queues - unless they haven't played the game yet to experience such a match.
I keep trying to get into PvP, but the issues listed here make me quit pretty quickly. The listes solutions sound good from a player perspective.
I got one shot today 3 times in a row (Conquest) and one was when I walked out of spawn point.
Not sure if I should continue to play this game. Hell, I dont want to play it, but I spent a lot of money on it, so...
It just sucks.
Everybody expects to get dunked on in PvP at first, that’s been a tale as old as Quake 1 or Team Fortress. The difference was that you could leave the server with the high skill players and find newer players to learn against instead. That's traditionally been the way folks have broken into online PvP, even going back to the beginning days of Half-life 1 DM or Counterstrike in its infancy. To be fair, there might have been a few highly skilled players trolling or smurfing on a newbie server, but there were usually ways to avoid them, or not 1v1 them directly (if you're brand new). But in this case, that isn't an option. You’re thrown in directly with the wolves, literally the top players, who know how to stunlock somebody 14 times in a row. Unlike the old days, there aren't 10 other public servers we can join instead. Gotta fix the Matchmaking issue before anything else, and probably triple/quadruple the rewards to incentivize new folks to play.
Thank you for making this video, fellow human. I, too, like Gen 3 bacon.
I quit GW2 pvp when I kept running into people who would 1v3 me and my teammates. they were I guess invuln or somehow took 0 damage or healed it, idk, and just avoided all damage and just killed us like we were naked. I don't even know how to begin to understand what happened and I'm not going to get a degree in GW2 wiki to try to figure it out. Just waiting for GW3 at this point.
I'd say issue # 7 is by design. If I remember well, they did say they wanted bunker builds out of the game mode in the patch notes they removed those statistics.
thanks for the video muk, love that pvp care
i think an extremely important necessity for people getting encouraged to play pvp would be a more detailed information panel for the matches, even if it only is displayed after the match ended.
1.- show the build of each match participant (ally and enemy)
including selected skills, all items from pvp equipment and the specializations
2.-show a more detailed description of after game stats
amount of damage per type, amount of self healing/barrier and ally healing/barrier, boons uptime, personal points gained by kills, objectives and passive, etc
3.-maybe have a tab explaining each pvp map and their objectives could help new pvp players adapt easier to the mechanics of the game mode, instead of going oonga boonga 2 weeks till they get whisper messages of threats
4.-i would love but understand it is a tall hurdle for a replay system that would let you save matches but man would that help a whole ton
I tried PvP during the rush event, and it was the worst experience ive had in GW2.
I tried it again during tje pvp rush event, and it was the only time I didn't have the worst time
I tried PvP during the rush event and I met a lot of nice people and had some fun (I mean it too, didn't have any toxicity), but I still prefer how diverse, freeform and drop-in-drop-out WvW is.
I play pvp regularly and actually faced the problem that during the event I was against new ppl who are not used to gamemode. I felt horrible, like matches would end with 500 - 0. I got to platinum in three days from gold 1 but then after event have finished lost it all and in gold1-2 again
All these changes sound great, especially the matchmaking one. I think that's the biggest blunder when it comes to PvP. Because, like you said, a first timer going in and getting obliterated by top tier players is disheartening at best.
I like the stun suggestion, even for PVE like facing Umbriel. Getting hit by an immobilize, stunbreaking or escaping it, then getting hit by another because an axe is moving, then getting hit because another axe moved, etc.
Having it where endless CC use makes it less effective for short term is a cool thing.
i used to play a bit with core guardian just farting boons and not dying every 5 seconds, now even that gets bursted lol
As another long-time pvper with 10k games and current top 15 on NA, first I want to say thanks for the video. While I disagree with a lot of your opinions, I appreciate anyone who puts effort into understanding pvp, and what might make it better. At the end of the day, we all love the game, and want to see it do as well as possible.
WARNING - LOTS OF TEXT AHEAD
I have a few thoughts on your main points. Sorry to anyone scrolling to "show less" XD
1. *Matchmaking is poor* - I really don't want to see 10+ minute queues, but like you suggest, the matchmaker is too quick to make poor quality matches. I have largely stopped playing ranked outside of primetime anyway, because even in low plat 1, you can get put into super lopsided games that are very punishing (as bad as +3 for a win, -18 for a loss).
