JTGuevara.9018

Eh...the assassination was expected. Smodur did kill Cinder, someone close to Ryland. He got shot in return, nothing complicated here at all.

I really don't see a problem. Drizzlewood is really two meta events in one, the southern portion and then the northern portion above the bridge. If you try to do both, of _course_ it's going to take a while!

The Balthazar reveal in season 3, hands down.

That _entire_ fiasco was the worst storytelling I have ever seen. A potentially monumental reveal such as one of the human gods was used for cheap shock value without any hints or implication. Just...bam...Balthazar. The whole disguise shenanigans as "Lazarus" was just hamfisted all the way to sunday. Of course, I could say the same for the 2nd half of season 3, which was the _worst_ season, imo.

....that is not pay-to-win, that's cosmetic.

Pay-to-win basically would be opening a black lion chest and getting a higher tier item above legendary with better stats. That does not happen.

I repeat: _Cosmetics is not pay-to-win!_

Now, loot boxes are a problem in and of themselves. It's a question of whether they should even be allowed in games in the first place. ANet's way, at the very least, deals only with cosmetics. As everyone says, other games abuse this system way worse.

NOT a good update. AS IF rev and engi needed any more buffs...warrior gets barely nothing at all...

I'm disappointed that rifle wasn't even touched upon. The pierce needs to be brought back. I also think adding a knockback to rifle 4 would be VERY nice!

> @"Julius Seizure.4985" said:

> This is what eventually happens when you tailor a game mode for the vocal elite. The developers and many of the top-tier players have alienated the fat part of the upper bell curve— mid/high gold to low platinum players. This is why there are long match times and the mode feels like it is moribund.

>

> The developers have allowed unbalanced duo-queue teams to farm solo-queue players for rank and rewards. Hackers, botters, and exploiters repeatedly go unpunished. Match manipulators are never properly addressed. Balance patches are few and far between, and the MMR algorithm should be adjusted far more often. Low skilled duos are consistently overweighted while high skill duos are underweighted.

>

> Many top tier players smurph on alt accounts, manipulate the queues with other top tier players, and generally kill the enjoyment of competition while chasing rewards and titles. This universally comes at the expense of mid-high gold and low platinum solo queue players, which have left the game mode in droves and spiked queue times.

Yup! That mid/high gold and low plat group is GONE. Those people were the ones propping up this stupid system. They're the ones that took the brunt of the MMR loads for their teams....now they're gone. Of course, when the company caters to the "elite gamers" and the social media hordes, THAT'S when your game dies. This happens in _every_ game.

> @"Hot Boy.7138" said:

> > @"JTGuevara.9018" said:

> > Ranked pvp needs to be BURNED to the ground. It's PLAGUED with a shoddy matchmaking system that limits leaderboard progression of any sort unless you get lucky somehow or exploit the system. Also the community is getting EVEN WORSE by the day. Afkers, a-rhymes with holes, botters, hackers, quitters...I'm close to just calling it quits at this point. There is no saving this sinking ship. I'm freaking TIRED of trying to rank up this ladder only for people to throw matches or decide that they're going to afk if they don't get their way, it's INFURIATING.

>

> matchmaking is pretty good in this game. The problem is the shrinking player base. they gonna keep force-feeding conquest until no one is left. And not to mention the big fat lie about frequent balance updates after that last big update. I love this game, so I hope anet gets it together. Until then, I'll be in PSO2

Matchmaking is GARBAGE. It is NOT good in the slightest.

Ranked pvp needs to be BURNED to the ground. It's PLAGUED with a shoddy matchmaking system that limits leaderboard progression of any sort unless you get lucky somehow or exploit the system. Also the community is getting EVEN WORSE by the day. Afkers, a-rhymes with holes, botters, hackers, quitters...I'm close to just calling it quits at this point. There is no saving this sinking ship. I'm freaking TIRED of trying to rank up this ladder only for people to throw matches or decide that they're going to afk if they don't get their way, it's INFURIATING.

Yup! Warriors and mesmers are STRUGGLING right now

I _love_ how most of these responses are telling OP to "suck it up", while YOU are all the ones that are offended that the OP has the audacity to block the chat, as if you people wouldn't do the same.

I just get so SICK AND TIRED of this community and online "gamers" as a whole every fucking day.

> @"Trevor Boyer.6524" said:

> I had to make the hard decision today to walk away from Guild Wars 2. This has gotten to be too much.

>

> All morning I witnessed unbelievable levels of blatant HACKING and throw war queue sniping in my games. This stuff wasn't directed at me, it was some group of players going against some other group of players and I was being caught in the middle of it. And then I came across a thief who's name starts with an N, which I am sure most of you already know exactly who I'm talking about, and boy oh boy had I never seen hacking until I had seen this guy hacking. We aren't talking someone who is sneaky with using speedhack during a stealth. Oh no, THIS guy was like 1v1ing three different people on 3 different nodes with blatant shameless use of telehack.

>

> After the barrage complete monkey @#$% that I had witnessed this morning, it was in that moment that I realized it was time to find a new game to play.

>

> GGs to those who kept it clean over the years.

