More Guild Wars 2 sPvP

I've done a little bit more sPvP and I wanted to check in on my blog to say that it is still fun. It is refreshing how easy it is to jump into a match, have a little fun, get some rewards, and then return to real life. Matches last at most 15 minutes, meaning you can be confident you will complete any given match within 15 minutes from the time you start it.

On top of that, the reward system for sPvP actually feels pretty good since they recognize you whether you win or lose at the end and give you points in a nice little pop-up. Most games I've played, I've even one of the top contributor awards for something. That could just happen because my team members aren't very good at standing on capture points, so I get the most credit for doing it, but it still feels rewarding and fun. This is the first MMO that I've actually had fun playing PvP modes casually.

First Impressions on Guild Wars 2 sPvP

I decided a couple days ago that I needed to give the PvP in Guild Wars 2 a try. I mean, they have daily achievements for it, and they probably give you something good in terms of rewards for participating.

It turns out that the daily achievements are super easy to complete. You just play 3 matches, which requires about 30-45 minutes of time, and they play one after the other. You get placed on a team against another team, and most of the games seem to revolve around controlling points on a variety of maps. Of course the real focus is beating up the other guys and keeping yourself from dying.

ArenaNet does a good job of keeping things balanced by upleveling all characters to 80 and giving them a full set of PvP gear that can be used only for PvP. All of your PvP items are unavailable for use outside of PvP. Somehow they manage to still offer item rewards through the use of alternate stat allocations and item runes. These additional items don't fundamentally change the balance of the game mode, but do provide additional variety and a method for rewards beyond just the stats on your profile. Overall the mode seems fun, and I feel like I should play it a lot more.

League of Legends (Ranked)

I know I've talked a lot about how much I dislike League of Legends, and there are still a lot of things that I don't like about the game (and the developer). However, I decided to give the game a shot again after more than a year of not playing it (my last games were in December of 2011) in order to play with my brother who has continued playing occasionally. That means I missed the entirety of season 2 and whatever happened in season 2, including the changes to items and all of the new heroes (I refuse to call them champions any more; they're heroes).

The main thing I noticed about coming back to League of Legends is how toxic the community is. It's really ridiculous that I communicate openly with the team, describing what I don't understand and the things I need help in (items and matchups mostly), only to be flamed incessantly for being the worst <insert hero I'm playing> they've ever seen. Interestingly, after a good 5 games of being flamed, my next game I was complimented as being the best support (Sona) they'd ever seen. Now I don't know what Riot should (or could) do to attempt to solve the problem with the community, but I've never dealt with this kind of abuse in Dota 2. HoN seems to be similarly angry about things.

Anyway, I have played a number of ranked games in the last week or so, and right now my profile reports an Elo of 1151. I recognize this isn't a pro ranking or anything, but I believe that 1200 is roughly the 50% mark, so I'm only slightly below the average of all people who play the game, even after taking a year off. I should also mention that I had only played a single ranked game before last week, so the ban and picking procedure was brand new to me. I do have a real job, and a real social life on top of the games I play, so I probably won't be playing anywhere near as much as other gamers. However, at the present time, I plan to play and stream League of Legends ranked games at least a couple times a week as I get a chance. If I can convince some of my RL friends to play on a team, I might even attempt to coordinate a 5v5 team too.

To give you a taste of how bad I am, here's a ranked game where I played Malphite in the jungle because somehow both sides forgot to ban him.

Bloodline Champions

A couple of my friends told me yesterday that they wanted to make an arena team in Bloodline Champions to play somewhat competitively. A while back, I had bought some starter pack for the game, so I was quite interested by this prospect and told them that I would give it a shot with them. Thus, yesterday, we played 5 of our 10 placement matches required to be placed into a competitive league. We won all 5 matches, which is very encouraging.

In addition, I brought my gaming stream back online using a new streaming tool that I'd be glad to discuss at some point in the future. Maybe I'll even update my streaming tutorial page. Regardless, since I recorded all of the matches, I decided to upload them to my new youtube channel, so you can find the videos there. I also have embedded the first match here.

Guild Wars 2, World vs. World

Guild Wars 2 has a fun game mode called World vs. World or WvW for short. The way it works is everyone from your world (server) can join together and fights against the players from 2 other servers for control of 4 maps. 3 of the maps are called "borderlands" for each of the worlds, where one world spawns in the middle and the others spawn on the edge and fight to control the nodes on the map. The fourth map is called the Eternal Battlegrounds and consists of 3 spawns around the edge of the map along with 3 keeps to control along with 1 castle (bigger than the rest) and many towers and supply camps. Supply camps are worth the fewest points, but they are the only way to increase the amount of supply in your larger buildings. Supply is important, because without it, you cannot repair buildings, build siege units, or upgrade your buildings to have stronger walls and greater defenses. There are NPCs that will help defend points you control, and you can hire more using supply and a small amount of in-game gold (usually only costing silver).

While I think this is really one of the best game modes for PvP in any MMO yet, it's not without issues. Probably the primary issue is when there is a huge player count imbalance between the worlds. It's not immediately clear what the right solution would be to having the wrong number of players from each world, but at least World of Warcraft tried something with Wintergrasp (even if it didn't always work the best). Another issue for WvW is that it split among 4 separate maps, and there doesn't appear to be any easy way to call for help from players on the other maps when you need it. Guild Wars should build in better tools for commanders to communicate with each other in order to organize the war. Even with these weaknesses, I still believe Guild Wars 2 WvW is one of the best PvP and PvE combined game modes I've seen.