GvG - What Keeps You Away?

The lasting appeal of Guild Wars has always been the build aspect to me. Without any skill balances taking place the build diversity is stale.

1) What is keeping you away from GvG? The lack of real teams playing. Even if we define 'real' as one player with henchmen or heroes(if allowed), The ability of syncers to dodge matches makes the ladder unplayable for those types of players.

2) What would encourage you to start playing or getting more involved in GvG/ATs/mATs? Skill balance changes(meta needs shifted from time to time), VoD (would require some adjustments), cash tournaments, heroes.

I've never been a fan of fluxes. Perhaps it's because they don't do enough to induce build changes. Sadly, I doubt the active player base will increase without some form of major modification or tournament.

With that said, are you happy with the lord damage mechanic? Do you think the lord damage mechanic pushes players in a general build direction?

Quote from MaxBorken

For me it would be the synchers too. If Anet could find a way of squashing those cheaters I’d be inclined to give it a try once more.

if you realy want to try it you can play ATs (there are 3 ATs each day) , imo ladder is mostly dead because of the lack of players( so is ATs) ,doesnt rly matter if like during an hour in the whole day the syncers are in.

Quote from Motoko

From what I recall, there were many MANY discussions on how to make VoD work. The problem came down to the fact that [iQ]'s strategy against [EvIL] promoted the type of play that encouraged defensive games that ultimately turned the game into a PvE fest by healing and nuking creeps at 30 minutes.

I'd be interested in what the other options were. If I remember correctly, they gave us "Victory is Ours!", which still encourages this passive gameplay. There needed to be an incentive to playing proactively. To me, playing defensively for a portion of the game is fine, it's when you can ball and nuke the NPCs that we have a real issue on our hands.

Quote from Motoko

I still don't know if a solution could have been reached without severely limiting team's ability to play defensively. Is the lord damage mechanic perfect? No, it isn't. But I would take it over what VoD evolved into any day. (And I sure as hell would take it over what GW2 competitive PvP matches are)

I'd start by testing a mechanic that allows AoE damage reduction for NPCs. How it exactly works could be tweaked to favor proactive play. An example might be: NPCs receive "X%" AoE damage reduction based on number of NPCs remaining at VoD and team morale. This would be my starting point and I'd move from there to attempt a fix.

On the other side of it, Could how NPCs scatter in EoTN be used to keep the NPCs from just blowing up to nukes?

Quote from Motoko

If there was some way to monitor and ban players who abused the defensive strategy of healing and doing nothing until VoD, VoD was a great concept. The health decrease, the NPCs duking it out, Guild Lords waiting a few minutes to follow suite, the ability to be losing a match but pull off a Guild Lord gank to manage a win. All amazing concepts and strategies. I miss it. To bring that back and hope people play honorably is just not going to happen unfortunately. People have the chance to play fun builds and honorable builds, but you'll never be able to fully get rid of those who will die hard trying to win no matter how small the gain is.

VoD felt like something BIG was happening in the game and now it's just really lackluster. I'd love to be able to explore possible fixes for VoD. I'd be cool if we could get some traction and really discuss this topic with someone like Izzy(even though he's moved on to GW2).

I always liked PVP, but I guess what always kept me away from GvG is how people behave : everybody is way too serious, flame, QQ, etc. You can't go on a casual run like in RA.
GvG is also a small community : everyone knows each other. I ended up in some people's black list because I played with botters (without knowing xD)

I don't think any update will change that :p

I'm like Vizi

I prefer PvP over PvE but never really did GvG, only RA/HB and sometimes HA. Now it kinda feels out of reach because of inactivity from normal players and over activity of syncers.

I think something that might help is adding incentives to play GvG, even with hench, while also discouraging syncing.

Though tbh I have no idea how one would do this

As a casual PvE player, I might pitch in a reason why I never really got into PvP. Vizu and Breeze are right on point, it's way too serious.

