HA in Crisis

As i told it a few months ago in some thread , HA is now completly dead .

During half of the day , you can get at best 1 opponent in The Underworld after 30mn-1hour. During the last half of the day, there are a bit more teams playing , but there are still too many restarts , skips , etc, which are removing all fun( i especially want to talk about uw --> court/hall skips when it comes to ganked or rock/paper map.. )

So , to make aswell a link with pvp on american hours , as you can imagine , many people just cannot play that arena at all anymore. That's why i think something should finally be done in HA , or even in any PvP arena , to prevent the fact that they will be for sure empty in a few months . Here are a few suggestions :

- Revert Back to 6v6 , or allow more henchs in party : it takes usually an hour to find an infuser for example , thus while waiting , people are leaving , etc... Aswell , as you know , when you get an afk/dc and then lose , your team has 99% chance of disbanding ....

- When someone DC's , there should be an option to ask party members whether they want to replace the guy with an hench.

- Making HA/GvG quest more regularly : it was suggested it wasn't really good idea , but it seems that a lot more people play those arenas when it's quest day...

I know that , for many players , they might consider this as " who cares of HA anyway " , and there are others who got no idea what HA is and are just going to post having read what some people said .Thus , it would be nice to not have such posts here and just try to elaborate a serious discussion . As i said , nothing was done for a year and half now , and it's time to do something ...

I'm afraid little can be done for HA, or for PvP in general. The above suggestions will only delay the inevitable decay that preceeds it, and PvP as a whole for GW1 is on the path to permanent inactivity. Once GW2 arrives, the final blow will be dealt, and there's just nothing that can be done to prevent this. I commend you as well as anyone else that strives desperately to save the very little that's left of PvP, but all good things must come to an end. Look on the bright side though, many awesome games are coming! GW2, D3, Star Wars MMO, etc.. *cheers*

Anet has a very long list of things to do and pvp has been sitting on that list for way too long. /signed for pvp love

However, them working on HA and pvp in general will make a lot of people angry. Anet's sitting between a rock and a hard place.

Better solution: those people currently playing HA, r6+ let's say, may form teams with noobs, ping them their builds for the beginning, tutor them through the first few games.
I'd love to get into HA, even just occassionally, but it's damn hard to find a group unless you're r3+ hero or r3+ glad.

Yea I agree with drkn there is much complains from the ones players that play HA but they have themselfs to blame for a person with no rank there is practical imposseble to get a team if you dont know someone.

It would be nice if people that got no idea what they're doing here and that aswell aren't contributing to the discussion ( such as 2 above posts ) , which is to make HA revive , stop posting thanks....

@ drkn : i understand your point ; on those dead hours , i personally take anyone , but the problem is that there is usually noone to fight here ( or at best , we get 1-2 opponents during 2 hours..). That's not really a rank problem imo....

Rank-discrimination drove away unranked players, both newcomers and seasoned. It's no surprise that HA is where it's at, now. I even went to HA about less than a month ago, and there were barely enough people to form two whole groups to enter. I saw a player with a party size of 3... wanna know what he was spamming?

---> "lf r9++ [insert build type here]" <---

Then I was all like, "bro... look around you... do you really think you can be picky with less a small handful of players in here? and about half of them are prolly afk, too..."

So if you ask me, HA's in a crisis solely because of this kind of discriminatory behavior towards players. I want to give you my sympathy... I really do, but... ... ...no.

" who cares of HA anyway "

when you creat team and ask r9-10+ then what do you expect

HA isn't in crisis.
Theres plenty of people there.

Stop asking for r7+ or some other BS and you'll easily get a team together

[qoute]- Revert Back to 6v6 , or allow more henchs in party : it takes usually an hour to find an infuser for example , thus while waiting , people are leaving , etc... Aswell , as you know , when you get an afk/dc and then lose , your team has 99% chance of disbanding ....[/quote]


No wont work, theres a reason why they changed/remove that. More henchmen means its PvE making fame more meaningless. 6v6 forces more constraints on builds aka less diversity. It's pretty hard to put foes grasping, rupts and song efficiently on a 6member team,aka less build diversity.


HA's reward for consecutive wins is soo great that elitism will always prevail. I myself will not play with any1 who is r10 no matter what. I barely play with most of the r12,13s because I think most of them are idiots and fame leechers. Anyways its people like me that is causing HA to die and honestly I rather not play than play with idiots. Why?? because I play to farm HoH chest or get 10+consecs, and I don't find farming the first 3maps fun, which is what most of what ID1 is mainly capable of. Also the players I know in HA don't even use ID1 to form groups(I'm sure alot of the sucessful groups do the same thing), if their friendslist isnt on they wont play. What this means is that any1 that forms in ID1 will get raped by the people that form with their friendslist, no one likes to get raped so newbies rage quits, no new player gets into HA blah blah blah HA dead.

