Why is GW2 pvp itself so toxic and anti-fun?

[Abraxxus.8971]

My opinion, it's so toxic and unfun because in ranked, there is no way to really gain rank unless you queue with a buddy and win a decent amount or participate in some kind of win trading scheme. Yeah, you might be able to get to a higher tier at some point solo queued, but with the way the matchmaker puts you on a team with 4 other random individuals, I wouldn't count on it. You might get an awesome team, or you might get a team filled with newbies and ego heroes who die a lot. At the core, the randomness of the matchmaker, due to the already low pvp population, is what makes people toxic, and the game mode, toxic.

[Vieux P.1238]

Toxicity, Hey don't be that surprise that population is so low in Spvp. I just got banned in pvp for inappropriate language. So you can't say reporting don't work. What i said you ask? I just ask a naked guy in pvp to let me beeda beedy bleep hole while dancing next to him. Trust me, it was funny! But,....snow must be white & Not even 30 min after i got lock out of the game for 300 hours. Time to go on my secondary account... Naaaaa! Play something else.. Good time for a break. thankyou guy with no life behind the ban button. :D

[Ovark.2514]

The problem is now heavily Anet incentivizes winning above all else. Most of the people playing ranked don't even want to do it. But you don't get rewarded for doing anything else in sPVP so here we are. The downed state system also exacerbates the problem. If you get downed in sPvP off a node and there are no allies near you, the opponent will likely just let you bleed out for as LONG AS POSSIBLE in order to keep the match 5v4 for as long as possible. The Bandage skill is pretty much useless and you're almost always better off not touching it. This culminates in you sitting in downed state for 20 sec or however long, feebly attempting to damage your opponent all the while knowing it's futile unless a super bursty or revive oriented teammate comes along to save you. Tell me that doesn't sound like the kind of situation you will be salty over. This game breeds salt, but luckily there are many good ways to fix it that anet will surly never do because they give 0 s H i T s about sPVP

 

[Airdive.2613]

> @"Ovark.2514" said:

> The problem is now heavily Anet incentivizes winning above all else.

 

Now I've seen everything.

[Master Ketsu.4569]

1. All PvP games result in some toxicity

2. Balance team / Class design refuses to accept the fact that builds which allow too much uptime of attacking and defending at the same time are cancerous and shouldn't exist.

[Sylosi.6503]

> @"ReaverKane.7598" said:

> > @"Sylosi.6503" said:

> > >@"ReaverKane.7598" said:

> > >it's really nonsensical to claim that team-based games are less competitive when played with teams.

> >

> > If it is a well functioning, well populated team queue, then yes, but if the game is GW2 and your "team" queue isn't a team queue, but a mixed queue, with some flaws on top of that and then your game lacks the population to enable even vaguely reasonable matchmaking in a vaguely reasonable time frame, then it is reasonable to claim that you actually on average get better matchmaking with solo/duo queue which therefore makes it more competitive in that case.

> >

>

> Well, League of legends is doing great with flex queue, Our own team queue was something comparable to that...

 

League of Legends has tens of millions of players, if it were the exact same game as GW2 it would still have vastly superior matchmaking simply because of the much larger player pool to match from. (hence why I mentioned "well populated" in my post)

 

Also if I remember correctly LoL brought back solo queue because at high MMR flex queue failed miserably, even with tens of millions of players.

 

Finally MOBAs are simply better at producing matched teams due to their design, for example it is much more likely to achieve a vaguely decent composition with a non-premade because those games typically have hard roles and a pick phase, same thing for reducing cheese when playing competitive because you get a ban phase and can only have one of each champ/hero, GW2 on the other hand...

 

> ...while it was available that was when PvP had the most players.

 

This game had the most actual PvP players at launch, most left within a couple of years, PvP has been losing players for a long time including back when there was team queue, temporary boosts from going F2P, luring a bunch of PvE players in for a while with shiny things or the initial novelty of seasons were just that, temporary boosts, then PvP went back to decline.

 

> Also all the feedback we had from devs (which, again, Arena Net isn't the most transparent of companies, so it was small pickings) does seem to point out that solo queuing vs teams (just like now vs duos) didn't have that much of an overall advantage. In fact the only mention to this that i can remember, and is still available, states that win rates of 5 men teams vs 5 solo players was close to 50%, but was actually higher on the side of the solo players (as in 5 random players would beat 5 man premades more often than not, although by a small margin).

 

No what we got back from the devs was spin, one stat that by itself is meaningless, a 50% overall win rate means nothing, because you can get a 50% overall win rate from a set of completely imbalanced games.