It's very tough on casual players, which means mostly the elitists stay around killing other elitists. And when they drop out, there won't be much players left. As soon as casual players drop by they will be utterly destroyed.

Edit: Constructive critisism. So what could be done about it? I really don't know. Maybe some more casual PvP areas that the elitists are not interested in, a place where casuals get to fight casuals? Similar to arenas with a max level, there could be some lvl 20 arenas with a limit on Champion/Gladiator titles?
As I never got into PvP seriously, I can't say if that would even work.

Yeah and the thing is now casual PvP is kinda dead too.

RA is mostly full of syncers, HB is ???, the only thing kind of alive is pug HA during zquest/double week

I'd love it if they could in a weird way make GvG pug-able

For me personally I just need a way to ease into it. I'm used to the occasional rage and shouting (although it can be really discouraging at times). Some GvG teaching is all I want. The reward for me would be to take part on high level in one of the best pvp games ever.

I am of the opinion that if you start start a GvG team with friends right now you will be absolutely stomped. Ladder used to get you to play with people of your own skill level but I understand there simply aren't enough players for that now.

It seems to me that what's necessary is a bigger player base. Things like this thread is a start of getting more people interested. It certainly sparks my attention.

Perhaps we could start a gofundme for a community funded GvG tournament?

Quote from Breeze

I'd love it if they could in a weird way make GvG pug-able

Any alliance with players could pull this off with a little coordination. If you didn't want to use the guilds you're in, you could make a pug guild with alts to play in from time to time.

Quote from Lye O

For me personally I just need a way to ease into it. I'm used to the occasional rage and shouting (although it can be really discouraging at times). Some GvG teaching is all I want. The reward for me would be to take part on high level in one of the best pvp games ever.

Hopefully at this point in the game someone would be willing to teach new players. I remember a training guild back in the day called team love. perhaps someone could start something similar up?

Quote from Lye O

I am of the opinion that if you start start a GvG team with friends right now you will be absolutely stomped. Ladder used to get you to play with people of your own skill level but I understand there simply aren't enough players for that now.

I agree. Ladder play needs to be adjusted as it could help ease newer players into GvG.

Quote from Lye O

It seems to me that what's necessary is a bigger player base. Things like this thread is a start of getting more people interested. It certainly sparks my attention.

Perhaps we could start a gofundme for a community funded GvG tournament?

Interesting. The question I'd have is how much money would it require to host a season/tournament?

Quote from Kahmal

Any alliance with players could pull this off with a little coordination. If you didn't want to use the guilds you're in, you could make a pug guild with alts to play in from time to time.

I know but it might help with the population issue GvG has a bit

Quote from Breeze

I know but it might help with the population issue GvG has a bit

100% agree. I was just thinking of a possible solution with the current setup.

What about the way such as HA. Just a type of AT reorganization.

The top map (like hall of heroes) with a good chest, every 30 mins for example.
Top map 8vs8 so it will be a fair matches.

But no 3h holding for cap like in HA, just make 1/16-1/8-1/4-1/2-final.
Win in a final match = 1 champ pt (1 or 2 can be a daily cap).

It will be too hard for sync, if many real teams will be in.

But you need to have a new 16 teams every 30 min, so it should be a hench teams, when not enought teams to join.

Quote from Motoko

From what I recall, there were many MANY discussions on how to make VoD work. The problem came down to the fact that [iQ]'s strategy against [EvIL] promoted the type of play that encouraged defensive games that ultimately turned the game into a PvE fest by healing and nuking creeps at 30 minutes.

The health decrease, the NPCs duking it out, Guild Lords waiting a few minutes to follow suite, the ability to be losing a match but pull off a Guild Lord gank to manage a win. All amazing concepts and strategies. I miss it. To bring that back and hope people play honorably is just not going to happen unfortunately. People have the chance to play fun builds and honorable builds, but you'll never be able to fully get rid of those who will die hard trying to win no matter how small the gain is.

