Is it okay to be casual?

[tacoclaw.8251]

There are 27 professions. Yeah, only a few of them are metas and there is overlap, but I really don't want to learn all the different skills of all the different professions before I jump into ranked pvp. I have a vague idea of all the different professions, but not a strong grasp. I have studied my toon pretty well, read about how all my buffs stack etc. Honest question: is this good enough for ranked? Is there a player base like me? I ask because in a few pvp mmos if you aren't a god having played for years and know how to counter each individual profession's abilities you just get flamed hard. I don't want to bring my fellow players down, I just want to play the best I can with the time I have and see what it happens. I really don't care if I win or lose that much, just want to try to work my toon the best I can and engage the map strategy. But I don't have the time to study all the classes. And honestly, if I ever let anyone down I'm sorry. BTW, I have played about 70 unranked and I have had two freezes and one weird disconnect. Please be aware that not all afkers and dishoners are purposeful. Cheers and happy hunting.

[Im Too Godlike.5629]

its ok to be casual youre skill level will be shown when u finish ranked placements and people who flame u are just as bad as u so it doesnt hurt that bad.

[sephiroth.4217]

Just jump in and have fun man.. Learn as you go if ya know what I mean

 

Theres usually throw away AT teams you can join too if that interests ya, I actually made one the other day and we accidently went a few rounds on troll builds lol

[Stallic.2397]

If you can beat most players in unranked, then you're ready for ranked. Other things to learn are team rotations and objectives, but you will get the hang of that pretty fast. If unsure, just follow the group

[xp eke xp.6724]

Its ok to be casual :)

Btw **if you play ranked you are casual**.

 

Thats cause ranked, ranking your solo skills at a teamplay match, you have too less control over your teams action. Oh and cause we have different numbers of played games, you have no chance to get a fair ranking at all...

 

Means it rated how you react on randomness and not , based on what a ranking should rank, on a competitive base.

 

So to be not a casual, do tournaments ...

[BadMed.3846]

Perfectly ok to be casual. Game is meant to be enjoyed and not something to stress over.

[Yannir.4132]

It's fine to be casual, just learn as you go. It's not a university where you need to study, and no one expects you to.

[Caedmon.6798]

You dont have to have knowledge about every skill ingame.It will come naturally when you find a class you dig and you keep on fighting the same specs with it.You will learn their rotations and what to avoid,eventually.Nowadays everything is just being spammed like mad so it's prob tough for a new guy to get into.You can however find someone willing to spend some time to duel with you,pref someone able to play diff classes well enough for you learn how to counter them and what to pay attention to.As for being casual,the game mode Is casual,eventhough people try to pretend its not.Unless you go for ranked and tourneys,you shouldnt worry about a thing except enjoying yourself.

[Abazigal.3679]

I used to play seriously, always try to make tactics, draw on maps and adapt to setups. But i stopped for 2 reasons :

- people mostly do not read chat and it gets boring when you end up losing 500-250 a match that could/should be won

- it's not fun making tactics in a meta involving mirages and scourges

 

So just play it casually and do not bother for your rank. You will have less trouble and more fun

[otto.5684]

There are no restrictions on what you play. You have the right to all content regardless of your skill level. Match making in both ranked and unranked exist to ensure that people of equal skills get matched together (theoretically at least).

 

Do not let anyone tell you otherwise ?

[MyPuppy.8970]

Short answer:

Yup.

 

Long answer:

Yes, it is.

[TheQuickFox.3826]

Yes, it is okay. But.

 

You will encounter players who:

1. Are very serious about PvP

2. Cannot stand losing a game

 

Some of these players will spray negativity around and start being hostile. They suffer from a condition called "too much salt" and cannot be cured. They may shout that they hate casuals or that you are stupid and not doing your best. The interesting fact is that this most often happens in silver-ranked matches, which most likely means that they themselves aren't very highly skilled as well.

 

Best option is to right-click these players and select the option 'block' to restore tranquility again. Good luck.

 

The ranked matchmaking system will need some time to determine your skill level and put you in matches that are fair with your skill level. Give it some time to adjust. As beginner you may get some terrible matches to begin with.

[pah.4931]

It's ideal to be casual. This is not the game for you if you are hardcore. It's mostly the opposite of that.

[Lilyanna.9361]

Get ready to be ping ponged across the bored unless you are duo'ing. Lmao.

 

I've been up and down the gold latter, dropped into silver because of losing streaks, climbed back up to gold 2, sunk into gold , in silverback up to gold one, trying to get into gold three even though I usually kept staying in gold 3 on the seasons I'm trying. IDK man. I would say have fun at this point. Too random now to be considered competitive these days.

[Magnus Godrik.5841]

Its perfectly fine to be casual. In fact i would think most players are casual. We have jobs, family, friends and other hobbies.

[OutOfOrder.3719]

Yes. Just play the best you can and learn as you go.

 

But please pick a viable PvP profession, maybe even look up a build to learn from. For example, do not play Renegade or Core Necro.

 

The only thing that upsets me now tends to be players that AFK when they are only 50 points behind or players that don't listen or care about winning and are only there to farms pips.

 

The majority of the PvP community welcomes new players as long as you try your best. Have fun and always try to improve.