 

So a simplified example - at lower MMR you used to get things like PvE guilds queuing as a 5 man team doing a PvP event then the matchmaker would place solo players with a higher MMR against them to "balance" the solo vs team issue, except often this was actual PvP players so the result would be an easy win for the solo players, because these low MMR pre-mades would not utilise their advantage as a team well.

 

Conversely at the other end, how do you matchmake a group of very high MMR players who queue together and who highly utilise the benefits of a team, discord, full cheese comp, etc , against solo players the answer is you don't, because it is not possible, so easy win for the 5 man team.

 

So when you put that together, you can still end up with a 50% overall win rate, yet none of the games are actually well matched or competitive, hence why players were still leaving the game with team queue.

 

> The problem with your statement, is that, unlike what you assume, you don't get a better matchmaking.

 

Actually you do, you are confusing a declining population of a six year old MMORPG and a higher percentage of PvE players in PvP for rewards who don't really care, with matchmaking. It is not up for dispute, it is fact/maths, if you have the same player pool then on average you will get better matchmaking from solo/duo than trying to match 1/2/3/4/5, because you have more discrete units, smaller units and are less restricted.

 

Now if you have a huge population you can get away with a mixed queue. I used to play Overwatch, it has 30+ million players, when I queued whether it was solo, duo or as a trio it didn't really matter the matchmaking was generally good. I.E - if my team was made up of my trio and solos, then the opposing team would mirror that with a trio and solos, then on top of that everyone would be in a reasonable range of MMR from each other. This game simply does not have the population to do that and never has.

 

> You just have to look at ATs (which aren't a viable alternative to a ranked queue, btw) and realize how teams pretty much sort out most of the issues with a competitive game mode.

 

I agree that teams sort some of the issue, problem is they don't sort out matchmaking because there are simply not enough people who want to queue as a team (and there never have been), which is why team queue was never competitive, it was a joke, this is a queue where you had certain ESL players (granted not the good ones, at least on EU) queue up at 2 or 3 AM to roll over solo/duo players (most of whom were not even close in MMR) to top the "team rankings".

 

And the funny thing is most of the time they didn't even really need to do that, because even if a high MMR team queued at primetime the player pool of teams queuing was so small that there was no guarantee of getting a good match anyway, hence the only real way for good teams to get meaningful games was scrims, not the laughable team queue.

 

Whilst that is obviously a more extreme example, the same thing happened all the way down, just to a lesser extent because GW2 simply never had the population. Hence why they have been trying for years to bribe PvE players into PvP to prop up that lack of population, which resulted in other issues as you mentioned.

 

> The lack of population is in part a result of the removal of team pvp...

 

The lack of population is simply what happens to a 6 year old MMORPG (that isn't WoW in 2010), especially PvP in a themepark MMORPG. I hate to break it to you but the population would still be lacking whatever queue system they have and there is no reason to suppose the the numbers who left because they wanted team queue is any more than those who left because they disliked team queue. (that vote went that way for a reason)

 

 

[TamX.1870]

> @"Aza.2105" said:

> The reason for all the toxic behavior is because the game mode. Its designed for coordinated gameplay with voice communications. Instead everyone experiences it with randoms and no voice com. In fact, you might even get randoms who don't speak English at all. Conquest should be AT only. Solo/Duo Q should get a mode that requires less communication and that is actually fun to play.

 

> @"ReaverKane.7598" said:

> IF ranked was deathmatch, or even stronghold (stronghold is easy to solo carry), then i'd give it a pass, although it's really nonsensical to claim that team-based games are less competitive when played with teams. But Conquest? Conquest is 70% coordination 30% individual prowess, the worse individual players in the world can beat the most mechanically talented ones easily, as long as that first team is much better coordinated. How many times have matches been won by teams with a fraction of the other team's kills, simply because of out-rotating and playing for the objectives?

 

I fully agree with these. If ranked PvP would be deathmatch, the story would be totally different. But when the competitive game mode is up to coordination, you are teamed with randoms, your chances to make a difference as an individual are limited, and it is the game mode that you need to take to get rewards, that creates fertile ground for toxicity.

 

All PvP games are toxic to certain limits. One of the differences to those in GW2 is that in this game it is your own team members that are toxic, not the opponent: in many other games, it is your opponents who throw insults on you when you win them.

 

I also agree with some posters here saying that ranked is anything but "fun to play, fun to play against". I can't say that I enjoy it anymore, and thus I have played it just occasionally, to remind me why I don't like to play that game mode.