The solution to this problem consists of not executing the very last part of VoD script, that is, the movement of Guild Lord to the center of the map. I'd be happy to see VoD feature re-introduced back personally, but only if the mentioned adjustment is going to be taken into account.

There's also no necessity to be doing anything about how victory condition through the amount of dealt Guild Lord damage is currently defined.

no chance to find good team these days.

It's been 13 yrs and the answer will always be the same. Three main causes. Factor 1) Toxic community against newcomers; Factor 2) All the guild drama when someone loses and mean, literally, there's always that guy that has to find a culprit, instead of having regular old-fun until everybody step up the game together. Factor 3) High Learning Curve. Unfortunately, Guild Wars isn't your average-joe game such as FPS or mobas. When it comes to gameplay and pvp mechanics, I would say that you would have to have at least 1,000 hours to play decently at the mid-end GvG scenario (back in 2005-2009).

Nowadays with the dwarf and closed community that learning experience is nearly impossible to obtain unless there are people willingly glad to have your back until you achieve that milestone.

So much so, when the game was on the verge of it's death, some folks did the GvG learning project that was great but didn't gather many people since the "infamous scenario of pvp" was already pretty known and installed. So people didn't bother to do the transition from the PvE.

Honestly, though, I wish someone would just fuckin copy and paste Guild Wars right now, start from the stretch and have regular skill balances. That would be enough for it to bright again.

Tombs finally died in 2011 for me, the pvp aspect of thegame had run its course, the balancing aspect of pvp got worse everytime they fiddled with it. Their answer for everything was to NERF everything over the years, this only led to only a few viable builds that made the game super boring, every balanced team composition was just 2melee, melshot/magebane ranger, pb/pd mes, a lightning ele, 2mo+rit because any other builds were nerfed too much to be viable. There use to be rspikes, bspikes, iways, sways, elespikes, vims, smite, hex, choking gas, eoe bombs, bbway, and so many more that i just cant remember anymore, it was so fuckn fun playing all that stuff because all those builds had a counter, but over the years the nerfs came hard and fast and thats when it got stale and the game lost its identity as build wars.

This probably and most likely indirectly affected GvG, as tombs was known as the stepping stone for most of the elite players to move into after they achieved rank 9/12 back in the days.

The elitist GvG attitude didn't help at all, by the time the GvG community tried to teach and help the community, it was too late, i noticed a large amount of disinterest in the game back in 2009-11 from a lot of my pvp buddies and moved on to other games and sporadically logged in and eventually quit.

Removing TA was one of the biggest fuck ups, i know a lot of TA players were highly skilled and moved to GvG directly from there.

Ping is and always will be a big issue in a PVP game, it was pretty much just EU and US servers left after the Asian servers were merged or removed. Also it's not fun or viable playing with 300-400 latency in the top end games, as you can imagine all it takes is 1 interrupt to gain an advantage.

Flux's is the laziest way to balance a game, this pretty much put the game on autopilot while ignoring the bigger picture.

Nerfing builds killed the casual scene, the game got too complicated for the masses to form balanced builds that required skill instead of cheesing it with sways, iway or spike builds. You kill the masses, you kill the game. The game became super unappealing for the average pvper.

There was just too many fuck ups by anet that couldn't be undone, they never made 1 good change for the benefit of the game while it was hot.

It's just sad how they neglected this game that could of had a longer lasting pvp scene for atleast a decade.

Sorry for the venting, but playing tombs was one of the best online gaming pvp experiences for me and talking about it makes me nostalgic and sad at the same time, especially wondering where my online pvp friends are at now.

Maybe a good chance of renew on the pvp scenario that wouldn't be a burden to work with at this point and state of the game - or relatively easy to implement - would be changing the HA and also GvG back (like once we had) to 6 teammates instead of 8.

Lowering that cap this way will result in more teams. Also a diversity of builds since there will be a need to adjust to the situation.

About bringing back VoD I would vote to that, if, they make it random, so people wouldn't assume and use "turtle" strategies also with less time for it to occur, 20 minutes at most.