2. *MMR feels like it never decays* - If you take a break, their primary solution is to temporarily increase your rating volatility - allowing you to more quickly be assessed and placed at an appropriate MMR. This seems reasonable to me, considering there are a lot of players that come back and instantly play at a very high level.
3. *MMR is account bound* - In unranked, it isn't. Unranked uses at least partially profession-based MMR. Considering that's where you should be learning a new class, I think the system is appropriate. A lot of issues would crop up if you tried to apply this to ranked.
3.5 *Lock people to their class* - Please no. A big issue with this is that comp building in pvp is incredibly complicated and constantly changing. There's no automated system that would work well enough in creating appropriate comps. Allowing swaps gives players the agency to do something reasonable, or even do something a little silly if they want to. Unconventional comps work all the time, and can be very fun. Swapping also allows people to queue while doing something on another character. The 2 per class rule is there mainly for lower mmrs, where people are unlikely to swap, and a primitive system can do some good. Limiting class stacking is good for optics in low mmr if nothing else.
4. *People who afk from the start* - First, I want to mention that games end pretty quickly, and you don't lose rating if someone on your team DCd for long enough. This feels like it works well enough at my mmr, but I've heard that in lower mmr, full afks are more common. Your "drop in" idea is interesting, but sounds difficult and complicated to make work. Your remake idea is decent with a small caveat. If a really good or really bad player needs to be replaced, the matchmaker would likely have issues finding another. Rather than just replacing a player, the matchmaker should be allowed to fully rebalance the teams according to who is available. Low priority queue for deserters is also a decent idea.
5. *Add another tier below unranked for guild missions* If Anet were to create a whole new tier, how do you expect it would get enough players queuing? Our matchmaker is already squeezed to try and put together balanced matches across ranked and unranked, so I can't imagine what it would be like splitting the playerbase even further. I'm also skeptical that this tier would be relevantly different from custom matches.
6. *Stun Lock* - Nerfing stun durations and cooldowns is reasonable. Diminishing returns is not the answer. Chilled to the bone with savagery sigil is just silly, along with many other skills. However, DR would be a confusing, un-intuitive mechanic that disrupts the timing and consistency of combat, and for that reason, I absolutely hate it. GW2 has always had more fluid, beautiful combat, and I don't want to see it become more like wow.
7. *One shots* - This is a difficult one. In the higher tiers, even despite the high damage, builds like bunker warrior are always waiting to take advantage of a slower meta and turn pvp into a snoozefest. To reduce damage or bring back celestial, you would also have to reduce invulnerabilities and sustain. So why haven't they done so? The answer is that players love power creep and hate nerfs. No matter what, even if you nerf everyone's numbers, people get upset. To overcome this, I think what could be done is simply adding raw health to every class in pvp. Health is the parameter that always falls behind in power creep, so rather than nerfing everything else in the game, it's probably easier and less unpopular to increase health pools, directly reducing the strength of one-shots.
On point 7 I don't agree that buffing hp across the board is the answer. A moba called SMITE tried that in it's season 9 patch and was very controversial, and after a couple of seasons of trying to make it work they eventually undid the hp changes of that patch and went back. Power creep is always creeping and so giving into it via more max hp is only a temporary solution. You can kick the can down the road but you're going to have to clean up the problem properly eventually.
@@zephyruspring They've held off on increasing max hp for 12 years. I'm not that familiar with smite, but it looks like rather than an across the board buff, it specifically buffed level 1 health by 40% which is pretty massive. I imagine it drastically shifted the gameplay of early levels.
Issues 6 and 7 have been around for too many years. I'm an on and off PvP player who really only plays GW2 for the PvP and the burst meta has ruined PvP at multiple points. There's no counterplay to getting bursted or stunlocked, other than stunbreaks and blocking which some professions/elite specs don't have easy access to. On my Virtuoso all of my utility skills are stunbreaks and they are nessary if you want to be viable. It really halts all build potential unless you want to take a stunbreak out.
I played this mode several times and these are the few times I regret it
My fix for pvp is to try and treat it like Smash Brothers. you are there for fun and to mess around, not necessarily to win. I think regular updates to "Default/Suggested" builds would help a lot with that along with maybe a short description of what you are supposed to do with it kinda like the Profession and Trait descriptions. (Yes I'm aware that players do not read.)
I like the smash bros idea. Take it a step further and have all the classes pre set up and balanced, just playing at that point.