 

EDIT:

 

> @"Zawn.9647" said:

> Classes that applies torment+confusion where the counter play is to stand still and not cast anything to not die (sounds cool huh?)

 

Yeah, true. I have also myself wondered these two condis, just because the counter act to them is - to do nothing :o At PvE land they might, just might still sound reasonable, but in PvP land they are pretty strange effects. In lesser extent I have also wondered boons like quickness and alacrity, as this kind of uncontrolled manipulation of skill cooldowns and execution speeds is a good source to create unbalanced effects.

[Spartacus.3192]

> @"Airdive.2613" said:

> > @"Ovark.2514" said:

> > The problem is now heavily Anet incentivizes winning above all else.

>

> Now I've seen everything.

 

LOL i know right...Who would have thought that ANET would want to incentivize players to want to win in a competitive mode.

[ReaverKane.7598]

> @"Ovark.2514" said:

> The problem is now heavily Anet incentivizes winning above all else. Most of the people playing ranked don't even want to do it. But you don't get rewarded for doing anything else in sPVP so here we are. The downed state system also exacerbates the problem. If you get downed in sPvP off a node and there are no allies near you, the opponent will likely just let you bleed out for as LONG AS POSSIBLE in order to keep the match 5v4 for as long as possible. The Bandage skill is pretty much useless and you're almost always better off not touching it. This culminates in you sitting in downed state for 20 sec or however long, feebly attempting to damage your opponent all the while knowing it's futile unless a super bursty or revive oriented teammate comes along to save you. Tell me that doesn't sound like the kind of situation you will be salty over. This game breeds salt, but luckily there are many good ways to fix it that anet will surly never do because they give 0 s H i T s about sPVP

>

 

Actually, the problem is that it **DOESN'T incentivize winning** You literally just have to get to the end of a match, and you get pips, gold and reward track progress... Sure you get a bit more of those if you win. But what's more efficient? Plough through bad Matchmaking and teams to get 10 pips in 15 minutes, or throw a match in 5-10 minutes and get 3?

The problem with GW2 is that rewards are made in a very "it's participating that counts" mentality, where you'll get a reward regardless of the outcome. If it really wanted to push you to win, you'd get pips on wins only, or they'd rework the whole rewards structure into something less passive (which i've made comprehensive suggestions in the past, not keen to repeat myself).

[Daishi.6027]

Would be nice if the PvP was about the P vs P with the goal to PK. Not sumo and rotate on points.

 

Oh well guess this is why dark souls and smash exists *sigh*

[Kako.1930]

It's competitive, people don't like to lose, and when they think someone else made them lose then they get salty. Nobody ever takes responsibility, either. Hence, toxic.

[bigo.9037]

as a player who has mained the same class since release pretty much I actually feel like pvp is ok other than a few things.

 

balance isn't perfect, but it's better than it has been for a long time. I remember back when d/d ele was basically a meta build you could just stack for 5 players and win ez. it was broken on so many levels.

my class used to be terrible, but now I am on par with the meta.

 

and I mean cmon.. anyone remember 2015 HOT release and the bunker / chrono meta? that was wayyy worse. now everything feels more fluid and engaging.

sure there are some bunker builds in the meta but they aren't invincible. my soulbeast can take down about 50% of fb's ( depending on how big the node is ). yea mirages suck and are certainly a bit too strong... but only a bit. other than balance is fine imo. would be better if all classes had meta builds ofc.

 

the only real problem I have is the win / loss streaks.

 

every time I play pvp I start with a winstreak of maybe 7-10 games. everything is easy and enemies are generally below my skill level so I don't have to worry at all. my team wins mid, I win close or far. by this time I usually reach 1740-1760 in score.. which is top 50 on leaderboards.

then, after 7-10 games, it's the other way around. I go close, either kill enemy who wants to cap it or head mid as soon as i cap, but mid is already lost and 2 players are down. blablabla match is lost and everywhere I go i am outnumbered. close I get outnumbered 1v2, damnit, I don't want to die, no teammate is coming to help me downing on point is useless. I run away to mid, oh, 1 guy down vs 2 people. then either die mid trying to survive or whatever, or run far just to find more enemies and a barely alive teammate. this goes on for the exact same number of matches with the only difference there are a few more matches that are fair with a chance to win if everyone tryhards the whole time. and that is good. but 5-7 out of 10 matches on loss streak are completely unwinnable as a single player. impossible to carry that hard when you are outnumbered in every fight.

[The Ace.9105]

Cause the game is bad and nobody should play it actually.