>

> My discord is: **TSBoyer#3149** for anyone who wishes to contact me.

Sorry to see you go, OP. I don't blame you one bit. I'm slowly getting to that point myself once again, the community is ruining this thing for me. I can't stomach another edgy smartass in-game trying to instigate crap in my teams and openly sabotaging games as soon as things don't go your way. It's like...you're costing me pips with your stupidity...Ranked has stupidly slow progression thanks to this matchmaking system. Losses are costly. This kind of thing is happening more often now. Worse, people even attempt to _rationalize_ it. If insolent, arrogant and toxic people want this game so bad to themselves, then they can have it. They can have its carcass. I'm 35 years of age and I have ZERO patience for this shit. I have _other_ games and wonders to play. pvp is pretty much the only thing keeping me in this game.

However, to make things somewhat lighthearted, today in a match I was accused of "throwing" even though I was camping at a home point for a while since it kept getting decapped! Apparently, you can't even play the game according to the basic rules or you get accused of "throwing"!

> @"Kickpuncher.8109" said:

> > @"LCL.6259" said:

> > I don't dip much time into GW2, but I always liked to PvP more than anything. I'm a huge casual but I'm still decent at the game and try to get better when I'm actually playing it (which isn't very often). I'm not super skilled but I can hit plat rather easily by q'ing metabattle builds and tweaking them a bit. I think its every time I place plat this game starts to just completely 180 on me from fun to garbage.

> >

> >

> > Playing only 2 weeks I already know way more drama than I wish I did, have seen Anet partnered players act in ways that really baffle me, played with permanent dishonored players trolling on their alts, etc.

> >

> >

> > I think it's really kitten sad that Anet has let this stuff slide for so long, and even still allows these players buy links in their twitch accounts. I've never played a game where the veteran pvp community was so incredibly toxic and cultish to outsiders, and where the publisher seemed to genuinely condone it. Anet will ban people for saying mean words on the forum - but when the high-level PvP players that they use to advertise their dead game treat the community like trash; they just throw their hands up and pretend they can't do anything about it.

> >

> >

> > There's no bigger reason PvP is dead right now than this. Who would want to step into this environment? I don't even have to call names because this community is so cultish that if you PvP enough you already know the people I'm talking about. This includes a certain recent meltdown that I'm sure you're all aware of. That person is so delusional they're probably creaming just at the thought of being mentioned.

> >

> >

> > I couldn't imagine having the desire to learn this game when the "top players" behave this way. I've genuinely never seen anything like this before, and yes I'm aware of how tense competition can become; I'm sorry though because that just isn't an excuse for this kitten. Where is all of this arrogance coming from? Because the truth is this game has NEVER had true competition. Being top 50 out of maybe 600 real players isn't special.

>

> ANET Devs don't respect PVP or the PVP community so you can't expect the PVP community to respect PVP or the community itself. The tone is set from the top.

>

> ANET doesnt care dude lol, keep complaining on the forums while ppl buy pixels and they make empty promises on 'ZOMG HUGE UPCOMING CHANGES' which just patch the game back in the stone age to 2012 when they tried esports and failed hard.

>

> Anet doesnt care about PVP, doesn't respect PVP, and doesn't respect you. Hard to hear but it is the truth.

And WHOSE fault is that? This community is NOT getting off that easy. You all made your bed, now lie in it. This community pushed this "esports" BS, not the devs. The devs just tagged along and went with the money train. If ANet doesn't respect the community, it's because they don't deserve it, simple as that.

OP, I'm with you on all that you listed. The hackers, the open sabotaging, the immaturity, the toxicity, however...

...you and many others _still_ refuse to admit that the matchmaking algorithm itself IS the problem. The matchmaking system pretty much encourages this behavior. You talk about "match outcomes", but match outcomes are the results of the algorithm! The matchmaking algorithm has a clear _weakness_ in that it's, as you said, easy to manipulate. You _cannot_ just brush that aside. The matchmaking may not have been as big as an issue in the past with higher population masking its flaws, but now with low population, the flaws are explicitly clear. We were all new players back then, we didn't know how the system worked so the problem wasn't visible. But NOW, that people have figured out how to game the system, the system is irrelevant. Any matchmaking system that practically encourages people to game the system and punishes those who play by the rules is _not a good system_. That system needs to be destroyed and abolished. Also, you don't _need_ to be "deep in the community" to know that the system doesn't work! I'm sorry, but I smell a little gatekeeping there. People who are new will eventually figure out that they're not progressing in the ranks despite of how much they practice, in time they'll eventually figure out the scam and then they leave.

Yeah, we're struggling right now but it's not catastrophic. At least we're not mesmer...

There are still solid SB and core builds to play, berzerker though, is absolute GARBAGE. A berzerker warrior in pvp is like finding a unicorn. ANet needs to undo that "rework" that happened a few months ago. It's basically a poor man's holosmith.

Honestly though, I think ANet is scared to buff warriors. This community just blows up if warriors have _any_ momentum whatsoever.

> @"yLoon.5289" said:

> The title of this forum is totally invalid.