Thank you for adressing these issues, muk. ❤
I do really hope that the matchmaking is added, I still continue to think that pvp in this game has the potential to be much much bigger than it is! The automated tournaments give actual rewards unlike things like events in league of legends that still give dog water benefits for the cost or attempt(Yayyyy a skin shard and that's it, how cool) and the skill expression in a game like guild wars leads to mastery expression of a profession going way above what some think is possible. I'd personally love to see something like a dedicated balance team fine tuning things in pvp specifically more often than pve gets since in pvp, sometimes how much fun you're having is directly proportional to how oppressive power creep has become. Though the matchmaking fixes would be a great step in the right direction in regards to tackling the same issue since lower skilled players are less likely to perfectly execute the one shot capability.
I cannot agree with your fix to Issue #3. Tying MMR to specific profession instead of the account would allow high ranked players to abuse matchmaking even more. What do I mean by even more? It already happens. Players queue as Thieves to force a Thief on the enemy team and then reroll. Because Thief is very hard to play and master in PvP they effectively end up with an advantage.
Love some of these changes!
Leavers and AFKers have been a thorn in my side for a long time!
Im happy your DPS video is done . 😂 I love these proposed changes and support videos
thank you mukluk, you are someone that has representation in the gw2 community and that has visibility. I wish, i pray and i hope that the changes you proposed get implemented, by the love of this game, dev please listen and improve the game, you are killing the gamemode, and you have the best combat system in the absolute mmo scene.
I'm suprised that you called out 1-2 sec time to kill, and yet not mention that four classes have oneshot combo (sometimes several), that can be cast out of stealth, with no way to see it coming, with only counterplay being literal cheats.
That's #1 issue in my opinion.
This is more of a "game mode" video than a "balance/systems" video imo. | If we want to talk about ^ we should start with Downstairs, predominantly Ranger. There's no earthly reason why any class should be balanced' / still be hilariously stronger than all others in downstate in 2024
@@crashthenoise8445 the "kill combo's with no counterplay exist" it the same vein of complaint as "TTK is too fast".
Except you can justyfy short TTK.
You can't justify sub-2sec kill combo starting with a hard stun, coming out of nowhere, with no tell or warning to the person being attacked.
I am mainly an open-world player, I did some PVP and got to Wolf Rank mainly I was doing PVP back in 2015, and now when after many years tired of PVP, boy... The AFK is really egregious espiecally now that people want that JW armor sets, I don't really care whether I win or not, but I hate leeching. I can't stand that people who don't even want to practice in mode get the same amount of progress in tracks as me.
celestial in pvp its the worst idea i've ever heard
would have the same effect as in wvw but worse, numbers on pvp are "usually" smaller than on wvw, and the only amulets with healing power are 4 stat ones, with healing as minor stat and supports are still real, adding cele would only end up in 2 results: stacking cele builds, or 4 cele builds and a support, ending in everyone with a bunker build.
the only solution to have cele on pvp would be really low stats, and then it doesn't work anymore, its not a stat bloat, and its not useful anymore and gets replaced by the already existing condi/power/support amulets that already exists on their respective roles, and by then why even add cele.
thing that i forgot to mention and edited: if you want to survive high damage, getting a bunker build its not a solution, or a band aid, its an amputation, just reduce the damage from their end, there are 3 amulets, with 1200 condi damage on it, lower it to 1000 and add 200 of something else, the same way valk + zerk trinkets work in pve, the only 1200 power amulets its berzerks and valks, valks has no precition, lower power to 1000, add 200 somewhere else, berzerker, same thing.
that or leaving only the 4 stat ones (it would need some new ones to take some of the spots left by the 3 stat ones)
or just lower the general stats of all trinkets, or the simple way of doing it: big pvp balance patch with coefficient nerfs all around, its still work, but it requires less reworking of systems.
100% agree on diminishing returns for stuns; stab is too easy to remove as well.
You make good points. I think adding a pvp trinket or a new slotted item that allows to break stuns or be invulnerable to them for a second would be a game changer.
Biggest problem for me is lack of game modes and maps. They have so many great PVP modes throughout history of video games and all we got is domination. Wouldn't hurt to have king of the hill maybe Team deathmatch payload or Capture the flag. Wouldn't also hurt to have a WVW Map that is smaller maybe 30v30 or 15 v 15.
I am an game developer and I really like your suggestions.
One addition, show the good players when the waitingtime is low, so they can finde good spotts for playing.