Bringing back Hero Arenas and implementing something to prevent the resign abuse would be a huge deal and certainly, would bring people from PvE back into the PvP.

Quote from Motoko

This is an interesting idea - At least how I am interpreting it.

Are you suggesting the idea of randomized goals?

GvG Match Starts - Goal is stated at the start - VoD, Lord Damage, - 3rd option not created yet. Game randomly selects one? This way you can't depend on abusing one form of GvG?

Yeah, just like that.

Implementing a 3rd option easy peasy too, there are several basic options, from annihilation or person of interest (assassinate certain player from the team - if no one kills lord on time) or golden goal, first one to kill someone from the other team, wins, winner winner chicken dinner.

Quote from Motoko

This is an interesting idea - At least how I am interpreting it.

Are you suggesting the idea of randomized goals?

GvG Match Starts - Goal is stated at the start - VoD, Lord Damage, - 3rd option not created yet. Game randomly selects one? This way you can't depend on abusing one form of GvG?

Perhaps the 3rd mode could be a mashup of the two? The lord could walk at say 20. Win by either lord damage or killing the guild lord outright. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to make a new end game but I actually like this idea.

Wrong Motoko, you could easily bypass those obstacles by putting a "condition" or "flux" that gives 20% more damage and less 20% on healing at 20 min mark (on assinate or first blood).

Not only that by the end of the game there is always people with Death Penalty, people who has the stand, which will granter advantage to end the game, etc. If neither serves right, just call it a tie, after 5 minutes, it's been done before and having a tie will also result in people leaving defensive play, since you are not going to win which is your primary focus.

Couldn't agree more. People will abuse whenever they have a chance, not crying a river on that, can't argue.

But the whole agenda of having randomness objectives on GvG is to diminish that, having different goals to rotate will also give less encourage on this behaviour. Not only that turtleness is not unbeatable, hell a single split can break a entire team if their sole purpose is to wait until the 20 mins mark.

There have been talks about different end game mechanics since it was obvious that VoD needed a change. Sadly I don't know the options which were given. Could ask around if you really want to know... But it doesn't sound like something easily to implement to increase activity (not that there will be an easy solution except for throwing a lot of money).

Quote from Sadness

Implementing a 3rd option easy peasy too, there are several basic options, from annihilation or person of interest (assassinate certain player from the team - if no one kills lord on time) or golden goal...

I've amended that condition a little bit, to be better-suitable for the task: the team which has taken down more foes within 4 minutes time frame upon timer countdown, wins the match.

As many of you might remember, the similar objective was previously featured on Broken Tower map of HA tournament.

Just to bring easeness to my sleep, i'm obligated to ask. Why the debate on these so called "minor changes" if we all know that the center and core of PvP is skill balancing? It feels somewhat...I don't know.

It would make sense if Stephen came to us saying: "Hey you know what? Mike O Brien finally had some reasonableness and saw that the game still has enormous potentional. He's going to spare 10 dev's/employees to rock the boat and see if the fire can spread again". But that's not even the case.

ps: and to be fair, to think that someone as Isaiah Cartwright is still there shows that the company is bound to be at all times at borderline catastrophe.

Hey,

Starting a bit shorter but can expand on any given point and will give my take on previous posts later.

There were many issues which made me quit from top tier GvG once upon a time and similar issues keeping me from returning surrounding, but not exclusively Skill balance (Removal of utility and team skills in favor of individualistic builds and high dps) , Game mechanics (VoD removal for example) and all focus on ATs instead of the quicker and slightly more random feeling of Ladder.

Some possible solutions from me from the top of my head, starting with what Motoko possibly was looking for.

1a. GvG in-activeness - Clean up the ladder from syncers and hit obvious cheaters quick and hard. Remove restrictions around teams only being able to face each other x amount of times. Remove incentive to farm title, at this point the game being fun should be the incentive I would hope. Monthly/Bimonthly ladder reset (the old claim that ladder was not reset due to historic preservation is not viable). Widen the Matchmaking search so finding games is quick.