> A Veteran Player doesn't give a kitten about bad playing. Most veteran can already foreseen how a match will end before it even started, and hence expected the result and any other stupidity may arise due to their experience in pvp.

> While I think newcomers community is the one ranting and cursing as they were pawned by Veteran Players in every match.

>

>

That's still not an excuse to quit the match.

> @"hotte in space.2158" said:

> 90% of all Gw2 players are friendly

> the rest I met in PvP :)

>

> In any real sports in real world, you will barely hear a real champion saying, that he hates bad players, that he insults other players or that he tries to make other players ridiculous. Some champions, some streamers and plenty of players in Gw2 PvP seem to see this different.

> When they loose a match, or sometimes even when they dont, these people behave like 3 year old little children when someone has destroyed their sandcake

That's because in the real world, there's actual social repercussions for the words you say. That's not the case in online games. Players collectively in games never matured past middle school level.

> @"Buran.3796" said:

> > @"LCL.6259" said:

>

> > There's no bigger reason PvP is dead right now than this. Who would want to step into this environment?

>

> Main reason of the state of PvP is ANet: even at the time of the ESL support and the Pro Tournaments with high prizes in cash involved they support for the game mode in terms of balance, bug fixing, feature adding and introduction of new content moved always at glacial pace.

>

> One balance patch every three months (at best), maps which remains in unranked for years, bugs which last for seasons, constant reduction in the amount of amulets, runes and sigils available due inability to properly balance and segregate the skills in each game mode, and above all the lack of a structured frame of how to take advantage of the interest from PvP in the way in a lot of other games do... You see MOBAS and Battle Royale games being weekley/monthly updated and monetizing through selling skins with great success, whereas ANet never had faith in PvP. The updating was minimal and the creation of exclusive content to the game mode to appeal new players was never done, maybe because behind the scenes they planed to release a different competitive game as a whole (which is was the case never surfaced, anyway), or maybe because they din't cared because PvE was supposed to be the main drive in the game... But the thing is that even PvE has his own crisis, for the same reasons: the support pace isn't enough to keep the players busy and buying things in the gem store.

That is freaking BS.

This community was DRINKING that e-sports cool-aid back then, I'm a WITNESS to that. ANet just looked the other way.

OP, as a veteran of 8 years, I support your statement 100%. I DESPISE the gatekeeping that goes on in this community among those that been around and should know better. It's _atrocious_. I DESPISE the lack of maturity that goes on. I DESPISE the condescending attitudes towards players if you don't slobber all over the latest streamer, "meta" or talking point that this community has concocted out of their behinds.

Yeah, ANet most definitely looks the other way at the shenanigans that go on in the upper ranks. Honestly, I think it's as you say, they don't want to buck the system hence the gatekeeping mob gets out of control and trashes ANet on social media. Frankly, the people primarily hurt in this are new players like yourself.

He still is! He hasn't changed. I don't even see the problem here. Smodur is doing what is practically done in any conflict, hold the line and punish betrayal and defections. However, he does have a more heavy hand in war than in peace. But still, it's no diffferent than what any mere run-of-the-mill Charr warband does on a daily basis. The thing is, the player and Crecia want diplomacy so they can bring back Ryland in one piece. However, diplomacy doesn't always work. Bangar's forces have made it clear that they will oppose the legions to the death.

If people see a problem with Smodur, it's simply because the latest episode did a good job highlighting the differences between Crecia and co vs. Smodur, which in any case good job ANet! Basically, Smodur wasn't a problem until the story said he was a problem!

I will say mesmer, only because us warriors still have SB and core to fall back on. Berserker though....yeesh...that's all I have to say. Ever since the "rework" berserker is a literal PAPER cannon. Yup! You read right, paper. I don't call it a glass cannon...it's a paper cannon. Berzerker is _very_ prone to cc and its sustainability has been gutted to the ground. Of course this is mainly in pvp, wvw is ok

> @"aelska.4609" said:

> Freakin premades will farm us again, heck no

....uuuumm....

You know what? Never mind....I'm not going to point out the obvious here...

> @"Meteor.3720" said:

> The whole current meta if focused around chain CC'ing your opponent. It doesn't matter if the CC themselves do 0 damage - your teammates can dps the enemies down whilst they are CC'ed and unable to react.

>

> (inb4 "judge dodge" or "just bring stun break" - there are not enough dodges/stunbreaks to deal with the amount of spammable CC floating around at the moment)

Yes, this whole focus by chain CCs is COMPLETE BS. All the stability in the world can't counter that. There NEEDS to be a counter against that.

> @"Amityel.5324" said:

> agree i cant play this game anymore worst patches ever you all wanted nerfs etc...but guess what its unfun to play nowadays iam done with gw2 till next powercreep and oneshot builds that are actually fun play with or against

And THAT'S when I quit. pvp is more fun this way, minus the ridiculous mount of CCs and conditions.

I swear, some of you people are spoiled with the previous powercreep BS. Yeah, it's fun for YOU, not so much fun for the one getting powercreeped upon!

3v3 is good.

CC is a MASSIVE problem, though. Getting CC chained for _ten_ seconds is **NOT. FUN. **