Honestly impressed about the matchmaking points you presented like the sub in system, I like that a lot! I think the balance ones specifically with cc aren’t the best though. There are some builds that have/had too much cc for sure, but overall I don’t think we need to add some kind of defiance system. PvP at its core is very well designed with its maps and ability to use positioning, most people who die to chain cc or get 100-0d in two seconds were out of position and didn’t have the cooldowns to justify their risky placement. And I don’t really have a problem with builds being able to 100-0 you quickly if they have one burst combo to do it. Most things in the game have enough defensive to survive one burst, but some things like willbender or soulbeast can burst you, force your cooldowns, then continue to burst you. I think things like the eod release power untamed, or chronomancer are perfect. They both did too much damage, and justified damage nerfs, but both of them had counterplay to avoid the bursts and if they missed they were out of position and could be easily killed (with the exception of continuum split). Mirage being able to split surge spam, deadeye spamming rifle, willbender ect are the real issues with the balance design. Back to the stunbreaks for a second, resources should be impactful. If you are expected a situation you might be chain cc’d, hold your stunbreak until you have the other resources (mobility/evades) to get out of that situation. Again some builds are problematic in terms of cc, but they should be targeted. I don’t think people should be rewarded for mindlessly using a resource in a pvp game mode, such as mindlessly pressing stunbreak upon first being cc’d and then being immune to follow up pressure.
Edit: I thought a little bit more about how to articulate my thoughts on dps in spvp, all the high damage builds at the moment are really difficult to kill. Willbender has insane damage with stab/resistance/3 stunbreaks/aeigis/healing from attacks and willbender flames/decent cleanse/it’s healing skill heals for 8k and cleanses. It’s just packed, same with spear spellbreaker. If the dps builds were more like chronomancer and had actual risks and flaws/difficult to play, it would be mostly out of lower ratings where people are still learning to deal with them and would be much more fun to play against. I do agree that there is such a thing as too much damage, but I think the bigger issue right now is how risk free the damage is.
What keeps me away from PvP is the changes to the skills compared to the PvE environment. The same skills now behave completely different: this one was an ammo skill, this one isn't, etc. I fully understand why it is that way, absolutely. But that doesn't make it easier.
As someone who plays multiple characters and classes, having to not confuse the same skills, with the same name, and then change how to use what when is just too much to ask. I would try it: maybe it's not as bad as I think, but in a "baby" mode for people completely unfamiliar with PvP. The current issues that you mention with the match maker really do no push me to even try that.
I'll never forget getting 3 games in a row where a team mate was AFK from start twice in a row, then next game we lost the first fight and another teammate gave up...
This is the *ONLY* competitive game that I played in the last 20 years where this happens almost every single damn match...
In Overwatch 2 if a teammate is AFK or dcs the first few minutes it ends the match and gives everyone priority queue times
Problem: A ton of players don't want to play PvP/WvW but are forced to because of the reward track system, some of which don't even have other sources. (GoBs anyone?)
Solution: Add a reward track system for PvE (eg, trade 50 exp bar per track instead of gaining spirit shards). So people who go into PvP/WvW modes, are those who actually want to be there.
Problem: A ton of WvW players don't want do play PvE but are forced to because legendary weapons and trinkets are PvE only!
What's your solution for that? ;)
Counter-argument: this way PvP would lose many less skilled players since the main reason why they play PvP at all is the reward track, similarly to WvW - most of the people that play this snoozefest do it for the reward track. I know your solution sounds great but you have to realize that this mostly affects the lower brackets, where skill is already all over the place. I don't think these brackets need less players in matchmaking pool just to have bit more balanced matches on average.
@@mechanicalhorserider2512 dont forget map completions... :(
@@mechanicalhorserider2512 I mean they already try to with the reward tracks letting you complete parts of visions and aurora but never let you fully finish them in PvP and WvW. Also you can buy the statues needed for Gen 3s but it still requires you to farm out map completions and favors for the blessings of the jade empress some reason.
So they already have had that idea partially implemented but abandoned it midway through for some reason...Multiple times.
Two more suggestions:
1. rank does not matter unless you are in top 1% - give more rank rewards at the end of the season, maybe even a reward when you first reach a certain tier and then another reward at the end for your final rank
2. group size is locked way too low (2 in 5-man mode, for example) - let us q with as many people as we want in the party, and then match us up against similar sized teams
nah 5 man party for ranked and the game is dead. Top players just go ranked with perfect comp and you wont win a single match anymore. Ranked just gets a longer MAT where still always same players will be on the top
@@bijuu2853 If you are doing full five man teams against full five man teams, you will get a LOT more serious pvp players. The biggest issue with the current matchmaker is that no one queues for it, and that is largely because you have to q solo or duo and deal with a majority of random people on your team, no matter how serious you are.