1b. Make GvG Pug-able. One idea is to have an "Arena" where people can meet to find people. Once this is done, the leader of the team can choose any Guild hall and the team is transferred there. There should be a Balth priest and Storage chest. Here the team can setup a build and enter GvG just like normal.

For ease, either let team leader choose a Name/Cape or just assign one and leave cape blank.

You must be able to be part of a Guild while at the same time allowing this.

Ladder rating etc, I am not sure about but the activity now is so low I would not worry about this at this stage.

Otherwise of course easiest is just something similar to TA but for GvG or a mix of above and this.

2a. Give more possibilities in Scrimmages. Allow Heroes, let the one who starts the scrimmage choose flux (I don't like fluxes so mostly it would be to remove it) and possibly let the one who starts the scrimmage choose Guild hall.

2b. Allow people to scrimmage alone or in team with/against Heroes/Henchmen. Just have the Opposing Heroes/Henchmen run to the flag stand and stay there. Can help players/teams practice.

2c. Give possibility of Guild members to "lock" skills and equipment for everyone in the Guild hall so Sealed deck scrimmages can more easily be organized since skill balancing is not being done. I had my go with Banned battles a year ago but every time a new player came, mistakes and misunderstandings occurred.

Meaw. I stumbled upon the "Guild Wars to do" list of Stephen and Lindsey. They kinda ruled out Balancing skills (Unlikely).

Well I would enforce the "soft" options which would be "cap" at least HA/GvG to 6 people. That would also lift the meta a bit. Maybe bring back Heroes, since there are roles that they do much better than humans anyway.

That measures seems to be easy enough and maybe would have a highly positve affect at the community, with results that could be foreseen in a month (MAT's and AT's) along with observable mode.

Edit: Bringing back Hero Battles would have such positive affect , but then I remembered that with the stale of Balance in a short amount of time people would stumble at the same problems that we did back in 2008-09. Anyway, I know for a fact that a lot of PvErs would rejoice by having it back, maybe it's worth on the long road . Scratching this since it's a "No-No" on Stephen list.

PS: I saw people calling back Team Arenas and that would only nail down the last pin at Random Arenas coffin. No Open casket.

Quote from Motoko

I still think applying the Codex Arena weekly skill deck change to Hero Battles is the way to go.

No. No, man. Shit, no, man. I believe you'd get your ass kicked sayin' something like that, man.

I don't want to start a long debate regarding 6 players HA, but, as one of probably less than 1500 players of that format who were involved in it at the times preceding the classical 4 Warriors, 2 Necroes / 2 Trappers IWAY meta, I'll simply share the observation that the 6 players format has never been as popular as the one constituting of 8. There's no necessity in making an already not too attractive thing the one which the majority of old-timers is simply going to avoid (Sadness: what you're thinking is serving the means of activity increase, will on the contrary drop it even further).

Quote from LinseyMurdock.4165

I was pretty heavily involved in the decision to go back to 8v8 and was deeply involved in the HA community both as a player and a dev. The move to 6v6 was not a popular one for a variety of reasons. Ultimately, why we changed it back came down to game balance. The game was fundamentally balanced for 4 or 8 players, and 6 was creating some weird probably with builds. I think that argument is likely still a valid one, but I understand the desire to get this game type active again. I am willing to have a conversation with Izzy about it (he and I worked on 6v6 together back in the day), but I am not convinced this would be a healthy way to rebuild the game type.

As for the application of Codex Arena's rule of weekly skill deck changes to Hero Battles, what's the ultimate benefit of it, if I understood you correctly, Motoko? Why limit skill choices available there to a lesser utility set? Considering the outlined terms of play are already implemented at the related outpost...

While SCW and Bill have (more or less) ruled out skill balancing, perhaps it's not entire impossible. Full skill balances are a no. But if we can find and agree on max one or two inferior skills, suggest minor tweaks to make them just good enough to affect the current meta, maybe it's possible.