Guild Wars: Why the GvG Weekend is Stupid

Apparently, Guild Wars is going to have special events each and every weekend. Last weekend, the developers brought back some our the player's favorite mini-games. Whether it was the rollerbeetles or the boardwalk or, my personal anti-drug the dodgeball, much fun was had by all. This weekend? Well, it's a GvG weekend! You'll get double the faction and double the champion points for playing GvG. Because, you know, it's not like we have a Celestial Tournament or anything to get people interested in high level GvG (I think it's doing a pretty good job of that, obviously, as while I don't have any proof it does seem like more people are playing. Obs mode is fuller and with better matches. People are talking. I know a few people who'd been taking a break who came back specifically because they wanted to take part in the tournament. So, if nothing else, the Celestial Tournament's succeeded in renewing a lot of interest there). But, of course, none of those matches are on obs mode and not everyone had a guild or got registered in time so perhaps there is a need to drum up yet more interest in PvP. Getting people to play and enjoy that part of the game is vital to its continued success, after all.

But double faction and champion points? Come on. More faction is never a bad thing but it seems like it's only going to be offered for GvG. The real people to attract into GvG aren't going to be enticed by that. You'd be better off by giving out special skins for PvP characters or fancy items like what you can get in the chest at the Halls as the people you want to draw are the ones who need encouragement just to PvP. Anyone who's thinking about PvP enough to be able to step into GvG isn't going to be enticed by a bit more faction. At best, you make their road to UAX a little easier but they're already well along the way if they're not already there. It's been several months since Nightfall was released, after all. And I can't speak for anyone else but I haven't PvPed nearly all that much. But I've already earned well over 300k in faction and have only a few currently unimportant elites to unlock. In fact, I'm down to the ones I want to pick up in PvE anyway and just haven't bothered to get to with the right character yet. It's a question at this point of whether I'll unlock them to avoid capping out my faction or I'll run some missions first. But there's nothing I need, nothing I want. And I've only been playing the game for two months. I've really only been heavily GvGing for the past month. People who've been doing HA or RA since the expansion's release are no doubt well ahead of me. This weekend, then, isn't offering much incentive for people who PvP a lot to head to the GvG format.

As for champion points. Well, champion points are earned by someone winning a match when their guild has more than 1200 rating. It used to be higher when titles were introduced which annoys me no end – I was in a lot of matches with guilds that hovered just under the top 100 mark and the 1300~1400 rating plateau around when factions was released. Games that, now, would have given me points but I left before the rating mark was lowered. It didn't bother me at the time because there wasn't any point to the title, it was just something to mark out the top 100 ladder teams and give them a little drool factor. Now, of course, those ranks give you a bigger faction cap and I actually want them (Not because I need the faction at the moment but there'll be another expansion at some point in the future. Having as much faction as I can on hand the day it goes lives means that I can grab a bunch more stuff right at the beginning. That's worth the effort to me.). The problem? Well, since the ladder was borked and the k-rating changed, there aren't many teams above that mark. So, by my count there are something like twenty~thirty teams who are already earning those points. Again, this weekend makes it a bit easier for them and might encourage them to play more. But those are the teams that are already playing a lot and enjoy GvG – those titles are a bonus not a reason for them to play.

For everyone else, though, who might be around the 1100 rating mark, say, this weekend's a reason for them to climb up the ladder and get to that point. Since the ladder's never going to reset, point inflation means that if they can get there they'll be likely to keep on earning those points. A little bonus weekend just gives them the incentive they need to get in a lot of game and make that push. That might be all well and good if I didn't think that the teams likely to want to increase their rating would be using the cheapest ways possible to do so. I imagine this weekend is going to be full of teams looking to come up with gimmick builds that will roll their opponents as fast as possible, get as many matches crammed into their playtime as possible, and, in so many words, be absolutely unbearable to me and my team as we're trying to get some practice for the next tournament match. If anything, it's going to encourage me not to play GvG this weekend because it's going to be a gimmick filled mass of brokenness as everyone tries to, predictably, game the system.

I'd much rather have another test weekend. Throw some balance changes into the mix, alter a few maps, and let people have fun with it. Some GvG maps, like Jade, could use some tweaks. And I think that, along with another carrot or two, that would draw a lot more people to spend meaningful time with the format. But, of course, with the tournament going on that's a pipe dream. Given all the scheduling difficulties, I'd much rather they put a hold on these weekends (At least the PvP side of them. You want to have double drops and roleplayer conventions, you go right ahead.) and set the fallback times for those rounds on the weekends. People will still have problems – I know OoX would have had a harder time getting people on this Saturday than they would have tonight, for example – but, on average, fewer people would have problems showing up for their matches. Beyond that, the developers are unlikely to touch anything balance-wise during the tournament especially when matches might be going on – since they leave the scheduling up to us, they have no idea when they might be played, after all. So, even though balancing is something that benefits from long-range planning and testing and sampling things well in advance, they're likely to wait and hold off on any sort of map changes or skill fixes. Again.