@@Cimarb yes but imo if you want to 5man party there are already enough tournaments
@@bijuu2853 Once every few hours, if you have a full hour+ to bother with waiting 50%+ of that time for your next match... and that gets even worse if you stomp your opponent (or vice versa) and the other matches are long close ones... yeah, super fun times there...
Another way to fix these massive glass cannon nukes is to reduce and rework a lot of the invuln and block mechanics. Most the classes you see that can run pure damage and survive (Mesmer for example), also have long duration invulnerability through things like distortion, or a guardian/ will ended with aegis, or a warrior with whatever perma block shit they have.
A potential rework could be to allow movement control effects to still take place (like you can be immune to damage but I can still immobilize, cripple and chill you) or make it so condis can still be applied but they don’t effect you until your invulnerability wears off. That at least gives counter play to the mechanic as opposed to what it is now, which is “I’m invulnerable now, nothing you can do except wait while I run away”
On issue #7. A big problem with going from 100 to 0 is the fact that so many classes/specs have access to instant teleports. There is not a competitive game out there that allows long range instant teleports (on low CDs) to your opponent, in addition to being able to just smash your buttons at the same time before an opponent can react. You can look at Cat Woman and MMH in Injustice 1 to see just how broken it is in a fighting game. Also being to teleport without los through walls just adds to how effective it is. I've been playing PvP since release and anytime I've said this (in-game) I always get hate because the reality is this one thing carries a lot players. It pretty much makes positioning trivial, outside of necro. At minimum teleports should require you to have los of target and be in range. Being able to chain multiple teleports to close the gap is also a issue. Unfortunately, it's so ingrained into the game now I doubt it will ever change.
Idea for matchmaking: As the scope expands, have them get a greater and greater debuff of stats or something, but boost the reward. So if they accept to play against "new" players, they'd be crippled(which should stop them dominating) and allow new players to learn. If the veteran player still wins, they'd get rewarded extra for accepting the penalty.
Would keep match making times down, but hopefully reduce the new player obliteration experience.
PvP is my fav game mode in this game but I think that is dead and won't change. The next PvP game mode will either became more successful than Conquest and will delete it or will be less popular and entirely fade as Stroghold. but there's nothing ANet can do now to fix the game mode: is like trying first aids in a war zone to a decapitated corpse. And by the way, I think that the changes in WvW (alliances replacing older servers) is having the same effect.
My main issue with PVP is the attached reward systems. And honestly I do not have ideas on how to fix that. Let me explain.
There are three PVP modes. Unranked, ranked, tournaments. Tournaments are kind of a thing in themselves, so lets discuss ranked and unranked. In theory unranked is the mode you are supposed to use to learn new classes and experiment. But since it has no PVP season rewards very few people actually play it. On the other hand, in ranked you have PVP season rewards with PIPs that are granted both for winning and loosing. Yes, you get more for winning, but an afk farmer who gets 3 pips per match where he did nothing is getting a better deal that his teammates who try to fight for 15 minutes to get the same 3 pips.
I think that PIP system has to be reworked to allow more incentive in unranked and to reward active participation in the match so that people who do fight get more than those who are just there for the ride.
I do agree with matchmaking/MMR, its silly how many times i got matched in silver with top 10 player... we got absolutely destroyed by just this one person.
Hot take: get rid of unranked.
There are probably a lot of people trying PvP but scared to participate in ranked, because it has this implied skill floor imposed by requiring players be PvP level 20.
Removing that barrier would consolidate the PvP community and prevent the well from drying up when players are queueing.
There will always be a problem at the top, because by definition PvP rankings create a pyramid that results in high ranking players struggling to find adequate competition. But the solution to that should never be to engage them with the bottom players, who as you've said, will respond by quitting.
This would free enough population to implement "trash" queue for reported players and afkers/leavers.
I don't have much pvp experience in gw2, but I have played a lot of smite.
In that game, there are many ways to negate cc effects, but the potency of them became such an issue where they did add diminishing returns to cc, and it worked out great.
So I think what you say about gw2 cc having DR is a sound arguement.