[judgebeo.3976]

> @"tacoclaw.8251" said:

> There are 27 professions. Yeah, only a few of them are metas and there is overlap, but I really don't want to learn all the different skills of all the different professions before I jump into ranked pvp. I have a vague idea of all the different professions, but not a strong grasp. I have studied my toon pretty well, read about how all my buffs stack etc. Honest question: is this good enough for ranked? Is there a player base like me? I ask because in a few pvp mmos if you aren't a god having played for years and know how to counter each individual profession's abilities you just get flamed hard. I don't want to bring my fellow players down, I just want to play the best I can with the time I have and see what it happens. I really don't care if I win or lose that much, just want to try to work my toon the best I can and engage the map strategy. But I don't have the time to study all the classes. And honestly, if I ever let anyone down I'm sorry. BTW, I have played about 70 unranked and I have had two freezes and one weird disconnect. Please be aware that not all afkers and dishoners are purposeful. Cheers and happy hunting.

 

Play condi mirage, spam axe, and everything will go smooth ;)

 

> @"OutOfOrder.3719" said:

> The majority of the PvP community welcomes new players as long as you try your best.

 

hahahaha of course...

[BlackTruth.6813]

95% of the people count as casual at this point sadly, can't really call yourself "pro" when you don't participate in cash prize tournaments. And guess what.. we RARELY have that anymore because of the people who released 10 minute point holding specs in HoT.

[Lilyanna.9361]

> @"OutOfOrder.3719" said:

> Yes. Just play the best you can and learn as you go.

>

> But please pick a viable PvP profession, maybe even look up a build to learn from. For example, do not play Renegade or Core Necro.

>

> The only thing that upsets me now tends to be players that AFK when they are only 50 points behind or players that don't listen or care about winning and are only there to farms pips.

>

> The majority of the PvP community welcomes new players as long as you try your best. Have fun and always try to improve.

 

Surprisingly people are climbing with vanilla condi core necro into the 1600s. It's not THE BEST, but certainly not the worst with how it used to be. I personally only use it in unranked since I prefer raw power damage of reaper, but the more confident necro mains could most certainly use it successfully in the right comps and against REALLY boonheavy builds.

[Daishi.6027]

You can be as casual as you want. However you don’t get to complain about balance if you lack perspective. I don’t want to see “zomg that ele imba cuz I can’t stop his healing!” Or anything like that.

 

Just do people a favour and don’t bring your team down in ranked.

[Ralkuth.1456]

While the matchmaking can go a bit wild sometimes, the rating does allow you to find people around your skill level.

It's absolutely great you feel pressure to do well, since it makes you play somewhat seriously and at least with focus. That's what it takes to have the mindset to improve.

Others may tell you "take it easy", but that's not the only thing you can do as a "casual".

 

Don't pay attention too much to your rating, focus on improving your skills with a good build and know its mechanics inside out. Watch streams of people playing the build at a high level.

Fighting game experts always tell you to (1) master the character you play (mechanics, and in GW2 we can include [map jump puzzle knowledge](

"map jump puzzle knowledge")), (2) know all the other characters you will play against, (3) ascend to the level of mind-gaming.

[Aplethoraof.2643]

I mean, ranked sPvP is only duo-queuing with some people bizarrely hating even that. That should give you a clear sign that it is as casual as it gets.

 

Yeah, it's cool to be casual. Just come in and have fun.

[tacoclaw.8251]

So i finished my first 10 matches and ended up in silver three playing a non meta toon. Since then I have bounced around. This is my first go around in gw2 pvp, but I have played at a high competitive level in other mmos. My take here is that at high silver and low gold the team's range of skill in more important than the player's range. Which indicates a matchmaking problem and that usually means a population problem. This may be a fun game at platinum plus when you get queued with equal players, but at the level I was at the narrow range doesn't capture the wide variety of skill set. So NO NO NO, this game is not at all good for the casual player beyond the first fifty games or so, because you will quickly see that there is very little team based play at the lower levels. You will play to your toon's full potential and then stall out and then get frustrated and then leave. The strategy happens at the higher levels. The casual gamer needs a strong ELO so that silver is meaningfully different from gold one, just as a 16 is different from a 14 handicap in golf. I would recommend they sacrifice queue times for match making. It seem instead they will just throw down pips and create a cluster kitten to keep queue time low. But the truth is matchmaking is broken in this game for the casual player. May as well play bed wars on minecraft.

[voltaicbore.8012]

> @"tacoclaw.8251" said:

>This may be a fun game at platinum plus when you get queued with equal players

 

Nah. The population problem is even more observable the higher up you go.

 

There are plenty of plat players like myself (former plat player now, I gave up on ranked this season after 6 seasons of plat and will never touch it again) that see mid-golds dragged into our matches because there aren't enough plats to go around. When I dropped into gold 3 this season, I still managed to cycle through a shockingly high number of top 50 players on the opposing team.

 

A big part of the issue is that people gunning for titles or seeking just to keep the plat badge _have_ to keep their matches played count at a tightly calibrated level. For several seasons, I myself only played to prevent decay. Because of the aforementioned population issues and lack of full team queue, the unpredictability of team quality means it's too hard for people struggling to keep plat 1/plat 2 to just spam matches and win enough to stay where they want. The season I managed to notch the top 250 title, I had to make sure that I played for just 1 net win per day for X number of days, to strike the right balance between number of matches played (if someone with a comparable score played more than you, they take your leaderboard spot) and a steady mmr increase.

 

 

[tacoclaw.8251]

The season I managed to notch the top 250 title, I had to make sure that I played for just 1 net win per day for X number of days, to strike the right balance between number of matches played (if someone with a comparable score played more than you, they take your leaderboard spot) and a steady mmr increase.

>

>

Thanks for the thoughtful reply voltai. I think it's a really hard thing for an mmo pvp to keep the focus on playing the game and not gaming the game. I moved to GW2 because the community is the best I have ever seen, but the problems of matchmaking remain. Six years is a long time! We pvp players are indeed a strange and dedicated group!

 

What I love about GW2 was there was no pvp gear grind.