"Competitive Casual" Gameplay Options

#1 - March 14, 2014, 11:11 a.m.

I’ve been thinking about the way Guild Wars 2 handles matchmaking, and match options for a while now. As for myself, I initially bought this game for the PvE and ended up getting hooked on PvP instead because I didn’t find the PvE engaging/challenging enough. I’ve been ranked in the top 50 of both solo queue and team queue but I’ve never considered myself a ‘competitive’ player. I enjoy playing the game (sometimes) and watching streamed tournaments/matches. In short, I consider myself the kind of player that Arenanet needs if they want the PvP scene to grow

The problem I have currently is that options available for casual/noncompetitive players who just want to have fun learning different classes and fighting conquest in a less stressful environment are really lacking.

Team Queue: Team Queue is great but after I get home every day I don’t necessarily feel like trying to find another four players to join with me.

Solo Queue: This mode is a step in the right direction but is actually probably the most toxic aspect of PvP. I see almost everyone running builds like Decap Engineer or Minion Necro or bunker warrior, and the imbalanced maps Spirit Watch and Skyhammer are frustrating to anyone who wants to play a specific class.

Hotjoin: No one plays hotjoin to try and learn the conquest game mode. It is a disorganized deathmatch with rampant team stacking.
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My suggested solutions:

1. Remove the leaderboards from solo queue or create an unrated queue. This will instantly stop the majority of the complaints about Skyhammer and create a friendlier environment for new and less competitive players to enjoy playing conquest as intended.

In addition to the above reasons, I believe that removing the leaderboards from Solo Queue would increase the amount of teams being formed because there are people seeking recognition on the Solo Queue leaderboards (even though they are broken) who would now move to team queue.

2. Remove hotjoin, keep custom arenas. Why? Hotjoin is a mess and is a terrible place for new players to try and learn the game. It is not uncommon to see a full team of rank 40-50 players against eight 1-20s. The games are invariably blowouts because even if both teams have even numbers of players, you can still join the one ahead by 200 points. The new unrated queue with a hidden MMR would serve as a much better place for new players to learn the game and feel like they are participating in something meaningful.

3. At a certain point, if participation in team queue picks up, teams should be grouped together under their guild name on the leaderboards. Arenanet has not done enough to make pvping as a guild group rewarding. Winning matches with your guild should give upgrade points to your guild the same way doing guild missions or world events does.

John Corpening

#8 - March 15, 2014, 8:15 p.m.

Thanks for the post infantrydiv. Your take on the situation is incredibly insightful and well thought out. I really appreciate your constructive feedback on where the game is and where it should go to accomodate players at all levels.

Do you feel that Solo Arena has any benefit to a player for learning how to play as a team?

John Corpening

#44 - March 16, 2014, 4:08 p.m.

Great discussion guys. There were some particularly good points made. Regarding building the base, Pixels, infintrydiv and a couple of others are really right on. It’s important to the game as a whole to bring new players into it. Even if someone starts off in PvP just getting their dailies, at least they are playing PvP, learning the basics and seeing the differences between how to play in PvP vs. PvE and even WvW. It’s a different skill set and takes some getting used to.

Hotjoins were meant to be the starting point to get your feet wet. They are chaotic and they don’t really teach you very much about teamwork but they do provide a way to experiment with your skills, and learn the layout and mechanics of the maps without thrusting players into an environment where the other players have a lot of expectations of your ability. It’s also a great place to chill out and let off some steam without too much pressure.

As garethh pointed out though, the end goal is to play as a team. This is something we don’t really get out of Hotjoin. The question was whether Solo Arena takes players a meaningful step closer to Team Arena or not?

Solo Arena was not part of our original plan, it is something we added directly due to feedback from the community. There were a couple of big reasons for it, one is that matchmaking doesn’t take into account the size of the groups involved. The other is that a lot of players asked for a format closer to Team Arena than Hotjoin that they could do when the rest of their team is offline.

What seems to have happened is that for a lot of players Solo Arena became a way to never have to think about making a team. This is in large part because a player could gain some fame from the SA leaderboard. As a result, a lot of highly competitive players did not move on to Team Arena and as teams inevitably broke apart many of those players drifted back to SA and made it their thing. So this area that was meant to be the next step for potential new hardcore players became the end goal for many existing hard core players.

This leads to infintrydiv’s post. The competitive casual group is a very important, and very large, part of the PvP ecosystem. They are the people who have taken or want to take that step out of Hotjoins but are not ready to be running the meta builds, to be looking for animation ques, or take on specific roles on a cohesive team comp, etc.. Most of them want a more competitive atmosphere but really want to keep it just for fun. Some of them will develop further and will become the next group of top tier players.

The problem is that they step out of Hotjoins and enter a highly competitive SA environment or they solo queue into TA to potentially face premades. From my experiences as a player, the latter option tends to be a better choice. I have often found groups grateful to pick up a fifth, willing to offer guidance on what they want me to do given my build and accepting that I’m a pug and probably not very good anyway. The attitude I often see in SA is that if everyone in this random group of pugs isn’t top notch then RAGE!.

There needs to be a safe place for the competitive casuals to develop by playing the game. I think infintrydiv and the rest of you have provided some really excellent suggestions on this.

One question I have for you as a discussion topic, if the system did better at matching similar sized teams with each other, would there be a need for SA at all? We couldn’t guarantee perfect matchups all the time so let’s also say that if it was detected that the matchup wasn’t good enough that the team at a disadvantage got a bonus for trying or at the very least was not penalized for trying? Keep in mind that we are just kicking around ideas here.

There was also some really great feedback on the topic of communication in the game. This discussion is big enough that it deserves its own thread. I’ll start that up shortly so we can brainstorm on that for a bit. Thanks to you guys who provided such great feedback on the topic of communication.