I would love a practice pvp matchmaking lobby. Unranked is like rolling dice, and Ranked is like being hit by a truck. I need a better starting point, so keeping a practice mode available to people below a certain MMR feels like the best solution to that gripe. Just place minimal rewards in it to keep away those dastardly smurfs
You're awesome Mukluk! :D
Another issue with PvP is how top heavy the rewards are: Most of the game modes rewards are for winning with you getting at times less then half the rewards if you lose a match(such as in ranked). This is without the worst offender: tournaments. Which rewards wise are more or less a complete waste of time unless you consistently top 3 them. Meaning most players have no reason to partake in tournaments at all.
This all adds to making trying to learn pvp worse as you more or less get nothing from losing while you learn it, which further pushes players away from PvP.
I racked up thousands of hours years ago when dueling servers were still a thing in PvP.
Coming back now, the power creep and matchmaking has been terrible. It's so easy to 100-0 someone before most players can even react. I feel bad for new, frustrated players in my matches when half the lobby is filled with gold-plat players.
I want the PvP community to grow but the learning curve and system in place are really ruining it. Definitely not new player friendly.
All of your observations are pretty spot on, but I think your suggested fixes address the symptoms, rather than the cause.
The matchmaking issues you mention are caused by a very low PVP population, and all of them would likely be improved by having more players of various skill levels play the game mode. Arenanet should increase the visibility of the game mode, increase the rewards for ranked and automated tournaments, and improve their handling of player reports, including letting people know that their reports caused something to happen (no details, but enough to let players feel that bad eggs are being dealt with). Have a window in game with suggested builds for newer players, with a bit of a guide for how to use it. Have the winners of each AT show up in global chat and let it have some effect on the world (like winning teams in Heroes Ascent in GW1 affecting access to the Underworld and Fissure of Woe). Make PVP more visible, accessible, and interesting for more players.
The gameplay issues are much harder to deal with, and I really don't like the suggestion of increasing survivability with stats, as I feel it would have rippling impacts on the pace of play, favoring slower, beefier builds and supports.
At its core, Guild Wars 2 is not a PVP game, and what we have is a very good attempt at making PVE characters fighting each other feel meaningful. I believe the team has done a good job with a difficult task, but put simply, they have a lot fewer knobs and dials to turn and adjust to make it a good experience than they could have had otherwise. Elements of the core game that need to be preserved to make it feel like you're still playing Guild Wars 2 are messing with the play experience of PVP. As an example, I agree that stuns can feel bad, especially when stacked, but without them, super mobile characters would be nearly unkillable - If they had more control, this level of mobility may not have made it into the game, which would lessen the need for stuns.
I don't have good solutions here, and I don't think any amount of tweaks can achieve perfect balance, but I would worry a lot about what the game mode would feel like if everyone was harder to kill and stuns didn't work as well. If they can get the mode to a point where it is fun for the majority, even if not for all, then I'd call it a success.
I would also like something to showcase more differences between PVE versions of traits/skills to help people who are unused to PVP versions of them.
Issues I noticed and that weren't mentioned in the video:
1. There are people who enter ranked just for the chest rewards and they openly say they don't care about rank or winning. I honestly think it's a good Idea to have some rewards accessible only to players playing ranked, but seems like something should be done about it (for example add these rewards to unranked, but make getting them slower or something).
2. Balancing issue. I don't understand how they can just release spear into the game, making Spellbreaker and Willbender who were already strong and present in EVERY game just straight up overpowered and then leave it like this for weeks making pvp less and less enjoyable with every day. This can be fixed in many ways, for example: don't allow new content in ranked pvp immediately on release; more frequent balacing patches and these could just be better, sometimes I don't understand their choices or they do dumb things like nerfing FA Weaver cuz FA Cata was too broken (just nerf cata traits and not things that are shared with Weaver); someone mentioned it in a similar video, but HOTFIXES, if something is utterly broken, just disable it until the next balancing patch.
3. The maps can be extremely confusing for new players, especially the ones with secondary objectives, so there should just be some kind of guide to each of them. Also, even tho I like the secondary objective mechanic, it's dumb how u must do it on some maps and can completely ignore it on others. Anet could make the ignored ones more valuable or impactful.
4. They improved the rewards for ranked and that's awesome (I've been sleeping on mountains of karma thanks to that), but I feel like it could still be a bit better at least or it could count towards some other objectives. Like, idk, getting some infusions or something.