Typical answer from someone who didn't read the reason of the thread. It's supposed to fix inactivity in that place at some hours . You prefer " PvE'rs making fame " or noone being able to get any team and opponent ????

Btw , since you obviously didn't understand , not everyone do play the game between 9-11pm GMT , and if you think it's so easy to form even a randomway at 6 am GMT for example , then show me some proof

wont work because you are fixing one problem with another problem. I have no problem finding 7other players that wanna play HA, you have. I have a problem with ha being 6v6 or hench based at its current state, but you don't.

reset all player's hero point to zero, it will come back to life instantly

if this happens then we'll see "GLF until recently r7+"

Say all you want about rank discrimination, the ranked people will just moan at you.

I tried telling them months ago but you won't sway them.

This is entirely true. Iv tried to get involved in HA over the years but I haven't been able to being r1 hero and r0 glad (and Iv only gotten r1 b/c a friend of mine used to lead an HA guild). At this point in time, iv kind of just given up even trying for a group. I mean back when I played for this friend's team, I learned how to play some of the HA midline builds pretty well, but even then, I had no way of proving that to other pugs. Currently, no matter how good you are, it doesn't matter as long as you don't have the rank. If older players would allow us newer players into teams and teach us the current builds/tactics, that would certainly get me back into playing HA. I don't really have the opportunity to gvg since Im not in a GvGing guild and I dont know anyone who could guest me, but I would love to be able to HA.

Unless changes are made to make HA more casual friendly, it's going to keep dying. Making it 6v6 isn't enough.

Here's the problem: casuals drive pvp and keep it alive. They are your grassroots and without them, you've got very little. However HA is extremely non-casual friendly in part because of how pvp is in GW.

Two words: relative fame.

The amount of fame rewarded for a victory should depend on your relative level versus the opposition. If two elite and experienced teams fight, it should reward normally. If two groups of complete novices fight, also normal reward. But if a group of random nobodies manages to defeat an elite team with an average rank of 12, it should be more rewarding than defeating a bunch of fellow scrubs.

Likewise, defeat should reward fame if your opponent was sufficiently higher in rank. That way, a group completely new to the format can get their rears handed to them, but still gain experience, and that experience translates into a minor fame bonus which will help them join groups later. It would only kick in when they fight elite teams, groups against which they will almost inevitably fail, thus providing them with an incentive to stick with the format even in the face of defeat.

There's no point in HA if it takes hours to find a team, and inevitable defeat gives you absolutely nothing when you get mauled by an elite crew. The first step towards getting around this is to help alleviate the rank discrimination that plagues the format.

1) Rank Discrimination
--- First, you have the elitist snobs who won't let anyone into their group. I've managed to get myself into a few r10+ groups, and honestly, they were awful. Sure, I got some fame points, but playing with people that shallow and rude sucked the fun right out of the experience. Second, if you PUG your own group with randomway, you're guaranteed to get at least 4 people who have no idea what they're doing. That's fine; everyone has to start somewhere, but if no one knows what they're doing, how are they going to learn how to PvP? There's only so many times a person is going to put up with utter failure before they give up entirely.

2) There's No One There
--- It takes almost an hour to find a decent group of people, and by the time you've gotten yourself past the Zaishen, it can take dozens of timer resets to get into the Underworld. That situation has nothing appealing about it for anyone, much less the casual gamer. You're wasting an hour and a half for nothing. Why bother?

3) Template Exclusion
--- I can't count how many times I've seen people thrown out of groups by idiots who think that the builds on PvXwiki are the only way to PvP. Meta builds are great to use as guidelines to let people know what's popular at the moment, but yelling at someone because they didn't copy skill for skill the build shown on the BBway Team page of PvXwiki is just retarded. Do people not have any ingenuity anymore? There's hundreds of skills in Guild Wars and there's only about 30 being used.

Conclusion: What we're going to have to do is start taking the initiative. It's obvious the higher ranked people don't give a damn about anyone but themselves, and it's obvious we aren't going to change their minds. If you want to play in HA, you're going to have to find people like yourself and play with them. Start groups. Start a guild. Look for a guild. Don't be shy! Add the idiots who trash talk to your ignore list. Watch the HoH matches in-game (press B). I do this a lot. You can learn from those. Pick a profession you like and watch what the person does. You bought this game; you have every right to play all of it.

Brilliant.
They could also award fame points, like they do with Balthazar Faction, for each kill.

Rank discrimination is a natural reaction to not being able to play with similarly rated players. No one wants to teach someone how to play every day and players want to play with similarly skilled opponents or they can't have fun. The only PvP format with this is GvG, yet it's even more difficult to play.

No, they're not idiot snobs just because they don't want to play with you. They're just trying to carve some fun out of a flawed format.

HA, RA, and CA will never be good without letting bad players fight bad players so they can actually learn.