GW1: PvP Heroes Ascent Guide

Not done yet - in progress

Most players in Heroes Ascent will try to form teams with a rank requirement. Their excuse for this rank descrimination is a claim that all lower ranked players are inferior, and lack the experience and the skill to play well enough. Conveniently, the only acceptable rank is almost always at a minimum of their own rank, only accepting players at their rank and above. Associated with this is almost always a great arrogance and constant put downs by those in the ranked teams, a constant bigoted sense of superiority and a responsibility to 'put the noobs in their place'. But this is all an illusion, a desperate attempt to hide a great shame. The real story is this - In online PvP games, a lot of people with destructive personal issues will swarm the game. In the real world, every village has an idiot. In online PvP games, those idiots form villages (like a bacteria infection). If the community doesn't hold itself to a respectable standard, these people will slowly take it over. This happens in almost every online PvP game, due to a lack of understanding by the developers and an unwillingness to maintain a community they give birth to. Both the developers and the community itself have a hand in the responsibility. In the case of Guild Wars, both sides have been negligent, which has almost completely destroyed the PvP community. A community that is no longer able to even understand most of the game mechanics, existing in a niche of griefing and trolling that hides under a false flag of victory and achievement. Back in 2005, 'Flavor Of The Month' builds gained popularity. It first started with Ranger spike, using Ventrilo and Teamspeak to count down to a spike. Instead of actually learning to play the game by outmanouvreing your opponent with unique strategies, teamwork and on the fly tactics, non-progressive players could bypass all that to follow a simple '3 2 1 spike' in voice chat, followed by pressing [punishing shot]+[savage shot]+[distracting shot]. Bypassing the game mechanics like this, eliminated the need to learn how to play. I once performed a little test to prove how easy it was to win with these kinds of builds. I took a team into Heroes Ascent (which was Tombs back then) with Ranger spike, and had all the Rangers turn off their screens and only play the game through Ventrilo. I was the match caller, and only glanced at my screen twice during the entire match (at the beginning, and at the end after it was over). I called spike after spike, and we won flawlessly. Ranger spike became very popular, and players who had no understanding of the game reached rank 9 in no time. Add to that the ability to prevent anyone from winning in relic run maps by blocking entry with spirits, there was no reasonable defence against it. To be able to beat Ranger spike, you would become completely useless against everything else. It wasn't that the game was imbalanced, because it was very balanced. The problem was a minor fixable flaw in the game mechanics, combined with players going outside the game and bypassing the game mechanics. The developers should have quickly added an unintrusive 'Warden' type software to prevent the use of voice chat during PvP matches, but they didn't do anything at all until the damage was irreversible. A mass exodus of the PvP community began in disgust, and Arenanet finally responded to it by slightly nerfing Ranger spike, and later preventing Spirits from body blocking players. But it was too little too late. An irreversible degenerate mentality in the PvP community had set in, and it was ever growing. Arenanet made more nerfs, only to continually imbalance the game further out of control. The skill balancing became so bad that Arenanet even ended up removing the lead skill balancer from his position and replaced him with someone else, due to so many complaints and players leaving the game due to the chronic game imbalance. The game balance improved a great deal for a while, but a problem kept emerging. Few players were interested in discovering and playing new powerful builds, they were only interested in easy builds. No matter how far their easy builds were nerfed, they just kept playing them. The long term degeneration in the PvP community was so stagnant, that Arenanet decided to stop trying to balance the game, and instead, deliberately imbalanced the game. This was an attempt to put pressure on the PvP community to try out new skills and adapt. It worked to a degree, and a constant shuffling around of buffs and nerfs were done over time to refresh the game and provoke flavor of the month players into trying something new. Over the years, almost every high ranked player gained their rank through easy flavor of the month builds like 'Ranger Spike', 'IWAY', 'Blood Spike' etc. It turned out that the players with the most rank had a tendency to be the least experienced, least competent, and most arrogant and closed minded. So is it any wonder that with all the rank requirements, they still lose to unranked randomway? Rank descrimination is a sign of weakness and desperation. Your rank should be a personal reference of achievement and experiences. It should never be a requirement. If you're ranked and still cant judge another player properly by their build and attitude, its due time you learn the game. The metagame sandbox is there as an entry level for new players, and for incompetent veterans who refuse to learn how to play the game. Good players will play in the 1,319 skill, 50 attribute world beyond. Build popularity has always been about the difficulty/success ratio, not about what's good and bad. The bigger the ratio, the more popular it is. A good player is open to possibilities. They can see a build, understand it, and judge it for themselves based on their experience and understanding of the game. A bad player hides behind rank, and has no understanding of anything outside of the very basics of flavor of the month builds. This graph shows the popularity of builds in relation to their difficulty rating and success ratio...

In a metagame full of inferior builds, most players prefer to play average builds with a lower difficulty rating, than to play more difficult builds that have a higher success rate when mastered. For a flavor of the month player to improve their game, there's a barrier they must push through. The opponents they're facing are weak, and hence an average build can beat them. They have no incentive to learn the rest of the game and improve, because doing so would mean that they would suck at more advanced builds and win less until they gain the level of competence required for them to use those builds correctly. The barrier is shown here in this graph...


(and a lot more to come)[build prof][/build]