5. Something should be done about the ability to change your class in the lobby. On one hand I don't like that it's possible, hovewer, the way pvp is designed I'd be losing way more games (whether I'm currently in gold or plat) because I just got matched with 3 roamers and 2 supports against sb, chrono support, reaper, willbender and idk, virtuoso. I won many games just by switching from teamfighting spec to a sidenoder or the other way round which, obviously, spared me some frustration, but just shows that the mode doesn't function properly.
As someone who played only wvw and never pvp this video really made me want to get into pvp
*Excellent* suggestions on CC. There are few things that undercut the entertainment of PvP than repeated CC spam. These suggestions could be applied to WvW as well.
ANet has done such good job creating solid PvP gameplay in many ways, it is baffling why they think being being constantly stun-locked and unable to move/act somehow makes things more entertaining for players. Limiting CC as suggested would be a big step toward making PvP/WvW more interesting for new players.
Increase the time to kill. Making big cooldowns and other specific abilities more impactful on when they should be used instead of spamming all your cooldowns instantly for a 'max power' boost right off the rip then playing whack-a-mole whenever another cooldown is up.
What's scared me the most about pvp is that I feel like I can't quickly look at someone and know what they can do. I've played a lot of other pvp games like dota and LoL. You can very easily at a glance identify the enemy hero and know what abilities they have. In GW2 you have no idea what abilities, traits, or gear they're using. I'd also like for there to be standard outfits for each profession so you can identify what they are as quickly and easily as possible.
There is an option that standarizes class models in competitive gamemodes so you can instantly recognize the profession
@@isardprat7900 That's awesome, I'm glad that option is there. It's still intimidating to not know what skills, traits, and gear they're running. In shooters the gear loadouts don't change that dramatically and in mobas the game is slow paced enough that you have the time to see what items they're building, but it's a little unnerving in this situation.
I have more experience with wvw than pvp but I 100% agree that CC needs to have some kind of limits in those game modes. There needs to be a cap or a diminishing returns system or whatever, cause sometimes you are just there being obliterated and unable to do anything.
I don't play pvp and I don't think you're proposed changes would change that, but I think they sound great and kinda necessary. I especially like the idea of a practice tier. That might, perhaps, get me to at least dip my toes into pvp when I need it for participation and stuff.
One of my main gripes, as some1 who already plays despite the mentioned flaws, is the utterly useless death recap. Make it so the skills that are shown are given extra info if you cursor over them. Even just saying if they were a projectile, AoE or whatever else. Instead it is ah yes I took 5k damage from "Aura Slicer". What is Aura slicer? Don't know, here have the icon of that skill. Oh and also you died to Burning stacks. How did you get them? Don't know! Useless.
An experienced, engaged customer has more to offer a product than a producer that thinks they cannot benefit from customer feedback 👍 I think your points were solid.
In terms of comparison, WoW PvP is far superior in its management on both sides than GW2. I've tried both and the difference is blatant. It's hard to get feedback and change from ANET or Blizzard in modern times, so as much as I wish these changes would be added to increase the flow of PvPers and encourage PvErs to get involved, I don't see ANET lowering themselves from their pedestal to go "You know what, you're right. Our system is flawed and we'll change that." Heck, it only took pointing out a lack of music on one of the maps before the guy overseeing it got sacked (if I'm remembering your story correctly, Muk) 😂
Already love your video when first thing you mention is the matchmaking that is very sad in this game... I love pvp but I play it for fun casually without to much stress required but I often end in one sided matches either on my side or other side, just that makes the pvp matches quite boring... also the spam of ccing is sick in a negative way in this game... no diminish returns or anything in this game... then some insane damage in some builds...but you spoke well all those points so I got nothing to add but just agree :) but in this game its hard to play a class you love cuz it might be bad in pvp, its sad how you do so well with some builds and others dont do well there... I for example cant play what I would love since everyone can counter those easy from what I seen of months of pvp... so I usually play condition berserk since its a lot easier to put pressure or so, and dont go tell me to go play spellbreaker I dont like the style much :)
I completely agree with each and every point made.
don't know about the last one, but the others are the same solutions I would propose myself: the only logical solutions to improve the game mode. The "pull player from queue to fill in" thing is perfect even if you want to deny people the possibility to switch alts, by replacing them the moment they switch to login screen, and, IMO, it's the thing with higher priority to be implemented on this list
I came back to GW2 after an 8 year break and decided to try PVP for the first time. It's an extremely unapproachable game mode for new players, and that's unfortunate because the combat is supremely engaging.
An issue you didn't mention that I think is worth discussion is unranked vs ranked. As a new player, you are forced to play unranked for about 60 matches (it took me 56 to get to rank 20), just so that you can start playing ranked and theoretically face players your skill level. The problem is that most unranked matches appear to have no MMR logic at all and are dominated by very skilled players. I was routinely being put in games either with or against high level players. So I either got deleted or I watched as the enemy got deleted. In neither case were my contributions important to the outcome of these games. I "won" exactly 50% of my games (28 out of 56) but I would guess that less than 10% of the matches I played, my being there had any influence on the outcome at all. I ran around doing my best, but I'm pretty sure I would have still won close to 28 games if I had just sat at the spawn area in those games.
The biggest problem is trying to learn how to play against people so far above your skill level in a game with such a large skill ceiling. What do you take away from a 100-0 deletion in 3 seconds? I should have pressed what buttons exactly? I have no idea and I have no real way to figure it out other than watching videos online and trying to theorize what I am supposed to be doing differently.
I'm not currently playing this game mode at all as I have found wvw scratches the pvp itch and is a lot less frustrating (outside high level roamers randomly deleting you when not with a tag - thankfully this is not a normal occurrence in my experience).
Being able to replay matches and see what those other players did to you would drastically improve learning curve for newbies. I wonder why gw2 still does not have those.
For me, more match types would be fun, like team death match or free for all
as mid level pvp player (49% win rate, usually stays in high gold) who spent years and finally grinded out every pvp legendaries, it's a game mode that i would never go back, here are some of my thoughts reflecting back on my experience.
1. high ranked player unable to find games if block them from joining low level player matches, an issue why is how MMR is counted, it does not take into account of number of matches played, an example I can see right now on ranked there are 3 players currently tied on 1665 MMR, one of them have almost the total number of matches played of the other 2 players combined. So unless ranking also take into account of number of matches played, it's gonna be difficult get higher ranked players to play more. I feel the ranking system needs to be a point system that takes both into account both, while MMR is for matchmaking only.
2. I remember once I took a break for a week, the system keeps a track of your MMR, decay is simply an add-on number that subtracts from your real MMR, only if you lose or accumulated enough wins the real MMR gets updated, so I see no real issue here.
3. In regards to class based MMR, I remember I heard from one of Teapot's stream that Anet does track class based MMR, but chose not to use it.
4. AFK players, there are multiple reason, there are the deliberate offenders to throw the game, and there are cases where the players just gave up because of the huge mismatch of team skills. Obviously you want to punish those are deliberately throwing, unfortunately everyone knows that the reporting system does jack.
5. Guild Missions, I have only seen them in unranked, so I don't see any issues with it.
6. Stun locks, power creep, etc. the great reset that happened 3 years ago (?) that brought big nerfs across the board was good, that was the only period I actually enjoyed PvP slightly; just like raiding, a big discrepancy of player skills could be attribute to understanding the boons, if Anet bring a sledge hammer to nerf the boons, say 90% I can see significant reduction of single combo kills. Say if boons can only attribute to extra 10% increase in power, I think it will simplify the game mode a lot for new players. If you look at why League of Legend is so popular, because it's easy to pickup for new players, everyone can press skills, but to excel to become a great player you need to be able to maneuver better.
I have 1800+ hours on GW2 and most of it was ranked PVP. I stopped playing because of power creep years ago, after the 2nd expansion came out PVP became so hectic and the time to kill became so fast it wasn't fun anymore. I miss when the game was simpler and a little less quick.
One of the biggest issues I have is that I can't right-click a player and request a duel. In other games that is how my brother and I would learn characters before going into mm. But my BIGGEST complaint is that some builds make absolutely zero sense. I don't mind getting one shoted, absolutely clapped in a duel, steam rolled in a team fight, or even butt blasted outside of spawn. What is an issue, is that a build can not only 100-0 you, but also tank 3 people, cap the point, and do my taxes all at the same time. It seems like every new update or patch there is something that's a farming unkillable death bot that makes it know you'll lose the game before the 12min mark.
Some of the builds are just straight up out of control. For a DPS class it should take 5 buttons to down an afk player.
And if there is any class that should be able to one shot someone it should be one with insane difficulty, not sword-warhorn soul beast from 1200 range.